Of small improvements and large…
…You may have noticed these past two weekends that our usual communion cups were not in service. Deacon Norm Janson and his wife Jackie purchased them for the parish for our 150th jubilee back in 2006. (Can it really be 8 years since then?) They have served us well, but gradually, over those 8 years, the gold plating on the inside began to fail in enough places that it was time to have them redone. So currently, they are ‘at the shop’ being replated on the inside. (the outsides have weathered time well) I hope to have them back by next Sunday at the latest.
…When Kevin Kirchgessner was a student, volunteers from the parish laid the internet wiring infrastructure that has served the school since then. This past year found Mr. Clark and our technology committee dealing with multiple issues which affected our teachers’ abilities to reliably use resources from the WWW in their class-rooms. I suspect the folks who did that first wiring of the school wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, and so they ran single wires to different floors in the scant spaces between radiator piping. Those runs went to switches from which more wires ran, which went to more switches and more runs. The result was a hodgepodge of connections with no ‘map’ of which wire connected to which room by which path. But it worked for quite some time.
New technology (Ipads and Macbooks co-existing with Windows) placed new demands upon the system, necessitating a change. So this summer, we are replacing the wiring with a more direct system of wires – each connection completing what is called a “home run” – where it goes from the server to the classroom without any switches or interruptions or change in wiring. This should stabilize both our wireless infra-structure as well as the communications between the server and the individual computers.
In addition, a student volunteer from UMSL’s I.T. department is helping us to reprogram our server (the main computer that talks to, and coordinates with all our other devices) to industry standards, cleaning up some ongoing issue there. The hope is that by end of the summer, we will have a reliable, robust and user friendly Information Technology environment for use by teachers, students and staff alike.
I meet tonight (Wed.) with my two architects of the rewiring project. I am hoping to need volunteers on Mon, Tues or Wed. of this week to get started. Listen for the pulpit announcement..