My first, out of two weeks of work experience was at the Parkes Radio Telescope doing computing work with Gina Spratt, a systems administrator. On my first day, Jodi Sant, who was also doing the same work experience as me, drove me down to arrive at 8:30. When we arrived we were introduced to Gina and the staff before we had to do a safety induction program with Brett Preisig which took about an hour.

We met up with Gina and she gave us and overview of operating systems and their differences, plus the different kind of computers and then we had morning tea at 10:30 and were back to work, installing a new operating system on an old home computer. First we done an upgrade, but because it can cause problems and takes up space we decided to do a full install. After we started doing that we then had lunch at 2:00 and then I started on this web page.

On our second day we arrived at about 25 past 8 to go on the dish, observing a new reseiver being installed in the receiver cabin, it was great. After settling down we met up with Gina to go and install software on the home computer, then Gina had a meeting so we just went on with our web pages.

On wednesday we started to install a new operating system, Windows ME, on a laptop by doing a full install which we didn't succeed in doing because the floppy disk drive was stuffed. Me and Jodi also had a look at the visitors centre, and Rick, the Centre Manager gave everybody some interesting facts about the telescope. After that, Gina pointed out a few things about the network like what the file server, web server and the apache program was and how they work. After lunch I continued on with this web page.

The next day, we finished off installing Windows ME thanks to Brett who found out a way to work the floppy disk drive. The rest of the day we followed Gina mostly fixing computer problems and continuing on with this web page. On Friday, our last day I started to install software on the laptop and finished off this web page. Overall the week has been a new and interesting experience for me and I would love to do it again.