Powerlessness and Empowerment

[eclectic_boy]

Okay, spirits of mischief. In my last SWAPAzine I said I supported the voluntary blackout! You heard me, you willful mislisteners!

Two Fridays ago I got a call from Ben just as I was getting ready to leave work.
“Hi, Jim! I just got home from work. There’s no power in Greylock!”
“Uh oh. Since what time? Can you check the clock in my room?”
“Since.... since 8:45.”
“Yikes! [I didn’t actually say that. I never say “Yikes”1] We’ve got a problem. How will we get word out to the FUN list that we can’t have 8PM gaming here?”
So I emailed FUN volunteering Will’s apartment, figuring he’d understand [thank you, Will!] And I called Media Real Estate to see if it was likely to be back on by 8. A very abrasive MRE employee (perhaps an MRE board ) told me that “you don’t get your electricity from us; you get it from the electric company. Talk to them.”

I got home, made my way up the lightless stairway to the apartment, gathered up some games, and went to Will’s, stopping on the way at Greylock 304, home of the Unger family. Suzanne is a homeschool activist, emphasis on the second word, and she was hopping. PECO had been saying power would be restored in about an hour all day. Then PECO shut off the power at the pole so MRE could work on the problem, which was inside the building, and by the time they were ready to turn it back on a thunderstorm had arrived, meaning they couldn’t go up on the pole to restore power. Instead, they left to go on other (storm-related) calls. But what had Suzanne really mad was that the electrical problem was in fact a fire in the basement transformer, and there had been no building alarm because there’s no detector system in that room. The fire marshal had told her that the fire might have gotten a lot worse, and that he had cited MRE for this months before.
Not wanting to get too involved in politics while guests were on their way, I went to Will’s, actually shuttling back a few times to wait for any gamers who didn’t get the message (I pictured someone arriving, seeing a totally dark building, and thinking, “Cool! Live action dungeon exploration! What a great game!”)
Gaming happened just fine at Will’s, with special guest Jeff Hildebrand, and then I headed home for bed. Except power was still out (PECO was now claiming restoration would be at 3AM), and it was muggy and warm. So I begged for Will’s floor & slept fitfully there. At 7:30 I decided to head back to my own bed, hoping the power would be back. No luck; I got a little sleep and just lay around groggily. Power didn’t come back until 3PM. Then it was Deal With the Fridge time (actually the freezer was wiped out; most of the fridge was salvageable), and the sleepy remaining half of a weekend I’d rather not repeat for a few decades. Sorry Prime, that’s another set of Square One that’s going to be missing an episode!


Computer Doings I
A few years ago my FooT (Friend-out-of-Touch, a useful term if a poor acronym. The type of person who you’d say you’re friends if it hadn’t been years since you last had any communication with them) Carol Royer asked me to come to the school she taught at (Friends Select) to troubleshoot a problem they were having with some of their Macs. Since then I’ve been hoping for/ disparately seeking a way to learn of when schools or other Good Cause institutions were in need of some such techie help, so that I could offer it. I went to the United Way and wasn’t able to find anyone who knew of such a tech-assistance volunteering program; I briefly thought about starting one.
Finally about four months ago I got a flyer from Philadelphia Cares, for whom I’d done some non-tech volunteering, saying they were starting up exactly such a computer help program. I signed up right away. Six weeks ago I went to my first session at the Sara Allen Senior Home in west Philadelphia, a very depressed area. Their computer room had three Macs (about 5-year-old ones; not that shabby) which had been donated by a university, along with a printer. The computers couldn’t talk to the printer. All they could do was practice typing skills, or compose things in Word but not print them. With a lot of trial-and-discovery and a fair number of surplus cables from the Institute, plus an old printer from same, I got them networked together and printing, by the end of my second trip there. My third, this week, was solely tutoring, a little bit of Word skills, a little bit of Finder basics, and watching people practice with the typing-tutor program. Over the course of 90 minutes, five people came, two of whom were handled be another volunteer. I think the biggest problem preventing most residents from coming (those that are potentially interested, anyway) is that the few hours a month we have volunteers there is the only time that computer room is open. What’s the sense in learning how to use something you’re not allowed to actually access?
But improving the Sarah Allen situation may be something I leave to others, because of the newly arrived...


Computer Doings II
This week I got another call from Philadelphia Cares, about a project at an elementary school in south Philly that needed help getting its entire computer setup going. Yesterday I went to see the place and scope out what needs to be done. I needed a telescope to see the other end. Until last year they’d had a single Mac in each classroom, most of which went unused because few teachers were sure what to do with them, and none were hooked to the ‘net. Then a new principal, Mary McKenna, took over, and decided to create a central Computer Lab to which each class would go for one or two periods a week for a group lesson. The problem here was that their computer science specialist was in fact nothing of the kind, he had been the wood shop teacher before shifting to this title. Apparently he was able to teach kids how to do some kind of technical drawing/drafting, and that was what happened in “computer class”. A few months ago the School District allotted someone with an actual degree in CS to take the position, but the school refused because the ex-wood-shop-teacher was so beloved they didn’t want him to lose his job.
Over the summer the District has wired the school, Ethernet to every room, and Mary has gotten a grant from Apple for 30 iMacs (not yet bought). Her new plan is to put the 30 in the computer room, redistribute the old machines back to the classrooms and the library, and begin having Real lessons in the classroom, with students able to really apply what they learn once they’re back in their individual classrooms.
Mary also asked me whether I could tell how many computers had illegal copies of Microsoft Word (the school district having just gotten a scary letter from some lawyers). A quick check of three computers in the lab made it look like the teacher’s computer had a copy registered to him, while the student computers did not have it. A relief, but one that begged the question of whether she should buy Word/Office for them all. I suggested that, as the lessons for these students were likely to be about basic skills that all word processors share, there was no need for the expense, and that since it was a good idea to have the ability to read Word files (for emailed attachments or whatever), they should buy a few copies of the Mac program icWord, which reads all versions of Word documents.
We also talked a little about what a curriculum for these kids could be, about what sort of relationship I should build with Glenn (the teacher), and about PECO(!), since it turned out that both our fathers had worked there, and knew each other.
I don’t really know how quickly things will get going with Jackson school; I hope I can devote the time the kids really need, that Glenn is a good learner, and that the school district tech has done a good job of setting up their network so I don’t have to [learn how to] mess with it. But I’m excited. This is exactly the sort of, and perhaps even the size of, project I was hoping to assist with. Now to see if I really want what I wanted.


Computer Doings III
Printing Ruth’s zine this month was about the strangest ordeal I’ve ever been through as an OEditor. She emailed a PDF file Friday morning, which I could display with Acrobat Reader 4.0 at work but couldn’t print; the program would give an “unexpected End of File” error and refuse to print. I told her about it and she emailed another one, which had the same problem. I thought maybe if I upgraded to Acrobat Reader 5.0 the problem would go away (as had the problem of Reader 4.0 only running on my home mac if extensions were off). But I couldn’t download 5.0. Every time I tried, the installed downloaded correctly, and ran through about 50% of the install before stopping with an “unable to retrieve file VISEsomethingsomething” error. So I waited until I was home, and tried 5.0, which refused to even load the file.
About that time Chaos came over and tried an Heroic Measure. She uploaded Ruth’s file to her Unix account, used pdf2ps to convert it to Postscript, ran a Postscript “cleanup” program on it, converted it back to PDF and downloaded it back to my computer. In the process, the zine had swelled from 324K to 5.8M. And now Acrobat 5.0 opened it! Slowly. When I tried to print, the Spooling.... box stayed on the screen for a Very Long Time. So long, in fact, that Chaos and I went back into the other room to be sociable with everyone else who was over here. Five minutes later we came back, and the box had been replaced by an error message. Six error messages one after another, in fact, saying “Unable to Print”, “File Error”, “Warning, Low Memory”, and a few other things.
Ruth had said that if we couldn’t get it to print it was no problem; she’d just add it to her September zine. I quit Acrobat and Chaos went back into the other room.
And sixty seconds later the printer started. I confess, I yelled “Yikes! It’s printing!” Then I followed with “oh. No, it just pulled a sheet in a few inches and stopped” [an intermittent hazard of quitting a print job]. But sure enough, a little while later it actually started printing. Chaos came back into the room. “Tell me you didn’t just say what I thought I heard...” Sure enough, it was printing. But only the first three pages; then it stopped. Who cared?! If it didn’t have enough memory to print the whole thing, at least I could do it piece by piece. And that, best beloved, is how that SWAPA got its Ruthzine. In four batches, after much turmoil.
Hey Jeff, Hey DVS, what are your oddest OEing experiences?