Fire and Smoke...
Jul. 10th, 2003 11:17 amSo, last night, while I'm finishing up in the kitchen and getting ready for bed, I hear a voice on what must be a mounted loudspeaker say, "We'll take care of it. Please stand back!" Then I notice the deep rumble of serious diesel engines and the distinct smell of pine smoke.
I wander out in my bare feet to discover that, just at the end of the little private road I share with my neighbors there are two fire trucks, a police car, and huge puddles of flame-retardant-filled water. There's a spray coming over the hedges in the neighbor's lawn. After the spray dies down I leaped over the puddles and joined my neighbors, who are all huddled together in the driveway of the home kitty-corner from my own. "Oh, hi, Elf. I decided I didn't like my bushes," says the woman who lives in the compound across from my house.
I'll say. She once had these scraggly, low-lying pine bushes, but now a rough, blackened rectangle about four feet wide and twelve feet long occupies that space. The fire department was still hosing it down to make sure it didn't flare back to life, and the police officer is asking if anyone wants to make a complaint about fireworks or other causes.
I head back inside where Omaha decides that she's going to start disassembling her computer. We try everything: we put in a different memory shim and it fails. We put her power supply in a different box and it doesn't fail. We strip off all her hard drives and it fails. We take out her modem and her networking card, and it fails. We're down to three things: the motherboard, the CPU, or the video card.
We're going to replace the motherboard. I suspect it may have fried in the recent hard brownout, even through the surge selector. We have really filthy power in Burien; I'd be tempted to drop the bucks on a UPS if I had any bucks to drop.
Pat Robertson again prays for the destruction of America if we don't turn away from our evil ways. He points out that the Supreme Court justices are old and have battled heart disease and cancer, and asks God to "tell them it's time to retire."
Japan's weird copyright laws have slammed up against technology. Apparently, it's not illegal in Japan to copy a book given to you by a friend so long as the transaction doesn't involve money. So it's not illegal to go into a bookstore and photocopy an entire book. Once, this procedure would have been prohibitively expensive, but now, with portable digital cameras ubiquiious in cell phones and OCR on everyone's desktop, it's proving to be a nightmare of digital shoplifting.
I wander out in my bare feet to discover that, just at the end of the little private road I share with my neighbors there are two fire trucks, a police car, and huge puddles of flame-retardant-filled water. There's a spray coming over the hedges in the neighbor's lawn. After the spray dies down I leaped over the puddles and joined my neighbors, who are all huddled together in the driveway of the home kitty-corner from my own. "Oh, hi, Elf. I decided I didn't like my bushes," says the woman who lives in the compound across from my house.
I'll say. She once had these scraggly, low-lying pine bushes, but now a rough, blackened rectangle about four feet wide and twelve feet long occupies that space. The fire department was still hosing it down to make sure it didn't flare back to life, and the police officer is asking if anyone wants to make a complaint about fireworks or other causes.
I head back inside where Omaha decides that she's going to start disassembling her computer. We try everything: we put in a different memory shim and it fails. We put her power supply in a different box and it doesn't fail. We strip off all her hard drives and it fails. We take out her modem and her networking card, and it fails. We're down to three things: the motherboard, the CPU, or the video card.
We're going to replace the motherboard. I suspect it may have fried in the recent hard brownout, even through the surge selector. We have really filthy power in Burien; I'd be tempted to drop the bucks on a UPS if I had any bucks to drop.
Pat Robertson again prays for the destruction of America if we don't turn away from our evil ways. He points out that the Supreme Court justices are old and have battled heart disease and cancer, and asks God to "tell them it's time to retire."
Japan's weird copyright laws have slammed up against technology. Apparently, it's not illegal in Japan to copy a book given to you by a friend so long as the transaction doesn't involve money. So it's not illegal to go into a bookstore and photocopy an entire book. Once, this procedure would have been prohibitively expensive, but now, with portable digital cameras ubiquiious in cell phones and OCR on everyone's desktop, it's proving to be a nightmare of digital shoplifting.
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