Calculatoarele noi vin degraba?

The laboratory full of new computers that my school won in October will arrive before February 1, according to a talk show on state television that focuses on education. I'll believe it when I see it.

In the meantime, I made some upgrades to the nine-year-old HP Vectra computers with 16 MB of RAM and 166 Mhz Pentium MMX processors. After spending a total investment of $60 at Fry's Electronics and on eBay and scrounging around the computer history museum that is my parents' house, I was able to equip each of the eight computers in the lab with 8x CD-ROM drives, the requisite IDE cables, and new motherboard batteries (when a motherboard battery runs out of juice, a computer can no longer remember the date and other important information when it is shut down).

These upgrades were cheap and should be effective. This is the first time the school computer lab has had CD-ROM drives. In introducing the CD-ROM drives, I was able to tell one of my favorite jokes, which translated easily to Romanian:

A man calls technical support and says his computer's broken just two days after he had bought it.

"What seems to be the problem with it, sir?"

"Well, I put my coffee mug in the cup holder, and it broke off."

It got a laugh in all of my classes. Maybe my sense of humor is getting better in Romanian.

The killer app that I'm trying to push on the kids is the CD-ROM encyclopedia. I showed each of my classes the 2000 Compton's Encyclopedia in English, and they were impressed with the possibilities, especially because the only encyclopedias that the school has, according to my 8th grade students, are from the Soviet times. One of my students has offered to bring in his CD-ROM encyclopedia from home, a 2006 edition in Russian. A Russian encyclopedia is more useful at the school than an English one, because nearly all the students understand Russian, as opposed to the approximately 10 percent of the students who understand English.

Of course, maybe we'll get an internet connection with this new computer lab. Then we'll have access to Wikipedia, at which point the possibilities are endless.

But will the new computer lab come? As the Moldovans say, "Vom trai si vom vedea." We'll live and we'll see.