Blog #6 - Week 7: May The Odds Be Ever In My Favor!

     My team and I are started this week off by venturing up to De La Salle. I was really excited that we were finally finishing up lower campus and moving to upper campus, especially being as we were a bit behind because of the shipments of Ethernet cords we were waiting for. Luckily, we had some in the office so we made do with those until we eventually ran out.
     Some of the classrooms in DLS were really easy to handle. We just connect the Ethernet to the projector, cut the keystone pull the cord out of the metal conduit and into the ceiling, re-clamp the keystone on, and connect the cords together, really simple. Some classrooms had a projector in it that was so old it didn't have an Ethernet port to connect to, so we couldn't do anything in those rooms. A lot of the classrooms were smart classrooms and we didn't know where the Ethernet port was to connect it to the projector, so once again, we couldn't do anything in those rooms. Some classrooms didn't even have projectors in them because they were taken out of the ceiling due to construction, so we definitely could wire those. After a while, it just seemed like there were so many odds stacked up against us. The various camps using the classrooms we needed to do, the inaccurate camp utilization chart we were given, classrooms without projectors, smart classrooms where we didn't know where to find the Ethernet port. It seemed like things couldn't get any worse.
     Then, we ran into rooms that had Ethernet ports, but when we tried to back the port into the ceiling we couldn't find the cord. There were several cords that looked like the cord that led to the Ethernet port, but none of them were clearly or obviously the correct cord. In one of the classrooms, we ended up cutting and re-clamping a keystone and when we connected it to a laptop the laptop was able to pull an IP from it, but when the projector was connected to the cord it wouldn't configure. After about an hour or so of cutting, stripping, and re-clamping cords we still couldn't get the projector to configure, so we made note of it on the spreadsheet and left it connected in the ceiling. We will have to go back on a later date and try to further diagnose the issue. But, after a long, hot, frustrating week, De La Salle was done and we were moving onto Miguel.