Fire

So I'm working calmly in my house, and suddenly there is an excited voice outside my house, "Excuse me sir, there is a fire!" I am wondering what the hell is going on there so I see outside through the window and there is this excited girl in the middle of the street shouting there is a fire. So go outside and look at the house next to mine and indeed it is spewing thick smoke so I call 911. It seems their location system is screwed up since the woman asked me for the address thrice. By the time the fire trucks reached here, just another 5 or so minutes, the fire had gotten worse. It seemed to take them an eternity to get all the pipes around and they still hadn't started any fighting business and by then you could actually see flames shooting out of the house.
It took them around 7 hours to get things out. It was amazing watching them in action. The main truck had an extensible boom with 3 jets that were remotely controlled. They seemed to be obscenely powerful. When the first jet hit the roof it knocked it right off and parts of the roof sailed flaming down. The whole place seemed like a flood.

I had no idea a house fire could be this bad. When they reduced the fire from one side, it seemed to come ou the other. There was one truck randomly spraying water around. Possibly to keep the sparks down. Outside it seemed like rain on a clear day.

They said they'll be around until morning to make sure it doesn't flare up again.

Humans are crap at judging risk

Just what we knew.

Coolest presentation

Bar Scene also tired of area bachelor

Bar Scene Also Tired Of Area Bachelor

NEW YORK—Arguing that area bachelor Gary Tate, 34, is "becoming too old for this lifestyle," hundreds of representatives from the New York...

This post is mainly for the benefit of William :). I hung out with Pepke in real life last week. He is a great fellow to do so with.

Shymeet 2007

So the long awaited shymeet took place in Media, PA last weekend. Kim and Nick were wonderful hosts and provided accomodations for everyone and kept the alcohol flowing freely. I was, surprisingly, the first one to arrive, and then we all went to pick up urz at the airport. Urz arrived in style with a police escort which made it rather easy to spot him. Not too long after Jamison joined us and then catsup came by. Urz had brought his juggling balls and some tropical malady along with him.
Later in the day we went to Dave and Buster's where Larkin joined us. Next day Marsha joins us and single handedly ups the energy of the group considerably. She introduces letterboxing to us and that's what we do.


Once the letterboxing was over, Marsha showed us how to make a whistle using an acorn cap. Not to be outdone, urz then shows us how to make music with a vagina. Marsha tried to do the same but found that her vagina was too shallow to get the rich tones that urz was able to obtain with his. The rest of the time was spent playing mini-golf and then later that night in a drunken debauchery. More pics can be found here.

Area man

Area Man Has Sad Little Routine For When He Needs Cheering Up

TIPTON, IN—To raise his spirits, Wes Mendic holds a "mini-Thanksgiving," which consists of microwaved turkey medallions, canned cranberry sauce, and a paper plate.

Home improvement

Apparently home improvement doesn't work like they show in those reality TV shows. I am at my brother's place and thought that while I am there we could improve the place since he recently bought a house and it needs some upgrading. My plan was, we take the dining room and paint it and change the old carpet. So far so good.
There were some tapes covering up cracks and I decided that they should be done away with for a proper job. When we started removing the tapes, parts of wallpaper came off, so I thought we might as well do away with the wallpaper. Then, at some points, removing both caused the plaster to fall off. So we decided to take off the plaster where it was really damaged and put up drywall there.
The scope of the project was rapidly expanding. While removing stuff in the room we also noticed a piece of the carpet soaked and stained with cat pee that was covered with a mat.

Then I noticed that some of the ceiling tiles showed water damage and they were ugly anyway so why not see what's behind them.
We found some plastic covering the whole ceiling. Cutting through it, it looked like there was significant water damage at some point which was covered up by a false ceiling. We decided we could do away with the false ceiling and put up drywall (or plywood) and make it a better looking ceiling. I did not foresee how much our job would increase with that.

For some reason, there were insulating foam in the middle of the ceiling. Now all the plastic's gone and the wooden slats in one direction from the false ceiling are gone. Removing the rest of the wood doesn't look like its going to be easy. What I thought would be a 12 hr project seems to have turned into a 2 week or so project.

My first computer

A post on IIDB triggered a flood of memories about my first programming experiences. My first computer was a Casio PB-80 as shown below.


My father gave it to me when I was in the 4^th grade. This places this around 1986 or so. Apparently this was a rather limited release computer. It boasted 512 bytes of RAM (0.5 KB, 0.0005 MB) and a rather limited BASIC programming language. Despite the limitations I managed to get it to do an impressive range of things some of which were thought impossible by my dad. Kids in my school got officially introduced to computers in the 5th grade so this one-year headstart gave me massive number of nerdpoints and most of them bowed to my superior knowledge of all things computer related.

Among the things I managed to get it to do that it was never meant to were things like "animations" by rapidly placing different characters at the same spot to produce weird shapes. I used them for making action games figures though you needed a little imagination to play the game. I think me and my bro were the only ones to really get into it. The programming skills did come in handy on bigger machines though some habits I picked up were hard to lose like using only single character variables to save space and reusing variables as it allowed for only 26 variables.

We only got 2 hrs a week of actual "real computer" time in the school which had to be shared among so 6 or so kids so to maximize the use of that time I made shorter programs which I tested out on this beast. Eventually, in the next 3-4 years, the membrane keyboard started giving out. The shift key was the first to go. I tried to repair it with a separator piece of tape and some copper but it made things worse as often as it made them work. I never threw it away and I wonder if it is still at my home in my junk somewhere. I cried the day when I realized the shift key was definitely dead.

Scab picking gone bad

Scab picking gone bad, originally uploaded by RadsWiki.

Just when you think you've seen everything possible. This patient picked at forehead scab for a full year until she finally made it through her skull.

Weekly World News

Weekly World News is all set to close. What will we ever do now in lazy supermarket lanes?

White and Nerdy

Google sky

Another cool addition to Google Earth.

Coolest video

This is probably the coolest video video I have seen in years.

Now I am Sheik Yerbouti, PhD.

PICT0008

PICT0008, originally uploaded by sheik-yerbouti.

I made bread. Read the full saga here

Vouchsafe your Virginity

Vouchsafe your Virginity, originally uploaded by Solitaire Miles.

Just when you think you've seen everything. This is not a joke, it's real
www.abstinence.net/store/00464.html

nude

nude, originally uploaded by kdrs75.

Just a test post.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Kitty

Guess what's she thinking?