School Work | wyckedone.net

Recovering grades

Summer, for the school system, is not a time of rest and fun. No friends, it is a crazy time of working fast and trying to get everything ready for the fall. The frenzied work can really be seen in the IT department. Computers have to be ghosted (updated WinXP, new software, etc.), wireless controllers/AP’s installed and new network equipment is set up.

This year was made even more fun because all of the high school teachers had their own laptops. The laptops were taken up the day after the last day of school. An email went out to all of the teachers and principals letting them know when and where to bring their laptops. The email also informed them to back up any important data to their user directory because the laptops were going to be reloaded.

One teacher got a little too delete happy. When he brought his laptop to us, he said, “I accidentally deleted all of the final grades for my class.” What!?!?! That’s right people. Instead of uploading his grade file daily to the grades server, he kept them on his laptop so he could work on them at home and only uploaded every 9 weeks. That’s a bad practice in and of itself. We asked him why he did that but he didn’t really have a good answer (shock?).

So what did we do? We Recuva‘d (bad form, booooooooo) his files. Recuva is made by the same company that makes CCleaner and Defraggler. Recuva can be installed on the local machine or carried on a portable drive (just copy the extracted executable). I took the hard drive out of the teacher’s laptop and put it in an external enclosure the school technician had. The drive was then connected to the tech’s laptop, which I had downloaded Recuva onto, and we ran the deep scan to see if we could retrieve the file.

Recuva has a really nice GUI that shows you if a file can be recovered or if it has already been overwritten by other files. Thankfully, the grade file that held all of the class final grades was able to be recovered. The teacher was happy because that saved him a weekend of re-entering all of the grades manually. I was happy because that’s one more person that owes me a favor.

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them. - Elbert Hubbard

04.Jun.08 School Work, Software Comments (0)

Clearing the halls

A teacher emailed me and said:

One of the laptops in the rolling lab is making a loud screeching noise. It’s so loud that it has caused some people to think it is the fire alarm.

That loud, huh? I’ve got to check this out. When I get to the school, I look in the computer lab where the mobile cart is supposed to be. Hmmmm, not there. I check the sign-out sheet and find the last teacher to check it out. A quick check of that teachers room yeilds nothing. I’m getting a little annoyed because I have no idea which of the 40+ rooms this cart is in.

When all the teachers arrive (I got in before they did), I have the school secretary do an announcement asking that whoever has the mobile cart needs to call the front desk. A teacher calls the front desk about 15 seconds after the announcement is made. She didn’t know she was supposed to sign the cart out. I guess she didn’t see the signs on all four sides, and the top, that states the cart can’t be removed without first signing it out.

I go to the room where the cart is and pull out the problem laptop. The system starts booting fine and even goes to the Windows XP login screen without anything odd happening. Once I login, and the start-up sound starts to play, an eardrum splitting noise starts blasting from the little laptop speakers. The teacher wasn’t kidding when she said it was loud.

After an agonizing few seconds, Windows finishes loading and I open up the volume properties. One of the kids had turned off the mute setting of the microphone (under ‘Playback’). This was causing feedback which was causing the loud noise. Muted the microphone and the noise stopped. The ringing in my ears took a few more minutes to stop.

Told the teacher what caused the problem, how it was fixed and left for some coffee.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. - Ann Landers

27.Apr.05 Hardware, School Work Comments (2)

12 year presidential term?

It’s just another day of checking the school network in order to make sure there wasn’t anything there that wasn’t supposed to be. Todays expedition turned up a great (sic) report about George W. Bush. I’ll spare you the two pages of poor grammar and extremely bad spelling. This excerpt shows how well the student understands the U.S. political structure (grammar and spelling intact):

And George Bush will now sty in office through 2008. And who knows he might even run again after that.

Hmmmm. I’m guessing that this student doesn’t know that presidents are held to only two terms. Maybe they also need to learn how to use the spelling and grammar checker built into MS Word.

13.Jan.05 School Work Comments (7)