John Lamansky

Today’s my first day of summer vacation! Yay!

The 2006 Future Problem Solving State Bowl was last weekend, which was March 31 to April 1, 2006. (Trust me; there are no April Fool’s inaccuracies anywhere in this post. ;-)) And, as usual with FPS bowls and conferences, it was a great experience. As I always have, I competed in the Team competition this year.

The State topic was Health Care Access. As with all FPS competitions, before the competition we do preparatory research. One thing I like about the FPS program is that kids get to be exposed to so much information on such a wide range of cool topics. Anyway, I learned some interesting things about health care access. (For example, did you know that according to Money magazine, 80% of medical bills contain errors?! :-o)

In the Future Scene (the sci-fi story that is the basis of a given level of competition), many people were living past their 100s. However, these old ages introduced a new variety of diseases and challenges. The F.S. focused on an imaginary disease called Stith Syndrome that affected 1 in 3 people between the ages of 115 and 120. It was a painful disease that caused nerve deterioration and eventually led to death.

The solution to this was health care known as Aqua-Treatment, which consisted of confinement in underwater high-pressure chambers. The big problem in the Future Scene was the cost of this healthcare.

After completing the written portion of the competition, my team and I competed in the skit competition. We did a play on the word “Stith” and changed it to “Sith.” In other words, we had Darth Vader be a 115-year-old with Stith Syndrome.

We received the results on the second day of the bowl — April Fool’s Day — which led to a very believable April Fool’s joke claiming those in the Senior division would have to wait 2 weeks for their results. My team placed first in the written competition and third in the skit competition. This means we’ll be going to Connecticut for the International Conference in June!

Yippee! I received the Sacrament of Confirmation last weekend! Receiving the sacrament was a very wonderful experience. I chose St. John Vianney as my Confirmation saint, for many different reasons:

• We share the same first name.
• He’s the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, in which I live.
• His middle name is Mary.
• He’s the patron saint of priests and confessors.
• He had a very difficult time with Latin while in seminary. I guess that means he would be a good saint to ask for assistance if I’m having trouble with my Latin schoolwork.

I also received many neat spiritual books and many wonderful cards from friends and family. I haven’t had this many interesting books to read for a long time!

[Note: This recollection of events is part 3 of a series, so to get the complete story, you’ll probably want to read part 1 and part 2 first.]

Finally, the technician was here! We recognized the technician from before, when he had come to replace a dead hard drive in the same computer.

Right away, he asked me what the problem was. After I told him, he said he was sure it was the power supply. It just couldn’t be the motherboard. When I told him about how the fans were still running, he said the fans could run even with a bad power supply. I was half amused, half upset, that the problem was the power supply.

After I completed my normal routine of unplugging everything from the back of the computer for the technician, the technician opened the computer and began to rip the parts out of the motherboard at amazing speed. I was in shock, considering how I had spent nearly half an hour about a week ago trying to delicately take a RAM module out of the socket.

As he was replacing the motherboard, my mom asked him whether he advised buying a warranty extension, since the expiration date for this computer’s warranty was days away. Much to our surprise, the technician answered that even he bought extended Dell warranties.

This seemed rather strange. If something went wrong with the technician’s computers, he would be the one repairing them anyway! It turns out he gets a warranty for the parts, not the service. Dell has some proprietary parts in their computers (I, personally, wouldn’t be surprised if they do that on purpose) that are almost impossible to get from anyone but Dell.

I also mentioned that the service representative with whom I had chatted previously had said that the lack of POST beeps must be caused by a loose connection. But the technician disputed that hypothesis by pointing out that the internal speaker was built directly into the motherboard.

After the technician finished installing the new motherboard, he closed the computer and turned it upright. Clang! We heard something fall. The technician put the computer on its side again, opened it up, found the fallen screw, and rescrewed that screw.

He turned on the computer, and the orange light was gone! The computer booted up! (Oh, so it wasn’t the power supply…) Still no POST beeps. Oh well.

The technician entered BIOS setup, set the time, and changed other settings based on my computer’s hardware configuration. He then inserted a CD into the drive and restarted the computer. The CD gave him access to a command prompt, which he used to access a program on the CD. Using the program he then typed in the Service Tag for my Dell computer. And then the program actually changed the stored Service Tag in the motherboard’s memory. Oooohhh…

Then… it was all done! Or so we thought. After a restart, instead of the computer booting into Windows, we were met with a “Blue Screen of Death.” Of course, in the Windows XP-era, a blue screen either means a bad driver, or it means something is seriously wrong… unlike older Windows version where blue screens happen quite frequently.

And then something else surprising happened: the technician had to call Dell technical support to find the answer to the problem.

It turned out that the blue screen was caused by an incorrect hard drive setting in the BIOS. The technician changed that and — whala! — Windows XP booted up just fine. The mystery of the orange light was solved!

Or, again, so we thought. The technician packed up his things and went out the door. I sat down at my computer, clicked on my user account, and began to type in my password. Nothing happened.

I ran out the door after the technician. He came back in and tried to use the keyboard. Nothing. The technician then restarted the computer. And tada! it worked. And this time the technician was able to actually leave.

A few days later…

Okay, I was panicking. I had a BIOS error that said there had been a fan failure! I quickly turned off the computer. I went online and all Dell Chat representatives were busy. Okay, so I called instead. This time I was determined that I would not let them call me “ma’am.” When the representative asked for my name, I said very slowly and with diction, “John Lamansky.”

The representative stammered something like, “Is it… alright if I call you by that name?” I was taken aback by this question, and stammered in return something similar to, “Yes… it’s fine… I mean, please do… call me… that.”

While we continued our conversation, the representative actually seemed to be soothing me by repeatedly saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll send a technician to take a look at it.” And he actually said, much to my amusement, and with much soothingness, “Don’t think about it anymore.” (”Now remember you Dell technicians in India, those Americans are really attached to their computers”)

The last part of our conversation seemed to take forever, because the representative would not stop repeating how everything was going to turn out okay. I was growing very impatient. (”I’ll be okay if you let me hang up!!”)

The same technician came back again. He just couldn’t believe that he had to come back to service the same computer. He guessed that the fan wasn’t spinning up quickly enough at boot-up, which is why I received the error. He did a few tweaks and left. That must’ve done it, because thankfully I haven’t received the fan error again.

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

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.

Earlier this month we were at a hotel while our mom attended tax school. One of the biggest highlights of staying at that hotel is going swimming. My siblings, my dad, and I went swimming twice, and were at the pool for a total of about 4-6 hours.

But soon after we went swimming the first time, my siblings and I started to have rashes on our skin. We didn’t think much of it, but after we went swimming a second time, the rashes grew larger. The rashes were there for days! We never had any trouble with rashes after swimming before. About a week later, I smelled my skin and I could still smell chlorine. Eek!

And several days after we came back from the hotel, we realized that my blue swimming suit had faded to the point that it had turned completely brown! At first my mom thought we had brought home someone else’s swimming suit, but it was unmistakeably mine.

Needless to say, that swimming pool had way too much chlorine in it. But if chlorine is capable of doing those things… I’m going to be a little more reluctant about going swimming next time.

As you can tell, I am quite excited, as I have heard that it is a very good movie. I’ll let you know what I think about it.

Where oh, where oh, is that John?
I wonder, wonder where he’s gone.
The haven’t been many posts lately.
Nope nope, not a single one
(well, except for a post about a rotten potato or something like that…)

The main reason I haven’t been posting much lately is because I haven’t had the time - I was working on version 3 of the Disciples with Microphones website. But now the new version is done, and now I have much more time to devote to my other hobbies and projects, such as blogging! Be sure to check out the site and the great Catholic podcasts there!

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.

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.