August 19, 2013

Today's theme was printers. I was the printer whisperer. I got an email this morning from one of the SPED teachers asking me about a USB cable for their printer because they were having to share the cord they had whenever they needed to print. I talked to the librarian and got a cable but when I went up to the SPED room I saw that they were actually sharing one printer. In my mind they had two printers and only one USB cable, not two computer and only one printer. So the cable I got was useless. I tried setting up the wireless but that always seems way too complicated. The printer would connect to the guest wireless network but the computers were connected to the main network and that seemed to be a problem. At this point I had to go back to the lab for my first class but I was determined to figure out the SPED printer.

One of the sixth grade classes came down because they are currently having laptop issues and the teacher wanted them to using SpellingCity. Earlier in the morning I went around and tried various student logins on all the computers just to make sure they were actually work, since they weren't last week. Thankfully they were. The teacher wanted her kids to print their test after they finished and this brought to light two more printer problems.

The first was with the position of one of the printers in the lab. Over the summer it had been moved over to make room for a new iPad cart. This move put the printer right in the path of one of the air conditioning vents. The paper comes out of the printer, back-to-front, so as it comes out the paper was getting blown back by the vent, and several times out of ten the paper would get blown out of the printer and it would fall down between the wall and the thing the printer is on. And more often than not, the paper would fall into a little slot thing on the back of the thing that the printer is on. I'm not painting the best picture here but whatever. The sixth grade teacher lost a few spelling tests back there and to get them out of the slot she had to get a yardstick and I put some tape on the end. After her class left I switched position of the printer thing and the iPad cart, problem solved.

The other problem was that one of the computers in the lab didn't have the lab printers on it. And that turned out to be a pain in the butt. I tried adding the printer when the kid was logged in but the permission level was sufficient, so I logged in as myself and added the printers, and then had the kid log back in. But he still couldn't print because the printers weren't there. I am learning a lot about multi-user computers this year. A good chunk of my day was spent figuring out how to install printers for all the users on a computer. Most of the solutions I found involved writing scripts and stuff on a higher level than I have access to. What eventually worked was getting the IP address for the printers and adding them through Printer Management. And that sounds really simple but Print Management is buried and getting the IP addresses for the printers was a pain. But I figured it all out and now that computer can print.

And going back to the SPED printer, I fixed that by plugging it into the network, typing the printer IP address into the SPED teacher's laptops as a local printer, and now they are able to print just by being connected to the network, no USB cables.

I think that was everything involving printers today.

The other major thing was kids having to log into the computer for the first time. That was interesting. The sixth graders got in pretty easily. The fourth grade teacher had her kids log in and out three times which I think was a pretty good strategy. Most of the third graders took awhile. And the first graders took forever. Capital letters are tricky, having kids hold down the Shift key and hit the letter they need at the same time takes a bit. And the first hurdle, before the username or password, is having to hit 'ctrl' 'alt' 'del' to get to the login screen. At the end of the day I was able to find a simple picture of a keyboard online and used Gimp to add red circles over the 'ctrl', 'alt', and 'del' keys. I wanted it to be big so I could put it on the wall but the biggest piece of paper we had was 10x18 construction paper. Which worked out I guess because the keyboard picture was just over seventeen inches long. So I cut the construction paper so it would fit in a printer, and then took forever to figure out how to get the printer to recognize an 8.5x18 piece of paper. I added it in somewhere but it still wasn't showing up as an option so I ended up opening up a Word document, making the page size 8.5x18 in the page layout, inserting the keyboard picture, and then making a custom page size when I printed (which was an option in Word but not in the printer dialog box itself so I couldn't do it through Gimp). So I guess that was another printer thing.

After work I was tired as hell because I stayed up until about 12:30AM last night watching a Saints Row 4 livestream with Sark and APL, and waiting for my laundry to dry. If it hadn't been jeans in the dryer I would have just let it go and set overnight but leaving jeans in the dryer overnight usually just leaves a wrinkled mess. I really wanted to take a nap but also wanted to be able to fall asleep tonight, so I didn't take one. But then I did around 7:00PM or so, which is worse than taking one at 4:30PM, I think. But I'm tired now so I guess it worked out. Unless I go to lay down in bed and can't fall asleep. I can see that happening. Anyway.

I spent my night watching a few episodes of Duck Dynasty and more of the Saints Row 4 livestream. I am looking forward to playing that game tomorrow. It really does look exactly like the last game but there are enough changes to make it look fun.

And now I am going to try and go to bed. And maybe wake up at 6:00AM instead of 7:00AM so I can exercise. I want to exercise. Not quite as much as I want sleep but I'm working on it.