I did a lot of things today but hopefully I don't go into too much
detail because it is late and I am tired.
Here are the things I remember. I scanned pictures for one of the
second grade teachers of her kids so she could print them out and put
them in a time capsule. Originally she took pictures with her phone
and asked if I could help get them off. I still had the second
kindergarten class pictures to edit so I was a little wary of
agreeing to another editing project so I asked if she had the sheets
of sticker pictures that each teacher gets that has four or five
small pictures of each kid. She did, so I told her I'd scan those
and see what she thought. This did involve a bit of editing but it
was a lot easier than individually editing twenty-five pictures. She
ended up liking it, so that was good.
I finished remaking the Lexile color chart for the library this
morning and I set up the smart board for the ELL office in the back
of the computer lab. The librarian found the cord for it last night
so I got everything connected, downloaded and registered software,
and set up the projector.
A fourth grader brought down a laptop that no one in her class was
able to log into. Based on the error message I thought the hard
drive might have run out of room to create new profiles. When this
happens to the computer in the lab with the small hard drive I am
able to go in and delete profiles. The problem with the laptop was
that I didn't have a profile on the laptop already so I couldn't log
in as myself. I tried several different students in the class, along
with several different students from the teacher's class last year,
but didn't manage to find one who had already used the computer.
After a lot of research and failed attempts, I finally managed to log
into the computer in Safe Mode, which gave me access to the user list
and I was able to delete most of them. The hard drive was down to
49MB so I was fairly confident that was the problem.
The next problem was that in Safe Mode there apparently isn't a
Recycle Bin and after deleting all those users, the hard drive space
actually went down to 15MB instead of giving me more space. After
even more research I found out where the Recycle Bin was located, in
a hidden folder, which contained hidden files, for each of the
recycle bins for all of the users. I was able to navigate to it in
Safe Mode, find the one that most likely belonged to the Safe Mode
profile based on the date of activity, and I was able to delete
everything for good, bringing the hard drive up to 2.78GB of free
space. It still seems like there is too much stored on it,
somewhere, and I don't know how much space student profiles take up.
Hopefully not a lot.
I fixed one of the sixth grade teacher's laptops by turning it off
and on again. It was tricky though because the off button wasn't
working. It also had a bunch of random lights that kept flashing and
I had no idea why. It was an odd looking laptop. After the power
button wouldn't work I tried pulling out the battery but the latches
got stuck and I couldn't get the battery out. I was finally able to
shut the laptop down by holding down the power button along with
another button that I had no idea what it was for but it looked
important. And that turned out to be a true because the laptop
shutdown and when I turned it back on, everything worked.
There was a break in the day for an assembly this afternoon that was
about storytelling. It was basically African fables about a spider
and the origins of stories. It was interesting, and funny at times,
but definitely geared toward younger children.
When the fifth grade teacher came to the lab this afternoon with her
class she also brought her broken flash drive. I tried a couple
different things that didn't work so I finally suggested taking it
out of its case to see if anything was obviously wrong. It was kind
of hard getting the case open but when I did I saw that two of the
four little prongs had come unsoldered from the board. I have a
soldering gun but it isn't made for such precise work and I don't
have the necessary skills even if it was the right tool.
Before the teacher left the lab I had the idea of plugging it into a
USB extension cord so I could play with it and not worry about it
getting stuck in the computer. I went down to the library after her
class left to see if the librarian happened to have an extension
cord. And she did. I looked through cabinets but she ended up
finding one after quite a bit of searching in her closet. I was kind
of surprised.
I went back to the lab, plugged it in, plugged the flash drive into
it, and then used my small pliers to push down both of the unsoldered
pins to the board. After a bit of messing around I got the sound of
something being plugged into the computer. It said the driver failed
to install but I couldn't actually looking into it further because
both of my hands were occupied.
School had ended about five minutes earlier so most of the teachers
were still standing out front. I went and told the teacher that I
had managed to get a sound but needed another set of hands. She got
excited by the sound part so she came down and we spent quite a bit
of time trying to get the flash drive to work. I held it in place
while I told her what to do on the computer. Nothing ended up
working though. We tried everything I could think of as well as
everything we could find online. And we did that on my computer, her
laptop, and another laptop she had borrowed from the library. It was
kind of frustrating.
Tonight I managed to prop the flash drive up with another flash drive
so I could push the pins down with the pliers with one hand and tried
several more things but nothing worked. At one point I think I saw a
faint red flicker of light on the flash drive but it didn't lead to
anything. And after awhile I couldn't even get the connecting sound
anymore. It seems safe to say that it is really out of my hands at
this point. It has all of her teaching stuff on it and she is
willing to pay at least some money to get the information back so
hopefully there is a place in town that can fix it.
After I gave up on that I watched YouTube videos and eventually got
around to responding to someone on the discussion post for this week.
Late tonight my academic libraries professor sent out a message that
he would be offline for the weekend because this morning his car was
hit head-on by a drunk driver. At 10:30AM. The drunk driver than
fled the scene but a stranger on a motorcycle followed him and after
about two miles was able to subdue the driver until the police
arrived. The professor said he was alright other than bruising from
the airbag and seat belt but had gained a new perspective on life.
He also said that he had seen it coming and knew it was going to
happen and I can relate to that because when my pickup was totaled I
could see the other car coming right at me and knew I was screwed.
It's a very uncomfortable feeling.
When I had finished my discussion post I took about thirty or
forty-five minutes to play a little Minecraft because that has
been on my mind a lot recently. I have an idea for an underground
mine cart track system and I wanted to build the hub for it which
will be under my house. I built a third basement with plenty of room
to make things happen. Hopefully. I've never actually experimented
with mine carts before. I've seen them a lot in videos but I'll have
to brush up on the idea behind them. That won't happen any time soon
though. I've got a lot of stuff to do for school.
Tomorrow I need to figure out all the reading I need to do for
classes and seriously look at the final metadata assignment because
it is due next Friday. I know it involves making a crosswalk between
two metadata schemas but that's about it. It would be nice if I
could get most or all of it done this weekend but that seems very
unrealistic.
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