Lab Notes, 4/6/04
Present: Olin Zuercher, Mike Cook, Yu Yunchun, Judy and Frank Bradley,
Sherral Stomatovich, Starr Mann
:: Demanufacturing
It's official. FGM has started demanufacturing computer equipment.
Last night Olin began training volunteers to demanufacture computers. The
group took half a dozen computers down to component level and sorted the
parts into tubs. They loaded the tubs and parts into Olin's van. He will
drop the material at The Barn.
Olin has an excellent collection of small hand tools. The volunteers used a
variety of Olin's tools. FGM may need to purchase a few tools to supplement
the standard multi-purpose screwdriver. I encouraged the volunteers to
bring their own tools next week.
Mike is going to coordinate purchasing gaylord boxes for us to place in The
Barn before next lab night. We may need some more tote tubs too. The
portable workbench, made of a metal door and two trash containers, worked
fine. The women were comfortable with it. Even so, I may buy two shorter
trash containers and see what they say about a lower height.
I will bring an assortment of 386 and 486 computers to lab for the
volunteers to disassemble. I have four pallets of computers stored in my
garage since last winter. Most of them are candidates for disassembly.
:: Clean Up
The volunteers also cleaned up the computer lab. It looks and smells great.
You could eat off the keyboards. We also cleaned up the fellowship hall
after the demanufacturing session.
:: Thurs. Lab
This Thurs. night, 4/8/04, I will open the church for a lab. Hopefully
Goose (Richard) will be free to attend. We will probably make it a software
development lab. If it works out, I will schedule 1-2 Thursday night labs
each month.
:: Upcoming FreeBox Classes
There are enough people on the waiting list to hold two more classes. I
scheduled the next FB class for Sat., April 17, and will confirm seats this
week.
If we get the demanufacturing process rolling, I may suspend the FB classes
after April and switch to distributing computers to volunteers rather than
students. Giving away computers at FB classes is good PR, creates
considerable goodwill in the community and attracts a base of potential
volunteers and clients. So we should discuss whether to stop the FreeBox
classes in a town hall meeting at the lab next week.
:: Enough FreeBoxes?
We may not have enough FBs to distribute to the next two classes.
Olin and I picked up 19 cpus last Saturday. All had NICs and none had
CDROMs. Yunchun and I loaded VL 3.2 on one we picked at random. It was
marginal for a FB. The on-board video subsystem was below our standard --
it would resolve at 800x600 pixels but only at 8-bit color depth. To meet
the 16-bit color standard we must install a video card with more RAM.
The boxes may be candidates for thin client workstations. The one we picked
had 120 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, a 3 GB hard drive and an Intel EE Pro 10 Mbps
NIC. We can remove the hard drives to use elsewhere. However, if there are
not 6 better systems, we may have to use these boxes for the next FB class.
In that case I will buy enough surplus CDROMs (about $7 each + shipping) to
cover the classes. The only other option is to postpone the next class
until we have better computers. There are better computers in the Upper
Room, but they are held in reserve for volunteers who have earned enough
credits to upgrade.
:: Volunteer Logs
Volunteers will need to sign in and sign out on lab nights. All foundations
and granting agencies want statistics. The United Way grant application
asked for stats on clients, volunteers and volunteer time. Goose and I will
develop the on-line volunteer log. Until then I'll keep a paper based log.
Tom
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