Our initial problem with New Horizon was easy communication! We were given an email address to the church that was invalid and emails to the Reverend’s Blackberry phone were received but Rev. Foggs never responded to them. Spring Break seemed to eliminate the GSLIS team and, then, Easter seemed to eliminate the New Horizon’s folks. Finally, we realized that our primary contact should be Mrs. Foggs and phone conversations with her started to get some results for us. When we finally made head-way with actually communicating with the organization, we found that there was a change in the lab’s eventual location.

During site visit, we had settled on the upstairs boardroom and felt that Reverend Foggs was comfortable with that room as the host for the eventual lab. When we started having phone conversations with Lady Foggs, she informed us that the room was too difficult for some of the aging populace of New Horizon to comfortably access. New Horizon switched to a room that was on a lower floor with more accessibility (a reasonable change) and had started making modifications to the room. Unaware of this, the GSLIS team had to scramble to realign our lab prospects with a new location.

We did not have exact measurements and, again, communication with the site didn’t smooth things over. So, closing in on the lab installation day, we opted to make an estimate on length of cables needed and, fortunately, were accurate with our guesses.

On the technical side of life, we had a lot of hardware issues with our selection of computers: hard drives and CD-roms and bad cables and dead IDE ports and C MOS batteries (really, what is that anyway?). We spent two full open-lab periods dissecting computers and losing screws. Eventually, we had some super refurbished (to the nth degree of refurbishing) computers…and then we could start the software excitement. To our delight, the software didn’t give us many issues but it was a long process full of updates and downloads and sluggish hourglasses ticking away time.

We had several issues with cable making. Most of them could be chalked up to inexperience. We did discovered that cables should not be judge by their covers…much like books. The pretty pink cable was too small and the ends kept sliding off. After many educational (but aggravating) attempts to make a pink cable, we had to switch to a different selection of cables all together. By the end of that lab section, we were all experts cable makers.

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After getting to the New Horizon site, Mrs. Foggs was there to meet us. They had not done any electrical work and had not grounded any of the plugs. They were in the process of fixing cracks in the wall and it looked like they were going to paint soon. Mrs. Foggs told us that they just wanted the computers to be dropped off in the boardroom upstairs. We were able to use the Internet connection in the office to check all of the computers individually. We also presented Mrs. Foggs with the user’s manual and explained some of the software that was installed. We took some measurements for the main cable that will connect the router to the switch in the future lab, and we brought it the next day, along with a replacement monitor for one we had that didn’t work.

The next day we went to Opal’s House to update their existing lab. There were four computers in the basement that we worked on, along with an office computer and a laptop. We needed to install Windows XP and all of the extra software. Since we were not planning on doing this, we were not prepared with enough discs to install XP and the software, so we had to wait to share some of the discs. It would have also helped to have extra memory along so we could have updated the memory on the computers to help speed the process up. Martin was able to burn some CDs the night before that we used for installations. We also did not have a user’s manual ready for them, so we will have to print a copy and send it to them.

We had a problem with the Internet when we were trying to install the extra software. It was giving us a user name and password prompt, and no one knew what that was. It turns out that the router was not connected, so always be sure to check the most obvious thing. The next problem we had was with filtering software. The webpage of the software was recognizing the password on that website, but not on the application that updates the IP address, which is very important. The problem was that the email that had the password information had not been confirmed. We also had problems with printers not being able to connect wirelessly. we needed to install drivers on each of the computers, but we didn’t have enough time. It was also confused by the fact that we had named all of our computers Opal. The name provides a unique identifier, so it was important to name them each something different. We also had problems with the security camera. (Note: don’t let other people leave with the cable making kit!)

Overall, we all worked together to get most of the things updated at Opal’s House. It may not have been the finished project that we intended, and we realize that more work needed to be done, but it came to the point where we had to leave it as it was. It was certainly better than when we started.