John Lamansky

It started out as a normal visit to the Sirloin Stockade. My family and I were going to the restaurant along with my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and two of my cousins. My other aunt would have come, but she had made a recent decision that she didn’t like the food.

After complaining to ourselves that the buffet prices seemed to have gone up (having made satisfactory visits to Sirloin Stockade many times before), we began to dish up at the buffet. So far, so good. We sat down and began to eat.

We waited and we waited. Our drinks didn’t come. Finally a waiter came and my parents expressed that we had been waiting. He apologized and went to get our drinks. He promised us we wouldn’t have to wait for anything else. After delivering the drinks, we found ourselves waiting for our baked potatoes. My dad, my mom, and I had ordered a potato (the potatoes being an optional free addition to the buffet). After being flagged down, the waiter fetched two potatoes and had to be told that we had ordered a third. After the departure of the waiter, my mom noticed that her potato looked rather… odd. She smelled it and the odor was repulsive. Of course, everyone wanted a chance to smell the rotten potato, so the dish was passed beneath the noses of a good portion of those seated at the table.

The waiter returned and my mom reported the rotten potato. He took the rotten potato and gave my mom the third potato which he had been carrying. After performing the potato swap, my mom smelled her “new potato” and it was “rotten” also. I tried to convince my mom to report the second rotten potato to the waiter, but instead my dad offered to eat it for her. The waiter never came with my dad’s potato.

Meanwhile, I was beaming that my potato was, as I described it, “flawless.” With much reluctance, I decided to offer the potato to my mom, but she declared that it smelled rotten also. I could not understand. The other potatoes did indeed smell rotten, but mine smelled, as I put it, “like a potato.” After further investigation with utensils, I was appalled that deeper down inside the potato, it had the same rotten look as the others, and it smelled, as I put it, like “a combination between rotten carrots and squash.”

During the rest of the meal, my iron-stomached can-eat-anything dad abandoned the second rotten potato, my uncle announced that the cookies tasted like they had no sugar and twice as much flour, my mom announced that the pineapple wasn’t ripe and that the lettuce was soggy, and I announced that the restaurant’s trademark rolls were hard. The only praiseworthily-tasting items there were the hamburgers.

By the time our meal was concluded, our stack of plates, many of which still held uneaten food, had overflowed onto the neighboring table. Being a rather large group, we had many plates which we desired to be removed from our presence. The waiter finally came to take some plates away.

He had accumulated a stack of plates in his hands when the entire stack of plates slipped out of his grasp and crashed onto the floor. He then proceeded to break the second commandment and say, “at least they didn’t break.” After picking up the plates and leaving on the carpeted floor an assortment of chicken and salad remains, he said, “it’s just one of those nights.” The waiter then left our table with a mess of food on his apron, while we burst into laughter and sympathized amongst ourselves, “poor guy.” After the waiter left, my cousin Kati described the sequence of events as, “the curse of the rotten potato.”

The waiter then returned with his apron in a much-improved condition to take the next round of plates; before offering to do so, stooping down and picking up a chicken bone from the floor. He then accumulated another stack of plates. Being in a sitting-down position and the waiter standing up, I was able to see a steady stream of “salad juice” trickling onto his apron. He obviously was having problems stabilizing the salad plates. Poor guy.

After his departure, I also noticed that another stream of salad juice had been directed at my brother’s coat. The spill was then speedily cleaned with a squadron of napkins.

The waiter came back several more times and carried away stack after stack of plates. He seemed very relieved to get away from our accursed table.

As we were leaving, my grandma made the unpopular decision of leaving the waiter a three-dollar tip. Despite the fact that we had a bad experience in terms of food, we thought it was so funny that we didn’t really think of filling out a comment sheet.

Ah well, at least the hamburgers were good.

That’s right: Microsoft is offering the components that make up Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition for free until November 7, 2006. So yeah, you have a bunch of time left to download them. There’s six Express products, all of which are being offered for free:

• Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
• Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

Microsoft does clarify on their site that the downloads will not be free until November 7 – they will be 100% free forever if you download them before that date. Considering each Express product will cost $49, this free offer will save you $294. Microsoft also claims that registering the Express products will give you thousands of dollars worth of free stuff. Sounds good to me.

Here’s a really cool concept: write a message and have it emailed to you in 20 years. That’s the idea behind the Forbes email time capsule. You have until November 30 before the capsule is “buried.” Read this article at Forbes.com for more info on the technical details.

Naturally, the biggest roadblock is that peoples’ email addresses change. (The article gives some advice on what type of email address you should use.) The second-biggest problem in my mind is the security of this database. After all, it will be stored in three places for the purposes of data redundancy. Although it does sound appealing, I probably won’t want to use this as a system of backup for my top-secret ideas for that A.I. program I’ve been working on…

Ah, time capsules… this brings back some fond memories. I’ve always been fascinated by time capsules, time travel, and etcetera. My brother, I, and two friends of ours buried a time capsule in our garden about four or five years ago. I can easily remember the time period because it was at the time when state quarters were the latest thing. So we buried some state quarters along with a sentance-long piece of paper that said in summary, “congratulations for finding this.”

Unfortunately, the map telling exactly where in the garden the time capsule is, as well as how deep it was buried, was misplaced. I do remember the general area of the garden in which the capsule is located, as well as the fact that it was about two or three feet down. I suppose that general information will suffice. Now I just need to decide when to dig it up.

[Note: This recollection of events is part 2 of a series, so to get the complete story, you'll probably want to read part 1 first.]

What?! The account was locked?!

I couldn’t believe it. My last hope, so it seemed to me, in order to fix my busted computer was to check if there was a sliver of warranty left. I knew my computer had been purchased about a year ago, but I was really hoping that there would be some left. But I couldn’t really do anything about the red-text error message on the Dell website. My mom’s Dell account was locked because someone had entered an incorrect password 6 times. The account would be automatically unlocked in 23 hours.

I couldn’t wait that long! If I had any warranty left at all, it was almost all gone. I didn’t really think there was anything else I could do. (But now that I think about it, I suppose I could’ve called Dell instead, but due to a dislike for Dell phone support resulting from previous experience…)

Two days later…

We were gone all day Sunday, so I was able to go back to working on the computer problem on Monday. I logged into my Dell account. (Please, let there be some warranty left!) Oh, the suspense; oh, the drama… (etcetera…)

I couldn’t believe it. 5 days of warranty left. I was relieved and thrilled. I began looking for ways to contact Dell.

Let’s see… I can do a chat or I can make a phone call. I decided to choose chat, for several reasons:

1. No accent problems.
2. No more calling me “ma’am” because my voice is rather high at my current age.
3. No more holding for half an hour just to talk to someone.
4. No more keeping the phone glued to my ear as I work at the back of the computer, etc.

So I started a chat. I was connected with someone named “Pooja,” obviously a foreign name. I remembered the name by thinking, “it’s a cross between Winnie the Pooh and Jar-Jar Binks.” He had me do many things: unplug everything but the power cord, check the voltage settings, etc. Nothing worked. Then he told me to reset the PCI cards.

Bother. Removing and replacing things in the computer was what was giving me trouble before. But I had to try it. The Dell technician gave me the URL to an article on removing PCI cards. I started with the graphics card. I got one end out, but I could not get out the other end. It suddenly dawned on me that I was trying to remove a PCI Express card using instructions for PCI cards. I had to push the little green lever first, then the card would lift out!

Anyway, by the time I was finished, I was greeted with an unpleasant surprise – the Dell technician had ended the chat. At first I was indignant that they would become so impatient as to terminate our connection, but then I saw a template message saying that due to my chat inactivity for the past minute, I had one more minute to respond before I would be cut off. Oh, the frustration of it all. But it turns out that the termination of our chat was one of the luckiest things that could have happened.

I started another chat and ended up with someone named “Prabal.” Another foreign name, obviously. I told him that I had been cut off, so he asked me what steps I had been able to complete. I responded with a list and the exasperated explanation, “I am now trying to reseat the PCI cards without breaking anything…” There were a few things I overlooked when making my list of successfully completed steps, so he asked me to do them over again, and — here’s the weird, but unsurprising, thing — some of his instructions were identical to those given by the “Pooja” person. Sometimes I wonder how much of a technician chat is actually original conversation. But I later found out this guy was awesome.

After those few repeats, Prabal had me remove (not reseat, as Pooja had instructed me to do) the cards and RAM from the system. I realized that this guy knew his stuff. It was common sense, yet brilliant – if we get a different error after removing a group of components, then it has to be one of those components! I was also excited because I was getting better and better and removing the cards and RAM modules. I removed both of the RAM modules in 2 minutes, instead of the 30 or so it took me to remove one of them two days ago. The orange power light prevailed, so it wasn’t one of those items. Then Prabal had me unplug the power and data cords from the disk drives and hard drives. Still the same orange power light.

Then he had me listen for beep codes (the noises the computer makes when it first starts up). I explained to him that I have never been able to hear beep codes even when the computer is working normally. He suggested that the speaker cable was disconnected. I believed him, but I found out later in the week that that was completely untrue (to be explained in part 3).

It had to be the power supply or the motherboard. Prabal had me see if the fans were spinning. Again, he was so smart – if the fans were not spinning, then they weren’t getting power. The fans were spinning. He told me it was the motherboard and got to work on dispatching a technician.

After giving me my dispatch number, case number, etc., he asked me to press a button on the chat website to end the conversation and complete a survey. Of course, I was so elated I wanted to tell the people at Dell how wonderful this technician was (compared to the first one I got), but with my blog in mind, I wanted to copy our conversation.

I was using my mom’s computer to perform the chat. And her computer was unusual in the sense that you cannot paste something into Word if you copy the item when Word is not open. So I started Word. Oh, yeah – Word is really slow on my mom’s computer. Apparently Prabal lost patience, or else he was just following the rules of the workplace. He terminated our session just as I was able to copy our conversation. The bad thing is I wasn’t able to complete the survey since it was terminated on the technician’s end. So that was disappointing that I wasn’t able to express my appreciation for his excellent expertise and troubleshooting skills, but at least a technician was coming to solve (dun-dun-dun-duuuuunnnn…) the Mystery of the Orange Light!

To be continued…

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Interesting news story at CNET News.com: Rice University has created nanoscopic automobiles made out of carbon atoms. The cars are a couple of nanometers long and are thinner than human DNA. Of course, one of the first things I thought was “just how do these ‘cars’ work?” It seems the news story doesn’t give a specific answer, but it does say:

Although the cars contain several atoms each that move in different directions, they actually consist of one single molecule. The nanocars typically contain four wheels attached to two axles. Each wheel is a buckyball, a spherical molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms. The axles are made of carbon as well. Although the bond between the wheels and the axles is strong, the wheels rotate like regular wheels on the axle.

So, what would these cars be used for?

The idea behind the research is to create molecules that will act as tools in the chemical reactions that will be employed to build microprocessors or other components in the future.

Roughly speaking, the nanocars would act like enzymes for industrial applications, he said. Enzymes in living beings help break down molecules and transport the by-products to the appropriate molecule for the next step in processing. Hemoglobin, for example, transports oxygen. Tour does not envision these molecules being used in medicines or for biological applications.

The article also mentions that the researchers at the university have created, in addition to the nanocar, a nanotruck that can carry a payload. Very cool.