John Lamansky

Yep, it happened. Much to my dismay, however, I was not present at the time (I was out helping some of my trick-or-treating younger siblings, who were in saint costumes, of course). This happened just a few minutes after we left.

So earlier this evening, our doorbell rang. Hmm. My mom opened the door, and lo and behold, there was a trick-or-treating boy, who happened to be on the local T-ball team this last summer along with two of my siblings.

As usual, our porch light was not on on Halloween (in our town, having your light on means you’re accepting trick-or-treaters). So my mom, not really knowing what to do, explained to him that only those houses with illuminated porch lights were offering candy. In sharp contrast to the rudeness of last year’s uninvited trick-or-treaters, he was very sweet about it; he said “okay,” and walked away.

A short while later my mom discovered the culprit: our garage light had turned on when the van, occupied by my dad, two of my siblings, and myself, pulled out of the driveway several minutes earlier.

First it was the paperboy, now the van. Ugh, those bothersome motion-sensitive lights!

Our family was at the house of another homeschooling family, the parents of which were named Gail and Joe, for a New Year’s Eve party. At about 9:30 P.M., I asked Gail if I could try out a program, which I had made, on their computer, and have their kids and some of the other kids there test it out.

She said yes, so I went to the computer, plugged in my portable USB flash drive, and copied the program onto the hard drive. I had actually run the program on the computer before, but it didn’t work because the computer had 24-bit graphics instead of 32-bit, which was what I had set the program to require. I had since fixed the problem, so I double-clicked on the program, and this time it ran.

It showed the splash screen, and was about to move to the next phase of the program when suddenly the screen went black. The “hp” logo appeared. Uh-oh… I knew that the computer had restarted.

Hmm, it must’ve been a driver problem with either the USB flash drive or DirectX. But that didn’t make any sense because I had used/run both the USB flash drive and the game on the computer previously (except, as mentioned before, the program didn’t work).

As Windows XP booted, I was planning to use System Restore to revert to an automatic restore point from earlier that day. The Windows XP boot screen disappeared. Normally the Welcome Screen would appear, but instead, I was met with a blank screen and a lot of hard drive access noises coming from the computer.

I held down on the power button. The computer turned off. I then removed the USB flash drive from the USB port and started the computer up again. The “Windows did not start properly last time” message appeared. I selected the “Start Windows Normally” option. The same thing happened.

I turned off and turned on the computer. This time, I selected “Last Known Good Configuration” from the menu. The same black screen.

I tried again, but this time selecting “Safe Mode.” As usual, the screen then displayed the name of each driver or system file as it was loading. But then it stopped on a file called MUP.sys. And I got the same hard drive access noises.

Great. If not even Safe Mode would work, then something was seriously wrong.

After Gail and Joe found the Windows XP CD-ROM, I inserted it into the top drive, which was a CD-RW drive. It was a little before 10:00 P.M.

I restarted the computer, but I wasn’t even asked if I wanted to boot from the CD. Since there were two drives, Joe asked if I was sure I had it in the right drive. I said I was sure, since the top drive, as far as I knew, was always the master drive.

I also noted that the light on the CD-RW drive was orange instead of green. Hmm, that sounds a little too familiar.

I decided I would need to go into the BIOS to change the boot order. I restarted, and repeatedly pressed F2, which is the BIOS setup key on my computer. That didn’t work. I repeatedly alternated between pressing F2 and the Delete key. None of them worked.

I asked Joe if he could look for the computer’s manual. Since the BIOS had finished loading before I had time to try anything other keys, I had to restart the computer again. Just as Joe found the manual, I pressed F1 and — tada! — “Entering Setup…”

Oh boy. The CD drive was set to load before the hard drive. That meant something must be wrong with the drive, as evidenced by the orange light and the fact that it would not boot from the Windows XP CD.

I was about to open the computer when it dawned on me. In the BIOS, it said the CD-ROM drive was set to boot before the hard drive, not a CD-RW! Oops. It was the bottom drive.

Hooray! The XP CD booted. I went through the screens until I came to the option to repair an existing Windows XP installation.

As Windows Setup repaired Windows, Mark (who was back from college for Christmas break) and I were pondering as to what could have happened. It couldn’t be something with DirectX, as that worked fine with other games. It couldn’t be my USB flash drive, as I had used it before on this computer.

We thought it had to be my game. But, naturally, I didn’t program any such destructive action into it. Was it a bug in the language I used to create it? Did a virus latch onto it? The bug theory didn’t make sense, since I had run the game on other computers before. The virus theory didn’t make sense, since my computer and their computer both had updated antivirus software.

Today I did a Google search for “MUP.sys” (the name of the file that was last to load in Safe Mode before the computer would freeze). I found that apparantly this file can be corrupted by a virus, or it can just become randomly corrupted. I’m guessing the latter was the case.

But Mark and I came to the conclusion that it must have been a Y2K6 bug that came two hours early.

Google has released a special data layer for Google Earth that supposedly uses a Santa Radar to track the location of Santa Claus and his fleet of aerodynamic reindeer.

To use the radar, first you’ll need to download Google Earth if you don’t have it already. Then you’ll need to download and open the Santa Radar data layer. Have fun!

For today’s DYK: Did you know that the word “Christmas” is a combination of two words: “Christ” and “Mass” ? If you find etymological details interesting, then check out the first section of the New Advent Christmas entry.

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

Earlier this evening, our doorbell rang. Hmm.

My mom opened the door, and there was a trick-or-treating boy and his mom. My mom, of course, was surprised. For one thing, it was 4:55 P.M., which was five minutes before trick-or-treating was supposed to begin in our town. Plus, we were not inviting trick-or-treaters.

So my mom asked “Is our porch light on?”
“Uh, yeah,” was the response.

My mom looked and, sure enough, our light was on. In our town, the illumination of the porch light or some other light on the front of the house was an indication of the invitation of trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

My mom then saw the paper boy walking away from our house and realized what had happened and explained to the expecting trick-or-treaters. The paper boy had apparantly activated our motion-sensitive porch light as he walked past our house.

Hmm… as the trick-or-treater and his mom approached our house, they probably saw the paper boy pass our residence, an event followed by the illumination of our porch light. I wonder…

Anyway, we now return to the trick-or-treaters standing outside our front door. My mom has finished her explanation.

Silence.

“Um, okay, I’ll see if I can find you something,” my mom said. So she headed for our pantry. I followed behind her, trying to explain that just because our light was on, “…legally, you don’t have to give them something…”

Anyway, my mom takes a bag of Snickers, opens it up, and drops one into the pillow case that the little boy was using as a container for donated candy. My mom was then, as she puts it, “stunned” to see the mother of the boy hold out a pillow case too. A second Snicker candy was given away.

And then, the boy held up his pillow case and said expectedly, “More!”

My mom did not honor that last request.