The Suffield Bell - Suffield Academy

6 - The Bell October 2007
News
The new high ropes course rises above
the SOLO building on the far west side
of campus.
Technology on Campus: The First Article in A Series
Jump Sosothikul ’08 & Sroaj Sosothikul ’10
The new schedule application is here! Includes
daily lunch and dinner menu, time until next
class, and pop-up notifications. Get it here:
http://web.suffieldacademy.org/~09crk
Spectators at the first game played on the new turf field
Turf Redefines Soccer & Field Hockey
Katharine Sacco ’10
Last spring, my geometry class
watched with fascination as different machines
pushed rows of grass from behind
Centurion Hall into large piles and then
trucked it away.
This was the work of Paganelli
Construction, a company which has done the
foundation for some jobs around campus before
– the track, the new dorms.
Paganelli created the foundation
out of layers of different kinds of rock. They
had to make sure the surface was perfectly
flat and provide for drainage. Although many
fields are crowned and so are slightly higher
in the middle than on the sides, ours has a 1-
degree pitch away from the building.
The installer, who only does two
fields a year, began laying out the carpet, an
A-Turf product which comes in wide strips,
in July. Although they are not visible, there
are seams in the turf that had to be glued together.
Some of the long, straight colored
lines on the field were part of the carpet, but
others, such as the curved lines and the SA in
the middle, had to be individually cut into the
carpet.
If you’ve dug your fingers into
the turf, you’ve found little black bits and
even littler white ones. These are rubber and
sand which were layered to create the infill.
It’s 60% rubber and 40% sand, with 80,000
pounds of rubber going into our turf.
After all this work, when we arrived
on campus in the beginning of September,
we were greeted with what Varsity Field
Hockey coach Mrs. Vianney calls a “state-ofthe-art”
turf field.
However, that moment seemed far
away when the Varsity Field Hockey team
made the playoffs last year, and they couldn’t
have a home game because of rain. According
to Mr. Godin, this “pushed forward a discussion
that had started a few years back.”
With support from Mr. Cahn, the
Board of Trustees, and the Parents’ Association,
and sufficient funds raised, Mr. Godin
and Mr. Cyr, head of the Physical Plant, began
visiting fields from New Jersey to Maine.
After choosing a product and installer
with the help of Mr. Booth, the turf
field went from being an idea to a reality.
Overall, Mr. Godin says the turf
provides “flexibility in terms of scheduling,
particularly in wet weather.” The fact that
teams will still get to play in the rain is the
“main advantage.”
During the spring season, boys and
girls lacrosse will be playing on the turf, and
during the fall season, boys and girls varsity
soccer will each get to play four or five games
on turf.
The varsity field hockey team will be utilizing
it for nearly all of their games. As Mr.
Godin puts it, “The current standard [in field
hockey] is to play on turf.”
So, what does the field hockey
team have to say?
“The field hockey program is
thrilled to play on this surface. Turf allows
field hockey players to move the ball more
efficiently and with better consistency, so the
game should be conducted at a much faster
pace than on grass,” says Mrs. Vianney.
Varsity soccer player Reagan Teed
’08 is also enjoying it. “The new turf field is
very soft on the feet and allows for a faster
game.”
The best thing about the turf, according
to Mr. Godin, is simply that in “creates
a lot of options.” Hopefully, everyone
will be able to enjoy and benefit from the turf
field in years to come.
Here many types of technology are
working around you all the time. This technology
ranges from the huge data servers in
the server room to just zeros and ones in your
laptop.
Technology is a major aspect of
our community, and we enjoy easy access to
it. But how much do you actually know about
our capabilities? Can you use these resources
to their full capacity? Let’s see what our
school has to offer. This is the first of a series
of articles on technology at SA.
First, let’s look at the school server
complex, which is located in the basement of
the library next to Tisch auditorium. Remember
that shabby little door? There are over 20
servers in there! They generate so much heat
that their cooling system doubles for air conditioning
in Tisch auditorium (an unintended
side effect which will be fixed any decade
now).
Some servers may be very familiar,
such as the file server, web server, or the firstclass
server. But there are others as well, for
instance the phone server, the Internet server,
and the packet shaper. The file server alone
contains 2.73 terabytes of space; that’s about
1 million mp3 songs you can store. You could
potentially listen to it non-stop 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week, for 18 years and never
hear a single repeat.
One interesting fact is that every
server is named after a movie character. For
example, our file server is Nigel from This is
Spinal Tap, our web server is Aragog from
Harry Potter, and our login servers are Luke
and Leia from Star Wars.
The packet shaper (named Lyle)
is actually a very interesting piece of equipment.
It keeps track of how much internet
you’ve been using and tags you with a rank
based on that amount. If you’ve used it a lot,
you’ll get less priority than the guy who’s
done nothing all day. So next time your WoW
lags, it’s not your roommate, it’s Lyle.
Lockdown, continued from page 1
are three signals you should look out for at all
times. The lockdown alerts are declared by
horn signals. One long blast means situation
normal, all cleared; two short blasts means
severe weather, clear all athletic fields; four
short blasts means full scale lockdown.
The first two signals should be self
explanatory; it is when we hear four blasts
that things get serious.
Should something dire occur, the
first thing anybody should do is seek a secure
location. First, see to your own safety. The
center for all information, both reporting in
and reporting out, will go through Fuller Hall.
Consequently, contact Fuller Hall as the next
step. Things then change depending on who
you are. Students should follow the directions
of teachers, who will lock people up in
safe locations. Remain there until all is clear.
If you’re alone, such as in a dorm room, lock
yourself in, and, if possible, contact Fuller
Hall by phone or e-mail. Keep yourself safe
at all time.
Teachers will lock the doors nearest
to their classrooms, close all windows,
and close the blinds. Teachers, administrators,
and staff have been asssigned to lock
every building. When each building is secure,
teachers and staff will contact Fuller
Hall with their locations, the names of the
students with them, and whether any threat is
imminent. Safety is the top priority.
As the school’s emergency team
gathers the names of all who are secured,
they will then work to account for anyone
who is missing. Are the students who called
in sick really safe at home? Did the history
Our internet speed is currently
17Mb per second for downloading and 5Mb
per second for uploading; that means you
can download a new album every minute.
Hopefully Lyle doesn’t notice you doing it,
though.
The school is planning to upgrade
from a cable modem to a fiber optic connection
with 19Mb down and 19Mb up. 2Mb
may seem like a small difference, but wait
until they upgrade and feel the surge!
There is some software in use on
campus that you may not know about, for
example: File-maker is a database software
that creates your schedule, Odin is a software
which manages your debit card account, and
Gradekeeper is a program which calculates
your letter grade and percentage.
All of this is here on campus,
so use it wisely. When’s the last time you
backed up your computer? Want your download
to speed up for once? Be smart about
technology and it’ll work wonders for you.
Tune in next time and we’ll talk about peerto-peer
communications and the ever notorious
BitTorrent.
Community Outreach
Launches Clothing and
Supplies Drive for Victims
of Hurricane Dean
Through lunch announcements,
emails, and signs around campus, we’ve
learned about the devastation caused by Hurricane
Dean.
As the signs say: “On August 18,
2007, Hurricane Dean pummelled Jamaica
with gusting winds and torrential rains leaving
many Jamaicans without shelter.”
Community Outreach members
have placed boxes around campus, asking for
donations. They are collecting clothing, pens,
pencils, books, notebooks, and other school
supplies.
teacher with a free period go down to Dunkin
Donuts? In any case the headmaster’s office
will contact parents, inform them of the situation
and tell them the safest action to take.
It is vital that parents obey the instructions
given by the school.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for
four blasts of the horn, though. Mr. Booth
doesn’t expect to need to use the horn, and he
certainly doesn’t want to. The lockdown will
happen only in response to the direst circumstance.
“As remote a chance as it is, we want
to make sure we could respond to a [dangerous]
situation” Mr. Booth told us.
The lockdown drill this summer
tested the procedures described above. At
this point some people are uncomfortable
with the having to be prepared for this kind
of disaster. Of necessity, everyone will be
trained in the procedures for a lockdown in
the near future. Classes on school safety will
soon be incorporated into the leadership program
with one unit exclusively on the lockdown.
“I’m expecting us to do drills periodically,”
Mr. Booth told The Bell. “We learned
a lot [from our last drill] about what works
and what doesn’t work.”
Until we receive further official notice,
it’s safe to say the lockdown can be kept
at the border of your consciousness. Always
secure yourself first before trying to establish
communications. “I feel that we’ve made
some great progress formalizing the procedures,”
said Mr. Booth, “we have some work
to do, but we’ve got the frame work in place.
We’ll get to where we need to be.”