You know what the best part about the (literally) hundreds of blog posts by the "Costa Rican land for sale" webbot is? It keeps the hundreds of posts from Chinese manufacturing, on-line pharmacy, flea-biter, religious zealot, etc. from being seen.

Unfortunately, those of us who have legitimate technology oriented blog posts also get lost in the deluge. <sigh>

My new blog

Well, there are over five dozen new entries from the latest blog spammer choking theSpoke. (Not that I've read the entries, but I think they're for online drugs.) Depressing, I know, but something tells me that no one will delete these entries (and the account that owns them). Of course, if they did disappear, it would give us long-suffering valid theSpoke users reason to hope that things will get better.

Since it is, unfortunately, getting harder and harder to be seen on theSpoke, what with all of the annoying spamBloggers and all, I've started a new blog elsewhere. (If you're interested, you can find me here.) I don't know how long it will take me to fully move there, or how long I'll keep this one active. Some of that will depend on your responses and reaction.

Feel free to stop by and chat.

Boy, it seems that the only time I get to write here is when something goes wrong.

This week (Feb 26-Mar 2) is Winter break in New Hampshire, a time when all the schools take a completely unnecessary week off, mostly so that families will travel up to the ski resorts and keep the NH economy going. Anyway, bright and early (8:00am) Monday morning I get a call from school: There's a leak in a pipe in the computer lab office right over your desk.

A half-hour panic drive to school revealed that it wasn't right over the desk, but did manage to soak a fair amount of papers, books, memorabilia, and a half dozen cases of laser printer paper. All in all, not very much was truly destroyed (most of the printer paper, in fact, was salvageable, thanks to the semi-glossy wrappers in the cases), but I did have to move ALL the furniture out of the office into the hallway so that the plumbers could come Tuesday and replace the seal in the circulating pump that was the source of the storm. Then on Wednesday I could move everything back.

Okay, it's Wednesday, and the plumbers have yet to show. Now, normally this wouldn't be too big an impact, I mean, it is a vacation week and all. However, starting tomorrow (Thursday), the school's FIRST Robotics Team will be in competition a dozen miles or so north at the Granite State Regionals in Manchester. Furthermore, during the regionals we host a visiting FIRST team from Vermont, and their kids and our kids camp out for two days ... here in the computer labs!

I don't know if things will be fixed by tomorrow; my guess is not. Which means I won't be in my normal camp-out location (my office), but may have to mix with the natives.

I need a vacation! 8^)

Alfred wrote about the recent ice storm here in Southern New Hampshire. It really does make the world look pretty, but there's another side to it as well. I was home with the kids yesterday, so I knew that around noon the power flickered, and then went out. It came up briefly here and there throughout the afternoon, and around 3:00pm it came on for about 90 minutes (just enough time to send some EMails!), but around 4:30pm it went out for good. It's 9:30am the day after, and it's still not on.

Now, the temperature is around freezing (32F / 0C), but my house is only 11 years old, and was constructed to the latest (at the time) insulation standards; the term "super-insulated" means that it will keep things comfortable for a LONG time. My house is one of nearly 200 built in the same development around a decade ago. Unfortunately, some things weren't built as intelligently as they should have been. The 200 homes have phone service fed from a single junction box (about 1/2 mile from my home), and that junction box has only a back-up battery to keep things going during minor power glitches. Which means that around 6:00pm our phones went dead.

If history is followed, somewhere today we'll lose water service as well. SOMEone in the neighborhood knows the tale that you should keep a slight trickle of water going if you lose power in the winter, to keep the pipes from freezing. What s/he doesn't realize is that with our super-insulated homes, pipes will take over a week to freeze (assuming constant sub-zero for that long!). Also, the local water company pump-house needs power to provide water, so it doesn't take long for the water supply to be exhausted (at which point the trickling water trick won't work anymore!)

The last time we had a storm this bad (back in '96), the home was dark for three days. I hope things are better this time.

Okay, so I'm a few days early, but ...

• today is the Winter Solstice (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere)
• it's the last day for my high school before 2007
• I will probably NOT be blogging on the 25th (not that I've been that active in recent months)

So, to each and every one of my readers (both of you), may God's Peace shine on your lives, and may health and happiness be yours through the New Year!

Yes, the AP-CS exam is almost five months away, but I still wonder what to do after it's done. For the past two years I've had my classes do Pocket PC application development. A few months ago, however, my son wrote me from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to suggest a better idea: XBOX game development.

He worked out all the details, the costs of equipment (have to have an XBOX 360, with enough XBOX 360 controllers for all students, etc.), subscriptions, etc., and presented it in a very persuasive document. I must admit, I've been mulling it over for two months. I've even dropped hints to this year's class that we need a really great idea for the Post-AP timeframe.

Well, what should arrive today but a blog post from Alfred. Looks like I have not choice, I'm going to have to look into this.

In my classes, it is fascinating to see students today who have no concept at all on how good things are today. Now I know this will make me sound old, regaling the days when I had to walk to school, up hill, both ways, bare foot through the snow (even in the Winter), but bear with me for a moment.

In 2006, we all have blindingly fast computers that are GUI based, powered by multitasking operating systems, running an unbelievable assortment of multimedia enabled applications. But it hasn’t always been this way. A mere 15 years ago, GUI was a new term, multitasking was largely accomplished as an OS add on (called “Windows”), and multimedia applications were rare if they existed at all. Five years more and the Mac was still new, graphics were still a neat (and expensive) add-on to PCs, and multimedia was just the sound that you could produce on the standard 2” speaker. A few more years back, and even GUI didn’t exist except in the dreams of some at Xerox.

The applications that we take for granted today bear little resemblance to those of a generation ago. Take the word processor, for example. Not too many years ago computer screens were text only, with 25 lines of 80 characters; 43 lines if you had the right video card and could stand the “small print.” Your display wasn’t what was called WYSIWIG (“what you see is what you get”), and you didn’t have a zillion fonts to deal with. If you wanted bold, underlined, etc., you had to use special screen indicators to show this. For example, a popular program called WordStar had a display that (if printed) would look like this:

         C:TEST  PAGE 1 LINE 1 COL 01
L----!----!----!----!----!----!----!----!

This is what ^Bbold text^B looks like,
and ^Uunderlined^U, ^Tsuperscript^T,
and also ^Ssubscript^S text.

Imagine for a moment a keyboard that only had the “standard” keys (those you’d find on a typewriter) and a Ctrl key; no function keys, no numeric keypad, and no cursor / navigation keys. How would you scroll around a large document? The WordStar “cursor diamond”: Ctrl-D for right, Ctrl-S for left, Ctrl-E for up, and Ctrl-X for down. Ctrl-F went to the next word, Ctrl-A the previous word, Ctrl-W scrolled one line up, Ctrl-Z scrolled one line down, Ctrl-R was page up, and Ctrl-C was page down. Want more? Ctrl-QD went to the end of the line, Ctrl-QS to the beginning of the line, Ctrl-QE to the top of the page, Ctrl-QX to the bottom of the page, Ctrl-QC to the end of the document, and Ctrl-QR to the beginning of the document. (Yes, it may seem foreign, clunky at best, but this interface was so effective that it was emulated by countless other programs, including other word processors, and even Borland’s Turbo Pascal!)

You can say that word processing 20 years ago was nothing compared to what it is today. But, when compared to a typewriter (the dominant technology of the day), it was light-years ahead. Just think: you could SAVE a document to edit later (Ctrl-KS). You could search for specific text (Ctrl-QF), and even rearrange text within a document (Ctrl-KV, but only after marking the text to be moved with Ctrl-KB and Ctrl-KK). And, when you were all done, you could send the document to the printer – just make sure you had your dot-matrix or (if you could afford it) the daisy-wheel printer attached; there weren’t thinks like ink-jets or laser printers around back then.

The other day it occurred to me that I haven't blogged in a while. Today I looked, and found that it's been a month since I added anything! I'm shocked.

There's nothing wrong, other than life is doing it's best to fill up my every waking hour, and quite a few of the non-waking hours. Since I last typed here:

• Halloween has come and gone
• I attended an evening open house at my school
• My oldest son arrived from Colorado to suprise my other son who ...
• Received his (Catholic) Sacrament of Confirmation
• I sat through two evenings of Parent / Teacher conferences
• My FIRST Robotics team set up the school gym for ...
• An all-Saturday FIRST LEGO League competition we held for 16 elementary and middle school FLL teams
• We cheered as my school football team won their third straight state championship (only one loss in three years!)
• I went to a Dinner / Theater night with my wife and friends
• We celebrated Thanksgiving, with it's obligatory travel to New York City, and two turkey dinners (Thursday and Sunday)
• With my son in town (again) we finished the ceiling in the basement play room
• And put up the Christmas lights outside (warm weather opportunity)
• Oh, yes, I picked up my middle son from football / winter track every school day, and took my daughter to swim team practice three times a week.

And that's just the highlights. Yeah, it's been a busy few weeks, but on the good side, I've got a bunch of other thoughts that have been collecting in my mind to write about. Hopefully, I'll get to them before I forget them.

To all those that I inadvertantly spammed, I ask forgiveness. I was trying to add the "Where I've Been" map that Alfred mentioned on his blog, and it took me three or four edits to get it right. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that every edit resulted in an EMail message to you.

It just shows you that even if you've been in the industry for 30 years, you still can do some very stupid things.

Sorry for the spam.

Leveraging off of Alfred's post, here's my world-wide travels (Boy, this is getting some use on theSpoke!):

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

My scuba trips to Aruba, Bon Aire and the Cayman Islands don't show up too well. Here's my US travels:

create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

Spousal-Mandated Disclaimer:

I've only driven through Delaware, Maryland, and Wisconsin, never stayed there; I've only driven into Montana (a rather large state really) a few miles, just far enough to buy groceries while camping in Yellowstone; I've only been in Tennesee while changing planes; and I've only really STOOD in Alaska, as the plane refueled on the way to Tokyo. Almost all of the other states I've stayed at least one night, and some places weeks to decades.

Neat web tool.

Recently I was asked if I'd mentor a new computer science teacher. I've never met the person, and all communications have been through EMail, but both of us have learned a lot in the process. The teacher drops me an EMail whenever they find themselves stuck with a bit of code and how to explain it coherently, or when a student asks a question and the teacher doesn't have an immediate answer. (Fortunately, I've got EMail running pretty much all the time, and so far I've been able to reply within an hour or two.

So, okay, the other teacher profits by having a mentor quasi-near by to ask for opinions, help, or advice. I also profit, because sometimes I learn something myself. Once in a while I'll get a question that I sort of know the answer, but in researching the problem I learn something new, or perhaps learn that what I thought was correct is wrong (or more often, obsolete!). But even if I don't need to research answers, I learn something with every question: I learn another point of view from students. No matter how many years I teach I will ALWAYS see new students each semester. When you start taking your own knowledge for granted, you'll start forgetting how you learned that knowledge. And when I forget what my new students don't know, I'll do a poorer job teaching them.

So take the opportunity to mentor someone. You'll never know what YOU will learn!

My oldest son (Will) is a sophomore at the United States Air Force Academy. Each year the first weekend of September is Parents Weekend, and this year we decided to bring our other kids out with us. When we told Will about this, he suggested we make a family hike up Eagle's Peak. So Mrs.I (Mary Eileen), Tom, Michelle and I spent the month of August climbing a number of peaks in New Hampshire to prepare for the climb.

Our climb went wonderfully: 2-1/2 hours up, 1-1/2 hours down. The pictures do more justice than I could ever tell.

For a better resolution on the pictures, check out my Gallery

(If you ask, I'll tell you which is Will's dorm room!)

Alfred's got an interesting blog entry that describes a web site where you can here an English paragraph spoken by hundreds of people from different places around the world. It is facinating to see how far from "the norm" a speaker can be and still be understood.

Years ago a friend of mine once suggested that English is as close to a universal language simply because it is extremely easy to speak it badly. In other words, a person with very few English skills (either grammar or pronunciation) can pretty much make themselves understood, even if they stumble horribly. In some other languages, the rules of grammar or pronunciation are so rigid and complex that straying from the norm makes it impossible to be understood. (I recall learning that in some Oriental languages even the inflection used can dramatically change the meaning of words.)

And, of course, this brings to mind a quote Star Trek (the original series): "Language, what an amazing invention. You're all so dependant upon it, but are any of you its master?" 

With the start of the new school year, I'm once again filled with a sense of the future and what is possible. I have one of my school's largest APCS classes, and even though I've managed to scare one of them away, I'm thrilled with the spirit and excitement I see. Even my other classes (Microsoft Office classes for the freshmen, and a mixed-year Visual Basic class) are populated with students who I see as some of the enthusiastic and nicest I've encountered. I am psyched for the year ahead of me!