Yesterday. I managed to render my new iPod Shuffle into an inert piece of plastic and metal. How? I have no idea, but probably because I pulled it out of the USB port before it was ready. It was so cooked that none of the computers in the house could peek inside it or even format it. iTunes said it was corrupt, but failed to repair it, and the Apple Updater also fell flat on its face.

I was resigned to taking the thing back to the store to get a new one, until I discovered after considerable searching online Apple’s own anti-nuke solution — the iPod shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.1. It saved my little iPod Shuffle from oblivion.

It was just released, so word of its arrival has not spread across the ‘net yet. I am adding a post about to help speed the news to other broken iPod Shuffle sufferers.

So, to avoid this problem, watch the blinking amber light on your Shuffle. Don’t remove the iPod from the USB port until the light stops blinking, or you risk corrupting the flash memory. In my case. the corruption was so bad that Windows and Linux could see the drive, but not recognize the data partition. Result: dead Shuffle.

I read online that many other “Shufflers” have had the same problem, to such an extent that Apple dealers don’t argue or attempt to fix the units. They just exchange them. I guess Apple corporate got tired of the piles of defunct Shuffles cluttering up the back room and asked the firmware programmers to whip up a solution. Thanks for the Christmas present, guys!

December 27th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Today was my students’ final exam in physics. With the exception of two absentees, all my kids were in the same room, working diligently away at their responses, while I walked the aisles doing the invigilating-teacher thing.

Maybe it’s the season, but it hit me that I really care about these kids. I want them to do well on the test. Like a parent looking in on his sleeping children, I had the chance to watch my students in a rare quiet moment, without the added responsibility to lead the class and keep them alert.

Some of my students are brilliant, and given a few additional years of coursework, could probably teach me something about physics. Others have a really tough time with the subject. And there are a few who are just plain incorrigible, who with the right attitude, could probably run rings around the rest of us.

I care for all of them, and this feeling is what sets really good teachers apart from those teachers who just show up to collect a paycheck. If I ever start to not care about my kids on an academic (or a personal) level, it will be time to find another line of work. Without some emotional connection between teacher and students, I doubt any real learning can take place.

December 15th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

Going forward, I would like to eliminate the clumsy phrase “going forward” from the US lexicon. I mean, what is wrong with saying something more precise, like “in the future,” or something really wordy, like “later” or “soon.”

The phrase sounds stupid, as if the speaker had a lapse in memory and stammered out whatever words came to mind. It has no real meaning, even if one is trying to emphasize he does not want to go backward or regress.

Time was, “going forward” was a favorite of politicians and business types, who utter all sorts of vague and/or wonky terms that carry little real meaning outside these guys’ (and gals’) professional circles. After all, we are still “going forward” in Iraq, despite evidence to the contrary.

Lately, “going forward” has entered into more common venues. National discourse, meanwhile, goes backward.

This week, I heard a fellow on National Public Radio say in an interview, “We need to work on some things going forward.” Right. As if you could work on them by going into the past?

That same day, while glancing through a mail-order electronics catalog, my eyes fell on this charmer, “You’ll need some composite and S-video inputs for your current gear, but going forward, the most important inputs are …”

Now, this sentence could be construed to mean the really  important inputs are in the front of your video equipment, but the copywriter really means that, to stay abreast of high-definition TV development, one needs HD inputs as well as the old kind. In other words, bunky, plan ahead.

November 29th, 2006 | Category: Random rants | Leave a comment

TomTom, the global positioning system (GPS) retailer, has been running these cute TV ads lately, featuring driver and passengers unsuccessfully navigating their way around, accompanied by a catchy, syncopated musical refrain: “boomp-boomp-boomp-boomp-de-
boomp-boomp-boomp-boomp-de-” etc.

And hearing that music was driving me nuts, because I know I had heard it before, somewhere, but I couldn’t remember when or where or how or who.

It reminded me of Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” from the 1962 movie Hatari!, but the TomTom sample has a completely different feel — definitely not a Mancini work. Yet I had heard it before. It was just so familiar, but dammit, I couldn’t remember the title, composer, or original venue.

Enter that wonderful mental backscratcher, Google. I tried off and on for three days to locate anything informative about the TomTom music, with little success. Choosing the right search terms for Internet searching is after all partly an art, partly a science and partly a crapshoot.

After trying different combinations of search terms like, TomTom, commercial, music, composer, ad, and TV, I finally struck gold with this combination: “tomtom composer tv ad.” The third hit, a Wikipedia entry, provided the salient fact that TomTom’s ad agency had artfully selected and sampled Albert Ketèlbey’s “In a Persian Market” (composed in 1920) for the commercial.

November 24th, 2006 | Tags: The media | Category: Commentary | Comments (11)

The flight engineers have weighed in, the flight directors have given the go-ahead — a Russian cosmonaut will in fact knock a golf ball off the International Space Station as a marketing stunt.

Admitting that golf is not exactly his game, flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin, told the BBC, “I play ice hockey and my understanding is that it is very similar.”

Da! And I’ve flown a Cessna 172 and I understand it’s very similar to flying a Boeing 777. On the other hand, applying his slapshot to golf worked great for Happy Gilmore.

When word of the Russian’s arrangement with golf equipment manufacturer Element 21 got out earlier this year, the folks at NASA went into a tailspin. They had unpleasant images of a regulation golf ball whizzing through space at more than 8 km/s (17,200 mph) and whacking either the ISS or some other valuable piece of orbiting machinery.

Well, the wily Russians worked out a safer arrangement. The ball will be more like a ping-pong ball than a golf ball, with a tenth a regulation golf ball’s mass, and “Happy” Tyurin will by necessity only be able to tap the ball one-handed. His bulky space suit makes attempting a regular golf swing nearly impossible.

Whatever the equipment used, the drive will likely be a record-setter, since space scientists estimate the ball will orbit the earth for three days before burning up in the atmosphere.

November 20th, 2006 | Tags: Science | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

Ninth graders can learn physics.

Let me say that again. Ninth graders can learn physics. In fact, I bet sixth, seventh and eighth graders can, too. So why do we numb their brains in middle school with rote learning and endless fill-in-blank worksheets? Because many “educators” think middle school students cannot learn “hard stuff” like physics, algebra and chemistry, because they do not have the right developmental skills.

Bullcookies.

If that were true, how is it that students in Europe, Japan, the Middle East and elsewhere manage these subjects from the sixth grade on? They cannot all be on the college track.

This school year, our school chucked out its science sequence of courses for the newly encouraged “physics first” sequence: conceptually based physics, then chemistry, then biology (P-C-B). After teaching physics to 10th, 11th and 12th graders for two decades, I have to admit that I began this school year with considerable trepidation. My plan was to hold essentially to the same conceptually based approach I had been using for years, with some modifications. It is not an easy syllabus. I don’t spoonfeed the material. Our school’s mission is to prepare students for college — all of our students — so we expect them right from the get-go to take an active part in their education. They have to work!

My kids are doing a terrific job. Not all are getting A’s and B’s, but they are all tackling this most difficult of subjects with tenacity and seriousness of purpose. I am really proud of them, and really glad we decided to make the curriculum change.

November 9th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Commentary | Comments (9)

OK. so I’ve figured out that maintaining a blog is a whole helluva lot harder when you’re teaching than when you have the summer off. Plus, my teaching load this year is higher than it was last year, so I don’t seem to have the spare time to write as much as I did.

Nevertheless, I persevere. I am not going to be one of those bloggers who quits before the year is up, nosirree.

To that end, I am going to try to squeeze out a couple of posts about teaching and a few other items that have been kicking around in my head for the last 12 weeks of school. One will be coming right up!

November 9th, 2006 | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

So, our Sunday was to be spent moving our larger items of furniture with a borrowed pickup from our present abode to a new place in nearby New Albany, Indiana. While we were gone from apartment #2 getting stuff from apartment #1, a fire broke out in #2’s building.

We returned that afternoon to find workers crawling over the roof of the building, the Red Cross response team helping residents find hotel accommodations, and a bright yellow caution tape barring access to our part of the building. Our new apartment was now aflood in water and smelling strongly of wood smoke.

This after we had just got the cable and internet hooked up, and moved most of our kitchen stuff into the new kitchen, which now resembled a small wading pool.

Of the residents displaced by the fire, we got off easy, since we still can live in apartment #1 for another week and could store our undamaged stuff elsewhere in the complex. We lost a few small kitchen appliances and will have to launder some blankets. No biggie.

We will probably get a similar apartment to replace the one we lost. Everyone else affected, five other tenants, are holed up in a nearby hotel until the property management can figure out what to do with their residences.

You can read all about the fire here.

October 23rd, 2006 | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

For lovers of the physical sciences — and isn’t that everyone? — the latest edition of the latest science blog carnival, Philosophia Naturalis, is at Nonoscience. Check it out.

October 13th, 2006 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment