Grapevine, Texas

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HelpingTulsa's main objective is to provide refurbished computers to schools, churches, and non-profit agencies, Senior Citizen Centers, Tulsa Housing Authority facilities, and HUD Section 8 facilities.

Our variation of the old Chineese proverb about teaching a man to fish is "Fix an old computer for a man and he will have a computer that will fill his needs for a while. Teach a man to fix computers and he will have a computer for the rest of his life, and he can fix computers for his friends and neighbors."

Therefore HelpingTulsa frequently has people come down to learn computer refurbishing, and then they set up non profit organizations in their cities, so that used computers, that might otherwise be sent to landfills, can have a few more years of life, helping people who can't otherwise afford a computer.

A Peace Corp volunteer from Nairobi, Kenya, missionary working in Belarus, Russia, and a Navajo from Flagstaff, Arizona are examples of recent previous visits.

Most people that come to learn, just bring an open mind, and they leave with a Road Warrior or two, and often more than that. But this was a different case. I presume that GRACE has been scraping a number of machines they did not have time to refurbish the old way, taking 4 hours to convert each machine, because Dave brought about 10 machines that are 600 - 700 MHZ (all capable of becoming Road Warriors), plus a nice supply of sound cards, modems, CD ROMS, video cards, and monitors, to say thank you for what he was going to learn.

We certainly appreciated the machines that GRACE provided. It appears that GRACE (Grapevine Relief And Community Exchange) is very similar to Tulsa's Cornerstone Assistance Network, which helped HelpingTulsa when we were first formed.

When we first got started Dave's objective was just one Road Warrior. When we first came out with our latest version of RW, I was using a 30 gig drive in my machine, so when I grabbed a HD to use for Dave's RoadWarrior I saw that I had three possible drives, a 30G on top of two 40G drives, so I just grabbed the top one, the 30 Gig. What I had forgotten is that after I moved my main drive over to a larger drive Mike Stockton had given us two new images, Super Bible and Super Child, and I had added an RW8 image which had everything on the RW6 image plus the two new Super images, so when I copied all of the RW images over to Dave's 30 Gig, it ran out of space. We deleted one image he probably would not need, and got everything he really needed, and we finished after a first day's major effort.

I got something to eat, and collapsed into my lift chair, planning on not moving until Dave got here the next morning, but at 2am God woke me up, yelling at me "why did I not give Dave one of my 40 gig drives, so that he could have everything". When The Boss is not happy with you, you need to listen, so at 2am I went into the Imaging Room and started a Drive Copy of the 30 gig onto one of the 40 gig drives, and when Dave got here at 9 I told him to grab a couple of additional trays, and another of the machines he brought, beause The Boss wanted me to make him a second RoadWarrior. Actually we went ahead and built him a third RW, this one with just one drive tray, like most of the Road Warriors I build (a one tray RW can do almost everyting a two tray unit can, and we dont have to worry about a poorly trained volunteer using the wrong tray and getting confused.

Dave left Wednesday with his three Road Warriors, and with a promise to try to find some teachers in the Grapevine area to help us expand our Children Image to include some Pre School and Kindergarten programs, and some programs for grade 7-12, so that rather than just an image for children in grades 1-6, we will have one for all children. If I understand the end users that GRACE machines usually go to, this expanded image should be VERY useful for them, as well as the children that get our machines.

I suspect it may take Dave a week or two to install each of the images we have developed to see what is on them, and then decide whether to begin training GRACE's workers to install our images, with GRACE's wallpaper, or whether he is going to sit down and develop a custom GRACE image, with software selected based on the recipient base that GRACE serves. He may want to get some trays and build some additional Road Warriors, and train the GRACE staff, but I expect that we will soon hear reports of some significant blessings being bestowed on GRACE's clients.