April 2015
News Briefs
BFF needs Volunteers
Bentonville Film Festival is looking for volunteers. NWACC will serve host to screenings and panel discussions for the festival. To sign up to be a volunteer, visit volunteer@bentonvillefilmfestival. com. Also sent your name to Justin Stewart at jstewart1@ nwacc.edu.
CMI Hosts Service
Campus Ministry International will hold fellowship services at 7 p.m. the first Tuesday of each month in the Peterson Auditorium of the Shewmaker Center for Global Business Development. Enjoy food, worship and the word April 7 and May 5.
Mary Beth Tinker to Speak
Mary Beth Tinker, who was involved in the landmark 1969 First Amendment case Tinker v. Des Moines Community School District, will address faculty, students and community members during a lecture at 6 p.m. April 7 in SC 108. Tinker was among a small group of students from Des Moines, Iowa, who in December 1965 wore black armbands to mourn those lost on both sides of the Vietnam War and to show support for Robert F. Kennedy’s call for a “Christmas truce.” Student participants were suspended from school until they would come back without the armbands. A First Amendment battle followed. The Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of History at NWACC sponsor the event. The public is invited.
Fiesta Planned April 9 BCM and NWACC Culture Clubs will host a Fiesta from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. April 9 at the Activity Center/Gym at 626 W. Olive St., Rogers. Open gym, snacks, cooking, supper, and prizes will be offered. All NWACC students and advisers are welcome as we learn about “Your World!”
Pizza with the Prez
Pizza with the President will be held at 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 5 to 6 p.m. April 8 in the Student Center lobby. The pizza is free.
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NorthWest Arkansas Community College’s Student-Run Newspaper Since 2007
Vol. 10, No. 8
The Flying Aces of “Be The Baron” Vanessa Brown Staff Writer Winners of Insatiable Ink’s Be the Baron Writing Contest presented their winning pieces during the Anita E. Jones Spring Arts Festival, Wednesday, March 11. The contest had three categories: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The contest was judged by members of Insatiable Ink, NWACC’s creative writing club, and their advisor, Lindsay Hutton. Hutton said they had a lot of really good submissions and they had to make some tough decisions, but they’re satisfied with the outcome because, “The winners are outstanding.” First place in each category was invited to speak at the festival, their works were posted on the Insatiable Ink website, and they were up for special consideration from the editors of “The Low Valley Review.”
Photo by Vanessa Brown Visiting poet, Jonathon Williams (Left), with Be the Baron winners, Monica Vallejo (Center) and Maxine Filcher (Right) at the Anita E. Jones Spring Arts Festival.
Monica Vallejo, winner of the poetry category, is originally from El Salvador and she grew up in Los Angeles and Arkansas. She’s a pro-
fessional tax preparer who enjoys many kinds of writing as a hobby and says she’s been inspired by things like “love, passion, dreams, fears,
and life.” Vallejo read her piece “Dreamland Villainy,” which she said was inspired by a dream she had the night before the due date. Vallejo
Virtual Desktop Project Cloud Computing Comes to NWACC
Henry King Sr. Staff Writer Traditionally working at a computer has always meant sitting at a desk with a bright screen flashing and an old desktop sitting next to it with fans whining and screaming trying to cool down the compacted components. Sometimes there’s no sound at all, or power, which usually means the computer is dead and now you’ll have to find another one in an already crowded lab. However, that annoying part of the desktop computer could become a relic of the past at NorthWest Arkansas Community College as the IT is working to roll out new “virtual desktops” for students to use in all the computer labs. Craig Heinze, manager of networks and infrastructure at NWACC, has been heading up this project, “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI for short, this is basically a consolidation effort to bring computers back to the data center for more manageability and also greater accessibility to services around the
Photo courtesy of Getting Smart campus for the students.” He says that VDI also would not cost much more than if the school purchased new desktops and would actually save money on electrical costs and maintenance over time as most of the equipment has almost double the rated life span of a normal computer. VDI, according to Heinze, is taking a very powerful computer/server with many gigabytes of memory and processors and dividing that up using software to “virtualize” multiple desktops. For example, “on one server you can have multiple instances of
Windows running, anywhere from 2 to 100 instances at the same time.” He also added that this is a more efficient use of computing power, most computers at idle utilize less than 1% of its available resources, “virtualization allows a [server] to better utilize all of those resources available to it,” and not waste power. During peak hours of the day when most students and faculty are using the virtual desktops Heinze has assured that there will not be any significant slow-downs. “Part of our job in IT is to do what we call capacity plan-
ning, the idea is to determine what is an acceptable level of performance for any user on campus and to build in enough excess capacity,” to meet needs and grow. However, during non-peak hours there wouldn’t necessarily be any performance gains because each virtual desktop is capped to a certain amount of power. Heinze says he wants to improve the end user experience and make as many resources available to students as possible, no matter where they are on campus. “Right now, we have labs scattered throughout the campus, and for most of them you have to be in a particular lab, at a particular time with a particular resource for you to be able to access that [software].” For example, if a student needed a particular piece of software to do their assignment and it was located in the health professions building, the student wouldn’t be able to access that anywhere else, but, “with this we are able to bring everything back to a central See Cloud, page 2
captured the disjointed nature of dreams with the real life conflict that dreams are said to help one figure out. And almost as a prophecy of her success, her dream-poem ends with her professor, “fist in the air shouting ‘Long live poetry!’” as she rides off into the sunset. Maxine Filcher’s emotive essay “A Soldier’s Constant: The Wicked Ways of Warriors and Women” won the nonfiction category. Filcher was an US Army machine gun and weapons specialist in Iraq. She said she draws most of her inspiration from real life experiences. This is evident in her winning piece by her powerful portrayal and comparison of life in the army with Tim O’Brien’s written wartime experiences. Professor John Allred said, “Anytime [Filcher] sends me an e-mail, I immediately stop what I’m doing... and read her writing. It’s that good.” The winner of the fiction See Baron, Page 2
Guns Off The Table Alan Baker Sr. Staff Writer House Bill 1077 passed the Arkansas House of Representatives on March 2, and went to the State Senate for consideration. Among other things, it would allow staff and faculty who possess a concealed carry license, and who take an additional 16 hours of training, to have their weapons on campus. This reverses a provision in the current law, which gave college and university administers and trustees the right to opt-out allowing of weapons on campus. Currently no four-or two-year colleges in Arkansas allow their staff to be armed. Ethan Beckcom, head of risk management at NWACC, pointed out that after weighing all the safety issues involved over the past two years, none of the 33 schools of higher learning, including NWACC, has opted to allow See Guns, page 2
News
News
Entertainment
History Day Celebrated
Golden Eagle Recipient
The Kingsmen Movie Review
Check out the photos of the individual exhibits that were on display during History Day.
As the recipient of the March 2015 Golden Eagle Award, Avery Goode has been recognized for her educational commitment.
Tanya Castella gives her review of the new movie release of the “Kingsmen.”
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