Both a phrase from a Snap song and the tagline from an Energizer Bunny commercial, today this has more meaning with respect to the Ice Storm of 2008 last Thursday. A combination of heavy rain, strong wind, and rapidly freezing temperatures resulted in a record number of power outages across New Hampshire. PSNH, the state's largest electric company, reported that at the height of the problem more than 350,000 of their 500,000 customers were in the dark. Most of the problems resulted from falling tree limbs pulling down power lines, but there were also the occasional direct causes of transformers icing over (and subsequently blowing -- man, those light up the skies!), and even the random car knocking over a power pole. This morning, the report was that the lights were back on for all but 100,000 customers, and I'm pleased to say that as of 6:40am I had power.

 

In some parts of the world, I know, electric power is at best sporatic. Some places only have electricity for a limited number of hours per day, every day if they're lucky. Even within the United States there are places were power is fragile, breaking down essentially at the drop of a hat. The first house I owned (~25 years ago) had regular power outages, every couple of weeks or so, although they usually lasted an hour or so. But over the 10 years I lived there, the situation improved to the point where even a momentary blackout was a rare occurance. Now in my second house (all of 2 miles away from the first, but curiously enough, on a different power grid), I'd say that we might have lost power for a moment just once a year over the past dozen years. The grid is remarkably robust, and I consider myself blessed.

 

Thursday's storm made most of New Hampshire realize just how good we've got it. We lost the lights around 9:30pm, and they stayed off for a LONG time. For me, it was 141 hours of no heat, no lights, and (for a short time) no phone. Fortunately, the water supply stayed constant, and much to my relief our pilot light-based water heaters did their job with no electricity, so we our water remained hot as well. Having the better part of 500 gallons of propane in the tank meant that we could cook (stove-top only, the oven won't turn on without AC power), and a fireplace meant we could keep reasonably comfortable even when the outside temperature was in the low teens (Fahrenheit, -10C). Not to say we weren't caught off guard -- we usually have a small supply of firewood stacked nearby, but this year we had to rely on a bunch of armfuls of wood from our neighbors. In the end, we had many candles and flashlights going in the evening; we blocked off passageways leading to the second floor (to cut the heat loss to places we weren't using), and we slept in the living room most nights. And, yes, we did lose a lot of food in the frigerator and freezer.

 

Alternative power? Yeah, we should get ourselves a generator one of these days. I would love one that uses the propane in my tank, rather than gasoline, but I don't know what they cost. Ours is one of the few houses on the block without a generator (although I did have to help one of my neighbors get his up and running ... another story perhaps?), and the roar from various nearby houses was farily constant. There were a bunch of instances of carbon monoxide poisoning across the state, from people who (foolishly enough) thought they could run their generator or other heat source inside their house, but fortunately no one I know. Sometimes I wonder if Darwin should not only be taught but enforced ...

 

For now, however, I'm glad to be going home to a (hopefully) warm house.

So, okay, I mentioned before that this past weekend the FIRST Robotics team that I run had an outstanding FIRST LEGO League tournament at our school. It was everything you could ever hope for: the veteran members and adults helped lead the newer members through everything that needed doing, the teams of middle schoolers and their families had a good time, the events ran on schedule, and the results turned out pretty much good enough that no one could complain about anything. We've heard from numerous guests that, once again, our team did a great job.

 

And then there was the "inside story": One FLL Team (Team A) had some issues with a parent who was getting, shall we say, a tad too enthusiastic about getting the kids to follow his way of doing things. Under the guise of "look what my son did over the weekend", he tried to strong-arm the rest of the seventh graders into abandoning their efforts and adopt the LEGO bot that he (and his son) built at home. Recognizing that this would defeat the entire "team" approach, the team's coach (and the rest of the kids) balked at the prospect of his approach. Upset with the rejection, this guy found another local team (Team B) five weeks into the eight week season, joined, and convinced them that they needed to abandon their ideas and go with this new fangled approach.

 

At our competition, the Technical Judges were easily able to see that the Team B didn't really understand how their robot worked (i.e., they didn't build it). However, since the kids performed well in the Research Presentation part of the competition, they won a ticket to the State competition next month. Word on the street is that this guy took the robot home after the tournament was over, and has been spending lots of quality time with it (and his son) rebuilding / reprogramming it so that it will perform better at States. Aside from the fact that this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of the FLL regulations, doesn't this guy realize what he's doing to the rest of the team?

 

Sometimes I take a lot of criticism about how I run my FIRST team, but there's not a single student who ever feels that the mentors have more of a say than they do.

Tomorrow morning, at the BG Gymnasium, (FIRST Robotics) Team 811 will be hosting the 6th annual Cardinal Chaos FIRST LEGO League competition. A bunch of local middle- and junior high schools will be bringing their LEGO-based robots to our school to see how well they do in this year's challenge: Climate Connections. There are about 18 "missions" on the playing field (a 4' x 8' plywood sheet boardered by 2x4 walls), and the teams have 2-1/2 minutes to complete as many of them as they can. Points are awarded for each mission completed, and deducted for each penalty (for example, each time the robot fails to return to base and has to be manually retrieved).

The 6th-8th graders have been working on their creations since mid-September, so Saturday's competition is the culmination of their efforts. I'll see if I can get some pictures posted.

This morning, after assuring myself that I had in fact gotten all of the critical data off of the newly recovered hard drive from my laptop, I got bold, and put the drive back into the laptop. Lo and behold, it booted! I was ecstatic, and proceded to (among other things) restore the desktop computer I was using back to student use. Unfortunately, by lunchtime I encountered another BSD; furthermore, by mid-afternoon it suffered yet another hard crash, and the laptop is no longer bootable.

 

My wife suspects virus; she may be right, but I think it's more likely that I have a broken OS mix. While I'm ecstatic with the fact I brought the drive back from the dead, I am still a little disappointed it's not completely healed. The next chance I get (this weekend, or early next week) I will do my MBR/PBS editing again, hopefully getting the system up and running again. THEN I'll have my MIS guy refresh the NT system, and THEN I'll do a virus scan. Hopefully that will keep it from spontaneously dying.

Two and a half years ago I wrote about recovering data from corrupted hard drives (here, here, and here). Two weeks ago I wrote about having to move my hard drive from one laptop to another, because my old one was suffering from some kind of motherboard failures. Well, while the computer "worked" well enough, it obviously had an issue or two (probably due to subtle system or driver changes due to the dying motherboard), because once in a blue moon it would suffer a BSD (blue screen of death) when I was doing something fairly innocuous. But, since a brand new computer was coming RSN ("real soon now"), I figured I would keep my MIS guy off my back by coaxing the laptop along until then. You have figured I'd learn by now ...

 

Late last week, right after a BSD incident, the laptop complained upon rebooting that it had determined that the failure was because I needed to install the latest service pack for Visual Studio .NET, and all would be well. Okay, I tell it, I'm game, go ahead. It proceded to take an hour or so to download the 417MB of data (wow, that's big). Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of the installation (I wasn't there at the time), another BSD occured. This time, it wouldn't wake up again. When I rebooted it, I'd get the manufacturers splash screen, and then ... nothing. Not the standard black screen w/ white status bar and then the XP Loading picture, just nothing. Okay, sweat starting to bead on the forehead, let's hit the old F8 key. Nothing. No hard drive activity, just plain dead.

 

I try the "move the hard drive to another computer" trick that worked so well before. Nothing. So I go to my MIS guy, and he presses the magic keys, and the system tries to boot from the network (VERY neat trick!). Okay, so the system is fine. He starts a network backup of the hard drive (since there is VERY important, and naturally not-backed up data on the drive), and he can read everything. Unfortunately, it's a binary image copy, which means that if doesn't have another drive of EXACTLY the same topology, the copy is meaningless. But it does mean that the drive isn't completely dead.

 

So, I borrow a USB drive caddy, with the SATA-ATA adapter, and I try reading the hard drive from another desktop. I plug in the USB cable, and see a message on the screen "The drive is not formatted. Do you wish to format it?" NOOOO!!!! This drive is telling me that it's got serious issues, with either the partition table or the partition boot record. (Yes, from a past life I know about both; I used to live there.) But I don't want to take a hack at it (literally) until my MIS guy has one more shot at it.

 

He tries a couple of more obscure recovery tools he's got, and late yesterday tells me that there's nothing he can do, it's all up to me. I happen to have a couple of periods free this morning, so I take the drive back. I also take another identical drive (the original drive from the laptop I hijacked two weeks ago) to serve as the valid data point. (For clarity's sake, let's call my original laptop and drive the A units, and the borrowed laptop and its drive the B units.) Armed with hard drive A, hard drive B, the SATA-ATA adapter, and a bootable floppy (with some of my magical tools from a dozen years ago), I opened up a desktop computer.

 

I put hard drive B into the desktop, booted the floppy, and used a home brew disk editor to look at the individual sectors. I see the Master Boot Record (MBR) with a valid partition table (which I dutifully copy down), pointing to a valid partition, whose partition boot sector (PBS) looks healthy. Good to know. There's lots of empty space between the MBR and PBS; this is expected. I'm a little disconcerted that live file data follows the PBS; I would have expected the equivalent of the FAT, but I know that NTFS doesn't have to have the FAT equivalent in any particular location, so I'm okay with this.

 

Then I put hard drive A into the desktop. MBR with a partition table identical to the other (expected), some blank space ... wait a moment, there's data here! The first track is not all empty! And there's no PBS at the start of the partition! Whatever overwrote this continued on, because the data that starts mid first track continues on beyond where the live stuff was. Okay, this is not good, but the explanation is here: SOMETHING corrupted the start of the drive!

 

Okay, take a breath, time to think. I reload hard drive B, and using another obscure and ancient tool of mine, I copy a bunch of the sectors from the "good drive" (including the PBS and the live data that followed) directly to the floppy. Reload hard drive A, and ... no, don't paste it down yet. First preserve the same sectors onto the floppy, in case this doesn't work. Okay, NOW copy the saved sectors from the good drive onto the same location on the bad drive. Done.

 

Now ... no, I still can't read the drive. I don't have a bootable floppy disk that can read an NTFS partition. Hmmm, okay, put the drive back into the USB caddy. Plug it into a booted system, and YES! IT SEES ALL THE DATA!

 

Immediately I start a large scale transfer of all the critical data onto a network drive. All is almost right with the world, I have the stuff I need for school again.

 

 

But now that this crisis is over, I have to wonder ... can this drive boot in my laptop again? Stay tuned ...

 

Anyway, my school has been generous enough to provide me with a laptop for years and years now, and the travel bag over my shoulder is definitely a standard part of my persona. So when my alter ego started acting strangely some weeks ago, it put me into a very strange place.

While I won’t mention manufacturer’s names, I currently have a Brand X laptop. I’ve used Brand X for years, and really like them a lot. (Which is saying something because a dozen years ago I worked for another PC manufacturer, NEC.) Anyway, a couple years ago, when the last Brand X computer was three years old, I was told that it was up for replacement, and that I would be getting a new Brand Y computer. Knowing how much I liked Brand X, I asked if I could get an X instead of a Y. As it turned out, my Brand X loyalty not only convinced them to get me an X, but five or six other people in the school got X’s as well. And other than a brief LCD noise issue, I’ve been happy for two+ years.

In the last month, however, strange things started happening to my system. The CPU fan started running at Mach speed (but the Task Manager didn’t see anything chewing up cycles). The LCD brightness would spontaneously change. The “Docking …” alert box would pop up while I was sitting in my easy chair. The system would not shut down completely when I wanted it to, forcing me to kill the power directly. The system would not (always) boot up nicely. When docked at school, it would suddenly forget that it was docked, and thus I would lose my mouse, LCD projector port, etc.

Suspecting malware, I gave it virus scans, spambot scans, adaware scans … which found a thing or two but didn’t fix the underlying problems. My tech at school and I concluded that something on the motherboard was malfunctioning, and that the system would need replacing. Curiously enough, most if not all of the other Brand X systems purchased at the same time were encountering other bizarre failures which couldn’t be tracked to any single point of failure. We concluded that, while Brand X is an otherwise fine manufacturer, we had obviously gotten a “bad batch.” Unfortunately, replacement systems (from Brand Y) were a few to several weeks off. I resigned myself to do whatever I could to keep the system alive as best as I could, and hope I could last until replacements arrive.

The past two or three days were getting very difficult. Boot-ups would take 15 minutes, if it booted at all; I could no longer connect an LCD projector to the VGA port (it appeared as though the VGA port lost the ability to hold the vertical sync). All but one particular mouse would not work. Blue Screens of Death were occurring several times a day. I would not, apparently, make it until November. So in desperation, I turned to my techie and asked if I could “borrow” one of the other systems that had been returned as defective. I swapped hard drives, and booted up my old hard drive in the new / defective system. It is working perfectly. (The techie and I are wondering if by “defective” the previous owner meant “virus plagued”?)

I figure, if nothing else, I would last the few more weeks before new systems arrive. But, if things work as well as the seem right now, I might just hold onto this, and let it last its full three years.

Well, it took a tad longer than expected (i.e., it wasn't instantaneous!), but several dozen of my blog posts from theSpoke are now part of this blog. I for one am happy I didn't lose these morsels of insight.

 

I apparently will have to go through them and add the pictures and other tags that didn't come along for the ride, and apparently all comments have been lost (maybe I can paste them on as well?), but now at least I can refer to my past wisdom when necessary.

 

And, yes, I will try to write more often, mom.

Update: I downloaded IntoSpaces from Channel 8 (actually, from CodePlex where it's published), installed it, and ran it. It found (!) the dozens of my blog entries in theSpoke, and it SAID it transfered them to here. So far, I can't see them. (I posted a comment on Channel 8, asking for assistance.) Again, stay tuned.

So I started blogging on theSpoke back in 2004, and blogged on and off for three years. Unfortunately, while theSpoke was a great place in 2004 and 2005, by 2006 it started collapsing due to spamblogs, automated spambots that did nothing but flooded theSpoke with junk blog entries. By late 2006 / early 2007 it was clear that theSpoke was dying, and I started this one. (Okay, so I haven't blogged much in the past year, but that's another story entirely.)

One of the things that bugged me about the death of theSpoke is that all those wonderful blog entries that I wrote would eventually (to use the technical term) go poof, and disappear forever.

On a whim, I went on theSpoke today. (No, I wasn't hoping things have changed; I was using a system that I hadn't in quite a while, and the Favorites in its browser included a link there.) Across the top was a banner that said "This conversation continued on Channel 8", the replacement for theSpoke. So I went there, and for the fun of it I searched the Channel 8 site for "theSpoke", wanting to see who else ended up there. Lo and behold, there was a post for a "theSpoke to Spaces blog converter." Could it be ???

Stay tuned, we're about to find out!

Short answer: lots of places, just not here. Somewhere along the line I've forgotten how to blog, but it is slowly dawning on me that I've been neglecting this. I've even neglected reading most / all of the blogs I've used for information in the past year. For whatever reason, I just haven't been able to get back into the swing of things since theSpoke imploded and I jumped ship to here.

My class load is fairly light this semester, and my classes are pretty much excellent. I've been prepping Team 811 for another fantastic year in FIRST (and my, what a great year it looks to be!) On a whim I built a wood lathe over the past few weeks so I could help a friend recreate some nifty antique balusters for a home renovation (pictures will hopefully follow, because words won't do it justice). And I just wrote a cute 3D style Maze game in VB.

Will came home for Thanksgiving, and will be in NH for a week or so after we return from Christmas in Florida. M.E. is now approaching five years into her six-month assignment in Mass, and had a five hour commute home the other day during the snowstorm.

 

Busy doesn't do it justice, but it is a convenient excuse. Hopefully I'll get back into practice.

Hmmm, my last blog entry was July 23rd, and was titled Busy Summer. Well now it's mid October. What happened to the summer?

I suppose I could blame it all on the "mountain of laundry" I mentioned, but that would be completely true. As always, life got in the way, and I got out of the habit of calling up this blog site. So many excuses, few of which are worthy. So let me fulfill a promise in the last entry and tell about part of my summer.

A bit of background, first: My wife's family comes (most recently) from central Ohio, and her parents some decades ago purchased a piece of land on an island off the northern coast of Ohio on Lake Erie, and built a nice summer home there. We (my wife, kids and I) have for many years traveled from New Hampshire for a week or so each summer, usually around the 4th of July holiday.

This year, with the 4th on a Wednesday, it would logically mean that we’d head out on the previous weekend and stay for a full week or two. The plans got a bit tangled, however, when A) my cousin was getting married on Long Island, NY on Friday June 29^th, and B) my son had a football camp in Worcester MA from Saturday the 30^th until Tuesday July 2^nd. Since my wife works about 17 miles from the football camp, we came up with a Plan:

We drove from home in New Hampshire down to my parents in New York City on Thursday the 28^th, and attended an utterly amazing wedding. (Perhaps another blog entry someday? 8^) Bright and early on Saturday, my wife drove my son back to Massachusetts, dropping him off at football camp, and continuing on back to New Hampshire. Since she had to work, and I was on vacation (high school teacher, got the summer off), I stayed with my daughter Michelle in NYC, spending a few quality days with my parents. Anyway, the master plan said that come Tuesday the 3^rd, my wife would pick up my son from football camp, pick up my daughter and I, and we would continue on to Ohio for a week and a half with her family.

Things went according to plan for all of about 4 days. My wife called me Sunday evening to tell me about an “enhancement” idea she had. My oldest son Will is a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, and for a variety of reasons found himself stuck out there for the summer. A previous “master plan” had him coming home sometime over the summer, and heading back to USAFA in a car we have been saving for him. Since he wasn’t coming home, this wasn’t going to happen, and he was looking at a LONG summer without any means of transportation. Anyway, my wife came up with the following idea: She would put Will’s bicycle in the back of he van when she headed out to pick us up and drive to Ohio. Sometime during our stay, my other son Tom and I would drive out to Colorado to bring Will his bike and spend a few days with him.

So bright and early on Tuesday the 3^rd, Michelle and I took a subway to Penn Station in Manhattan, and grabbed an Amtrak train 150 miles north to Albany NY. My wife left work at noon, picked up Tom in Worcester, and drove 2 hours West to Albany, where she picked us up. We then drove nearly non-stop to Ohio, about 600 miles / 9 hours.

We spent Wednesday the 4^th on South Bass Island, enjoyed the fireworks, tooled around a bit (fixing this an that around my in-laws’ house), and had a quiet Thursday with family and friends. At daybreak Friday, Tom and I jumped in the van, took the ferry to the mainland, turned West on I-80, and headed to Colorado. Okay, so there was about 20 hours of driving in there, through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, with a stop in the middle of Nebraska for sleep, but we got to USAFA around noon on Saturday. I can’t do the scene justice with my simple words, but trust me when I say that my 6’5” tall third year cadet looked like a kid at Christmas when I opened the back of the van and he said, “It’s my bike!”

After an all-too-short stay (three days), Tom & I headed home. We took a more Southern route, driving through Kansas and Missouri. On a humorous note, I realized that I drove past seven Major League Baseball Stadiums (Shea and Yankee in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, and St. Louis), but unfortunately we didn’t / couldn’t stop to see any games. Over 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of driving, loaded with great memories, and lots of quality time with both sons. Priceless.

Don't you just hate it when you blink and realize that a month has gone by? It's been almost two months now, but I would hope that I have some excues.

In the last month I visited my parents in NYC (and also attend my cousin's wedding), my wife's parents in Ohio, my son in Colorado, and my wife's sister in Philadelphia (so I could go to the wedding of a former student). In a throw-back to the good-old days, I did all this traveling by car! Roughly 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 km) since the end of June.

I'll have to find some time to describe some of the things I've seen and done, but not today: I've got a load of laundry to tackle!

I just realized that I neglected to announce that last week (Thursday, to be exact) we finished our task and produced a working schedule!

 

The previous blog entry said that we had what could be called a release candidate. Unfortunately, what we didn't know at the time was that we neglected to keep track of some of the finite resources (specifically Art rooms), and inadvertantly double-booked an Art room or two. Which meant we had to go back to the mid-Friday files and remap the classes from that point onward. That took Tuesday.

 

Wednesday we discovered that we didn't keep count of the rooms in use, and ended up with 42 classes in one period. This would have been fine, except we have only 41 classrooms available to us.

 

On Thursday, we finally hammered out the final details, and got a schedule that A) didn't overbook any individual room, B) didn't overbook any teacher, and C) didn't overbook the school as a whole. In fact, we even minimized the number of consecutive periods that teachers taught (always a nice thing to do). Some computer periods had more students than the labs have computers, but a few iterations through the seating optimizer managed to make them all fit.

 

In the end, there were only 11 students (out of nearly 900!) who didn't have schedules that could work. However, a brief perusal of those showed things like "Well, you asked for AP-Nuclear Physics and Underwater Basketweaving, but since they are each one section courses, and they both meet at the same time, you'll have to probably forego the Baseketweaving."  (Note: Neither is a real course here!)

 

Overall, we're happy with the results. We can't stand the tool we use, but we're okay with the schedule.

 

The other day I described the frustrating task of scheduling. Yesterday, "Day 2" of doing things by hand, went much better than expected. I mentioned that we got the 1's through 5's done on Thursday, so we started Friday with the 6's. Things went very well, and we plowed through on into the 9's by 4:00pm. We (myself and another coworker) quit for dinner, and returned at 7:00pm to finish the 9's, 10's and 12's, the last course (which humorously enough is one of my computer classes!) Well, lo and behold, we were DONE by 9:00pm, and have a schedule that's in pretty decent shape. There are still some things to hammer out:

Okay, so I haven't written anything in a week or so. I've been doing scheduling.

 

I teach Computer Science at a private high school. Last year, the person who's handled the task of creating the schedule for the 900 or so students each year asked for some help, and since I have industry software engineering skills, I got picked. (Somewhere along the line I fear they may try to hoist the task on me alone, but that will only come after significant negotiations, but I digress.)

 

We have a software tool that is supposed to facilitate the scheduling process (900 kids, 7 sections per semester, each kid therefore gets 8 to 12 course selections, etc.), but it still involves a fair amount of scrutinizing, beyond checking that students don't sign up for Spanish IV before they take Spanish III, etc. Things like you have to make sure that the gym is available for the PE class, or that teachers get a break now and then, or that you can't fit 25 kids in a lab that has only 24 computers, etc.

 

This year they rolled out a brand new version of the scheduling software. It is supposed to make life so easy people will WANT to do scheduling. Sometimes I wish reality would catch up with hype. It took a while (a week?) to figure out all of the super-intelligent switches (and many calls to the program's support line), so that it wouldn't assign all 62 students to one section of a three-section course, but today we managed to crank through all classes in about three hours. THEN we started analyzing what it gave us:

• Some students started searching for cheap and acceptable video cards. Mail order has some for around $30, which means I could probably get a half-dozen systems up without too much trouble
• We loaded XNA on some of the school's laptops, and found that things run well. With 10 such laptops, we'll be pretty well covered (unless, of course, other teachers borrow the laptops for a period or two)
• I sent word out the school's faculty that I've got 15 top notch programmers chomping at the bit for a challenging assignment. So far three ideas have been suggested
• The old standby: PocketPC applications

I'm still hoping that we can pull off something in the XNA arena. I know two groups of students are still interested at least. But I'm also glad to see the other groups digging into different projects. A Jeopardy game for one teacher (probably several more, if it's written well), a lab-partner-selection utility for another, and a PocketPC game. Can't wait to see the results.

Yesterday my class took their APCS exam. (Yeah, I suppose I should have written this yesterday ...)

 

By the rules of the game, I'm not allowed to ask them what they thought about it until tomorrow at 11:00am, so I don't really know how they did. However, I have every confidence that they did well. Not to be too critical of the past, this class seems to have "gotten it" better than any I've had. The quality of the discussions, the depth of the questions they've asked, the diligence that they've applied, it all clicked throughout the year. I honestly believe they've done well.

 

But, I have to wait until tomorrow to really find out. Stay tuned.