Category Archives: Around the U

John Fox did a lot at Radford, including service as a volunteer at WVRU.

John Fox was everybody’s friend at Radford, but anyone responsible for a Mac computer lab will tell you he was a lifesaver. Saint John of Cupertino, I once called him, and he said “pssshawww, Ive never even been there.”  And smiled that famous smile of his.

His death Aug 12, 2021, was unexpected.

I met John back in  the late 90s at a time when each department was responsible for its own set of those fragile little electronic boxes,  John was hired to be the IT guy for Mac computers, and one day he showed up with a pair of pliers and a multi-headed screwdriver. He asked how things were going,  and then sat around and fixed things and told jokes and passed along some wisdom of the digital kind, and otherwise.

One of his favorite tricks before we had individual screen logins in the labs  — Im sure this doesn’t matter now — was to use the number 1 as a password.  Imagine the time we’re saving, not having to key in complicated passwords, he would laugh. We could spend a weekend fishing with all this time we saved.  I was over in IT a few weeks ago in July, 2021, and told that story, and all the old timers broke out laughing. Yeah, that was John, they said. He was remembered fondly.

Which brings me to this story:   When we did start using full logins in the Media Studies Mac lab in the basement of Porterfield, suddenly, one day in early fall of 2003, nobody could log in. The spinning wheel  would just keep on spinning on the screen, and entire classes would go by, watching the little wheel. For anyone teaching with computers it was a very serious crisis, although the local department heads and sundry administrators found an endless source of humor in it all.

Using computers to teach photography and writing is just a crutch, they would sniff. Try teaching without the computers for a while, they would suggest helpfully, trying to hold back a schadenfreudian smile.

Digital photography and web design, which is what we actually were teaching,
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