I goofed, and I admit it.

I have restored my original site to its normal state. For details, visit www.wheatdogg.com.

In which I gripe about hosting issues

Forgive me, I have to vent my frustrations with this whole website business.

Everything was OK until sometime last week. The site loaded kind of slowly, but it has (had) so many links, I figured the external servers were the problem. Then, yesterday I went to my site, only to be greeted by a “suspended account” index page.

I checked my billing page — no problem there; I was all paid up. So, I sent a message to the support staff. They replied with a terse explanation that something was bogging down their server, and they traced the problem to my sites (I have three there), which they shut down.

OK, I can understand their point of view, but most hosts will trace down the problem files and inform their clients of the offending file or feature. These guys did no such finetuning. They just pulled the plug on my entire account (and perhaps others, I suspect) while they figured out the server bog-down.  I offered to delete some PHP scripts that I suspected were at fault if they would enable my account long enough to make it happen.

Mind you, shutting down my account at this hosting company means I lost a principal email address and FTP access to my server space, as well as any chance of visitors finding the sites. I’m an Amazon affiliate, so shutting me down was also possibly costing me customers.

While I deleted the scripts I figured were at fault (emasculating one site entirely in the process), I made backups of my entire directory space and database tables and saved them to my desktop PC. That way, I will be able to recreate the sites elsewhere. Mark here at wordpress.com says he will be able to convert my previous WP blog hosted at the Evil Hosting Service to the site here. Best news I heard all day.

After deleting the files, I checked my error logs in cpanel and in WordPress. There were a few messages regarding errors resulting from one of my WP plugins, which I had already disabled. Just about all the messages reported  that the “Zend Optimizer was not compatible with this version of PHP.”

Whose problem is this? Not mine, because I do not manage the server. It’s the hosting company’s fault for upgrading PHP to version 5 without also upgrading Zend, as far as I can tell. I mean, how dumb can they be?

I hope this saga has a happy ending, as I have to have access to that email address for a lot of reasons. Meanwhile, I have moved my blog here for the nonce. At least the WordPress staff knows what it is doing.

Same blog, new location

My previous host (who will remain unnamed although I am pretty p*ssed at them) has suspended my account there no less than four times in the last several days, apparently because something is bogging down their server. They claim it’s something on my site, while I insist it’s their server’s setup. Argh!

Anyway, I have to have some continuity, so I am in the process of moving the site from its old location to here, under the wordpress.com umbrella. There are some advantages to leaving the site where it was, but the presses must roll. If I can resolve the issues with my old host, I’ll consider moving  Wheat-dogg’s World back there.

In the meantime, there is not much here. I have to upload my old posts, theme, etc. So please bear with me while the process unfolds.

John Wheaton,

proprietor and general manager,

Wheatdogg’s World

Magic iPod Shuffle fixer-upper saves my tunes

Yesterday. I managed to render my new iPod Shuffle into an inert piece of plastic and metal. How? I have no idea, but probably because I pulled it out of the USB port before it was ready. It was so cooked that none of the computers in the house could peek inside it or even format it. iTunes said it was corrupt, but failed to repair it, and the Apple Updater also fell flat on its face.

I was resigned to taking the thing back to the store to get a new one, until I discovered after considerable searching online Apple’s own anti-nuke solution — the iPod shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.1. It saved my little iPod Shuffle from oblivion.

It was just released, so word of its arrival has not spread across the ‘net yet. I am adding a post about to help speed the news to other broken iPod Shuffle sufferers.

So, to avoid this problem, watch the blinking amber light on your Shuffle. Don’t remove the iPod from the USB port until the light stops blinking, or you risk corrupting the flash memory. In my case. the corruption was so bad that Windows and Linux could see the drive, but not recognize the data partition. Result: dead Shuffle.

I read online that many other “Shufflers” have had the same problem, to such an extent that Apple dealers don’t argue or attempt to fix the units. They just exchange them. I guess Apple corporate got tired of the piles of defunct Shuffles cluttering up the back room and asked the firmware programmers to whip up a solution. Thanks for the Christmas present, guys!

You have to care …

Today was my students’ final exam in physics. With the exception of two absentees, all my kids were in the same room, working diligently away at their responses, while I walked the aisles doing the invigilating-teacher thing.

Maybe it’s the season, but it hit me that I really care about these kids. I want them to do well on the test. Like a parent looking in on his sleeping children, I had the chance to watch my students in a rare quiet moment, without the added responsibility to lead the class and keep them alert.

Some of my students are brilliant, and given a few additional years of coursework, could probably teach me something about physics. Others have a really tough time with the subject. And there are a few who are just plain incorrigible, who with the right attitude, could probably run rings around the rest of us.

I care for all of them, and this feeling is what sets really good teachers apart from those teachers who just show up to collect a paycheck. If I ever start to not care about my kids on an academic (or a personal) level, it will be time to find another line of work. Without some emotional connection between teacher and students, I doubt any real learning can take place.

Schools should be like close-knit neighborhoods. They should be small enough for teachers and students to develop some sense of what makes the other “tick.” Fortunately, I have spent the last 20-odd years teaching in such an environment. My total class load is only a little larger than that of a typical elementary school teacher’s, so I have had the luxury of seeing my students as more than a name or number in a roll book. I get to see the person behind the academic performance.

I have participated in several online discussions about teachers’ pay levels and about educational policy in general. Too often, it seems that those who deny raising teacher pay would be beneficial or who attempt to quantify student (and teaching) performance with fill-in-the-bubble tests entirely ignore the emotional aspects of teachers and learners spend so much time together. To these critics, teaching kids is like assembling cars or working a desk job; from that perspective, teachers’ pay is adequate once you adjust for actual days on the job. To them, teaching is just a numbers game; the end product (test scores) is more important than fostering any love of learning or respect for the subject.

Caring for one’s students as individuals is not, unfortunately, quantifiable. Students (and some observant parents) can sense when a teacher cares for his or her students, but that sense is hard to communicate to administrators and policy makers. There is no reliable test that can measure whether a teacher can establish or maintain such a caring attitude. It’s an emotional response that can only be acquired through experience. In other words, a teacher can have all the creds in the world, but if he or she is a cold fish in class, that person cannot be really effective as a teacher. Emotional bonds (as long as they don’t get too intimate!) are a necessary aspect of effective teaching.

Stop with the “going forward” already!

Going forward, I would like to eliminate the clumsy phrase “going forward” from the US lexicon. I mean, what is wrong with saying something more precise, like “in the future,” or something really wordy, like “later” or “soon.”

The phrase sounds stupid, as if the speaker had a lapse in memory and stammered out whatever words came to mind. It has no real meaning, even if one is trying to emphasize he does not want to go backward or regress.

Time was, “going forward” was a favorite of politicians and business types, who utter all sorts of vague and/or wonky terms that carry little real meaning outside these guys’ (and gals’) professional circles. After all, we are still “going forward” in Iraq, despite evidence to the contrary.

Lately, “going forward” has entered into more common venues. National discourse, meanwhile, goes backward.

This week, I heard a fellow on National Public Radio say in an interview, “We need to work on some things going forward.” Right. As if you could work on them by going into the past?

That same day, while glancing through a mail-order electronics catalog, my eyes fell on this charmer, “You’ll need some composite and S-video inputs for your current gear, but going forward, the most important inputs are …”

Now, this sentence could be construed to mean the really important inputs are in the front of your video equipment, but the copywriter really means that, to stay abreast of high-definition TV development, one needs HD inputs as well as the old kind. In other words, bunky, plan ahead.

It’s natural for language to evolve. We express ourselves in much different ways than English-speakers did in Shakespeare’s time, or even Hemingway’s. Bill and Ernie would have some trouble understanding modern jargon, I’d bet.

It’s different, however, when vague and stupid-sounding phrases enter into common speech. (Like the wonky verb, “to impact,” which means “to affect, alter or change dramatically.”) That’s not progress. It’s regressive, moving speech from the communication of precise meaning to obfuscation.

Politicians and the suits in business might want (or need) to blur their meaning. There’s no reason for the rest of us to follow suit.

No more going forward for “going forward!” I’m drawing the line right here. Who’s with me?

Those annoying mental itches that have to be scratched

TomTom, the global positioning system (GPS) retailer, has been running these cute TV ads lately, featuring driver and passengers unsuccessfully navigating their way around, accompanied by a catchy, syncopated musical refrain: “boomp-boomp-boomp-boomp-de-
boomp-boomp-boomp-boomp-de-” etc.

And hearing that music was driving me nuts, because I know I had heard it before, somewhere, but I couldn’t remember when or where or how or who.

It reminded me of Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” from the 1962 movie Hatari!, but the TomTom sample has a completely different feel — definitely not a Mancini work. Yet I had heard it before. It was just so familiar, but dammit, I couldn’t remember the title, composer, or original venue.

Enter that wonderful mental backscratcher, Google. I tried off and on for three days to locate anything informative about the TomTom music, with little success. Choosing the right search terms for Internet searching is after all partly an art, partly a science and partly a crapshoot.

After trying different combinations of search terms like, TomTom, commercial, music, composer, ad, and TV, I finally struck gold with this combination: “tomtom composer tv ad.” The third hit, a Wikipedia entry, provided the salient fact that TomTom’s ad agency had artfully selected and sampled Albert Ketèlbey’s “In a Persian Market” (composed in 1920) for the commercial.

A successful (and well paid) composer of music for silent movies in England, Ketèlbey specialized in impressionistic pieces that created mental images of exotic places. The first few bars of “In a Persian Market,” for example, recall the rhythm of camels loping toward the market, as their drivers urge them on — perfectly suitable for a TV ad promising automobile drivers quick and reliable guidance. It’s a masterful choice of music, if you ask me.

After finding the source of the sample, my next step, of course, was to download an mp3 of the piece to confirm the Wikipedia reference. Of course, it was dead-on, but while I found several renditions of “In a Persian Market,” I have not yet been able to find the exact recording used in the TomTom ad. I swear I have heard it before, possibly as a child, as my father played the few albums of “serious music” he owned.

One of those albums — now since lost — I remember included Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” a piece as evocative as Ketèlbey’s “Persian Market.” Both works got stuck in recesses in my youthful brain. Strangely, I had no problem recalling the title of Khachaturian’s rousing piece, I guess because it’s such a popular accompaniment to all sorts of shenanigans. But “In a Persian Market” is a tad more obscure, I suppose, and its details ended up lodged even deeper in my memory than the “Sabre Dance.”

All it took was a simple 30-second TV ad (and three days of googling) to help knock it loose. (And as I write this sentence, the very TV ad is running in a video window on my desktop!) Mr Ketèlbey would no doubt be amused that his tune endures in a new medium, and dismayed that mushbrains like me would forget who wrote it.

UPDATE (11/24): After listening to a dozen versions of “In a Persian Market” — including one by Spike Jones and His City Slickers — I finally figured out that the commercial samples Terry Snyder and the All Stars’ rendition from a 1959 album entitled “Persuasive Percussion vol. 2,” produced by Enoch Light. I remember seeing it in my dad’s record collection, too. Final confirmation is here. Mystery solved. Thank you, information superhighway.
Now I suppose I need to buy that album, for old times’ sake.

Happy Gilmore, cosmonaut

The flight engineers have weighed in, the flight directors have given the go-ahead — a Russian cosmonaut will in fact knock a golf ball off the International Space Station as a marketing stunt.

Admitting that golf is not exactly his game, flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin, told the BBC, “I play ice hockey and my understanding is that it is very similar.”

Da! And I’ve flown a Cessna 172 and I understand it’s very similar to flying a Boeing 777. On the other hand, applying his slapshot to golf worked great for Happy Gilmore.

When word of the Russian’s arrangement with golf equipment manufacturer Element 21 got out earlier this year, the folks at NASA went into a tailspin. They had unpleasant images of a regulation golf ball whizzing through space at more than 8 km/s (17,200 mph) and whacking either the ISS or some other valuable piece of orbiting machinery.

Well, the wily Russians worked out a safer arrangement. The ball will be more like a ping-pong ball than a golf ball, with a tenth a regulation golf ball’s mass, and “Happy” Tyurin will by necessity only be able to tap the ball one-handed. His bulky space suit makes attempting a regular golf swing nearly impossible.

Whatever the equipment used, the drive will likely be a record-setter, since space scientists estimate the ball will orbit the earth for three days before burning up in the atmosphere.

Now we need to persuade Hillerich & Bradsby to put a Slugger into space, and get a US astronaut to set a record for a fly ball!

Ask, and you shall receive; knock, and the door shall be answered

Ninth graders can learn physics.

Let me say that again. Ninth graders can learn physics. In fact, I bet sixth, seventh and eighth graders can, too. So why do we numb their brains in middle school with rote learning and endless fill-in-blank worksheets? Because many “educators” think middle school students cannot learn “hard stuff” like physics, algebra and chemistry, because they do not have the right developmental skills.

Bullcookies.

If that were true, how is it that students in Europe, Japan, the Middle East and elsewhere manage these subjects from the sixth grade on? They cannot all be on the college track.

This school year, our school chucked out its science sequence of courses for the newly encouraged “physics first” sequence: conceptually based physics, then chemistry, then biology (P-C-B). After teaching physics to 10th, 11th and 12th graders for two decades, I have to admit that I began this school year with considerable trepidation. My plan was to hold essentially to the same conceptually based approach I had been using for years, with some modifications. It is not an easy syllabus. I don’t spoonfeed the material. Our school’s mission is to prepare students for college — all of our students — so we expect them right from the get-go to take an active part in their education. They have to work!

My kids are doing a terrific job. Not all are getting A’s and B’s, but they are all tackling this most difficult of subjects with tenacity and seriousness of purpose. I am really proud of them, and really glad we decided to make the curriculum change.

From my cursory review of the literature, our experience has been shared with other schools and districts that are trying the “physics first” strategy. Correctly done, the course can breath new life into the science experiences of ninth graders.

Here’s a few general comments, none of which are particularly original. If you challenge a student and give him or her the support he or she needs to succeed, they will take on those challenges and not turn away. Have high expectations, and they will live up to them as best they can.

If you instead assume students cannot learn a subject, because they are too young or ill-prepared, and “dumb down” the teaching, they will be bored, especially if you teach them the same old thing over and over again. Low expectations result in low performance. You reap what you sow.

Granted, I teach in a college prep, private school, so our kids are generally motivated, either of their own volition or by their parents’ pressure. Our kids are not all brainiacs, nor are they all from well-to-do families, however. Some are workaholics, and others far from it. They can all learn tough subjects if you give them the chance, and the support.

I just came back from a recognition dinner for a local educational program, Youth Alive!, here in Louisville. Its founder, a former teenage drug dealer, dropout and homeless man, Kenny Boyd, takes kids from the poorest sections of town and steers them toward dignity, self-respect and academic achievement. A few of these kids are and have been my students. And they are making it at our school, with its high expectations and tough curriculum.

You reap what you sow.

The difficulties of blogging …

OK. so I’ve figured out that maintaining a blog is a whole helluva lot harder when you’re teaching than when you have the summer off. Plus, my teaching load this year is higher than it was last year, so I don’t seem to have the spare time to write as much as I did.

Nevertheless, I persevere. I am not going to be one of those bloggers who quits before the year is up, nosirree.

To that end, I am going to try to squeeze out a couple of posts about teaching and a few other items that have been kicking around in my head for the last 12 weeks of school. One will be coming right up!