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the best parts of human nature
Friday, May 9 2008
I was at one of the prisons today, having carpooled with the woman who handles all the loose ends of the collegiate programs therein. While there, I was finally able to establish a transitional framework for the prisoner-students to use a fileserver for the storing of their work, as opposed to using the My Documents directory of individual workstations.
Prisoners are, as a group, a marvelously resourceful population, and even without a working fileserver, they'd improvised an equivalent in the weeks since I'd networked the computers together. They'd shared out the hard drives on all the workstations and had begun storing their work on specific workstations, getting to a paper across the network if another prisoner-student happened to be using the computer it was stored on.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that there were digital files of pop music on the computers that the prisoner-students could listen to as they worked. These files were all in the .wav format, so the files were enormous. In this particular prison all of the following are contraband: thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, and cell phones. So I wondered to myself: where could all these files be coming from? Were they to know about them, prison authorities would surely find the presence of such files suspicious. But for me they were like a gust of warm, pollinated wind in springtime. They were evidence, you see, of the survival of the best parts of human nature even in an arbitrarily repressive environment. I also felt a little pride when I was backing up a computer and one of the students took me into his confidence and showed me the stash of music files he'd been keeping in a deep subdirectory of c:\program files.
Back home, I continued implementing fixes to the basement guestroom in anticipation of tomorrow's arrival of Gretchen's parents. Gretchen had conducted some sort of cooking jihad before she'd left for Long Island and had left me with a kitchen disaster to clean up.
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