::A Geek in Korea::

Last week, after a request to move some music around on my wife’s iRiver H10, I completely messed up her device. I had installed Rockbox, which worked well-ish considering the maturity of the firmware. Rockbox doesn’t support Korean fonts in any manner I can figure out on my own. My wife’s music, being mostly Korean, was showing up as a series of blocks, not characters. It wasn’t acceptable. She asked me to switch back to the original firmware.

Luckily, switching back to the original firmware was easy. There were no signs Rockbox had ever been installed. This is a good thing, because I damaged the music database that the device uses to sort and organize music. Without it, the player was nothing but a Windows-Only paperweight. P.O.S. My wife took it to the after service center and they wiped out her music and rewrote her database to get it working once again. I had made backups of her collection anticipating this, so she didn’t lose anything.

I was handed a blank Mp3 player and told, “Please, put my music back on this.”

I decided that I’d go back to what I had originally planned when I started Windows XP virtualization. I’d run my VirtualBox Windows XP install, mount the USB drive, and use the Windows application that comes with the Mp3 player to manually rebuild the database each time I add or remove songs from her player.

Now, how the hell should I go about that?

First: Install the PUEL version (Non-free) of VirtualBox. It includes support for USB.

Second: Enable USB support for VirtualBox. I followed this guide.

Third: Install the propriety Mp3 database program. In this case iRiver Plus 3.

Fourth: Add music to Mp3 player in Ubuntu. Unmount.

Fifth: Load of Windows XP. Fire up the Mp3 database program. Rebuild Database. Unmount.

BOOM. New music on the player that doesn’t damage the database anymore.

FINISHED!

Now I don’t need to bother with the damn thing anymore, and my wife can get her music with Korean fonts. I’ve gone from defeat and threatening to throw the player out our balcony to mild annoyance at poor Linux support and the number of steps it took me to get to this point. It took around a year, but I’m finally done with it.

Last time I had to do evaluations, I got scolded for one of the comments I left for the parents to read. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it made the parents upset. The paraphrased comment was something approximating this:

“This student causes problems in class that make it difficult to teach. He often starts fights, and throws books at other student’s head. He picks on one girl in particular, and can’t be in the same room with her. If his behavior improves he will be better to have in class.”

This was a fairly…diplomatic evaluation considering the antics this particular student pulled in class. As far as I know, the comments are complete free of consequences except when the parent complains I was overly harsh. No one has quit over them that I’m aware.

Before I was even handed an evaluation to grade I’ve been warned about their content this time around. My director came in when I was in the office to tell me I had to be very careful about telling parents that their kids were poorly behaved in class.

Her stance was laid out like this, ” Parents of bad students know that their children are badly behaved. They don’t have the power to change how their children behave. No one wants to hear their child was acting badly in class to you. So don’t mention it, okay?”

Even if the children are not learning due to their behavior, I’m not supposed to mention this. It might be the only thing from holding them back, but it’s not something I’m allowed to discuss. I’m suppose to bring up what they ARE doing well. I tried to always do that anyway. It’s like a one-two punch to catch parents off guard.

“Your child has managed to learn phonics, and he can stab people with pencils with great accuracy!”

Or…

“You middle school student is mastering English speaking. He talks in his sleep in class most of the time.”

Apparently even THESE sorts of comments are no longer allowed! I’ve got to think of positive things to say about every student! I’m snarky online and off, and yet I’m trapped in writing 100 nice things about students that may not be nice to me a single day of the year! It’s either that, or resort to boilerplate stuff so vague that it could apply to anyone. With my director watching my comments like a hawk, I wouldn’t even be able to get away with this.

To be truthful, I’m lucky. There are only a handful of students this time around where behavior is even an issue at all, unlike previous semesters where I wanted to slaughter whole classes with cruel remarks from my pen. These children will be spared as I try to think of some sort of glimmer of hope for them.