Shortly after Kelly and I were married in March 2009 we began to attempt to have children. Kelly started by going off birth control as an obvious first step. She then went on to investigating potential causes for infertility issues due to diet, vitamins and other standard body issues. In this pursuit she determined she was allergic to gluten and certain forms of dairy. In order to improve our chances to get pregnant she drastically changed her diet and began taking supplements. She also went to acupuncture to see if it could help. While this was going on she was charting her temperature and using other techniques to try to increase our odds.
Almost exactly a year after we were married and had made almost zero progress with diet, supplement, acupuncture and other homeopathic remedies we began to pursue more traditional infertility treatments. We started meeting with the Fertility Center of Maryland after some recommendations in late March / Early April 2010. They immediately started by putting both of us through a battery of tests to try and figure out what is wrong with us. Much to Kelly’s dismay her tests were much more numerous and invasive than mine. This began a trend that continues to this day that they focus on Kelly more than me, something she is not fond of.
Shortly after starting this process I had the beginnings of my own health issues in May 2010. That however is a story for another post.
After much testing and theorizing Kelly was put on a course of drugs, both pills and shots, to induce / force ovulation. This was accompanied by a process called IUI or artificial insemination. This means that the doctors help my part of the equation get to the right place in completing fertilization. The IUI was done partially because I was determined to not be ideal in my fertility as well. Something that has never been investigated to Kelly’s satisfaction again because they seem to want to focus on her.
Only 2-3 of the 5 forced ovulation attempts resulted in theoretically viable eggs. Of those none successfully implanted as fertilized embryos. These attempts happened from the summer of 2010 until January of 2011 with pretty much zero progress. During this process and after Kelly continued to go through more and more tests to try and determine why things weren’t working out properly. There have never been any concrete answers.
After January 2011 we determined with the doctors that the next step forward was IVF. IVF makes what Kelly had gone through so far look like a walk in the park. Each attempt is about a 2 month process. The first month is somewhat shutting down ovulation mostly done via oral medication. All the while with at least weekly if not almost daily blood tests. The second month is much worse for Kelly (and wasn’t great for me). This is involves daily shots of 2-3 different medicines injected by me into Kelly, Kelly does NOT like needles. This was a pretty painful process both physically and emotionally all around.
The first retrieval happened in mid-May. This involved putting Kelly under anesthesia and surgically removing all the eggs she was forced to produce. Normally an ovulation cycle produces 1 egg and sometimes 2. Kelly produced due to drug intervention 22 eggs. They then took the 22 eggs and fertilized half “naturally” and the other half via a process called ICSI. ICSI is a process where sperm is manually inserted into the egg to almost guarantee fertilization. Seven eggs fertilized via these two processes. Two were returned to Kelly in hopes of a pregnancy and then the other 5 were frozen in case they were later needed.
While the retrieval / fertilization / return was happening Kelly suffered from OHSS or ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome. This caused her ovaries to swell excessively and then begin leaking fluid into her abdomen. This landed her in the hospital for several days. While there they had to drain the fluid from her abdomen and give her medication to help prevent the retention of further fluids.
After all of that there was no pregnancy and that was pretty heartbreaking. A few months later the frozen embryos were defrosted and attempted. This process for Kelly was closer to IUI than IVF, but still not fun in any way. Unfortunately this ended in the same negative result.
In late September / early October a second round of IVF was attempted. This time Kelly produced about the same number of eggs. Luckily she did not suffer the same fate of ending up in the hospital. This time ICSI was attempted on all the eggs. 11 successfully fertilized and were monitored. This time the fertilized embryos were kept in the lab for 6 days to try to find the best candidates. This ended up with 6-7 likely possibilities but none were “great”. The embryos didn’t blastocyst as they should have by that time. The 3 best ones were returned to Kelly in hopes that they would continue to mature correctly. We found out a week ago they didn’t. Also none were viable candidates for freezing so we don’t have any for further attempts.
With this result it pretty much brings to end our attempts to have a child of our own. Our insurance will only cover three attempts at IVF with no success. Also since we haven’t made much progress over the last 18 months there doesn’t seem to be a reason to continue. Further Kelly can’t handle emotionally or physically any further attempts. We have so far spent almost $10K dollars out of pocket in this process and the insurance companies have kicked in probably another five times that much easily.
In the last 6 months or so we have been investigating various forms of adoption. Ranging from foster care to international to local or national domestic. We have gotten pretty close to deciding on a national domestic adoption agency. As part of that process the agency recommended coming to terms with what has happened thus far in our family planning. This post is definitely a part of that.
One of the steps of moving on is admitting and embracing the anger felt during the fertility attempts. Often this anger is misdirected at totally inappropriate people. The main direction of anger is toward other people who are pregnant. There is a feeling of “why do they deserve to have kids and we don’t?” Like I said this isn’t helpful, but happens none the less. This is especially hard for Kelly and I due to our jobs I think. At least for me it seems like almost every week someone else is either having a kid, announcing they are pregnant or some other stage in between. I know I have felt resentment that all these people around me are having kids and I can’t. This thinking isn’t helpful and I hope I can move beyond it.
If you have read this far thanks and I hope I haven’t depressed you too much. I hope that sometime in the future Kelly and my fortunes with becoming parents will have changed for the better.
]]>I wanted to write up some thoughts on Steve Jobs and the more recent products he had a large part in releasing. This wasn’t meant to be as long as it turned out but I just kept writing. Hopefully it is worth the read for those who find it.
Many people will argue that Steve Jobs legacy is the Macintosh and its related computing devices or possibly Pixar. I think his iDevices have had and will have much larger and longer lasting impact on the technology world and beyond.
The iPod was first introduced almost exactly ten years ago on October 23, 2001. When the iPod was released it was not the first MP3 player that honor goes to the Diamond Rio which was followed by the Creative NOMAD . It wasn’t the best by most accounts either. It didn’t even really take off in sales until 2003 when the 3rd Generation iPod (now known as Classic) came out. Not surprisingly sales seemed to increase when iTunes 4.1 was released and introduced Windows support for iPod removing the need to use MusicMatch Jukebox to sync the iPod and opening the iPod up to the vast majority of the computing world using Windows instead of Macintosh computers.
The iPod did nothing truly new or unique other than potentially the click wheel which Apple didn’t even create (Synaptics who is known for laptop touchpads primarily created it) and has since been all but killed by the iPhone and iPod Touch. Over the first few generations Apple rapidly refined the iPod and iTunes to support it. As the iPod sales and popularity grew it basically killed off the rest of the MP3 player market. The iPod is also arguably responsible for the near death of the CD and growth of digital audio sales via the Internet.
There have been many sizes and shapes of the iPod including the now named Classic, the Mini, the Nano, the Shuffle and lastly the Touch which is really an iPhone without a phone. The storage sizes grew with the growth of miniature hard drives and then shrank again when the iPod switched to solid state memory instead.
At this point it appears Apple is ready to kill off the iPod except for the iPod Touch which has more in common with the iPhone than its iPod ancestors. The iPod was the first of the iDevices and started a string of changes throughout the world.
iTunes and iTunes Store
iTunes is a piece of software as opposed to hardware like the other three but it is intrinsically linked to them and they wouldn’t have worked as well up to this point without it. iTunes was initially released on Mac OS 9 and then shipped with all versions of OS X. As mentioned above in October 2003 iTunes 4.1 was released bringing with it Windows (2000 / XP) support. iTunes wasn’t the first CD ripping / MP3 playing / music organizing software and initially it definitely wasn’t the best. The Windows version still to this day is a little bloated and slow but it is your only option if you have an iDevice, at least for now. Just as with the iPod iTunes has succeeded in killing of most competitors (like its initial partner MusicMatch JukeBox) or at least keeping them niche players like WinAmp.
During its development Apple added podcast support and even tried to control the name podcast saying it was related or similar to iPod. Again iTunes became known as the defacto standard podcast aggregator mainly due to the index of podcasts available in the iTunes store. I personally use iTunes and iPods for podcasts about 90% of the time with audiobooks and music making up the remaining 10%.
In the spring of 2003 Apple released the iTunes store that is now one of the largest (if not the largest) digital media stores on the Internet. The iTunes store started with music only; bringing with it some of the biggest changes in the music industry in decades. iTunes brought legality to the realm of MP3 (or AAC) music; something that had been sorely missing in the time of Napster and other P2P sharing services. Second, in most cases songs were available individually rather than in a total album grouping. This allowed consumers to purchase only the '”good” songs and skip the filler that many albums had. Over time there have been several competitors in the digital music sales arena that have come and gone even from big companies like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Currently the only real competitor to the iTunes store is Amazon, which is good since it is keeping Apple honest at this point.
The iTunes store started offering other products over the years as well. First was Audiobooks via a partnership with Audible. Next Apple added video in the form of music videos and TV shows in October 2005 with the release of the first video capable iPod. Later in March 2009 Apple added movies to its video library. The last major addition to iTunes was the App Store as part of the iPhone 3G release. The App Store now has hundreds of thousands of apps available. My biggest problem with the App Store is that it doesn’t have a requirement of having demo versions. In many cases the only way to test an app is to purchase it and hope it is worth the money.
One interesting note about iTunes is that even in its latest version of 10.5 it still supports Windows XP which means machines dating back to at least 2001 if not earlier can still run it. On the flip side iTunes 10.5 only works on Mac OS X 10.5.8 which can’t be run on anything before 2003. It is required to have iTunes 10.5 to support the latest iPhone which means some will be forced to upgrade their computer to support their phone.
The second major iDevice released was the iPhone which was announced in January 2007 and released in June 2007. Just like the iPod the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone by far, the Palm Treo (2003), Windows Mobile (2003) and BlackBerry 8000 (2006) all proceeded it in the US alone. It also wasn’t the first Apple branded phone either, that honor went to the doomed from the start Motorola ROKR. The iPhone brought with it a new touch screen based interface not needing (or really working with) a stylus and form factor eschewing almost all buttons. It also had a web browser that worked more like a desktop one than a mobile phone one allowing access to more of the web. It did however ship without Adobe Flash and still to this day lacks it and by all indications will never have it. With the increased functionality of HTML5 the need for Flash keeps shrinking.
The original iPhone lacked 3G which meant its Internet connection was quite slow, even in its latest version it doesn’t yet have LTE/4G opting to wait for the chips that provide it to shrink and lower power demand. It also had an initial price of $599, which was soon dropped to $399 and left many early adopters a little unhappy. The first versions of the iPhone came in 4 GB and 8 GB models which was less storage space than almost all iPods which meant the iPhone wasn’t even a very good iPod initially. Now more than 4 years later the iPhone is on its 5th version with an almost yearly release schedule. The latest generation is thinner and lighter but for the most part is similar to how it started.
The iPhone started with a still only 2 megapixel camera and now has an 8 megapixel still camera that can also record 1080p video as well as a secondary camera that is front facing for video conferencing. Its storage has also grown up to a maximum of 64 GB on the current high end models. The screen also doubled in resolution giving it one the highest pixel density displays on the market (it is less than 4” in size though).
The iPhone has sold millions of units worldwide now over its five versions. Those sales have brought thousands of developers trying to cash in on all the users of iPhones via the iTunes App Store. Also as the iPhone has matured its performance and capabilities have improved allowing for larger, more complex and a wider variety of apps. All apps must go through the Apple approval process which sometimes seems overly rigorous and at other times amazingly lacking. If Apple doesn’t like an App, like Google Voice, it will just not allow it but then turn around and allow over a hundred fart sound apps.
The iPhone made a large dent in the fledgling smartphone market. It pretty much sealed the fate of Windows Mobile 6.x but Microsoft is attempting to make a come pack with Windows Phone 7. The iPhone began the decline of BlackBerry which has since accelerated and now it is questionable how long BlackBerry will survive. About a year after the iPhone came out in September 2008 Google released the first Smartphone running the Android operating system.
At this point there are close to a hundred different smartphones worldwide running the Android operating system from almost a dozen manufacturers as opposed to the 3-4 models of the iPhone from only Apple. The Android operating system is still pretty rough around the edges and Google has to rely upon phone makers and cell phone service providers to release updates as opposed to Apple being able to totally control the process. However due to the sheer number of options the Android based phones are now outselling the iPhone. Apple still has mindshare due to marketing and the app store but who knows for how long.
There is no denying the iPhone revolutionized and jump started the smartphone market just like the iPod did to the MP3 player market. It remains to be seen how the iPhone will fare in the long run since it actually will have to compete instead of simply being a monopoly owner of the market.
The final iDevice and potentially the one that Steve Jobs will be remembered most for is the iPad. The iPad was announced in January 2010 and released in April 2010 and then was quickly followed by a second version in March 2011. After the initial announcement I wrote up my thoughts on the iPad based on the information released at the announcement. I still agree with much of what I said then but I have changed my opinion in some areas.
This will sound like a broken record but the iPad was definitely not the first device of its type, there have been tablet / slate devices since the late 90’s at least. Many if not most of those previous devices were not commercial successes. One of the more successful previous attempts was Microsoft’s Tablet PC as part of Windows XP and later Windows 7. Even Microsoft couldn’t break out beyond a couple of vertical markets like healthcare and education. Microsoft was just not a wide ranging success.
Apple took what it had learned and succeeded with in the iPhone and iPod Touch and just expanded it to a larger screen. The iPad doesn’t have the phone functionality of the iPhone but does have the option of cellular or can be Wi-Fi only like the iPod touch. The software is literally identical between the three devices which have further helped expand the market for the iTunes store and especially the app portion. It seems Apple just took the iPhone and stuck a 10” screen on it.
The iPad had the luxury of coming out at a time where miniaturization, screen technology and battery efficiency intersected in such a way to make the device possible. Previous devices were missing at least one of the above which prevented the device from succeeding. For Windows the two common drawbacks were weight and battery life. Other devices lacked functionality or performance to get the battery life needed for a portable device. I honestly don’t think the iPad could have existed as little as six and for sure twelve months before it came out.
The iPad has been an even bigger success in a shorter time than the iPhone; it has sold 40 million units in only 18 months. It took the iPod over 4 years and the iPhone almost 3 years to sell that many units. As a result of its massive sales the iPad has become synonymous with the term tablet so much that when talking about a Windows tablet PC I have to be careful to be more specific since if I just say tablet everyone thinks I mean iPad. The iPad has also helped accelerate digital books (but not nearly as much as Amazon Kindle) and digital magazines along with digital on demand of other types of content.
Just like with the iPhone the competitors (after getting over the initial shock) are fighting back. Google followed almost the exact same game plan by taking its existing Android operating system and polishing it a bit and putting it on 10” tablet slate devices. Also just like with phones Google has partnered with even more hardware providers with devices ranging from 5-11” trying to compete with Apple. Google’s attempts thus far have had not had much success with the sales of its device being measured in the tens of thousands instead of tens of millions. Although Samsung with its Galaxy Tab 10 has gotten such a good device out that Apple has sued to prevent its sale based on patents. As with phones, I have a feeling that given time Google will get more devices refined and will have a broader range of devices and pricing and as a result may start selling more competitively with Apple. Microsoft is also preparing a response with Windows 8 which will be geared more toward touch based computing with an emphasis on slates. Windows 8 is most likely 6-18 months away though so Apple will have an opportunity to have 1-2 more revisions and get an even larger sales lead in this space.
Legacy
I think one of or all three of these devices will be Steve Jobs lasting legacy or at least the changes they brought about in technology and society. Apple and Jobs didn’t invent most of these ideas, what they did was refined and polished them and marketed them amazingly. That is another important part of Jobs legacy is being this generation’s P.T. Barnum and knowing how to make people desire what he is pushing. Most competitors could only wish they had a pitchman like Jobs and the mystique of Apple. It remains to be seen how Apple will do in the post Jobs era, but it will take 12-18 months to really get an answer.
]]>
I will start with a pretty graphic that I borrowed (with attribution) from Weather Channel website. The important detail here is the average monthly rainfall of about 4 inches a month. 
The next bit of data comes from a weather station fairly close to our house. I used this since this August there have been very localized thunderstorms in the area. I have highlighted the precipitation for the month, which is 11.5 inches already. 
For this month we are 7-8 inches above average already. Now they are talking 6-12 inches more rain for the hurricane Irene timeline. The house may just float away!
]]>If the carpet was wet that meant that there was a few inches of water in the basement. Sure enough the laundry room has 2-3 inches of water. I found that the sump pump had failed to activate and run for an extended period of time and allowed the basement to fill. This was really the first problem that had happened with the pump since my dad and I installed it five and a half years ago. I got the pump running by tapping the float and it began emptying. I then did as much as I could to clean up that night.
The next day Kelly and I began the ordeal of removing almost everything from laundry room and parts of theater. Then we pulled up the padding / carpet in a third of the theater and dried the raised floor. We spent the weekend throwing away and cleaning stuff up and putting things under porch outside to get out of the way.
Over the course of the rest of the spring and early summer we tried various things in working on the basement. Cleaning floor with bleach and scrubbing the walls. Then trying to put down some new flooring, which we later removed since it didn’t work well. We threw out even more stuff, cut out some drywall and kept cleaning.
Eventually we just sort of called a truce with the problem for the summer it seemed. Kelly left for Seattle and our new twin nephews. When I went to visit her in early July the basement flooded (much less) again. Our pet sitter did his best to deal with it thankfully.
Once we got back in mid-July I looked at the pump again trying to figure out what was happening. I figured out the float cable had slipped over the years allowing the float to get stuck against the side and not to activate either at all or at the right time. This probably explained most of the issues of the last few months with it. At least that is what I thought.
Last Friday night just as another 2 inch rain dropping thunderstorm rolled through the sump pump just died basically. This time the float was working and everything, it just wouldn’t pump. I could hear it attempt to activate when I moved the float but nothing would happen. This was a problem as there had been 4 inches of rain in the last 24 hours alone. I attempted to deal with the problem with the backup pump I bought 5 years ago (and had never tested) only to find to my dismay as it totally was insufficient. The pump simply couldn’t get the water from well to the sink. This meant filling buckets and carrying them to sink. When draining an entire yard worth of water that isn’t going to work for long.
I left Kelly to bucket bail and went to the store to find a better short and long term solution. When I went out I found that the power was out at stores nearby but luckily the closest Home Depot was still open. I was able to get a new backup pump that is almost as powerful as the main pump and is able to keep up with the incoming water and get it to the sink. The only downside to the pump is it just runs non-stop. Which means you have to watch it to keep it from just sucking air and damaging itself. However, it got us through the night so I could do a proper long term fix the next morning.
The next morning I went out and bought a whole new sump pump system. This system includes both a primary and secondary pump. The secondary pump can activate for one of three reasons. First, the primary isn’t keeping up and I hope this doesn’t happen because that is a lot of water. Second, if the primary pump just doesn’t work which again I hope doesn’t happen anytime soon. Third, most importantly for the next 24-48 hours is it can run off a battery which I got and attached to the system in a power outage.
This new sump pump came all assembled with the dual pumps and everything so installation wasn’t too bad. The hardest part of the installation was just mating the 1.5 inch pipe and rubber clamps by pushing them together. I had to cut a 4 inch pipe to fit the height from old pipe to new pump but that was it. I had the new one installed in under 2 hours and it would have taken me less time if water would have stopped pouring in as I worked. I kept emptying the well to work in.
Since last Saturday the new pump has been humming along and hopefully will keep doing so. The timing of its installation was more by luck and accident it now seems given current circumstances. We also got just a plain old water sensor just in case, something many will probably ask why I didn’t buy 6 years ago? That is a good question.
Now fast forward 72-96 hours to Thursday and the story of Irene starts ratcheting up. Thursday night as it became apparent there was likely going to be high winds and large amounts of rain arrive over the weekend we decided we should finally get everything off of porch from April so it didn’t become projectiles or become any more ruined than it already was. Mostly Kelly (since I wasn’t feeling well) brought in everything from outside. Even bringing it in rushed and not putting it all away it isn’t filling the space which shows how much we have cleaned up since April. However, we still need to organize a bit.
The last thing we did was to get stuff put away in shed in back and with that the back porch is pretty much as ready as it is going to be for Irene. Now to see what it brings in the next 24-48 hours.
]]>Before
Mid point of a mostly empty office 
After View 1
After View 2
]]>For those that are curious about my issue check out this thread on a forum going back to the beginning of the problem.
]]>I woke up and got into work a few minutes after 9 AM on Sunday February 20. I found that pretty much all the servers had come back up without issue. The only real problem was the UPS that powers the networking equipment didn’t power on. This is was most likely due to me trying to move plugs around on Saturday trying to keep stuff powered up. I turned on that UPS and the network backbone booted up. I found that the firewall again had forgotten to pass any traffic, I had to update its rules to get it working again, have to investigate it again.
Since everything had already been offline for almost 24 hours I decided to do some updates that needed to get done and just leave servers offline for a few more hours. I had a series of Windows updates, drivers and firmware changes that needed to be made. One set of updates was for the hard drive storage which is used by all the servers. Which means I had to shut down all the Virtual Machines and all of the Virtual Servers. The VMs aren’t too bad since they boot fairly quickly. The virtual servers however can take 20-45 minutes to reboot. I had to reboot them a few times to do all the various updates. Once all of that was done I totally shut off the Virtual Servers and began the process of updating of the SAN storage. That process took another hour or so.
Finally about 3:45 PM I had finished all the updates and gotten all the servers fully working again. I then left work and headed out to my car. After getting in and starting my car I realized I forgot my sunglasses inside and headed back in. On my way back to my car I noticed that my driver side front tire was totally flat, yep my tech problems expanded to automotive.
I then set about removing the normal tire and mounting my space saver spare. As I was jacking up the flat tire it began to seep air quickly enough for me to hear it. I never found the hole visually but I could certainly hear it. I then mounted the spare. As I let the car down off the jack I noticed the spare was not “fully” inflated. Which honestly isn’t too surprising since it had been in my trunk for four and a half years. One small bit of luck is that I figured the maintenance shop at my school had some way to inflate tires. I slowly drove around the back of my school to the shop. I found a compressed air hose on a ceiling pulley that was pressurized, lucky for me. After wrestling with an ill fitting mate point on the hose I was able to inflate the spare properly.
As I drove back to the front of the school I noticed a small shiny metallic cylinder on ground. I stopped to look at it since it looked odd. It is good I did since it was the key for my wheel locks. I apparently left it on the lock lug as I drove away and it fell off. If I had succeeded in losing that it would have been a week or so waiting for a new one in mail. Another bit of good luck. I then limped home on my space saver spare.
On Monday February 21 we had the day off for President’s Day. I had decided to get a full set of new tires since I still had the original ones on my car and they had 45 of 50 thousand miles on them already. I didn’t think patching a tire that old was worth it. Kelly and I drove to Costco and I got a new set of 4 Michelin Primacy MXV4 which are the new version or upgrade of the Energy MXV4 that comes default on the Accord. The tires were a little pricier than I had hoped, but they were cheaper at Costco and also had a $70 discount (for 4). I can say for sure the new tires are better than the space saver spare, not ready to decide on them overall yet since I have only driven 10 miles on them.
After getting home from the tires and relaxing for a few minutes I was prodded to determine the fate of the TiVo and its potentially dead drive. I took the “dead” drive and attached it to my arcade PC which I use for this type of diagnosis. I was initially enthused since the drive showed up and seemed to work when I turned on the computer. I then ran a command on the drive to prevent it from falling asleep (going idle) and not waking up. This is a problem that sometimes happens with this model of hard drive in a TiVo. I returned the “dead” hard drive to the TiVo and it worked, hurrah! Another stroke of luck it seems. I will be getting a UPS for this TiVo in hopes of protecting it and keeping it running well into the future.
The end of this story of a weekend of problems ends on a bright note I suppose. Tuesday is a snow day, maybe I can relax a bit after shoveling some more snow. If you made it through all 4 parts thanks for reading and I hope your President’s Day weekend was better than mine.
]]>Somehow within 2 minutes of finishing fixing my home machine I get a call from work telling me the power is out. Really? This is great news since you know I was just bored today anyway obviously. Nothing else to do other than take a shower and go in and see what is happening.
A little backstory here for context. Over the recent snowstorm in early February we had a power outage as well. In that one 1-2 phases of our 3 phase power were flickering on and off causing all sorts of havoc. Also I found that some things were plugged into the wrong UPS. I spent several hours moving power and rebalancing the power after the last outage. According to the UPS controller card I was supposed to get a little over 2 hours out of everything but our phones, which is more like 14 hours.
When I got the call from work they tell me the power went out about 10:30 AM. I was hoping to get to work before the batteries ran out to check something and shut down nicely some things. I got to work close to 12:30 PM and found everything but the phones dead, sort of. Apparently again 2 of our 3 phase power is out. What this means is random outlets are powered on but only half to 3/4 voltage, which sort of works but not really. If you walk around my school some emergency lights are on and others aren’t but in most cases you can’t turn on the real lights either. Which means it is just DARK.
The data center has no windows and the lights don’t work, and since some power is still there the emergency lights won’t power up. It is so much fun to work like that I must tell you. All the UPS are dead except for phones which say they still have power, again sort of. Luckily the UPS takes the 80 volts and boosts it to 120 but isn’t draining batteries as fast. I grabbed a standard light and plugged it in to the one UPS still on so I would have some light in the room. Since some power is on I tried moving some plugs around to get stuff on. This doesn’t work to well since as soon as I draw too much power it basically goes off. I can get little power adapters to work but not power up full servers. I try various things for almost 90 minutes and don’t make much progress.
Shortly before 2 PM the rest of the power goes out finally. I figured at that point I couldn’t do anything else. I went out to my car and decided to drive around back where the power comes in. Surprisingly the BGE (power company) guy is there. I stop and wait for him to come back to his truck and while I am standing there I see a tree that snapped in half and the top half with a y fork in it has fallen directly onto the power lines pinning the 3 phase wires together and potentially doing more damage. For some reason I didn’t take a picture of this, oh well. I find out he turned off the one remaining phase to prevent any further damage being caused by drawing too much power at the wrong voltage to their equipment and ours. The good news at this point was we know what the problem is. The bad news is it only affects my school which is essentially one customer instead of 100-1000 customers like other outages around the area. I finally leave and head home close to 2:30 PM.
While I was at school Kelly called about 1 PM and let me know the power went out at home. I tried to power off the server from school but lost the connection before I could. The power got turned back on at about 2:20 PM as I was heading home.
When I got home I checked my server and it appears to have stayed up the entire power outage. I didn’t think my UPS would last that long but I guess it did. I then went upstairs and sat down with Kelly in living room. I noticed the TiVo had the TiVo symbol on it and all the lights were on instead of showing the time as usual. ARGH!!!
I turn on the TV and am greeted by the initial TiVo powering on screen that just says “Welcome. Powering up…” I pull the plug on the box and wait a few minutes. Plug it back in and same thing. I repeat and wait longer, again same result. I did some searching online and most people say this usually indicates a drive problem. Hard to believe since as I related in Part 1 I just replaced this drive less than 2 months ago. I opened up the TiVo case and powered it on while listening carefully. It sounds like the drive is spinning up, but not going any further. I still actually have the original drive from my TiVo that best I can tell I had never booted up or I at least ran a complete Clear and Delete on. Once I installed the original drive the TiVo booted right up and took me to the guided setup screen. I went through and configured the TiVo with OTA and FIOS. It has OS version 9.4 on it instead of the current 11.x but it works for now.
I still have yet to pull the dead drive and hook it to a PC to see if I can access it and hopefully copy it off. Also I will have to RMA this replacement drive that I have had for less than 2 months. Maybe I will take this opportunity to RMA my server drive too. I may have lost all my recordings and season passes though, which really sucks after having worked so hard to save them and just lose them again.
Fast forward to 9 PM and I get a message on my cell phone (missed it while I was in basement watching movie) that the power is back on at school. I will go in tomorrow to see what is happening. I would work from home but I can’t connect to anything, which I suspect is due to some UPS not turning back on most likely.
Hopefully this will be concluded in Part 4, although it may be a day or two before I find out the final fate of the TiVo drive. Stay tuned.
]]>Friday February 18. 2011 I woke up ready to go and plans for things to do that day. Friday was a teacher work day which means no students and usually less interruptions. I was hoping to finish building some new install images based of the freshly released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and maybe do some upgrades of servers to Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. However that isn’t what happened. At about 7:45 AM I got a call at my desk saying “Did you know all the phones in the Ward House are out?” my response “Um, no?” The ward house is where almost all the employees that aren’t teachers have offices, admissions, business, etc.
I went over to check it out and apparently one of the switches that connects our phones to the main server room and powers them via Power over Ethernet was dead. It appears that the switch really overheated, most likely caused by it being 70 outside (strange for February) and the heat still being on in building. We have two 24 port switches for the phones in the Ward House and I found out we have 32 active phones. Luckily many people were out on Friday so I set to work getting 24 phones working as quickly as possible. The first problem was determining which 24 to fix and where they are plugged in. You might say “don’t you know that already Mr. Network Admin?” and it would be a valid question. My only excuse is there have be a bunch of people who left or moved in last year in the Ward House.
Fast forward 2 hours and I have 24 phones working and everyone is happy. Just for fun I plugged back in the dead switch after having it unplugged and cooling for 2 hours and it came back on. Just in case I only hooked in the 8 non-needed phones for Friday. It seemed to still be working fine when I left Friday evening.
As a result of the 2+ hours lost in the morning I never really got back to doing what I had planned to do. I didn’t really work on the images at all, but I did get to install SP1 on a few 2008R2 servers for testing. Although I had a splitting headache most of the day, I think due to spending hours in a dusty hot wiring closet.
Saturday February 19, 2011 started off ok, after Kelly woke me up with the Cuisinart I got up. After eating breakfast and relaxing a bit I turned on my desktop PC to pay some bills at 9:11 AM. At about 9:14 AM I got a virus / malware infection on my machine. I saw Java load on my machine and I should have know something odd was happening, I thought it was the updater but it was actually running something. Then almost every application on my machine instantly closed and I got a taskbar notification of an infection (from a fake program). Watching this happen in real time right in front of me without any user interaction gives me a much better understanding of what happens to students at my school. I have often said I wonder how they get this stuff on their machines, now I know how. Of course there are many other ways and sometimes they help it, but it obviously can happen without even trying.
My best guess is this particularly nasty little program got on my machine via a Flash exploit via a page I loaded on startup in Opera. The only other thing running on my machine was iTunes (auto started to synch iPod) and Outlook. I didn’t have IE open at all. I know I had a semi out of date Flash version in Opera since it doesn’t seem to prompt to update as much or as well as the ActiveX version in IE. The sites I had open in Opera are ones I open every time I load Opera and visit almost daily. Most likely one of those sites hosted an ad that was fake and exploited a hole in Flash to install a dropper. I immediately tried to start Task Manager and Process Explorer, both of which this fake anti-virus killed. The fake AV pretty much instantly killed anything I tried to load.
I then logged out of my main account and logged in as an alternate admin account. Thankfully the fake AV appeared to be contained to my main profile. When I logged into the alternate account Windows Defender popped up and warned me about finding Rogue:Win32/Winwebsec at 9:21 AM. I imagine it found it actually when I was logged in as main account but was stopped before it could warn me. I told it to remove it. I then loaded Process Explorer to check for anything odd running and didn’t see anything strange. I also ran AutoRuns to look for anything, I didn’t really see much but it doesn’t look at stuff for other profiles very well. After some manual checking I loaded Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (my current favorite app for removing fake AV and other spyware) and ran a quick scan. MBAM like Autoruns works much better as the infected user but in this case the infection was preventing it from running so running it as another user was the only choice. It ran and found a handful of items all within my main profile. It found a combination of Spyware.Zbot and Trojan.Hiloti at 9:41 AM. I also installed updated versions of Flash (both ActiveX IE and Opera versions). While trying to clean the machine I installed a real Anti-Virus on my machine for the first time in a REALLY long time (if ever). I installed Microsoft Security Essentials because it works arguably as well as any other and it is free. I started a full machine scan to try and make sure nothing else was hiding on the machine. While the full scan was running our power went out at 10:18 AM. It only went out for a few seconds, just long enough to be annoying.
I turned my machine back on at 10:20 AM. I logged in as my alternate account again. Immediately MSE popped up and warned me it had found Trojan.Podjot.A in my main profile directory (now the fourth different virus). I had it remove that. I then initiated another semi-full scan, I excluded a few directories that literally have millions of files and I am almost 100% sure wouldn’t have the virus in them. It finished at 10:47 AM and found a bunch of Java based pieces of a virus. Here is a screenshot of those: 
As a result I went and installed the latest version of Java just in case. I don’t think the virus entered through Java, but rather just used it to run. I then rebooted my machine again after I uninstalled some other unrelated items.
I logged back into my main account at 10:53 AM and was instantly greeted by the fake AV again. I then promptly logged back off again then back in as my alternate account. I ran a quick scan with MBAM and a custom scan with MSE of my main profile directory again and found nothing, which was not good. I had previously used regedit to check the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and RunOnce and also checked with AutoRuns. I now manually loaded the main account ntuser.dat as a hive so I could check the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and RunOnce for it. In the RunOnce I found a key pointing to aOfOjPl08200.exe in C:\Programdata\aOfOjPl08200. I was pretty sure this was my last problem and I verified it by looking at the creation time and seeing it was 9:14 AM. At this point I was very curious as to why this wasn’t caught by MBAM or MSE so I did a Google search for online virus scanners. These are sites that you can upload a file to and have it scanned for viruses. I tried a few and the file kept coming up clean. I then found Virus Total which uses 43 different Anti-Virus engines to scan a file. I uploaded the file there and got the results you can see at this link or in the picture below: 
You may notice that only 13 of the 43 anti-virus even picked this up as a virus and notably MSE did not. I apparently was the lucky recipient of a freshly created variant of the Zbot Trojan, yippee! I deleted the registry entry pointing to this file and deleted the file. I then logged out and back in as my main profile which didn’t load properly. I then realized I had forgotten to unload the hive. I logged back in as the alternate account and unloaded the hive and rebooted the machine just in case.
Update: Microsoft now recognizes my file as a a virus as you can see at this link.
I logged in at 11:22 AM and found a clean profile. Success! It only took me 2 hours to clean these 5-6 viruses off my machine. All of them were working together on some level to infect and prevent removal on my machine. Nasty stuff.
Then at 11:24 AM my cell phone rang, read what happened next in Part 3.
]]>Over Christmas Kelly and I went to visit my parents in Pittsburgh, PA. We left the morning of Wednesday December 22 and returned Sunday December 26. When we left everything tech wise was working pretty well in the house. However when we got back a sequence of events started unfolding to make that no longer true.
We arrived home to find the arcade / Windows Media Center computer dead. This computer records all the stuff we watch on normal over the air networks and feeds it to the Xbox 360 to allow us to watch it on the big screen in basement. The computer wouldn’t even boot up and it appeared the main drive was dead. I tried various methods to recover the drive with almost no success. Luckily that drive only housed the operating system and non of the real data other than what was scheduled to record. All the data was on other drives. I went out on Monday and bought an Intel 40 GB SSD to replace the dead drive and get the machine working. After a few hours and some reconfiguration I got everything working again. I also later found out the original drive had a 5 year rather than 3 year warranty so I got it replaced as well.
While I was getting the arcade OS drive replaced I finally got the failed half of my 1 TB mirror for server replaced as well. It actually had died a long time ago (like years) but I had never replaced it since the online RMA page wouldn’t process it. I tried it again since they were both Western Digital drives and it actually worked this time. I got both drives on Wednesday and was still off work thankfully so I could get them installed.
Also on Wednesday the hard drive in my Series 3 TiVo decided it was also time to quit working. This was not totally a surprise since the TiVo had a few freezing / garbled picture / rebooting issues before. This time however it would boot and only work for about 10 minutes at a time. Knowing it was dying and not wanting to push my luck I immediately removed the drive and started determining what to do. This was also a WD drive and was still under warranty so I started a third RMA. The replacement drive arrived on Friday. After a couple of false starts and a good dose of patience I was able to copy 95-99% of the failing drive to the replacement. Luckily the lost parts were in recordings and not the operating system part of the drives. I think we lost a few minutes of a few shows but not much really.
The final problem occurred within a week, not sure of exact day. Half of my OS 150 GB mirror in server failed as I was doing a consistency check on the mirror set. As of today (2/19/2011) I still haven’t replaced this drive via RMA with WD (yes again), however I may do it now for reasons you will see in Part 2.
On short note on Western Digital. You may think by reading this that their drives are junk and prone to failure, but I would really disagree. Most of these drives have been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for almost 3 or more years. They served me well for quite a while. Also the RMA process of getting a replacement no questions asked in 48 hours max can’t be beat.
]]>Over five years ago a colleague from another school told me at a conference about his thoughts on a potential future. In this future he described students having the ability to pick and choose what classes they wanted to take, but not in the traditional sense. The students would be able to decide the school, teacher, timing, pace and price of these classes. This choice would be facilitated by something like the OSG.
There are many competitors in some respects to the OSG on the market. One type of competition is from universities offering high school diplomas like Stanford’s EPGY OHS, where professors teach there existing often lecture heavy style. Another type of competitor is for-profit institutions such as Kaplan or K12 International Academy, these schools offer varying services for different prices. The last type of competition is from state sponsored virtual schools either setup as a public school or some type of charter school. Often these are available for free to residents of the state or district.
Right now OSG is still very small at 150 enrolled students and only 1 section of each class offered. OSG is primarily seen currently as supplemental offerings to existing classes offered at schools like mine. These offerings are classes that most schools can’t offer due to limited enrollment. The most common are high level math or science and foreign languages where there might only be 1-5 students at a given school wanting to take a class. Via OSG those students from various member schools can be brought together into a virtual classroom of 12-16 students for a normal class size. My school accomplishes some of these goals via coordinated classes with sister schools, but many schools don’t have that luxury.
During the presentation two students taking an OSG class came into to answer questions. When answering questions the girls highlighted some of the benefits for them. The first was simply the ability to take a class they were really interested in that they previously wouldn’t have been able to take. Next, was having the flexibility of time management. Both girls had numerous extra curricular activities and the online class allowed them to work on classwork when it fit their schedule in between these activities. Lastly, they seemed to really enjoy the fact that they had classmates from all over the country and all over the world in their virtual class that they could work with and interact with.
The girls were asked what the downsides of the class were. They couldn’t really come up with any at first. Then they said that it makes them like there other classes less since they aren’t as flexible. I asked about self motivation and procrastination and one girl admitted that in the first unit / assignment she did have that problem. However due to the frequent check-up / check-ins and teacher interaction she quickly realized that she couldn’t allow herself to do that anymore if she wanted to pass the class.
This brings up an issue that I think will be a big concern. If there is a student that needs constant reminding / hounding to turn work in or stay on task how will that work in the online / virtual classroom world. I think the answer is the school environment / support structure that exists today. While there are 100% online schools I don’t think schools like mine will go that way rapidly. Rather I think virtual / online classes will be supplemented by traditional classes as well as the rest of the school community. This means that an advisor will still be there to try and help the student and possibly be a go between for the virtual teacher and student.
With all that being said I think that options like OSG will allow students (and families) to choose how they want to pace and pay for their education while still getting the environment offered today by independent schools.
The big questions now looming in my head is what does this mean to schools like mine, the teachers in them and heck to me? For schools in the short term I think it will allow them to expand their offerings as a value add to potential students which is definitely a positive. In the long term I think it may cause a shift in daily life for students as well as cost structures. It is unclear to me exactly what the financial details of OSG are. Do the member schools get anything back from OSG or is it simply the ability to have input into its development along with reduced fees. The schools can potentially realize some cost savings by changing the utilization of teachers and reducing the per student cost for some classes. These are questions though for head masters and boards not for me to answer, and it will take many years I think to answer them.
For teachers this could be an opportunity. Many teachers currently do outside work in the form of tutoring or teaching at college level. OSG offers teachers another venue to utilize their skills. In listening to the presentation it is obvious that OSG has some very high standards for curriculum and teachers, but if a teacher is good enough they can share their skill and knowledge with even more students potentially. However in some cases I think schools may reallocate funding and head count which could adversely affect teachers, this also is unclear in the short term however.
For me and others like me in technology support it will likely shift our responsibilities. The entire OSG is based on hosted services in the cloud. This allows it to be run with very limited technical support from OSG. During the presentation it was mentioned less than an hour a week in server management. At the beginning of the year there is startup tech support but that is quickly wrapped up in the first few weeks. After that it is up the teacher to maintain their own site and students to maintain their own access. For both teachers and students all that is needed is an Internet connection and computer with a microphone / video camera for discussion or chat purposes.
One of the main points that really hit me was just what is possible and how it is going to change things. A main driver of this change is going to be money. Right now to attend a school like mine it costs $20-30K a year. Stanford’s online school costs $14K, K12 is $7K and OSG is $6.5K. That is some amazing costs differences. The question is how do you merge the cost savings of OSG with a school like mine to lower the cost but keep the community? Just like 1-1 laptop programs before I think online / virtual classes will cause a shift in how schools operate except those working in a very traditional sense.
]]>