For class today, we had a walking toward of the ECC building which is the main building for the DoIT department. There is a SINC site there, but there’s so much more. Our tour guide was Behzad, one of the lead network administrators for the university. He showed our the server rooms, the telephone wire room, and many other networking facilities. It was fascinating seeing all the servers, the batteries and the many wires that runs this whole campus. There were buttons for blackboard and everything and if anything were to happen (such as Sandy last year), there was another backup generator in Syracuse. Then when learning about telephones, Behzad said back in the olden days, people would test a working telephone, but testing the core connectivity with the tongue. If it was a working phone, there would be a small shocked felt (but not a big enough shot for injuries since it was less than 10 volts). From this I just realized that the land line phones do not run on batteries nor is it plugged into an outlet. Apparently the landline is only connected to these phone cords for a connection, but those phone cord carry a current that supplies energy. There was so much fascinating information that Behzad knew and he got to know all this information because he was inquisitive and asked a lot of questions. This was a great advice because when working, everything should be a learning experience and if you’re curious about something, questioning it would only allow you to learn more, which is pretty amazing. Towards the end of the tour, we went into Behzad’s office and his office computer was able to detect the location of a person with the person’s netID. I was so amazed and a little bit freaked out. I thought only government agencies or like police officers were able to track down people, but Behzad was able to detect a person using the person’s netID. It works if the person is on Stony Brook campus or using wifi which was pretty amazing.