Category Archives: Oops

Snow in Seattle is a Big Deal

On Tuesday there were light flurries, which was enough to freak most Washington natives out for some reason:

That didn’t make much sense to me. So I went to work, and again on Wednesday.

Then I woke up this morning (Thursday) to the following:

You’ll note that the truck in red is stuck. Blocking half the exit to my parking lot. Of course, there was only one thing to do:

Build a snowman! And then, of course, listen for interesting sounds of stranded vehicles. Who would have thought to catch this one so early?

That’s right. “Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet, nor snow…” Not to fear, a rescue operation soon ensued, involving a special courier delivery of a spiffy set of tire chains and two grunts to shove the truck out of the rut after wrestling the chains on:

Don’t worry, he made it. Oh, and the snowman? He was buried by 3:30PM…

Yeah. I think I’ll work from home today. Did I mention that the entire King County only owns 27 snow plows and 15 dump trucks for over 2100 miles of road? Compare that to Dane County, WI, which employs 58 plows for county and state highways alone. Oh, and that’s not counting the “170 pieces of equipment” used by the city of Madison…

Obviously very different in terms of yearly snowfall, but still. Can you blame me for staying home?

Crash and Burn

Bike crash and landscaping burn, that is. Seems Jason just wasn’t satisfied with his nice newly patched tubes and realigned derailer. After so many crappy rides to work, a nice one for a change just wasn’t enough excitement. So… He crashed it. Don’t worry, he’s fine, just a little dirty. If you look closely here, you can see a leaf in his seat quick release, a very dirty and banged up pedal, and even a drooping chain that is pretty clearly not on a gear. Nice work, Jason!

btw, Did anybody get the movie reference? Please tell me I’m not the only nerd on this site…

[Edit 7/17/07 09:31a]: not new tires, but rather, newly patched tubes. (Insert internet tubes joke here: _________) [/Edit]

[Edit 7/17/07 8:11p]: My apologies to Jason… I did not mean to be mean; I think I was too excited over making up a movie reference to my limited repertoire to think about how that was probably not the most tactful way to title this entry & tone to write it in… Sorry! [/Edit]

How NOT to Make Iced Coffee

1. Grind coffee beans 2. Dump grounds into a Nalgeen 3. Fill with water 4. Shake to mix grounds into water 5. Let stand to brew …. 6. Mess around with coffee filters to try and get the stupid grounds back out…
Warning: Performing the aforementioned steps may incur incredulous laughter from any baristas you may know… 😉

Why Water Didn't Come Out the Tower

The angle is a little sub-par, but: this is the base of a 30-foot tower full of water. The water is supposed to come out the top. The base has a tap for a garden hose. That tap is pictured here. That tap is closed. Water is coming out anyway. Fast. :-(.

Update: Yeah, actually, no… turns out the spigot was open, and that is why water was coming out. Oops. [/Update]

Downside of Meebo

I forget that I have it logged in, and do inconsiderate things like: leave the room to eat supper, fall asleep on my couch, go to an hour and a half exam review, buy 7-up, etc.

Sorry to, well, pretty much all these people: (I didn’t mean to ignore you all)

[Intentionally saved with 10% JPEG compression quality to protect the innocent. Hm. Compression as obfuscation. Interesting concept…. basically I don’t have any image editors with a Blur effect installed on Vista yet.]

They "Cleaned" It

So at the Engineering Bash I tried to turn on the fountain. It flooded in about 60 seconds. I jumped to a hasty conclusion that the summer maintenance folks had failed to clean the filters properly, and accused them of such, publicly. Only to have one of those said summer maintenance folks inform me, in person, that he was in fact on cleaning duty this summer and can vouch for it having been done. I was left looking like a jerk, grasping at straws for other explanations, and having to walk away embarrassed.

Today, Tim and I took a look “under the hood” of the fountain to see if we could figure out what, after the assurance of clean filters, could possibly be causing the flooding problem. Here is what we found:

Oh wait: That looks an awful lot like completely clogged filters, leading directly to the flooding we experienced.

15 minutes with a shop vac later, the problem was resolved and the fountain runs fine. So I looked like a jerk for naught, and apparently the maintenance guy and myself have a different perspective on the precise definition of “frequently cleaned.”

The mouse IS the better mousetrap

I was trying to clean my laptop screen today with my “Klear Screen” cleaning solution (bought two years ago from Scott’s recommendation, works awesome. www.klearscreen.com), and I could not seem to polish off this one particular smudge.

Let me back up. The cleaning process is:

Turn off monitor. Well, I didn’t want to shut my laptop down, so I settled for turning off the backlight, leaving the contents of the screen just barely visible.
Spray once for 14″ or less, or twice for above.
Spread solution to corners of monitor with corner of micro-chamois.
Immediately begin polishing off the solution with remaining surface area of micro-chamois.
Once no solution is visible, the monitor is clean.

Use once a week for best results (Hm, I’ve used it about half a dozen times in 2 years…)

So I was stuck in step 4, because I couldn’t seem to polish off this one spot. Upon closer inspection, that spot was my mouse cursor. Oops.

The Spark Between

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