Lord of the Flies


What happens to scientists when their servers are down?



James, playing on the dance mat that Santa brought this Christmas.




James, pushing cars along the Geotrax layout.

William stayed home today, although he seemed to feel okay this morning. He went to My Gym this evening, and he'll go back to school tomorrow.

-----

At work yesterday, we had a brief power outage in the afternoon. The power outage apparently lasted only a few seconds, but when the computers came back up, apparently the water cooling system failed to come up. Some time in the late afternoon, I am told, the room temperature where the servers and hard drives are stored was in the mid to high nineties, which means the computers themselves must have been steaming hot on the inside. The servers came down, along with their mounted hard drives, and they remained down today. Even when I could find a computer to log into -- usually a Sparcstation on someone else's desk -- I couldn't access any of my data on the network.

Luckily, I do most of my work on my PowerBook, so I was able to continue doing a little.

-----

I also went for a 2 mile jog at the track near the gym, today, which is the hardest workout I've done in months (unless you count my 90 minute yoga classes, which can be pretty strenuous, albeit less of a cardiovascular workout).

-----

When I went to pick up James at school, B., the director, told me that another parent had visited one of our top-three kindergarten prospects and came away horrified at the regimentation she witnessed in one of the classrooms. I'm pretty sure I know which classroom she saw, and all I can say is that, while I agree the teacher can be intimidating, some students can possibly thrive under the discipline. I think William might be able to handle it, given that he's doing quite well in Tae Kwon Do. However, Hsuan and I actually do prefer the other kindergarten teacher at that school.

What's a little off-putting is that B. seemed rather happy to supply me with the news of the other parent's disapproval. It seems to me that B. is rather strongly wedded to the Developmental approach to education. While I'm fine with Developmental approaches for young children, Hsuan and I are more focused on traditional academics, long-term, and the school in question is definitely traditional.

-----

The wired hands-free set for my cell phone started to crap out today, so I finally buckled down and went to Target for a new Motorola Bluetooth headset. It seems to work fine with my Sony Ericsson phone.

Posted: Wed - January 10, 2007 at 11:55 PM          

©