Education in the 1960’s

Way back then schools were simple compared to all the options available today. There was no home schooling, no alternative school, no church school, there was just the one public school and we still learned enough to get by. Now days hardly any kids go to the public schools with all the virtual classrooms out there we will soon end up with virtual teachers and finally virtual students.

The most import class when I was recess because there were so many. We had an Early Morning recess before class started and then the regular morning recess right after show and tell. Next came Lunch recess which was followed by the afternoon recess and then finally we had the after school recess while waiting for the bus. With all those recesses we needed some down time to catch our wits but first we had to spend an hour each on Art, Music and PE which left precious little time for the reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.

The favorite high tech device at school was the Projector. There were two variety of projector, the common overhead projector and the motorized movie projector. Even though there was an overhead projector in every room they were still only used on irregular occasions for special material and the one shared movie projector was only dragged out for super special occasions such as holidays or snow days when we couldn’t go outside for the many recesses.

In between projector use the next most high tech tool in our classrooms was the mimeograph machine. It took a simple piece of carbon paper and turned it into a real printer with a simple cranking motion, no electricity required. They should have kept it around just for the exercise.

The real work horse back then was the chalk board. This ever present wall of green (sometimes brown or black, later replaced by white) was used by every teacher without exception. How else was the substitute going to communicate their name. The chalk board was a combination bulletin board and shared display. Every student took their turn at the board just for the fun of it. For us there was nothing more educational than that clicking and scraping sound of a teacher conveying knowledge on a chalkboard.

Cleaning the chalkboard was a privilege that all the wannabe students would fight for. You could tell how productive a class was by the size of the chalk dust cloud produced when the chosen kids would clap the erasers every afternoon. The gym class had no cloud at all while the science classes consistently put out a veritable fog and in between were various clouds of a size in direct proportion to the quantity of the learning achieved in that room.

The sound of chalk scratching on the chalkboard has been replaced with the squeaking of magic markers on whiteboards and now there is no way to measure the teachers productivity.

Sweet Spots

Life is a series of long boring stretches with brief moments of extreme along the way to help us remember anything at all. In between the sour spots are occasional sweet spots where everything works out right for once. October is the sweet spot in time for yellow leaves on trees. That is also the month when the tarantulas migrate.

The planet Earth certainly sits within the sweet spot zone in the sun’s warmth. Alongside Mother Earth is the Moon which also represents the perfect balance between living too close together and someday collide or too far away so they eventually wander apart. If the moon were too big it would take over more than our tides and if it were too small it would only be a token.

The sweet spot is not always at the middle. Being wealthy or powerful is best savored at the top just as the sweetest golf score is down at the bottom. Like the old joke that goes; “When they called for brains I thought they said pains and I didn’t want any”. When we line up for brains you want to be first and for pains the best place is last.

Carbon owns the sweet spot on the Periodic Table of elements by virtue of being flexible enough to bond with more neighbors than anyone else and in more ways too. All the good stuff is made with carbon and not just living matter. The hydro-carbon bonds cover everything from gasoline to plastic. On our planet in this galaxy with this set of universal physics, there is no better building block than carbon.

The color green sits on the sweet spot of our visual spectrum. There are good arguments that we specialize in green because plant life did it first but in any case there are more shades of green than any other color and it sits right in the middle of visible light between the extremes of infra-red and ultra-violet.

Goldilocks can be the cheerleading mascot of the sweet spot philosophy; finding that best of all worlds, the middle ground between too much and not enough of whatever is under discussion at any given moment. The banana belt is a kind of sweet spot, geographically speaking. Sweet spots are out there, everywhere and anywhere but it’s up to us to find them and I am hoping to find mine on vacation next week.

Server Room Series – Chapter 5: Quarterly Outages

I had a friend who was a Millwright and every summer they had a two-week “Shutdown” at the mill so they could rebuild all the machinery that had to run 24\7 the rest of the year. My friend was mad that he had to work double-time for two weeks while everyone else had the time off, so he eventually switched from millwright to truck driver even though the pay was less and the job was not as interesting. No one wants to do the dirty work.

In the hi-tech world the shutdowns are more frequent and our company has settled on once every three months around the second week of February, May, August and November. We have two basic types; minor and major Quarterly Outages. A minor outage has to have basic services up so people can keep working on projects while the major outages require every device be turned off for a complete fresh start.

The timing of the shutdown is critical so the last one down has to be the first one up or every other machine will sit there on boot up waiting for the other guy to start the handshake. The network has to be first, the DNS name resolvers are second, and then come all the secondary service providers so that none are left hanging. Each type of server has further dependencies to get the desired clean start and it is not uncommon to have to go back and start over.

There is that one brief moment in the middle of the major Outages when everything is turned off and the server room is almost silent for once, except for the background hum of the AC and UPS units. The place is almost dark with all the racks silent and missing their blinking lights it is as spooky and feels as bad as having the power go out completely. It is almost a peaceful moment except for the anticipation of something going wrong on reboot and we are always anxious to get it over.

Even though we have test machines that we practice on before each outage and we try to anticipate every contingency there is still always some fallout after the Outage is over. Every outage is good for a few panic attacks and there is almost always that one server or service that does not come back up and some patch has to be removed or the whole machine rolled back to a previous version. Finally we declare the Outage is over and take a comp day off to recover from the all 24 hour marathon but right after that we immediately start planning for the next Quarterly Outage.