The Great Stillwater Fire of 2007
Posted by Chris | Filed under Don't Even Think About It, Random
This story starts out like any other story: on a Saturday. With wind gusting around 89 mph. All stories start out on Saturdays b/c writers are generally bored on Saturdays, but this is when they are also the most creative.
Being on a Saturday, my (beautiful) wife and mom were out running errands. My (perfect) child was in bed. Having the house to myself and in despair from my beloved Cowboys dropping another game, I decided to drown my sorrows in my third favorite television show. I recently had been given the Season 1 DVD set of Bones (Wednesdays 8/7c on Fox), so I popped in a disc and was all set to enjoy the horrors of forensics and the awesomeness of FBI-ism. During the second episode, I noticed a smoky smell. Thinking someone was grilling outside, I continued to watch. As the episode progressed, the smell became stronger - even to the point that, being the nosy neighbor I am, I went outside to see if it was really a grill or something else. Guess what? It turned out to be something else.
I saw the white smoke rushing through the “alley.” I knew it was too much for a grill (unless it was an industrial grill. And if it was an industrial grill, why is there an industrial grill in someone’s backyard anyway?). Since our house and others don’t have fences, I was able to walk out back and look right down to the end of the block. Through the smoke I saw 3 or 4 people trying to beat the grass into submission with a combination of water torture and persistent foot-stomping. Later I found out that they weren’t interrogating the grass for the enemy’s position, but the grass was on fire.
I raced back into the house to get some shoes (forget socks). As I rounded the house to get the hose, the fire rounded the neighbor’s fence and started mocking me. It said, “Come get me. Try and put me out. I’m going to get you first, Jack.” Fortunately, I know the fire language, as you probably would’ve misinterpreted it as mere crackling. Having my CTU shirt on, I knew the fire thought I was Jack Bauer, whose spirit arose in me. In true dramatic TV fashion, I had trouble connecting the hose. I had it, then it slipped off. The fire grew closer, it’s mocking becoming louder and more annoying. I felt it’s hot breath on my face and the sting of it’s smoke in my eyes. I finally managed to get the hose connected and started blasting away at the fire. I managed to stop it 6-8 feet away from the house. And having a concrete draining ditch next to our house slowed the fire enough that I managed to put it out before it jumped to the next house. However, the backyard of our back neighbors wasn’t safe - yet.
I trodded right through the ashes, watering and stomping out smoking grass. The fire raged on up the alley, so the smoke became a problem. I couldn’t see through it! It was like going through a cloud. A smelly, yellowish-white cloud that burned and could kill you if you stayed in him too long. I did my best to stop the fire reaching their house. It moved along their neighbor’s fence. My hose, being just long enough to reach the back edge my property, and the wind blowing my stream of life-saving water, wasn’t up for the task. The fire was engulfing a renegade trash can that had rebelled it’s way into the back yard. I knew my only chance was to grab the trash can, shoot it in it’s knees until it agreed to cooperate, and fill him up with enough water to reach the fire before it took out a fence. I dropped my hose, forced my way through the small, but raging, flames and grabbed the bin. I soon choked him into submission and filled him 1/3 of the way up with the all-natural ridder of toxins - both inside the body and out. With the help of the neighbor across the drainage ditch, we managed to subdue the fire. until, that is, another neighbor came out who needed help. His backyard was almost completely burnt, but I offered my aid by soaking his yard so it could not ignite the small, unburned portions. After fighting the last remaining flames and dowsing a smoldering fence board or two, the fire department made a sweep of our area and continued upwind.
Throughout the ordeal, I only received second-degree ashes. Fortunately, the firemen were well equipped with extra water and paper towels. Our house was saved, but only half of our backyard went unscathed. He is survived by the other half of the backyard, his spouse the front yard, and their children the two sideyards. Memorial services have already closed, but gifts and monetary donations are still welcome.
Below are some pictures. If you are easily scared, get queasy or have small children around, I suggest you use extreme caution while scrolling. Some images may be very disturbing.
Why Mail dot com? Exactly.
Posted by Chris | Filed under Don't Even Think About It, Technology
I finally got fed up with my Mail.com address. The site had seriously slowed down to a crawl. I don’t know if it was just my account (or mine and Jen’s, since she said hers was slow as well), but I assume not. I assume that people over there are lazy and easily distracted by (potentially) pretty women.
Why do I assume this?
For one, when you first log on to mail.com, you see a login and an option to choose mail.com or mail.com beta *new*. However, this has been up since I joined and that was over a year and a half ago!!! It’s not new anymore! They haven’t gotten around to updating anything inside mail.com for the user to enjoy probably in over 2 years. Second, they have launched a new service within the past month or two: personals.mail.com. Since when does an email provider host a personals section? I think that Microsoft and Yahoo! do it, but they are more than just email providers. They are search engines, news aggregators (maybe not by definition, but hey), and more. Mail.com is just an email provider.
So, how do you get out of Mail.com? Well, the easiest thing would be to just quit logging in and let the thing die. The funnest thing to do would be to go find where these guys are and mess with their computers ala Mission Impossible - hanging from the ceilings and removing the M, N, L, O, and P keys from the keyboard, changing their monitors brightness and contrast, and then loading their own site so it will bog down their computers. As this is probably an inconvenience for most of you, and you don’t want to leave your precious emails just sitting out there all cold and lonely, you buy pop3 access and download them to Outlook, Outlook Express, or the cool open-source Mozilla Foundation project Thunderbird (get Firefox while your at it). You then move everything into the Inbox (assuming that you’ve created folders to organize your emails) and hit Send/Recieve on your desktop email program. After you have all the emails on your dekstop, the polite thing to do would be to email tech support at Mail.com and tell them that you’re leaving (how you do this is up to you). You do this so that they can take your name off of your email address and open it back up for someone else to register. In my mind, this has pros and cons.
Pros: proves that you are a geniunely nice person, helps you to sleep better at night, if enough people leave mail.com, they’ll shut it down.
Cons: you are opening up another address for another sorry sucker to get suckered in to, defiles another human by letting them use the crappy email service.
What you decide is up to you.
From now on, you can reach me at chris[at]solidroots[dot]com. And in an amazing turn of events, Jen is using her SR address (she just hasn’t posted yet). She is jen[at]solidroots[dot]com.
Yahoo! News
Posted by Chris | Filed under Don't Even Think About It, Politics
6 Court-Martialed for Scrounging Equipment
Granted Yahoo! isn’t known for its hard-hitting news stories, it’s our homepage in our break room at work and I always peruse the top headlines @ noon each day. I usually read at least one, usually two to three stories. This one caught my attention.
Let it be noted that I am all for freeing the people of Iraq AND for bringing our troops home as quickly as possible.
But why is it that when our forces need resources, we can’t take what’s available. This story says they stole the vehicles. They STOLE the vehicles - FROM OURSELVES!!! It’s like my wife going in and using my socks (which she does) b/c mine are warmer than hers!!! These soldiers took a couple trucks in order to get their job done. By the sounds of it, the equipment was abandoned! No one ever reported the trucks as stolen or even missing! And whatever happened to “Get the Job Done By Any Means Necessary”?! What, we can go over there and shoot up the streets of Fallujah (remember, I support this war), but we can’t use our own trucks to get fuel to other troops who need it?!?! It literally blows my mind…
The report also says that the troops should’ve returned the vehicles. “Yes, we put them back in the middle of the freakin’ desert just to rot away and be an eyesore in the middle of nowhere.”
I know very little about military etiquette, but the report says “The deal was, when you are moving, if it was going to take more than 30 minutes to fix it, you left it,” as stated by an officer. Can the powers-that-be not see that it was going to take more than 30 minutes to fix these things, so they were left? What if rebel Iraqi forces would’ve gotten there first? Would we have tried to try them in the World Court on theft as a war crime? Or what if the equipment would’ve been the enemies and they left it? Could we have taken it then? Would these six have been punished the same way they are now?
You could also view this as too many levels of management and too much disconnect between the top and bottom levels. Just like in a huge corporation, the CEO doesn’t realize how each plant functions, all the CEO sees is what is put on paper in front of him/her. All he/she sees are the hard numbers — production, man hours, down time, widgets produced, widgets discarded. The CEO doesn’t know that a widget can be made several different ways—some saving time, others not. So a CEO might go in there and say, “Why aren’t you making more widgets?” Really, all one can say is, “We’re doing the best that we can with what we’re given.”
What’s really sad is these soldiers were just doing their jobs. However, 23 soldiers refused orders from a superior and nothing is going to happen to them: “Last week, the military said it would not court-martial any of 23 other Army reservists who refused a mission transporting fuel along a dangerous road in Iraq, complaining that their vehicles in poor condition and did not have armor.”
For their “crimes” these men and women are getting six months in jail and dishonorable discharge. These are men and women who are protecting our freedoms, who did the best they could with the resources that they were given.
I’m sorry guys - you can’t go around using America’s equipment like it’s yours. Because it’s not.
