October

I can't believe that October is already 2/3 finished! Man, time flies when you have a pile of stuff on your plate.

October, as I just alluded to, has been a busy, busy month. To put it in perspective, it's the end of GES's first academic term, which means final exams, report cards & massive evaluations. Being the librarian, IT guy, resource manager & high school computer teacher, let's just say that there was a bit of massive multitasking going on. However, on top of the regular humdrum of end of term, the best possible thing decided to happen: our school's computer network was infected with a virus.

Now, usually, this wouldn't be a very big deal in most organisations, because most organisations run antivirus software on their computers (like GES does), but here's the catch: GES, being an institution with widely-available access to Thai-version software (aka "pirated") was "protecting" its computers with a non-functional antivirus software suite. Pretty much, this means that the computer would tell you that it had a virus on it, but it had no method of actually fixing the problem.

The type of virus that infected our computer network was a very pernicious worm, that would make copies of itself in every unprotected folder that it could find & then broadcast itself to every computer on the network 3 times every second, which meant that as soon as you cleaned one computer, it would be barraged by about 800 new copies of the virus by the time you blinked your eyes. The problem was manageable on staff computers, as they were advised to remove themselves from the wireless network, scan their computers, do a clean-up & sit on their feet until the problem was solved. The real problem came around when we looked at our file server.

All of GES's important documents— including everything from students' attendance & academic records right up to Ministry of Education accreditation requirements—have been residing on one computer on the school's network, using one consumer-grade hard drive. Now, consumer-grade hard drives are designed for what's called "light duty," aka, random access of files every once & a while. When the virus hit the network, it caused a burst of activity on the server, making the hard drive work non-stop for 4 days before I decided to finally pull the network plug as a last resort to ensure the hard drive didn't literally go up in smoke & GES lose all of its files.
After finally containing the virus, cleaning the file server & checking its hard drives, we discovered that the main hard drive on the server was reporting a projected end-of-life on the 10th of October—right before report cards were due. This called for immediate action, and I was sent on a mission to find some sort of solution that would both fix the problem _and_ ensure that the data on our hard drive(s) wouldn't be placed in such jeopardy again.

***NERD ALERT!! Pass the next paragraph or two, if you don't like computer jargon ;)***

For the computer nerds in the crowd, here's what my solution eventually became (due to budgetary constraints): a new motherboard with 2GB DDR2-PC2300 ram, supporting our current CPU (P4 Northwood) and upgr3adeable to a Core2 Duo on the future; 3 new 120 GB 7200rpm WD SATA-2 HDDs installed in the on-board controllers & designed to be configured as a software managed RAID-5 under XP Pro (using a registry tweak & some hex editing of disk management dlls).

Now, as I tried to put all this stuff together, everything went smoothly—even the XP Pro RAID-5 management... Until I rebooted. Turns out that due to SP3, the wonderful work-around to use RAID-5 in XP Pro had been compromised by the Microsoft guys, and every time the system rebooted, the array needed to regenerate. Uugh. Then I noticed something peculiar... One of the drives I had purchased for the array was reporting bad sectors. It was brand new! In fact, every time I ran chkdsk to fix the sectors, more & more clusters came back as reportedly "bad." I whipped out my S.M.A.R.T. log reader, looked at the drive details & discovered that the hard drive which was sold to me a "new" actually had about 160 logged hours on it. Hrm.. Something was suspect. At any rate, the drive needed to be returned because if it was already reporting bad sectors, the problem would only get worse & RAID-5 or no, the data was running a high risk of compromise.
Round two to the computer place, Pantip. This time, I commandeered our helpful & friendly Jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Mike—a Filipino missionary working at the school who is semi-fluent in Thai—to come with & help with the return process. A few hours later, and we were back at the school with a fresh drive ready to be thrown into the array.

Because the software RAID was initialising every time Windows rebooted, it became painfully clear that a different OS was needed. Thankfully, I had enough insight to purchase a Thai copy of Win2k3—which was originally going to be used as an experimental install for our new library database server—and with that, I tossed out XP & gave the file server a proper server OS. Night & day difference, let me tell you. Night and day! I had never before in my life touched a server OS, and now that I've seen what they can do... I am in awe.

***End Nerd Alert***

Of course, all this computer fixing stuff that I needed to do was considered high-priority, but I also needed to do it after business hours, seeing as I was still teaching & running the library from 7:30-5:30. Talk about late nights. And talk about doing all that as well as preparing my own grades for report cards (who woulda thought creating report card grades for 97 computers students would be time consuming?). Then, of course, there was the room provisioning/registration for overnight camp, the outstanding library fines reports that needed to be given to teachers so that delinquent fines could be collected before report cards were sent home, the negotiation of the new library software purchase, other software/hardware meetings regarding data security & numerous administrative hiccups along the way (apparently, high school students are required to have a computers grade, even if they're not enrolled in any computers class due to military service!).

Sigh. I'm glad that those weeks are finished. The first thing that I did on Friday after school was go out with a dozen of the other teachers to an Irish pub & celebrate the beginning of our break with a pint of Guinness, a huge bacon cheeseburger and a pint of Hoegaarden to finish off the evening. Delightful. Delightful & well deserved.

Other things that happened in October so far go like this:

• Two weeks ago, I was invited by the pastor of the same church up in Lopburi (small provincial town 2.5 hours north of Bangkok) to come back & preach again. I did. It went well, though there were less people in attendance that Sunday when compared to the one previous. Speculations were made that it might've been due to rice planting season.


• That same Sunday, I asked to try some barbecued rat... And the family with which I went to Lopburi bought me a whole rodent. I ate it with some of the teachers later that evening on campus. Rat tastes exactly like baby-back pork ribs. No lie. If you're a Facebooker, I've a video posted with us eating it.


• The term is over & many teachers have gone abroad, as per usual October breaks. My original plans were to go to Chiang Mai with a group of teachers, but due to the intensity of my past few weeks, I had absolutely zero desire to do stuff... And as a result, I'm staying in Bangkok for the break. The past 2 weeks of school typically had me in the office from 7:30 in the morning until 2:30 at night (no jokes, people. It was rough. My caffeine consumption went from 23 baht per week to 150 baht per day just to stay awake for those 14 days. This past Friday, we got back from the pub at midnight; I didn't crawl out of bed until 2:00 Saturday afternoon. That was an amazing sleep). I'm planning on laying low in the city until November, when the term resumes.

I don't know if there's much more to say at this point... If you're a praying person, you could pray that:

• the teachers return refreshed & encouraged from the much needed break
• the students, also, would be refreshed from the break
• our focus as an organisation would gravitate back toward a central goal of displaying Christ & that our daily/weekly activities would reflect that.
• over the break, teachers & staff would be spiritually revived & willing to go the extra mile to make the ministry potential maximised.

A special note/prayer request:

One of the families at GES—the very same that takes me to Lopburi—is looking to plant a church in their community, one that is directed on reaching the 16-26 year-old demographic. Being Bangkok, real estate is not cheap & they're having difficulties finding a space wherein the church could possibly meet: options—renting or buying—seem bleak, considering the financial situation. Many of the Christian students at GES don't have a church that they can attend, and this would be an amazing opportunity to meet the spiritual needs of the community. The idea is to run a café on the building's main floor as finance-generation for ongoing operational costs, have the second floor as a meeting space for the church & sub-let the third floor to students or others who need a place to live (for further finance generation / outreach [perhaps rent at an extremely low rate]). The problem is the start-up cost(s). If you all could pray for the Lord to work in this situation & provide a means for this project to be realised, that would be awesome. Furthermore, if you—any of you—know of any organisations or groups or people what would be interested in sponsoring/supporting or investing in such a venture, please let me know. I'm working with this family to see if we can actually make this thing a reality.

Thanks for reading this (again) novella. Your time & patience with my verbosity is greatly appreciated :).