Packing in Shamattawa at Robert Pogson

It is my last week in Shamattawa. While there have been many disappointments, I have enjoyed seeing the little people acquire new computer skills. I remember the first day I taught the Grade 1s to click a mouse. They were overly enthusiastic. Now they are pretty skilled at running browsers, editors, games and dual-booting.

I arrived with 25 pieces of freight and will depart with about 10, having returned seasonal stuff at Christmas time and eaten a lot. I am making a lot of soup this week to use up my store of sauteed and frozen mushrooms. Combined with catsup and my remaining spices that will make pasta sauces. After my freight departs, I may have to live on low-cal pizza… .

The lab is pretty well the way it will be in the fall. I have installed FireFox rc3/Ulteo/Opera 9.5/Cygwin on all the XP machines that survive. I have installed keys for passwordless login, so the teacher can turn off all the clients whether they run Debian or that other OS from a script. We still have no spare parts or spare servers. We do have some power bars and a 500 gB backup drive that will be useful. I will clean accounts of the graduates. The IT manual will be about 60 pages of all the stuff needed to run everything, the IT plan, and a summary of what has been done. On top of that there will be an inventory. The air-conditioner is still sitting on a table, for want of a hacksaw… If my replacement reads this, he/she should bring some tools.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.