Sebastian Payne

When I arrived back at Durham from the Christmas break, this was what the Purple Radio office looked like

A horrendous state of old servers, old Sun workstations, boxes, cables, CRT monitors and general computing rubbish. Most visitors would comment 'was this a radio station or an IT lab' - I have wondered this myself. Slowly over Epiphany term, the situation has improved by binning lots of rubbish, cannibalising computers to get the useful bits out and seeing what isn't needed. On the last few days of term, Jake and Graham from the IT & Systems team went in with myself for a big dumping session. My uncle and I then took 12 old systems, two G3 iMacs and a laser printer to the local dump 'household waste recycling centre' and things were looking much better. All of these systems were either beyond repair or too old to be any use to anyone. Recycling them would have been better but no one was interested in them.

Over the holidays, I have been buying posters and tomorrow, I'm traveling back to start decorating with the help of some friends. Instead of the light blue, we are going magnolia with should brighten up the place and look cleaner. Expect some more photos soon of a much friendlier office (with a kettle and toaster to boot!). On another note, if anyone has any old equipment they don't need, please let me know as we may be able to use it. Monitors (flat screens), servers, desktops, RAM - anything really can be useful.