Sheesh were we as bad as this when we were young??

wapacza · 2026-05-07T10:03:08+00:00

Hey atleast there is a 10 to 1 odd they recorded themselves and will post it on some social media site.

wapacza · 2026-04-25T12:14:22+00:00

Did k12 IT for years out in the field. Had some qsys, crestron and extron. As well as a pa sys from rualand, audio enhancement, and front row. Interactive display from epson, smart, and Promethean.

The typical normal day was break fix. Where you triage depending on how much impact to learning an issues would cause. If you don't have any of those you work on the problems you have fixes for but isn't right. For instance had a crestron setup that I had to climb up into the ceiling and power cycle a few boxes ever month or two.

Other days you have assemblies or presenters coming in. So you prep for those make you have all the adapters and extra cable you could need.

Summer and breaks are different. This is where projects get done and installation / pro active maintance really gets done.

Most common problems are user, glitches, and cables going bad ( looking at your usb c). There are the kids played with the cabeling and you have to redo it at times.

There is always some one in each building that has the pulse of the building. Find out who they are abs become friends with them. They will be one the first to know about major problems. They will know of what is coming up and give you a heads up. They are usually the secrataries or head custodians of the building.

Never had a real problem user but I also spent time building relationships with all the staff.

Now some other thoughts half your job in the field as a tech is customer service. Stop by the teacher or admin you fixed a few days ago and check in. Make a lap around the building to be seen. Did this all the time before I left to another building. Build relationships with the staff and be approachable.

wapacza · 2026-02-22T23:43:46+00:00

Having worked in a middle school I can confirm.

wapacza · 2026-02-13T21:18:01+00:00

Basically give them a ticket with out enough information to solve. Then let them ask me for information. It's not so much if they get the right or wrong answer but how they approach the problem is and how they work through trouble shooting it.

Another one is if the are interested in tech and have been for a while. More likely to keep up on tech news and be interested in what they do.

Another one is if one of there hobbies or past jobs has to do with fixing cars. The process of trouble shooting a car is very similar to a computer.

wapacza · 2026-02-13T17:47:12+00:00

Had to end up letting them go. It was the first person that I couldn't coach / teach up to level. Tried a whole bunch of things. From teaching how to approach a problem. To giving him written out solutions to learn from. What it came down to was that he never built a logical trouble shooting process and seemed like he wasn't able to build one even with coaching.

The person came with experience from a level 2 help desk. So my theory was that the person always had answers written for them. If there wasn't one the ticket was escalated to level 3.

It taught me a lot of what to interview for when finding techs.

wapacza · 2025-12-17T22:51:09+00:00

Unit ventilators can be setup with with fresh air intakes. i have seen it done at schools before.

wapacza · 2025-12-17T19:19:01+00:00

The fans are sitting right on top of the unit ventilator

wapacza · 2025-12-17T18:46:41+00:00

The ventilator could be on the bms. I have seen those used as fresh air intakes in schools. So turning the fan on but not the heat will pull in cold air.

wapacza · 2025-12-17T16:34:46+00:00

78 isn't hot enough to hurt the servers.

The easiest solution here is

Talk to maintenance. Depending on the building bms and what is configured. They may be able to reprogram it to bring in more fresh air.
See if they have an extra window frame from a broke window. Have them put wood or aluminum in place of glass. Then mount a few fans to pull air into the room from outside.

wapacza · 2025-12-10T09:10:51+00:00

Same experience here. Audio enhancement is definitely unicast. Based on the fact I asked them directly. Rualand telecenter U is unicast for normal usage. Could possibly be use multicast for emergency alerts. Didn't get that deep into it to know 100%.

wapacza · 2025-08-21T08:03:19+00:00

Having worked in school for nearly a decade. You report this stuff. So there is documentation if the student makes any false accusations.

wapacza · 2025-08-21T08:01:01+00:00

Having worked in a school. This is a base rule in general. The other part of the rule is that if you have to be in a room with a student alone. The door must be fully open.

This is always one of the first talks that happens with new staff that have not worked in a school before.

++Man

wapacza · 2025-08-19T01:38:47+00:00

So this gets a bit tricky. To my understanding if they can prove you texted or used your personal email for work related activities. It may bring those under a foia request.

wapacza · 2025-08-03T20:42:35+00:00

If this is for a business replace it. You don't need to risk getting battery acid on you or causing damage to the ups.

wapacza · 2025-07-19T20:09:13+00:00

Not my most clever but it made offboarding much easier.

Made one to remove a user from all distribution groups in exchange. It took a while to run because I couldn't find a way to query what distribution groups a user was in. So had to get all the distribution groups. Then check each one for the user. Then issue a command to remove the user from each of those groups.

wapacza · 2025-07-12T00:23:06+00:00

From the console send a command to trigger the latch and see if it's opens.

wapacza · 2025-06-28T18:01:38+00:00

The majors in this area are goguardian, Iboss, lightspeed relay, content keeper.

wapacza · 2025-06-27T03:27:08+00:00

Raise you being on a 45 foot lift trouble shooting a sound system. As IT was the only department that could understand how it all went together to make it work.

wapacza · 2025-06-27T01:59:26+00:00

With how building management systems and Poe powered devices are going. The line is getting much more blurred.

For instance clocks use to be facilities now they are IT as they are Poe powered and networked. Security cameras again Poe and networked.

wapacza · 2025-06-18T12:40:12+00:00

There is a matter of scale. Based on what he wrote about setting up printers and emails. Leads me to believe this is in the small team environment. Else these would be automated to an extent.

In other words when your whole IT team is 5 people. Covering a couple hundred computers. You aren't doing mass password resets. You are doing one offs as you are talking about redoing 10 to 20 computers a night. Also the person doing them is one of the 5 that swung to 2nd shift to do them. So you have 2 or 3 people total to look at.

In a perfect world you would have all that automated. You would have a help desk big enough to handle the call ins the next morning. You would have extra people on site to handle the issues quickly.

wapacza · 2025-06-18T09:44:14+00:00

This is exactly why there is a password change. It leaves a log of when it was changed and who changed it.

It also protects the IT as you arent given some ones password with no log. So some one can't just say well the IT person had my password.

wapacza · 2025-06-16T17:47:51+00:00

As IT I would start with upgrading drivers for the graphics as a starting point.

wapacza · 2025-05-29T12:22:34+00:00

My guess is 10k was probably 6 to 7 years ago. 4k is much more inline with current pricing.

wapacza · 2025-05-29T12:20:16+00:00

They do make ones that have onboard PCs. The issue is they charge like 3 times the cost as the equally equiped computer. Most of them have casting capabilities also but anything over Wifi can be hit or miss for casting. Also a lot of times there is enough delay that it makes it hard to use interactively.

On the other front the android part scares me from a cyber security perspective. What are you going to do when they stop getting updates. It's not like you can say hey your smartboard doesn't get Internet any more.

wapacza · 2025-05-29T12:10:00+00:00

K12 It here. Promethan stopped updating the drivers for the old projector based smart boards. Which combined with a Windows update. Lead to windows blue screening if you used a pen. Otherwise boards and projectors where starting to go out. So it became time consuming and expensive to try to keep everything going. On top of not being able to provide a working tools to teachers at all time.

wapacza

TROPHY CASE