how quickly 3 months has past!

this week was the the final full week of my time at west space. it has been a week of excitement, disappointment, frenetic consolidation and hope that what i've done here has made a difference in some way. my last day here is tuesday, but today is the last day i'll get to hang with all of the peeps from the space, 'cos they work part time and rarely on a monday/tuesday.

there were two major things to sort out this week: one has been resolved. one isn't yet.

web design

at the end of last week, most of the content that we could chuck into the new back-end was there. it needs editing and tweaking, but 90% of the furniture was in last week, all in preparation for wednesday's meeting with the designer/developers. the big reveal. one of the interesting things about the project from the get-go was the fact that they were going to be designing-live. they would implement their designs onto the structure of the content and alter it on the site. the equivalent of live art.

we were all pretty excited, looking forward to seeing our armature - all the events, publications, projects, outline text and the structure - would look wrapped in colours, organisation, fonts, delineation, menus, etc.

unfortunately, the meredith music festival stole our thunder. i'm not really jealous, because the meredith site is amazing and only possible through the hard work of the kids at golden grouse, but because it was a lot of work, sadly the west space site had to be relegated to static sketches of what the site would look like. sculpture had become photography (ed - lesson, lauren?).

the site will have design applied to it from next week onwards - we will see the true form soon, and be able to engage with the design/development of it, but we have to be patient. and i'll have to do so from the northern hemisphere. bittersweet.


network

when i first arrived, after we upspecced the girls with new macs, back-up, etc; i set about making a better network for them, one that would approximate a file server: all data in a single place, separate from a computer and able to be backed up.

my network skills are not as good as i would like, but i knew the concept of what was important. i enlisted the help of my inhouse geek side-kick and we came up with an ethernet plan: modem>ethernet switch> main workstation>external hard drive>back-up.

over the last 2 months, this has been working well-enough, but occasionally we couldn't save to the file, or open a file properly
. no immense troubles, but enough to be annoying and problematic long term. obviously we really did need a file server, or a dedicated computer to control the traffic.

yesterday was the day in which i had to decide how to do it, so there was time to implement before i head off. i had been in contact with one of the other geeks, dan from TSO, and he was awesome, but really, we needed a fileserver*.


it was a pretty exciting day on an investigative mission:

i googled how to set up a basic mac file server - thanks to the very clear, if slightly naff, about section on macs

we had a G4 power mac spare and i used mac tracker to find out how high we could upgrade

i've obtained a copy of leopard, which has excellent file-sharing capablities, and we're going to install it and transfer the data on monday.

it's gonna work nicely! yay us!




party time

i wish i got a photo of our little party, but the gals threw a little lunch party for me to say 'cheerio' and wish me well. it was super lovely and they got me a couple of excellent books: letters to a young artist, and situation, edited by claire doherty. awesome.

next week is going to be little amounts of tidy up and then i leave these kids, hopefully with some more knowledge, a bit more confidence and a whole lot of capability to do the awesome things they do.


* i had a nice little family moment - i called my stepdad who has been in IT networks for years - and he helped me out and assured me that i wasn't as dumb at this as i felt. geek families rule.

Labels: geek-in-residence, technology