The cell phone issue was the biggest. I had bought my Treo 600 off eBay ages ago with the understanding that it was unlocked, meaning that I could use it with any carrier as soon as I inserted the appropriate SIM chip into it.

Wrong.

Sure, the Treo could find China Mobile and China Unicom signals, but without international roaming enabled (not that I could afford it), I could not use those signals. So, senior English students Christopher, Ava and Sophia took me to the China Mobile tents set up for returning students, where they helped me get a China Mobile account and SIM card.

Of course, it did not work. Believing my phone to be the all-powerful, unlocked, works-anywhere-in-the-world SuperTreo, I was of course mighty perplexed. The kids took me to the China Mobile store in downtown Jishou, where I got another SIM card that worked the same as the previous one.

“SIM card not allowed,” my SuperTreo informed me. “Your phone cannot be used with this SIM Card.”

How very informative. Thank you.

Of course, I gradually realized after spending an inordinate amount of time on the Web that my faith in SuperTreo was based on false information. My phone was in fact still locked to T-mobile, and the only apparent way to unlock (other than to call T-mobile and ask them to unlock it, not exactly feasible under the circumstances) was to pay someone a little money ($15) to download an unlocking program and obtain an unlocking code to free my Treo from its electronic prison.

I am now on the China Mobile network. And the $15 was still cheaper than buying a bargain-basement phone here.

Now I mentioned I used the Internet to solve my cell phone problem, but I actually had no Internet access at home until late Monday. Disappointing, but I could use an office computer in the meantime.

Chinese universities use a high security protocol for their wired connections, called the Ruijie supplicant. It’s based on the standard MD5 encryption, but with a local twist apparently. Without a university-supplied account, IP address and the Ruijie supplicant program, your wired connection ain’t gonna do nothin’. (Wireless does not exist here, by the way.)

Well, I had all that, but still nothing was happening. I have no clue why, but in any event the IT staff got it working by Monday evening. Only for Windows, though. Irritatingly enough, the Ruijie application provided me for the Ubuntu half of my dual-boot laptop (xrgsu) will connect, but will not authenticate my computer. At least others share my pain; my research into the matter turned many similar cries of woe, but no apparent solution.

So I’m stuck using Window$. Bleah.

When I first arrived at my flat on Sunday, I had no electricity. Well, actually, it was there; I just didn’t how to turn in on. A quick call to Christopher on the cell phone the office loaned me until my own cell was working again provided the answer. Outside each door is an electrical box. To turn on the power, you close the circuit breaker. Ah, so simple!

This morning, I awoke to find that once again I had no power, despite the circuit breakers in the box being all closed. Some texting ensued, during which I found that these boxes have a slot to insert a payment card to “recharge” your electrical account. (The boxes are called chargers for that reason.) My account had run dry sometime in the wee hours. The university, which is supplying my electricity and Internet at no charge, fixed the problem by lunchtime.

If you walk around this campus and look at the dorms, you will see every window or balcony (or rooftop!) festooned with laundry hung out to dry. Washing machines are thankfully standard issue here, but clothes dryers are not. I would wager then that each student has at least half of his or her wardrobe hanging outside to dry on any day. If I were to have clean clothes, I needed to emulate them and plan ahead. Washing my clothes the night before might work back in the States, with a clothes dryer at the ready. Not so here.

My flat has a little washer just outside the bathroom. Its buttons naturally have labels in Chinese. Since I had already bugged my hosts about cell phone, electrical and Internet problems, I was damned if I was going to ask them how to work the stupid washer. So I went to the local Jun Hua supermarket and bought some Omo laundry soap, confident I could certainly make the washer on my own.

The washer has two large buttons and four smaller ones. The big button on the right clearly turns the washer on, but no combination of the others would actually make the little fella do anything.

The Internet to the rescue! Poking around the Web with the model number eventually led me to realize that the manufacturer is Little Swan, a big whitegoods concern here that just happens to sell its products in the USA under the label Haier. And on their website I found an operation manual (perhaps written by some unmotivated business English major, judging from its lack of proper spelling and grammar) for a model similar to mine.

I am embarrassed to say how my Little Swan works. You push the righthand button. Then you push the big button to its immediate left. That’s it. So easy, an Ivy League graduate could wash his clothes. (The little ones provide washing and time-delay options, but the manual I found provided no help in making them do anything successfully.)

Now my flat looks like everyone else’s — half my wardrobe is out on the balcony. My cell phone works. My (Windows) laptop works. And I have electricity for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could manage to cook a decent serving of rice without burning it or drying it out …

It was inevitable, and a little sad, but times change.

Back in late 1997, I decided I needed a second job. I walked into Louisville’s only Computer City store, filled out an application, and within short order was working the floor as a commissioned computer sales associate. That was back in the days when computers still cost more than $1,000 and margins were high, so a salesperson could actually make a commission and the store could actually turn a profit.

I was (to my mind) surprisingly successful in sales, and was able to make almost half my teaching salary working part-time at Computer City. (That’s a sad comment on teaching salaries, by the way.) It was hard work, but fun in many ways.

At the time, Computer City was a subsidiary of Tandy Corp., which also owned Radio Shack. It was not making Tandy all that much money. So when CompUSA, formerly known as SoftWarehouse, offered to buy the entire Computer City chain in 1999, Tandy did not put up much of a fight.

It was a bold move, and a risky one. Tandy had literally hundreds of stores nationwide, so CompUSA was taking on a huge investment in personnel and property. Buildings cost money to operate; personnel need to be paid. All of those expenses cut into a company’s profit margin.

CompUSA reduced our commissions to practically nothing, and I moved on to another retailer in April 1999 where rewards were somewhat more generous. I quit retail when I moved to South Africa for a teaching exchange and never went back. The future of computer sales clearly did not include commissioned sales people.

Since that time, computer prices have dropped far below $1,000. You can buy them at Wal-Mart or from online retailers or directly from the manufacturer’s own outlets. When I visit CompUSA or Circuit City now, there are no sales associates prowling the computer aisles, at least not in the numbers I remember from 1997-99. They cost the company too much money. Sales clerks field any questions, and I doubt their commisssions amount to much.

[That is, unless they sell the dreaded extended service contracts. Those things are real money makers for the retailers; they cost next to nothing and are pretty much all profit. Thus, sales folks are rewarded handsomely for pushing the service plans.]

Computers have become a commodity like TV sets, and for the most part are more reliable and less fussy than they were just 10 years ago. There’s really no room for a chain of stores that sell only computers and computer stuff, especially with the advent of online shopping.

CompUSA was a dinosaur that fell victim to the evolution of retailing. I’m sorry it has to leave, since I have friends who worked there, but its demise was inevitable.

We were using iChat on an eMac, with a webcam I brought from home. The video quality was pretty bad, largely because of the equipment on our end. I suspect NASA/JPL has somewhat more sophisticated video equipment. Still, you could tell there were people on the screen, despite the pixellation and slow response time.

Audio was a different issue. The audio through the network was garbled, like those early webcasts using RealPlayer. I gave up on the iChat video finally, and just connected my desk phone to their teleconference line and put it on speakerphone. Then at least we could understand what they were saying.

So, we had blocky video from iChat and somewhat clear audio from the telephone. Not ideal, but it worked.

The format was straightforward. We introduced ourselves (not individually, by schools) and the four Cassini scientists introduced themselves. Then they opened the floor to questions from the students. Each school took a turn, until the hour was up.

From what I could gather, at least two of the conferees entered the contest individually. The rest of us participated as science classes. The individual students had fairly sophisticated questions about the moons of Saturn and the planet itself; the classrooms had less technical questions. One can assume the individual students were more interested in space exploration than the typical student, and had spent more time delving into the Cassini mission.

One of our students asked the scientists which planet was their favorite. The answer was Jupiter, which was greeted with whoops and hollers. Who knew?

Another student wanted to know if you could see all of Saturn’s moons from the planet itself. That gave the Cassini guys pause to reflect, since no one had ever asked the question before. It turns out some moons are really small and hidden in the rings, so finding them would be hard.

What’s the temperature of Saturn? another asked. Not an easy answer to give, since the cloud tops are at 80 K and the core is at 1,000,000 K. There are places in the atmosphere of the gas giant that are at room temperature (293 K), but of course there’s no breathable air. It would not be a fun field trip.

I would have liked to asked about the complex hydrocarbons detected in Titan’s atmosphere, since I’m writing a post about it. But we ran out of time.

Many of my students listened intently, despite the poor audio and video quality. They included students who I did not expect to be so interested. A few seemed incapable of being absolutely quiet, but I suppose in a small room packed with 34 classmates, it would be hard to refrain from chatting. Still, I was not entirely pleased, and I told them so after the conference ended. Quiet means quiet. What’s hard to understand about that?

Whether the outcome of the conference is as successful as I had hoped remains to be seen. It was hard to hear the conferees sometimes, until I made the phone call, so you had to concentrate to understand the questions and responses. I am hoping the NASA folks recorded the session somehow so I can share it with my students. At the very least, the Cassini people looked and acted like regular folks, and not like the stereotypic scientist portrayed in the media. Two were women, which I hope will encourage my girls to consider science as a career.

All in all, it was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Herding cats is hard work.

[The essay winners were announced in a press release while I wrote this post. None of our entries were winners, but I hope to find out which (if any) made it to the finals.]

The Cassini imaging team at the Jet Propulsion Lab sponsors a contest each year, which challenges students to write short essays relevant to the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. This year, the challenge was to argue why the team should choose one of four possible targets for a 91-minute imaging sequence. The essays could be no longer than 500 words, and students could work in teams of not more than four members.

Among the 188 essays accepted for judging were our 13 submissions. On Friday, I received two identical emails telling me that one of our essays had made to the final judging round, and inviting our students to an hour-long teleconference/video conference with the Cassini scientists this week.

I was excited enough to photocopy the message and hand it to my 34 students as they took a scheduled chapter test. Some admitted to being excited; others were outwardly more blasé, but apparently intrigued at least.

Having never organized a video conference before, I had to take a crash course by surfing the Internet. After frantically reading all kinds of information, asking an alumni parent for some corporate-America help and downloading a copy of CuSeeMe, I emailed the Cassini team for advice.

Turns out we can do the whole thing with iChat. Thank you, Apple Computers!

So, this afternoon, I am bringing down one of the eMAcs from the 4th-floor digital photo/video lab, hooking up a USB webcam and assembling the kids in my classroom for our conference with real scientists, some of whom are not that much older than my high school students. [We may actually instead use a student's Mac laptop, since it has a built-in iSight camera and video-out port. I'd like to project the conference on the wall instead of forcing the kids to squint at the eMAC's 15-inch screen.]

I have no clear idea what to expect from the conference, since there is no agenda apparently. Other schools will be participating at the same time by telephone, so we will only be part of a larger contingent of students, but the virtual contact with real people in space science will still be educational, and I hope influential on the students’ mental images of what scientists are like.

Sometime today, we are supposed to hear who made to the finals, and on Friday, the team will announce the two overall winners of the contest. I have no idea what the prize, if any, is. But I for one don’t really care. The important part of the whole project is that the kids can see an immediate reward for their hard work, and that others outside our littel insular community can see how top-notch our students are.

By the way, did I mention most of the essays were written by ninth-grade physics students? Take that, Manual High School nerds!

We were driving the short distance to the local Jay C supermarket one day when the Geo just quit running less than a mile from our house. It had done this before, and would usually start right up again after sitting for a while. So we got a lift to the market and back home, and let the Geo sit alongside the road to cool off.

After waiting a reasonable length of time, we walked back to the car, started it up and drove it home.

The next day, it refused to start. With a shot of starter fluid, the motor would run a bit, then die. OK, I said to myself, it’s gotta be something in the fuel injection system: bad pump, bad injector, bad electrical relay. The next chance I got, I checked the car for the obvious, John-can-fix-it items in the fuel system.

The pump was not the problem. I could hear it whine when I turned the ignition on. There was fuel pressure in the lines — fuel squirted out when I loosened a fuel line clamp. The pump was OK, and so was the relay then. Next, I checked the injector. This little guy turned out to be a challenge to remove, not because it’s hard to reach, but because the factory puts thread-locker on the mounting screws. None of my screwdrivers would turn the screws, and I was afraid to strip the screwheads. In the end, the only solution I had on hand were a pair of ViceGrips. Not elegant, but effective.
The injector, it turned out, was also OK. It was clean as a whistle and its electrical resistance was within factory specs. It smelled like fresh gasoline, so clearly it was doing its job.

At this point, I decided it had to be an expensive repair, and I would have to admit defeat and have the Geo towed to my mechanic. (Smith Import Car Service, for you Louisvillians out there, does terrific work at fair prices.) Trouble was, I didn’t have the cash, so the Geo sat in the garage while my bank account recharged itself.

Since the car was going nowhere, I figured it would be a good time to take care of a few routine maintenance issues, like changing the spark plugs and replacing a bad tire. I bought the plugs a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t get around to changing them until yesterday.

For the non-gearheads out there, spark plugs ignite the fuel-air mixture in the cylinders by sending an electrical spark across two electrodes. Electricity does not need wires to travel around. Air can also carry electric current. In a spark plug, the center post has an electric potential several thousand volts higher than the base of the plug (the ground). If the gap is set to factory specs, or close to it, the potential, which is analogous to air or water pressure, is high enough for the electric charges to jump across the electrodes. If it’s too small, you get a weak spark (the charge doesn’t build up enough “pressure” before jumping). If it’s too big, the spark is either intermittent or non-existent (there is not enough “pressure” for the charges to jump the gap).

For my Geo, that gap is supposed to be 0.39 inches. When I pulled the plugs out, their gaps were too large for my gapping tool to measure! The center electrode was worn down to make a gap easily twice the factory spec! It ‘s a wonder the car started at all, much less ran as well as it did.

Feeling somewhat abashed for ignoring for so long one of the cheapest and most obvious solutions to hard starting, I gapped the new plugs, put them in, and lo! the car started right up.

Doh!.

You can stop laughing at me any time now.

I had assumed that some glitch had delayed my monthly payment, but the explanation was much worse and more embarrassing. Hackers had entered my web server space and inserted files that were sending out those misleading messages from “PayPal” about your account being suspended or canceled. Youch!

So, my hosts caught on, since their server was no doubt spending a lot of time sending out emails through their SMTP service. To protect themselves, they suspended my account and my site until we could correct the problem.

This blogsite lives alongside another, nearly dormant site of mine oriented toward computers. For several years now, I have been a reasonably happy and competent user of php-nuke, an open source content management system (CMS). Nuke has a well deserved rep for being a security nightmare, but with care and skillful coding by technically adept users, it can be made into a safe, reliable CMS.

Almost. Several weeks ago, hackers exploited a weakness in one of php-nuke’s scripts and slipped past my site’s defenses to essentially wrest control of the site from me. I corrected the problem and restored the site from backups, sure that I had closed all the holes.

Or so I thought. Both my host and I had noticed that extra directories and files had appeared in my webspace, so we deleted them. My host recommended I change my passwords, which I did for the CMS but not for cpanel (the control panel for the webserver) or for the databases that support the sites. BIG MISTAKE!

The earlier exploit clearly had enabled the hackers to get my cpanel password, so they could exploit my little share of the webserver. They added directories containing their PayPal phishing scripts (in several places, as it turns out), created a subdomain to direct hapless mail recipients to access and used my webspace to serve up spam.

Oh, the shame!

My hosts restored my site yesterday, after deleting what they assumed were all the offensive scripts. They changed my cpanel and database passwords for me, and allowed this site to come back alive again. Yay! The original CMS is still dead in the water, because of the password change, and may stay that way. I have an alternate site already in place.

My further investigation into the exploit turned up the same offending scripts in a few other places in my webspace, so my host did not exterminate all the bugs. I need to check a third time to make sure I have completely sanitized the site.

Meanwhile, php-nuke and I are parting company for a while. I’m ditching php-nuke for the foreseeable future in favor of Joomla, another open-source CMS that seems more secure. I already had a Joomla test site up and running, so moving the remaining nuke content over won’t be a headache. My host is cool with my keeping the nuke site, but they have the mistaken impression that later versions of php-nuke are more secure than the older ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. The newer versions (after 7.7, if you care to know) are accidents waiting to happen. I know. Believe me. I know.

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PS: I would like to acknowledge the help offered by the following parties. Visit them.

Planet Earth Hosting (www.pehosting.com), my hosts, who are always quick to spot problems and are really nice to work with.

Castlecops (www.castlecops.com), computer security experts, who sent me an email advising me of the exploit on Monday. Unfortunately, since my site’s email was down, I didn’t get the message until after we fixed the problem.

Thank Google! I was able to recover all but one of the lost posts by copying and pasting Google’s cached pages. The missing one I recovered from my own computer. Then I changed the posting dates by editing the database.

Nice to be back in business!