Gorillapond Dot Com

I’ve been learning about the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop concepts and playing with the emulated environment. I’m completely impressed and excited. More on that later.

I’m completely excited that I have finally (after waiting 3 weeks) made first contact with someone at OLPC, who forwarded my information to someone who can help me directly. It’s just a baby step, but it’s much better than no contact at all.

We’re looking at getting a few demo units. Beyond that, I’d like to get a set for a whole class, and then the sky is the limit. I am so very excited.

If you will be at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference next week, come see me. I have 2 sessions: Virtualization Everywhere and Desktop Deployment. Both are on Wednesday afternoon. If you are looking for the notes/slides from these sessions, just click the appropriate heading at the top of the site. You should be able to download the handouts from there.

I hope to post some thoughts on the sessions I visit each day, so look out for those.

Update: I think I will post results and new ideas from the sessions when I get home instead of trying to do it here in the hotel. I also updated all the handouts to the newest version of the slideshow tonight. If you saw the session and have comments, leave a comment on this post!

I am putting together a virtualization presentation for IT people in education settings at the moment. I’m going to overview what virtualization is, what options are available (VMware, Microsoft, Xen), and describe the project we executed this summer (What, Why, How). I hope to make it as accessible as possible and get those that might not be exposed to emerging technologies like virtualization, excited about the subject.

I have submitted a request for a session at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. I hope it gets accepted.

I will be presenting this next week (October 18th, 2006) at SOITA. More information should be available at this page when they update it!

If anyone has materials that may be useful (especially virtualization related clipart), send me an email. Contact information is available using the button above.

The following is an email I had sent to a local technology coordinators listserv after someone asked about the free VMware Server. I’m sure I will go into more detail about our recent virtualization project on this blog in the future. Also, I have submitted for a session at the eTech Ohio Conference to discuss virtualization, how we’re using it, and what we learned from our project. I also plan to put together a desktop deployment session, since it seems to be a hot topic in other school districts. Read the rest of this entry »

My Major Tasks to Complete:

• Test, test, and retest mass account creation for staff and student accounts
• Fix sound card issue on notebooks and verify it works (oops.)
• Test and tweak student computer lockdown security
• Install Read 180 Enterprse on server and create client package
• Create as many software packages as possible before start of school, and keep going until they’re all done
• Ensure Destiny install goes well. Upgrade SQL server to newest service pack.

All of this seems pretty easy and possible if I were able to focus on them exclusively. But, I can’t. I’m being pulled in many different directions so that I can’t stay focused on one task for more than an hour. It’s starting to get to stress me a little.

Update: I wrote this last week. This week has been quite a bit better. I think we’ll be okay, aside from all the software we still need to package. I just noticed the title of this post has 2 meaning depending how you read it!

August 21st is the deadline. The computers (and software, and countless other things) must be ready to use.

Summer time in our department is probably unlike anything a non-educational organization’s IT department must face. It’s a curse and a blessing. We get an opportunity to do large upgrades, taking down servers for multiple days if necessary. We must maintenance every computer (about 1500) to get it ready for the students to use over the next school year. Once the students come back, it’s prime time, the reason we even exist.

But why is that so hard? Read the rest of this entry »

My boss and I have been thinking the same thing apparently. Last week our ‘big server project’ was implemented and now we have to live with it. We installed a 2 server VMware Infrastucture 3 cluster complete with SAN. The real deal. I have a feeling it is just the start of much more. I’m very, very excited about it all. (Can you tell?)

It’s a big move for us, previous to this we had 8 independent servers, and a NAS (basically a normal server with more drives than the other ones). It wasn’t bad, but it was very inflexible. Now, we can be nimble.

Today my boss and I were looking at VMware training. It only seems natural to get more training on what you’ve gone head first into. We had confidence in the vendor we chose to implement the project, and I think we chose well. So far it has been as smooth as I expected. Now we have to take over the torch, it’s our baby now.

With training generally comes certification. I’m very interested in becoming a VCP after taking the official training sessions. Not for some professional reason, or to make me more ‘marketable.’ I just feel like it’s a topic I’m passionate about, and it would be nice to be able to prove “hey, this guy might just know a thing or two.”

So I’m thinking, sure, I get the knowledge. But then what? At some point I’m going to have our infrastructure needing very low maintenance. There’s going to be a limit of what I can implement in-house.

After having been to a handful of IT and education gatherings, seminars, or conferences, I really have a feeling that my school is just way ahead of others in many ways. Now, I’m only talking at a technology implementation level here. I’ve gotten some dropped jaws describing our previous desktop deployment method to other people in a similar position to mine or my boss. Things we’ve deployed like networking, desktop and application deployment, virtual servers, and wireless are way beyond what some districts have even dabbled with. We’ve been blessed with a large amount of community support and administrators understand the importance of technology. I think the progress we’ve made really illustrates that fact.

Today I made a comment about ’selling’ our service to other districts. I was joking somewhat, but it would be interesting to not be a money pit like the average school district department. A revenue stream in a school district? Who knows. My boss made a comment like it was something she had put some thought into already. We’re both very proud of everything we’ve accomplished so far and even if don’t sell our services and knowledge, we want to show off our stuff. We want to help other school districts, exchange knowledge, and as I said before, perhaps even sell our services.

There lies a problem, she explained. How much support do you give? Where does it end? How much time spent is too much? She thinks it will most likely interfere with the business we need to get done ‘at home’. I don’t disagree, but I think it might be worth it in some way.

It’s a short term goal of mine to offer a session at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. The whole event is 3 days of seminars/panels/displays from other districts, educators, or vendors. There’s a large exhibition hall where you can see all kinds of products. I was pretty disappointed at the selection last year. It had a lot of vendors, but nothing I actually thought was cool. Cisco was demonstrating products we’ve been using for 2 years already, and didn’t know about products we would actually want. There was a session that focused somewhat on VMware, but only 5 people showed up. 3 of those people were myself, boss, and a coworker.

I think I want to somehow demonstrate how we do things on the IT side of things. How we do it, why we do it that way, and what mistakes we’ve made along the way. I’d like to include desktop and software deployment, virtualization, and web-based software we use. I could also like to describe our next steps into other areas we’re dabbling in, like content and document management.

I never thought I would be ‘blogging’ but here I am. I’m not sure what direction the content on this site will go, but I suppose nobody does initially. I hope to update it often with little tidbits instead of monster posts. Feel free to subscribe to it using the Entries RSS feed.

My idea is to combine the topics of Computing (What’s cool, What’s new), Information Technology (Stories from the life of a network admin), and Instructional Technology (Supporting teachers using technology in the classroom and helping our students get ahead)

If you want to know more about who I am, and what it is I actually do, check out the “About” link at the top.