Fire is a simple thing, really.

Fuel is heated until it gives off gasses. The gasses combine with oxygen. The reaction produces heat. The heat perpetuates the cycle. Take away any of these elements — remove the fuel, exclude the oxygen, cool the system, or interfere with the chemical reaction — and the fire will cease. This is the art of firefighting.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that firefighting is far more complicated than simply “putting the wet stuff on the red stuff.” For example, some fires can only be effectively extinguished by covering them with a dry power; putting water or foam on burning metal will often exacerbate the flames. Then there’s search and rescue, salvage and overhaul, the seemingly endless folding of hoses… the list goes on. Thanks to a class that I’ve been taking these past few months, I got to learn many of these skills.

Before the class, I could write the chemical equations that describe fire with ease. For example, the complete combustion of carbon monoxide can be described as: 2 CO + O₂ -> 2 CO₂. Before the class, I had used a fire extinguisher on a single occasion to (unsuccessfully) extinguish a fire. Before the class, I had driven a fire truck and randomly actuated enough of its levers to get it to pump water.

Now that I’ve taken the class, I know the best water patterns to battle blazes in certain situations. I appreciate things such as thermal layering. I know how to read the fire and predict its behavior: Is a flashover imminent? Where is the seat of the fire? Will a backdraft occur if I open that door?



Thanks to the class, I can now do forcible entry (useful for when a locked building is on fire). Hoses, nozzles, and hydrants are no longer a mystery. How about ventilating buildings with chainsaws, axes, and fans? Yup, I learned that too.

I even learned about pike poles, which some argue are the tools that began the association of Pike with fire trucks. (Warning, tangent ahead: What if a Pike chapter took it upon themselves to do something to benefit the local fire department, in a charity sort of way?)

Learning book knowledge is great, but hands-on experience can’t be beat. That’s why my favorite parts of the class were the labs. Of those, my favorite labs were the ones with live fire. There’s nothing like “playing” with real water and real fire! With both the physical and mental tasks committed to memory, I was prepared for certification.



A week ago, I took the state “Firefighter I” certification test. It consisted of a 150-question multiple-choice test and four practical tests. The practical tests were: knots and ropes, salvage and overhaul, tool cleaning and maintenance, and search and rescue with SCBA. I aced three of them and got a 92% on the search and rescue evolution. The written test seemed easy, but I won’t have an official score for a couple of weeks. Regardless, barring some complete mental lapse on my part, I believe that I successfully completed the firefighter certification. Woohoo!

Overall, the class was a fun, enlightening experience, an excellent diversion from the routine cubicle existence of my full-time job. The class was well-run, and the teacher was one of the best that I’ve had — Rose profs or otherwise.

So, now what? Well, I’d still like to be a volunteer firefighter once I move to an area that has such a department. I like the idea of battling fire and saving lives and property. I just don’t think that I would want to be a career firefighter; besides, it is insanely difficult to get a job as a full-time fireman. In the meantime, I’ll content myself with memories of the class and stories in books. My firefighter certification will be just one among many other licenses that I don’t use: firearms, motorcycle, and ham radio, to name a few. For now, all I need to do is to make sure that my future house is close to a fire station.

It’s been a rough morning. First, I was playing poker at Canterbury, and that didn’t go so well. Then, while driving home, my car’s engine temperature gauge shot into the red and the computer warned of excessive coolant temperature. While dealing with that problem, my cell phone broke and fell apart. Speaking from my recent experience, being stuck in the middle of nowhere, at 1:45am, with a fierce wind blowing heavy rain, and without a form of communications, unequivocally sucks.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my work computer’s hard drive went down for the count last Thursday. All signs were pointing to a catastrophic hardware failure, yet the drive continued to show faint hints of life. Ontrack’s software was able to pull the names of many of the files off of the drive before consistently freezing at 76% complete. Windows’ bootloader was able to launch from the hard drive and proceede until the time for mounting the boot volume (hence the error). I didn’t give up hope.

That’s not to say the IT department rep shared my faith. That guy made a cursory attempt to mount the drive using BartPE, which even a untrained monkey could have told you would not have worked in that situation. After that feeble gesture, he fed me a bunch of bull related to data loss and data recovery software before leaving. I HATE it when IT guys lie to my face. They think they’re being clever, but I’m not fooled for even a second.

Now, the guy doing the actual replacement of my hard drive was much easier to deal with. He was receptive to the idea of loaning me the old drive for a couple of days to continue my recovery efforts (it would have to be returned eventually to fulfill the warranty terms). We agreed that he would put a new drive in my computer, image the new drive, and hook my old drive up as a slave device. After performing that operation, he gave the contraption back to me.

A wonderous thing occured. When my computer booted off its new drive, Windows launched and — this is key — mounted my old drive. All my files were intact and accessible! There was no sign of the previous turmoil.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, and I’m even less certain what fixed it, but I do know that I got my data back.

Needless to say, I spared no time copying my precious data from the old drive onto the new drive and onto the network drive.

Nothing foretold the pain and agony to come. No hints, no indications. When it happened, it was out of the blue.

I was sitting in my cube this afternoon chatting with one of my coworkers about a design approach. All of a sudden, my computer restarted itself. “How odd,” I thought. The computer posted, went through the Windows bootloader, and began to start Windows. As the black WinXP splash screen was being displayed, the screen briefly flashed to blue and the computer restarted again. This time, I interrupted the boot process to tell Windows to start in safe mode.

Blue screen: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

The next time, I told it to launch the recovery console.

BSOD again.

Uh-oh.

A tech from the IT department came out and did a cursory check. He spoke the words I feared most: “Your drive is fried.” D’oh!

Most of my files are stored on a network drive, but all of my source code gets checked out to my local hard drive. I had a half-dozen files checked out that hadn’t been checked in for almost a day. A day’s work, up in smoke. Arg!!

On the upside, I’m not convinced that all is lost. There is evidence that the filesystem is hosed but that the drive is still somewhat functional. I’m going to go in early tomorrow and try my bag of tricks to recover it. If I am unsuccessful, it might be an early weekend for me, as a replacement drive wouldn’t be available until Monday. Oooohhh, I hope it works…