Teaching CS in Dallas

Ping - Partation Image Not Ghost

http://ping.windowsdream.com/ - Saved my butt this week.

Our Norton Ghost isn't working right now.  Think it's the CD Driver.

Anyway, came in on Monday, workstation would not load any software and run it.  Finally got a blue screen of death, etc.  Rebooted several times, several ways, it was gone.

Called specialist and he said could reload the workstation, but couldn't that day.  I remember only difference between my workstation software and the kids computers was Lanschool, Deep Freeze,  my personal software (Camtasia and the like), and hardware.  So I used Ping, grabbed an image and loaded it on my workstation.  Worked like charm

Dennis came by on Tuesday morning, he loaded Deep Freeze -- that really DOES take him to do, and I immediately took an image.  Loaded my hardware and software, took another image and left for the day.

Went to work yesterday, and got messages saying that my C:\Windows was corrupt, so I decided I had a bad hard drive.  Tried the image and COULD not get it to work.  At this point I have a student station.

First, the second image was bad, as the hard drive had been running for a while.  Second, I was reading directions but not following them.  When I tried to restore the image, I kept typing in the image name, NOT THE DIRECTORY.  Argh!

Follow and read instructions, that is what I am always fussing at students for.

So when I left yesterday, I had swapped a student workstation for mine, was up, and was restoring the student image on my old computer.

Making your life easier

As many of my regular readers now, my year has been really stressful since I became the Campus Technologist.  There is one thing I did last spring, that has really made a huge difference.  Getting a maid service.

My fellow teachers had been onto me to do this for a long time.  A few months before, my next door neighbor at school had "The Maids" come and do her house and then hired another teacher's maid to come on a regular basis to keep it up.  Years ago, when I worked at TI, I had a maid but she eventually drove me nuts.  I tried a second one, who was worse than having my other around so I'd given up on it.

This time I hired "The Maids", and it took them almost a full day to get the house caught up.  It had not had a deep clean since we moved in about 8 years.  I had to do a lot of prep work but not as much as I should have.

I have them come every other week and I am considering changing it to weekly.  Right now, I spend one week enjoying having a clean house and the second week getting ready for them to come back.  That means making sure I have clean sheets, and that I pick up the areas that tend to clutter -- bathroom counter, kitchen counter and the dining room table. 

What does that mean for teaching though?  Easy, today is Sunday and reather than worrying about having a clean house, or having a dirty house and it wearing on my mind, I can concentrate on getting ready for the next week.  I'm putting together review packets, making sure I have every thing ready on the class website, etc.  I also will be doing some grading and updating the gradebook. 

I really recommend a service like the "The Maids" rather than hiring someone personally, because if they do drive you nuts, they will send you a different team.  In fact, I don't think the same people clean each time anyway, which keeps them from acting like your mother.