So I got tagged by this "8 Facts About Me" meme. From what I can tell, a "meme" is a trendy new cultural thing that everybody who's anybody is supposed to know about and, I guess, feel good about themselves because they know about it. The particular meme seems to just be a blogging version of a chain letter. I've seen it bouncing around and I guess it was inevitable that it got to me eventually, despite the fact that I am hardly trendy and am effectively a dead end on the blogworld street map. Anyway, I'll give my best effort to play along and not be a total stick in the mud.
First, the Rules:
1) Post these rules before you give your facts
2) List 8 random facts about yourself
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) people and list their names, linking to them
4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged
Whatever. I've never been a stickler for rules on things that don't matter, especially those that come uninvited via the internet. We'll see how I do.
Some facts:
1) I hate the word "meme". It just drips of elitist internet speak. (Or 1337, if you're that into it.) I'm aware that the word was coined before the internet, but it seems to be everywhere now, since the internet allows a complete explosion of new trendy things you're supposed to keep track of. Google "meme" and you get 322,000,000 hits. It's right up there with "blogosphere" as a word that I wish will go away, but I know will only get stronger. This is probably why I am unlikely to ever be trendy.
2) I used to drive a bus for the University of Virginia. It was a pretty cool student job, as far as student jobs go. We had fairly flexible scheduling options and decent pay, and we didn't have to wear aprons and slop mashed potatoes. We did have uniforms, but they consisted of either a crappy blue shirt or a slightly less crappy blue jacket (I still have mine.) which, as we wore them, made us quite possibly the least professional looking bus drivers you've ever seen. Maybe they've gotten better, but I wouldn't count on it. When your main customers are either irritated nurses or drunken students, it's hard to get worked up about your appearance. The best thing about it all is that it's where I met my wife. I admit I didn't recall her right away the first time I saw her. She was one of a group of new trainees that I met all at once. I'm pretty sure she remembers me though. I was the longhair in a red bandanna rolling around in a wheelchair. I wasn't damaged at the time; I was just showing the newbies how the work the lift on the bus. Romantic, huh?
3) I was a pretty good bus driver too. Each year, most bus companies host a competition among their drivers called a Roadeo. (See the brown box near the bottom of the linked page.) You drive bus around a cone-filled obstacle course, check out a rigged bus for problems, and take a written knowledge test. The top four finishers go to the state Roadeo and the winner from that goes to a national competition. I went to the state Roadeo 3 times, having won ours twice. I came in 3rd once at the state level. I may have come in 2nd once as well, but I could be remembering wrong. This, despite the fact that we kind of made a joke of our competition. The last obstacle on the course was the "controlled stop". You are just coming out of the "diminishing clearance" obstacle, in which you floor it and go through a set of traffic barrels that start with one foot of clearance on each side of the bus and end with one inch. Some people tried to do this right, but many just tore through the barrels on one side, with the logic that if you aren't really going to try anyway, at least you only lose half the points. What we really liked was taking this now-speeding bus, and doing the "controlled stop". This consisted of a cone straight ahead of you. You are supposed to stop within 6 inches of it with one constant controlled braking application. You can't see the cone by the time you are that close, so, to do this right, you need some skill. We, however, preferred to call it the "panic stop." Our method consisted of keeping the speed up until the last minute and slamming on the brake to skid to a stop. Yes, you can skid a bus. It's quite a rush and can't be good for the vehicle. Some people occasionally got close to the cone, but most proved that it's a good thing nobody sat in front of it. We fished a lot of cones and barrels out from under buses. Anyway, the point is that, despite that level of training, I still managed to do well at the state Roadeo. Yay for me. (This is probably more pathetic than Al Bundy continuing to subsist on the glory of one high school football game, isn't it?)
4) Speaking of driving, I drove a race car in college for a short time. It was a Legends car, which is a small race car meant to be a relatively cheap way for people to get into real car racing. The UVA Mechanical Engineering Department bought one, along with several other ACC schools, and we competed against them several times. The program was just getting started as I was leaving, so there wasn't much to it at the time. Several professors were working on getting a motorsports curriculum started, which is now up and running and I think it involves two cars and quite a few students. I didn't actually compete in the car much. I wasn't a bad driver, but others were much better, although, unlike several of them, I never crashed it.
5) I've lived in 6 states and one foreign country. As well as I can remember, I've visited 38 states and 5 countries, staying at least one night in 28 and 3, respectively.
6) I was a pole vaulter in high school. By the time I graduated, I held the school record at 12' 6". Those of you who know anything about pole vaulting probably already realize that, although it's over twice my height, that's not a very impressive number. I only did it for a year and a half, and there hadn't been any pole vaulters for a few years. The track coach got us started, but he didn't know what he was talking about, and we only got to about 8' 6" that first season. I and one other guy that had some skills went to a pole vaulting camp that summer and came back to coach ourselves the next year. By the time I left I had that record I mentioned, but nobody outside the school was impressed (and most people in the school were unaware). The other guy was two years behind me and got to something like 14' the next year. He ended up getting a scholarship somewhere to continue, maybe even with real coaching. (I also tried high jumping for one season, and actually jumped 5' 10", which is over my head. Nobody was impressed though, because in the spring when the basketball players came back to track and field, they were hurdling our bar. Real high jumpers are up over 7 feet in high school.)
7) I'm a pretty good cook if I have a recipe, or at least some general guidance. However, if left to my own devices to come up with something, I look at the kitchen like it's Chinese market and I have no idea what's in the various packages. This works out well with Franny. She has no trouble breezing into the kitchen and grabbing random stuff out of the fridge and coming up with something good. However, it's almost comical to give her a recipe and see what actually comes out. I've seen 7-layer dip with only 6 layers. We make a good team though. She's an artist with no tolerance for details and I'm a computer who won't do anything until told, although I will do it well once pointed in the right direction.
8) I never would have guessed it, but I actually enjoy yard work now that I own a yard. All I remember of growing up was being forced (coerced/bribed/whatever) to mow the lawn. I was also cheap labor for Dad's planting and digging and building projects. Apparently I learned something from all that though. Now that I have a yard, I find myself interested perennials vs. annuals, ground cover, fill-in plants, flowers, trees, bushes, mulch, compost, and gardening gadgets. Who knew?
9) I do enjoy home projects as well. I learned a ton of this kind of stuff growing up. Dad and I always did pretty much any home improvement project ourselves. We rarely had anyone else come in. We did have an electrician tie our electrical additions into our breaker box, but we had done the rest of the wiring already. We also had a plumber install some copper piping. Other than that, we did pretty much everything else. Carpentry, electrical, drywall, painting, furniture building, concrete, hardware installation, repairs, whatever. I won't claim to be an expert at any of that, but I find that I'm not afraid to try most projects and I'm willing to find out how to do most anything. This is a source of continual amusement for Franny. "You don't know how to do that!" Sometime I do and sometimes I don't, but I'll try anyway. I haven't done anything too bad yet, although I occasionally do pull off some bonehead mistake that takes a bit of time to fix. Anyway, I usually get to impress my wife with my house skills. It's all about picking your audience.
10) I was in Navy ROTC for a year. I didn't get booted or anything, but I did feel like I didn't belong. Most of the other guys (and gals) were WAY too into marching in straight lines and keeping their hair buzzcut. I kind of figured that if the Navy ever decided they needed me enough to draft me, I'd be back, but until then, we were both fine without each other. I did however enjoy being on our pistol team. I never knew I had it in me, but I was pretty good with a .22 target pistol. This came back to me later when somebody pointed out that I had a very weird stance at an arcade shooting game but that it was kind of scary how good I was. It's been a while though, so I'm not sure it's still there.
Oops. Too many facts. I kind of got on a roll there. Too bad. Now you have some facts about me, along with a good deal of rambling. Congratulations if you made it this far. I'm not sure I know any bloggers who haven't already been tagged, so I'm just tagging everyone willy-nilly. If you feel tagged, put a link in the comments and I'll add you on here. In fact, I think I like the chain letter thing via a blog better than the e-mail way anyway. I can amuse myself with this silliness without foisting it on anyone else.
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
News Caught my Attention Today
I'm not sure why, but news caught my attention today. I listen to what's going on in the world a lot, but for some reason, several things today made me feel like commenting.
First, somebody wants to replace this artwork with a Walgreens.
I'm not sure why. Drug stores are a dime a dozen, but cars on spikes are a little harder to come by. I only care about this random piece of weird art because I remember it from Wayne's World, which wasn't a great movie by any means, but I had fun with it at the time anyway.
Next there's the latest recall of toys from China, from Mattel again. Several recalls, some for lead paint, which are China's fault, but mostly for detaching magnets, which are Mattel's fault. China made the magnetic toys exactly like they were told to, but it turned out to be a bad design. This affects something like 9 million toys. For those keeping score, that's about 10 times as many as Mattel's recall from earlier in the month. China's not looking too good these days, but for perspective, most toys these days are made in China, so it's not unusual that most of the problems would come from that direction. We're still plenty capable of coming up with automobile parts and food made in America that need to be recalled. You can check this site to see if you have any of the affected toys around. The Mattel recalls are in the "Consumer Products" section. This is a good page for the paranoid to bookmark for future everybody-panic news stories.
Baltimore just announced plans to push for a gun offender registry. From what I understand, it would be similar to a sex offender registry, in that convicted gun offenders would have to notify the police of their whereabouts regularly. There is of course the question of whether it would actually be effective, seeing as the type of person who is going to commit multiple gun crimes might not be likely to keep his address updated on a bureaucratic government list. However, assume for a moment that it would actually deter some people and therefore save lives. In that case, is this a good idea? Any opinion is interesting, but I'm more interested for the moment in hearing the opinions of the more pro-gun side. From the gun-control advocate point of view, this is obviously a no-brainer, so it's not much of a jumping-off point for discussion. I'm not generally against guns, but I don't currently own one either. I understand the historical reasons for the existence of the 2nd amendment and I am well aware that for a large portion of the American population, the right to own a gun is non-negotiable. However, I also understand the "well regulated militia" part of the 2nd amendment and the fact that weapons have shown themselves to cause a lot of problems and therefore require some kind of control in a civil society. The fact is that the people on this list would be convicted of some kind of gun crime and therefore, by definition, would not be the "law-abiding citizens" always touted by the gun crowd. The question is, does this make a difference to the policy's acceptability, or does it still fall under the slippery-slope argument that tends to end discussions before they even get started? I'm actually curious what any of you might have to say about this. Leave a comment if you have an opinion.
I also read about the connection between waist size and heart trouble. So much for BMI. Now we have another number to obsess about. This issue has more meaning to me these days, as Franny and I have both dedicated ourselves to jumping back on the health bandwagon. We've gotten back into running, even getting new shoes, which hasn't happened in a while, but has made a world of difference. Apparently, 6 years is too long to depend on a pair of running shoes, even if you don't run that much. Good to know. Anyway, we're serious this time I think, even to the point of getting up early to do it. Good thing we got this itch now and not in February. Hopefully, by the time the weather gets bad again, we'll be into good habits already.
The last thing that caught my ear this afternoon was Portland's first-of-its-kind biodiesel requirement. All diesel sold in the city starting tomorrow will have to be at least 5% biodiesel, which can be used in any diesel engine. The only exception is the one truck stop in the city limits, which would likely lose all of it's business, since biodiesel is slightly more expensive and trucks could certainly make it another 10 miles to the next option. We have a biodiesel plant in the city that is more than capable of keeping up and is actually well situated to make far more as the need arises. 5% doesn't seem like much, but a 5% decrease in oil-dependence is a good start anyway. I'm guessing the rest of the state and country will be watching this experiment closely.
I'm not sure why I felt the need to expound on all that stuff. I just needed to run off at the mouth I guess (run off at the keyboard?). If you're still reading by this point, I guess you didn't have much better to do either. Sorry about that.
First, somebody wants to replace this artwork with a Walgreens.
I'm not sure why. Drug stores are a dime a dozen, but cars on spikes are a little harder to come by. I only care about this random piece of weird art because I remember it from Wayne's World, which wasn't a great movie by any means, but I had fun with it at the time anyway.
Next there's the latest recall of toys from China, from Mattel again. Several recalls, some for lead paint, which are China's fault, but mostly for detaching magnets, which are Mattel's fault. China made the magnetic toys exactly like they were told to, but it turned out to be a bad design. This affects something like 9 million toys. For those keeping score, that's about 10 times as many as Mattel's recall from earlier in the month. China's not looking too good these days, but for perspective, most toys these days are made in China, so it's not unusual that most of the problems would come from that direction. We're still plenty capable of coming up with automobile parts and food made in America that need to be recalled. You can check this site to see if you have any of the affected toys around. The Mattel recalls are in the "Consumer Products" section. This is a good page for the paranoid to bookmark for future everybody-panic news stories.
Baltimore just announced plans to push for a gun offender registry. From what I understand, it would be similar to a sex offender registry, in that convicted gun offenders would have to notify the police of their whereabouts regularly. There is of course the question of whether it would actually be effective, seeing as the type of person who is going to commit multiple gun crimes might not be likely to keep his address updated on a bureaucratic government list. However, assume for a moment that it would actually deter some people and therefore save lives. In that case, is this a good idea? Any opinion is interesting, but I'm more interested for the moment in hearing the opinions of the more pro-gun side. From the gun-control advocate point of view, this is obviously a no-brainer, so it's not much of a jumping-off point for discussion. I'm not generally against guns, but I don't currently own one either. I understand the historical reasons for the existence of the 2nd amendment and I am well aware that for a large portion of the American population, the right to own a gun is non-negotiable. However, I also understand the "well regulated militia" part of the 2nd amendment and the fact that weapons have shown themselves to cause a lot of problems and therefore require some kind of control in a civil society. The fact is that the people on this list would be convicted of some kind of gun crime and therefore, by definition, would not be the "law-abiding citizens" always touted by the gun crowd. The question is, does this make a difference to the policy's acceptability, or does it still fall under the slippery-slope argument that tends to end discussions before they even get started? I'm actually curious what any of you might have to say about this. Leave a comment if you have an opinion.
I also read about the connection between waist size and heart trouble. So much for BMI. Now we have another number to obsess about. This issue has more meaning to me these days, as Franny and I have both dedicated ourselves to jumping back on the health bandwagon. We've gotten back into running, even getting new shoes, which hasn't happened in a while, but has made a world of difference. Apparently, 6 years is too long to depend on a pair of running shoes, even if you don't run that much. Good to know. Anyway, we're serious this time I think, even to the point of getting up early to do it. Good thing we got this itch now and not in February. Hopefully, by the time the weather gets bad again, we'll be into good habits already.
The last thing that caught my ear this afternoon was Portland's first-of-its-kind biodiesel requirement. All diesel sold in the city starting tomorrow will have to be at least 5% biodiesel, which can be used in any diesel engine. The only exception is the one truck stop in the city limits, which would likely lose all of it's business, since biodiesel is slightly more expensive and trucks could certainly make it another 10 miles to the next option. We have a biodiesel plant in the city that is more than capable of keeping up and is actually well situated to make far more as the need arises. 5% doesn't seem like much, but a 5% decrease in oil-dependence is a good start anyway. I'm guessing the rest of the state and country will be watching this experiment closely.
I'm not sure why I felt the need to expound on all that stuff. I just needed to run off at the mouth I guess (run off at the keyboard?). If you're still reading by this point, I guess you didn't have much better to do either. Sorry about that.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Things on My Mind
Heavy things lately. Last week wasn't exactly all roses, and now Virginia Tech. I'm actually somewhat familiar with the campus and I know the buildings involved, although it's been some time since I was there. Still, listening to the news reports all morning Monday, I had very vivid images of where they were talking about. What an awful day, although I really don't have sufficient words for it all. A sister of a friend who is a VT alumna now living in Australia had a better take on it all. Very eloquently put.
They released a bunch more details about the guy today. What a lunatic. The radio was making a big stink (on a BBC program) about whether it mattered that he was South Korean. Nobody here seems to care too much, but I guess the South Koreans are taking it pretty hard. Apparently, they have a far more collective idea of guilt and responsibility than we do. The show pointed out that the Koreans made a huge international incident out of a traffic accident a little while back where a US serviceman in Korea killed a couple kids. They held the US responsible for that incident and we didn't understand why. Now they are collectively grieving and feeling somewhat responsible for this tragedy and we don't understand why. Unexpected culture clash.
Also, I'm already tired of the gun-control discussion that will rage forever and go nowhere. The first quote I saw from Bush on Monday noted that he was sending his prayers to the families and community and, oh, yeah, he still supported the 2nd Amendment. Good thing he pointed that out. I've already heard from one side that we are the only gun-happy industrialized country and that should end immediately. I've also heard from the other side that if more law-abiding citizens had been armed, this would have ended much quicker. As usual, not much middle ground.
I was working at the US Forest Service laboratory at OSU this week. We only actually got the contract because the guy that has been calibrating their stuff for the last 25 years of so just passed away last month. He was about 85-90 years old and has been working this area longer than my boss. He was apparently a nice guy who like to tell stories going back even before his time on an aircraft carrier in World War II. Usually when I work a new place, it's because whoever was doing it before annoyed them too much so they are happy to see change. This was different because everyone seemed to like him a lot, so I felt like the runner up that they didn't really want to see. It didn't help that every time I replaced one of his stickers with my own, I felt like I was erasing a piece of history. I can look forward to doing this a lot in the next year since his daughter has been giving us a referral for all his old customers.
There's been some light stuff too. I had a dream the other night. Usually I don't care much to hear other people's dreams. They tend to be much more interesting to the person who dreamt them, and then often only until they say them out loud. But this was different (yeah, right), and anyway, this blog has no point. Anyway, it was loosely based on the end of I, Robot, although way more apocalyptic. For some reason, Will Ferrel was working with the robots, and in an odd twist, was not acting like his normal stupid-but-lovable buffoon self. He was actually very mean and evil, including a black leather jacket, head scarf and a couple guns. I reached for one of his guns, and he noted that he had another one pointed at me, so I took that one too. He laughed because when I shot him with it, I found that it was a water pistol. So I choked him with it. Apparently, I don't like Will Ferrel very much.
Franny and I took the Mizz to the tulip festival this weekend and met a couple other people with kid of the same name and only a couple days younger. We've been there before, but not with him. Not the same thing. We took him away from the flowers pretty quickly since he mainly wanted to pick petals off. I thought this seemed like excellent babysitting since they had several acres of flowers, but reluctantly decided against it. Luckily, there were lots of kid-friendly activities that we walked right by last time. The Mizz had more stimulation than he knew what to do with. He especially liked the roller slide, which was about 15 feet high, so I went with him. I apparently don't have enough padding on my behind, as it was pretty bumpy. None of the kids seemed to mind though.
The Mizz got to experience hail this evening. It was coming down in about 1/4 inch balls, so we went out on the front porch to watch. I caught one for him, and he thought that was great. He held it until it melted and then wanted another one. I caught several more until my feet got too cold. He didn't want to go back inside, but I distracted him with the doorbell. At least that's still easy.
I should write smaller things more often. Sorry for the rambling.
They released a bunch more details about the guy today. What a lunatic. The radio was making a big stink (on a BBC program) about whether it mattered that he was South Korean. Nobody here seems to care too much, but I guess the South Koreans are taking it pretty hard. Apparently, they have a far more collective idea of guilt and responsibility than we do. The show pointed out that the Koreans made a huge international incident out of a traffic accident a little while back where a US serviceman in Korea killed a couple kids. They held the US responsible for that incident and we didn't understand why. Now they are collectively grieving and feeling somewhat responsible for this tragedy and we don't understand why. Unexpected culture clash.
Also, I'm already tired of the gun-control discussion that will rage forever and go nowhere. The first quote I saw from Bush on Monday noted that he was sending his prayers to the families and community and, oh, yeah, he still supported the 2nd Amendment. Good thing he pointed that out. I've already heard from one side that we are the only gun-happy industrialized country and that should end immediately. I've also heard from the other side that if more law-abiding citizens had been armed, this would have ended much quicker. As usual, not much middle ground.
I was working at the US Forest Service laboratory at OSU this week. We only actually got the contract because the guy that has been calibrating their stuff for the last 25 years of so just passed away last month. He was about 85-90 years old and has been working this area longer than my boss. He was apparently a nice guy who like to tell stories going back even before his time on an aircraft carrier in World War II. Usually when I work a new place, it's because whoever was doing it before annoyed them too much so they are happy to see change. This was different because everyone seemed to like him a lot, so I felt like the runner up that they didn't really want to see. It didn't help that every time I replaced one of his stickers with my own, I felt like I was erasing a piece of history. I can look forward to doing this a lot in the next year since his daughter has been giving us a referral for all his old customers.
There's been some light stuff too. I had a dream the other night. Usually I don't care much to hear other people's dreams. They tend to be much more interesting to the person who dreamt them, and then often only until they say them out loud. But this was different (yeah, right), and anyway, this blog has no point. Anyway, it was loosely based on the end of I, Robot, although way more apocalyptic. For some reason, Will Ferrel was working with the robots, and in an odd twist, was not acting like his normal stupid-but-lovable buffoon self. He was actually very mean and evil, including a black leather jacket, head scarf and a couple guns. I reached for one of his guns, and he noted that he had another one pointed at me, so I took that one too. He laughed because when I shot him with it, I found that it was a water pistol. So I choked him with it. Apparently, I don't like Will Ferrel very much.
Franny and I took the Mizz to the tulip festival this weekend and met a couple other people with kid of the same name and only a couple days younger. We've been there before, but not with him. Not the same thing. We took him away from the flowers pretty quickly since he mainly wanted to pick petals off. I thought this seemed like excellent babysitting since they had several acres of flowers, but reluctantly decided against it. Luckily, there were lots of kid-friendly activities that we walked right by last time. The Mizz had more stimulation than he knew what to do with. He especially liked the roller slide, which was about 15 feet high, so I went with him. I apparently don't have enough padding on my behind, as it was pretty bumpy. None of the kids seemed to mind though.
The Mizz got to experience hail this evening. It was coming down in about 1/4 inch balls, so we went out on the front porch to watch. I caught one for him, and he thought that was great. He held it until it melted and then wanted another one. I caught several more until my feet got too cold. He didn't want to go back inside, but I distracted him with the doorbell. At least that's still easy.
I should write smaller things more often. Sorry for the rambling.
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