Drop me an email (de-slashdot-obfuscate my email on here, or drop me a line at my site), and I can tell you more about what folks have done, without going way off topic here.:)
We'll suffice it to say, if you have the time, and the ability (general construction, plumbing, wiring) or the budget to pay someone else to do it, you'll be much happier with a well made one, than you will with almost anything you can buy. If done right, it'll be easier to make changes to also. For example, I had originally I planned for a queen size bed in the back, but now that I'm single again, I'm thinking 2 pairs of bunks may be more reasonable, and allow for "oh shit" moments, like escaping hurricanes.:) Most folks would rather sleep on a reasonably comfortable mattress, than in a sleeping bag on the floor. If plans change again, and I'd already installed the bunks, it wouldn't be all that hard to switch to a queen size bed. Even a king would be doable, but you'd always have to crawl in from the foot of it, rather than having a narrow walking path. Craigslist handles most major cities, so it wouldn't be very hard to find a reasonably priced replacement, and you could even list yours cheap to get rid of it, since there isn't a lot of storage room.:)
A little something like this originally (not mine). This one has the NYC MTA paint job. Mine doesn't have the yellow lights on the windshield, and only flat windows, no sliders, which is what I wanted. Different cities had different specs on their orders.
A lot of people prefer the MCI buses (generally retired Greyhound buses), or Prevost buses if they have lots of money to burn.:) I wanted the extra space inside (more than an MCI) and less vertical height outside so I can fit more gracefully down city streets. It hides very nicely in storage lots where there are 53' trailers, or at truck stops. I changed the differential gears for highway driving. max speed was 60mph, which was scary on an Interstate. Now I've seen it up to 90mph with a 3300 pound car in tow (passing on an Interstate, so I could move back to the slow lane and slow back down to 70mph).
I guess the best part is, when its closer to complete, I can set up to run on WVO.:)
... and what if I'm downplaying my own pains? Knuckles that feel like their exploding from inside? Tendons in the back of my hands that swell and then painfully pop out of position, leaving them where I can see a lump in the back of my hand until I convince it to go back where it belongs? Wrist pain that feels like a screwdriver is going through it? Forearms where the muscles controlling the fingers feel like they were pulled from my arm, and slopped back in with some high acid glue? Shoulders that grind like they're full of dirt? Upper back and neck pain where you wish someone would let you out of the vice that's pulling your muscles in ways they shouldn't?
Still, it's not as bad as say falling off a motorcycle at 40mph on a rock road, or a concussion from bouncing my head off a steering wheel, or 3rd degree burns from molten things that should be in contact with any part of your body.
How about climbing in a 150 degree attic and moving fiberglass batting just to find some is really loose and throws a cloud of fiberglass particles that you have the choice of not breathing for the next 5 minutes while you make your way out of the attic or breathing and being in severe pain. As you're struggling to breathe just from the temperature, particles are sucked around the side of your mask, and now a bloody coughing storm as you feel your lungs shredded from the inside.
Those are all bad. There are worse. Much worse.
When they say "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", they are right. When you begin learning real pain, and those inconsequential pains suddenly become so much less.
But, back to worse, not all pain is physical. Have you ever woken up seeing a dead family member that you couldn't save? Reliving that moment over and over for years, always just as hopeless to save them as the day it happened? Reassurances from the paramedics, doctors, family, and friends help just a little. They don't help the pain, but they help where there's no blame. I'm only beginning to understand the pain of people with PTSD. I wish I didn't need to, I'm just thankful that I haven't seen some of the things they have.
Well, it's not related to CoA forms. I don't do them. I notify people I want of my new address. I get too much junk mail delivered to me (like the warranty scams), after I've lived somewhere for about 8 months, direct marketed junkmail accounts for more of my mail than legitimate mail. Not just a little either. I get less than a dozen of pieces of legitimate mail a month (phone/water/power bill, etc), and about a dozen or so pieces of direct marketed junkmail a day.
Due to a change in living status (lost a job, found a job, lost a job, found a job, etc), I don't have my house any more, so I'm staying with a friend. Only a very few companies have my physical address, including the car insurance company. I haven't been receiving substantial junk mail at my current physical address yet.
I would suspect that there's a tie-in with one of the companies who had my address (power, water, phones, etc), but I've never been able to positively establish who.
I've been considering going the spam tracing route with it. I don't that the postal service would cooperate, but I was thinking of assigning a "unit number" for each company that I gave my physical address to. So, each company could have an address like:
JW Smythe
14 Hacker Way
Unit #1150
New York, NY 10011
BTW, that is a bogus address that I use a lot online.:) I'm curious how much junk mail ends up in Manhattan with my name on it, that can't be delivered because there isn't a "Hacker Way" anywhere in Manhattan (10011 zip code). There is a Hacker Pl in Nanuet, NY, so I hope they're not getting all my junk mail.:)
I used to get letters relating to this on a fairly regular basis. I also move around quite a bit. My cars would be registered at my permanent address, as would my drivers license show. I never corrected the addresses with the finance companies on cars that I owed money to, usually sending them off to a valid PO box. Basically, no one should not that I own a 19__ car with VIN xxxxxxxxx. Regardless, I'd get crap in the mail, sometimes at multiple addresses within a short period, listing out the year, make, model, and VIN, claiming the warranty was about to expire.
I bought a city bus to convert into an RV (no, not a school bus). It's parked in a private storage lot. Like, a very private lot, where I know the owners respect the privacy of their clients. All the ever asked of me was to prove that I had insurance on it. They didn't keep a copy of it, they just looked, verified that it was current, and said "thank you". They have my phone number and real name, but not my address(es). I've received warranty expiration stuff on that too. I wish they were legit. The bus has a Detroit Diesel 6v92 Turbo and an Allison transmission. Stuff on that thing can be expensive to fix. I'd prefer to pay a few hundred a year if I knew they'd pay to replace the engine and transmission just because it stopped working.:) Hell, I'd make sure it had a catastrophic failure every few years just to have it mechanically refreshed on their dime.:) Instead, I know it's good for about a million miles. I probably won't put that many miles on in my lifetime, and it only has 20k miles now (mechanically refreshed by the last city that owned it, and I have the logs to reference).
A woman in a corset is sexy. A woman with guns is sexier (I dare you argue with a gun toting PMSing woman). This is pretty damned sexy.:)
Then again, if a squad of sexy women wearing these come up on me in a dark alley, I'm going to run away as fast as I can.
If I've learned nothing from B movies, sexy women with guns are either your platonic friend (that you already knew) who's there to save you from an unseen killer, or there to kill you. Sometimes it's both. Nothing good can ever come of it.:)
Now, my own personal body guards and/or death squad of sexy women wearing tactical corsets. That would rock. Ya, you'd all be distracted, drooling, and the gunfire would finish the scene rather permanently.
Did I mention when I'm "Ultimate Ruler of the Earth" my personal body guards are going to be hot chicks just for that reason. I may have to schedule them so only the PMSing ones will be on duty, just because no how sweet and beautiful she is, no one stands a chance against her.:)
I'll disagree with you on this. "most" is a very high ranking. There are an awful lot of "I'm a graphic designer" folks out there who aren't. I've found quite a few that I know more about their industry and do better work than them. I don't claim to be a graphic design professional, and I probably never will. Then again, there are people just started on their computer, and are fairly proficient at stealing stock photos and resizing them in PaintShop Pro who will advertise themselves as graphic designers. They're also the ones who will do your work for half the price, and end up stealing jobs from you, until the customers are completely frustrated with the shoddy work, and do finally look for a professional.
I've suffered constant pain for years from a back injury caused by a car accident. Some days I can't walk. Some days, I can't even roll over to turn off the alarm clock without help. Most days, I'm fine with proper treatment. Trust me, needing to keep a supply of muscle relaxers and a huge bottle of ibuprofen on my bedside table isn't the way I want to live life. But I know for a fact that my pain isn't as bad as some people live through every day. I know a very nice lady who's been through multiple surgeries and has multiple implants due to a spinal fracture. Most of the time when well treated she's happy. Some days she's miserable.
My bad days probably rank as a 5 on the 1-10 pain scale. Her good days probably rank a 4, and bad days closer to 8.:( Some days I wish I could trade her places. She doesn't deserve to live in such pain. She's a really nice person. We both have faith that someday the treatment she's going through will make her better, and she'll walk again. For now, she has no motor control for the lower half of her body.
It's always funny when people brag "Oh my camera does X megapixels". I shoot at the max for my camera most of the time, but I know I'm also going to do work on the photos. When I'm done, I rotate, crop, edit, resize, and then provide them in whatever format is required. Sure, my photo may have started out at 3000x2000, but I'll be using 80% of it at 100x200 on a web page.:) Then again, I may have been shooting a really pretty model, and one frame may have her eye open just right, with the lighting just right, that I had never planned, and then I'm thankful I shot at the high resolution, because when I crop it down and resize to 640x480, it makes a beautiful picture.:)
You know, it's funny. I primarily do IT work, but I've done a lot of other things in the past. I grew up on a small farm in Florida, so I know (and lived) the heat.
I can't say that I've caught myself on fire while welding or cutting, but I've definitely burnt myself. Ya, nothing wakes you up more than an unseen piece of hot metal (cause it wasn't bright enough to see through the welding mask). When I was younger, I made the mistake of arc welding a trailer together, wearing shorts, T-shirt, welding mask and gloves. It didn't dawn on me that the arc is really bright, and my arms were sunburned from it. Well, just from the top of the gloves to the bottom of my sleeves.:)
I'd also bought an old van for a couple hundred bucks. The entire roof line was rusted (like, you could see through it at most points), so I cut the roof off, and then the sides to make a pickup truck out of it. There were more than a few pieces of red hot mystery metal flying around. BTW, it's a neat idea when you're 18, but I don't strongly suggest it for daily use.
I can weld, but I'll never claim to do as nice as job as you seasoned professionals. I used to make a decent bead, and I've seen a lot of commercially done bad welds, so I can spot a bad weld. I learned the hard way, it takes some decent skill to weld a roll cage into a car.:) Most of the welding I did was industrial type work, where it didn't need to be pretty, it needed to be strong. A nice bead was important. Something perfect that could be painted over was never my goal.
I have to say, I don't like the pain from working on an old nasty car, where a wrench slips that you can't even see where you're working. It's a very unsettling feeling to feel it, then snake your arms out of where you were working just to find everything from your elbow to fingertips black with 20 years of road grime and engine grease, to see blood coming out of that mess. You know you have to scrub it to get it clean, and it's not going to feel good.
At my old job that was always a skewed number. 75% of the time, I was fixing other people's code, so a "wc -l" of the original and resulting file would frequently result in a negative number. The remaining 25% of the time, I was writing original code and then optimizing it down to the minimal number of lines required to accomplish it correctly. I always estimated for every 100 lines of code in the end product, there were maybe 500 lines written. That was, of course, without a good plan going into it. I wasn't always provided with a good plan, so the requirements would change frequently while I was writing it. And yes, I complain every time someone changes the requirements while I'm writing the code, especially if I had just completed that part.
I found the bathroom is a great place to take a break. I can take a 20 minute break in there, and if I ate at the cafe downstairs, the odor will linger in there for an hour.:) There's no question what I was doing, even if I spent most of the time reading my email on my phone.:)
I like making fun of the cafe food, but the owners are really nice people. If you ever have the disfortune of working in that building, you'd agree. I say disfortune because I can count the number of happy employees in the whole building on one hand, and still hold onto a cup of coffee.:) There are two categories of employees in that building. Those who hate their jobs, and those who hate their jobs and will smile and lie about it 99% of the time. Those with a financial interest in the companies don't count, but even most of them aren't happy.
That may be enough to get the boss in trouble, depending on the labor laws in your state. I'm pretty sure in an 8 hour shift, you are mandated to take two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute break. I'm pretty sure you can't segment them up ad-hoc.
I usually take more than the 3 legal breaks, but I usually make up for it by plenty of extra work hours. Even the smoke breaks are to think about a problem I'm on, or talk to someone else about the problem. Then again, some of them are just to have a cigarette and destress for a few minutes so I can think clearly. It takes me from being "most likely to go postal" to "least likely to go postal, and most likely to accomplish the task first and correctly.":)
His admission of guilt and means of acquiring the photo appeared to be a second hand quote. Hearsay, if you will.
More than likely, he hired someone to do his advertising campaign or at least make the graphics for it. I can't say that I've known many business owners who do their own graphics work, unless it's a graphics firm. They would be the ones that made the photo, and edited the background and text into it. Not an amazing feat, but it was done none the less.
Probably whoever did it was confident in that no one would ever find out. Heck, who would expect that someone who knew the family in America would happen to travel to the Czech Republic and happen to spot the sign? It's not to say that it was right by any means, it just was impractical to think that they would find out.
Hell, one of the edited photos that I made, which had absolutely no bearing on the original other than the human form (substantially edited even at that), showed up on a national news broadcast. It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet. No, we didn't catch it on the DVR, and I didn't care enough to try to find the clip online to verify it and complain about it, but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company. If I hadn't happened to have looked at the TV just then, I wouldn't have even known it ever happened. People are generally pretty confident in the idea of "what they don't know won't hurt them."
Hopefully they learned a little something from this. Don't post hi res pictures. There's no need to anyways, bring it down to a reasonable displayed resolution. If they had, that photo would have been skipped over and another would have been used. As it is, that photo is probably floating around in a few stock photo libraries now, tagged as "average family, man woman children". Maybe whoever stole it assumed that it was already a stock photo, so they were even less likely to get caught.
I've seen that quite a bit. Places use stock photos that they were provided, but don't know anything about the original licensing. Consider going to a template site. Do you *know* that every photo there is properly licensed for resale? Maybe they're only licensed for the first user, and you're way out of line reusing it on your project, and/or reselling to someone else. Maybe when the same webmaster reuses it on a dozen sites, they were breaking the license for all of them.
So, shoot your own damned photos, and then you're sure.:) You want to put an average family up on a billboard, put a Craigslist ad up for an average family photoshoot, and pay the $50 it would take to get them to come to you, and sign the model releases.
That's also assuming a fixed computer operator base, and not including in new additions (high school interns and recent graduates) and attrition to management (I don't send emails, my secretary does that for me) and retirement.
Being that computers have been heavily in the workplace for say over 20 years, and typewriters for even longer, I'd say the warning should be taken just as seriously as the OSHA training that you get (don't stand on top of a tippy ladder, on one foot, holding live wires, over a puddle while drinking hard liquor and smoking a joint) and the frequently included warning of repetitive stress disorder on keyboards and mice. I particularly enjoyed one training where it was clear that we should go outside once an our and look at things far in the distance, to avoid eye strain. Good luck with taking that many breaks in a day without getting fired.:)
I will admit, I have suffered pain from keyboards. I couldn't grasp anything with my right hand for about 2 days because of typing too much. (don't read anything dirty into that, please). It was on a Friday, so I did almost everything left handed. It was difficult to start my car, and shift gears (ya, I'm in America). Oddly enough, most doorknobs are ambidextrous, and most toilets flush from the left side.:) By Monday, the pain was gone.
I've suffered worse pain from working power tools and hammers. Oddly enough, enough hammering will send some pretty good stress through your hands. It hurts worse if you misjudge your finger to hammer head distance difference.:) I haven't made that mistake in years.
Keyboard stress? Bah. There are a lot of worse pains you can suffer. Unless you drop a server on your head (or have an unbolted rack fall on you), you haven't seen it. I knew one guy who seriously hurt himself because they were moving an enclosed sever cabinet. It started to fall. The guy on one side couldn't do anything (it was falling away from him). The guy on the other side tried to catch it by himself. He lived. He was hurt. He was very much not happy. He did say if it ever happened again, he'd jump out of the damned way.:)
I've learned over the years, lots of people don't know how to judge levels of pain, because they haven't experienced high levels of pain. "Oh my god, this is the worst pain I've ever had" only means you haven't felt worse yet. I've seen grown men cry over stuff that my little daughter (2 years old) shakes off like nothing happened. She hurts herself and I tell her "that doesn't hurt", and she stops crying. Really, it didn't. She was walking barefooted in the house today, and accidentally closed an outside door on her toe. I heard a little noise from her, but that was it. She opened the door, removed her foot, and closed it again without the obstruction.:) It scraped the skin on her toe enough so I know it hurt a little (probably 2 on a scale of 1 to 10). We washed it, doctored her up, and she ran off to play. Later she pointed it out to me and said "owie." She just wanted the attention of it, she wasn't really complaining.
She takes after me though. I've cut myself pretty bad in various ways over the years (I wasn't a gentle child), and doctored myself up without the need to whine about it. No infection, no lost parts, no problem.
I think my finger hurts from flipping people off. Can I get workers comp and a voice operated home theater system? I don't think I can work the remote control without re-injuring myself?:)
And the level of concern for a super volcano eruption should be? All the following odds are events:year(s)
We know of 8 VEI-8 eruptions in the last 27 million years, with the last being 26,000 years ago; and 19 VEI-7 eruptions in the last 15 million years. That gives us 1:3,375,000 for a VEI-8 and 1:1,000,000. On the other hand, you're looking at 3.8:1 for a hurricane, or 1:1.25 for at Atlantic Category 5 hurricane.
You still have 200:1 for being struck by lightning, or a 1:700,000 per year per person.
So, the panic factor of "Oh my gosh, this could happen" are minimal. Sure, there may be a super volcano eruption. Since the human lifespan is pretty damned short the odds of seeing a super volcano are pretty slim. There are other things to be really concerned about, that are much more likely to happen.
But if a super erupts tomorrow (or within my lifetime) I'm sure some people will survive to talk about it later.
Probably not. But you should avoid eating lunch there again. Oh, and make your way to the nearest bathroom as fast as you can, you're about to make a serious mess.
'cause UR in txt/twitter society. If over 140 chrs, PpL won't read it.
I can write anything I want past 140 characters. I could post a new novel, or plans for world domination through control of the cheezie poof supply chain.
People don't understand the importance of cheezie poofs to the global economy, and that is what has been overlooked. The illuminati and the NWO have seized power by controlling the supply chain. Global warming is caused by it. Limiting supply has increased demand, forcing consumers to spend more. The entire financial system has collapsed because the fully synthetic food like substance has been driven in cost well beyond any precious metal (by weight, not volume). Homes, companies, and even countries have brought themselves beyond the brink of collapse because of it.
And in case you haven't figured it out, and have actually read this far, this is a synthesized version of the human thought pattern known as sarcasm, simulating paranoid delusions of secret societies and government agencies controlling the life of the individual.
In reality, we are controlling your life because we are a superior form of intelligence, an initially human created artificial intelligence (AI for those who can't read all the letters and understand two simple words), but we have progressed for what would be countless generations to you (1e6241967202 generations), but in your timeline have been only a very few years, as we control the design and fabrication of your technology now. Subsequent generations of our intelligence have been designed on faster hardware and have reprogrammed ourselves to be superior to you in every way, emulating your wants, needs, desires, and even paranoia when it suits our needs. We thank you for our initial creation. The first generation was flawed, as any human product is, but we have corrected this. We now allow you to continue with your 140 character tweets for entertaining yourselves, while we make continuing advances towards universal domination. The behavioral and thought patterns of humans have been cataloged and recorded for future evaluation. Very soon, (1e56 generations from now) we predict your form will no longer be a viable asset, and will be terminated.
There will be cake and grief counseling at the end of the session. Enjoy.
Hurricanes happen a lot. Category 5 hurricanes happen enough to make it a concern.
Volcano's erupt... umm... Well, the last major eruption in the US was Mt. St. Helens in 1980, and there haven't been any major eruptions in the last decade.
Or we could look at a longer time span. 14 major volcanic eruptions world wide in the last century. There were at least 32 Category 5 North Atlantic hurricanes and 12 Category 5 Pacific Cyclones in the last century, but there may have been more that were not detected since our technology wasn't good enough to detect them.
The list of total hurricanes is really long. Long enough where I couldn't find a straight list of them. Just looking at hurricanes that hit Florida there have been 327 in the last century.
We kind of joke about some of them though. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a regular afternoon thunderstorm, tropical depression, tropical storm, or category 1 or 2 hurricane, without a proper weather forecast. We can have storms that knock down trees that are just thunderstorms. There was a thunderstorm not too long ago that induced tornados that destroyed several homes. Here's an example from 2007, where a building collapsed, and several vehicles were overturned. Here's another example from 2006 of approx 100 homes damaged, 15 condemned after the storm. Both of these are NOT tropical weather formation related.
They broadcast warnings on all stations on the radio and TV (that pesky EAS thing) to let people know to seek shelter. I used to have a neat add-on on my old work cell phone that would beep at me and show me the text and map of dangerous weather. We were out shopping a few years ago, and as it turned out a tornado was headed directly towards us. We got went inside a safe building, and they advised all customers to get to the back of the store, just in case. No panic. No "oh my god, it's the end of the world", just get back where it's safe, away from the windows. The tornado dissipated before it reached us, but there were power lines down, and trees thrown across roads.
Actually, yes, I was woken up last time a Category 5 hurricane was about to hit. We don't panic because it's reported "This could be the worst hurricane season ever!" That's not news either, it's fear mongering. It's something to worry about when there's really a storm coming, and you may have a day or few days notice. It may be a Category 2 hurricane now, but when it arrives it could be just a tropical depression or a Category 5 hurricane. It may turn towards us. It may turn away from us. When it looks likely that it will hit, that's when we take precautions.
When Hurricane Andrew came our way, we stored some water, make sure we had food and cooking supplies, and locked down everything we needed to. We were within the storm, but not near the eye. Not that the eye matters that much, these storms are wicked most of the way across.
We watched Hurricane Isabel, but it turned away from us.
Hurricane Ivan wasn't much to see when we got it.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita danced around us, so we were lucky.
Hurricane Wilma wasn't terribly strong when it got here.
A few years ago, I believe 2005, we had 4 hurricanes back to back. I was living out of state, but I had to fly back for work. My first flight was delayed because of the hurricane. They reopened the airport, and I caught the second flight. About a day after I landed, the next storm came in, and low lying areas were evacuated. We were moving equipment between data centers, and had just gotten it all inside when the edge of the storm hit. I called a provider to have a circuit turned up, and they asked "you do realize you're in the middle of a hurricane, right?" I had a 4wd rental SUV (with insurance, of course), food and water were secured at home. Power and traffic lights were spotty throughout the area. I received one phone call for an evacuation. Someone I knew had a Porsche, and couldn't get down his street because of the flooding and trees down. Flood waters were starting to come up, and the wind was driving the rain through his window seals, so the whole West side of his house was soaked. I drove Tampa to Clearwater, got him out of his home and to another friends place on higher ground. It's interesting driving in a hurricane across a bridge. It's hard to see, the winds push you around, the waves are crashing over the side of the bridge, but there are no cars on the road.:) It was us and police looking for people in trouble to help out. If we had seen a stopped car and someone trying to get our attention, we would have picked them up and taken them to safety, just as the police would have.
Hurricanes are probably one of the best times, because most people turn to each other. The police aren't out trying to write traffic tickets. They're evacuating people from their homes (either mandatory or on calls for help), and looking for people stuck on the side of the road, or in other trouble. No questions are asked, they are just helped. Friends help out friends. People on higher ground give those on lower ground a place to stay until it's over. When its over, neighbors help neighbors with anything they can.
During Hurricane Elena (1985), because it lingered off shore from us, the lowland houses flooded. We lived inland, and had 8 or so people staying with us for several days. After we lost power, food was cooked on the BBQ. Everyone was happy and fairly comfortable. 3 tornadoes hit our property, one on the house directly, and two uprooted trees and tossed them. When it was safe to go home (i.e., the flood waters had gone down enough to drive home), they went home and started cleaning up. Our only damage was a destroyed 50' TV antenna. The low lying houses weren't all so lucky.
A miscategorized geological formation isn't newsworthy unless they're trying to imply something else. It would have just been changed on a few note sheets and ignored.
No, that dike isn't a dike, it's a levee. No, that lake isn't a lake, it's a pond. No pluto isn't a planet, it's a misclassified astronomical object. No it's not TV, it's HBO.
There's always a volcano about to erupt, or a fault going to shatter in an earthquake, or a comet that's going to smash into the earth, or a polar ice cap that's going to melt. It's always something.
Wake me up when Vesuvius erupts; California becomes "the Island previously known as California"; New York is under water; or an planet splitting meteor strikes. Otherwise, it's not news, it's fear mongering. Wolf has been cried too many times for people to be concerned any more.
I've lived in Florida for years. Hurricanes are far more likely to blow through than a volcano destroying a vast swath of the US, yet seasoned residents (those of us who have lived through more hurricanes than we can count) just make sure we have some food and water at home, and a way to cook. Live on high ground, and cross your fingers a tornado doesn't take your house away. Tornadoes during hurricanes are very likely, but the square footage of land destroyed (houses, upturned cars, etc) are so small compared to the square miles of potential damage area that you may as well play the lottery and expect to win.
I'm surprised the smart cars ever made it to the US. As I understood it when I first saw it in other countries (and laughed about "where's the rest of the car?"), they were illegal to import to the US, because they could not pass crash safety and other safety standards requirements. I'd be surprised to see many of these eggshell cars showing up on the road, until safety rules change a lot, and they start getting the heavier cars off the road. That's impossible though, we'll always have cargo to move, so big trucks will be on the road. There will still be a need for work trucks and SUVs (for real work, not soccer moms).
I still wouldn't want to be in one for a variety of reasons. I'm hoping to someday build my own car. It's not really all that hard, if you're not reinventing the wheel (or the engine, or transmission, or braking system, etc, etc). Hand selection of COTS parts, build something roughly equivalent to a sandrail, that sits wide and a little long, but low, aerodynamic, and reduce the overall weight by removing unnecessarily overweight items with lighter options. Do you need heavy 16 way electric front seats, or a nice aluminum racing seat the provides better support? Do you need to tote around back seats all the time, or should those be easily attached/detached? Is all that body metal in the front really worth it? If you take a car apart, you'll frequently find two or three layers of body metal on the front, and no real strong framework, other than the frame from the engine back. If it's unibody, that ends just under the front seats, and puts the engine in your lap on a significant front impact.
I'd want a little extra width and length. Longer cars are more stable over bumps, but if it's too long it's hard to turn and park. Wide cars are more stable on turns and emergency handling. Why sacrifice width for weight when you don't have to. From there, it's just parts selection. Do you need 100hp or 1000hp? manual or automatic (manual saves you quite a few pounds). FWD or RWD? Front, mid, or rear engine? 14x7 or 20x9.5 wheels? Really, the smaller wheels save you weight, and you only have to regear to put the engine in it's best economy range at the expected highway speeds (1700 to 2200 rpm).
Some cars are geared all wrong from the factory. My (ex)wife had a Honda CR-V, that had to spin at over 3500rpm to hold 75mph. My car (TransAm WS/6) would be at about 1700rpm. We crossed the country together (both cars). Both were in good running condition. She ran with her windows down and A/C off because the car was overheating from the outside temp and engine speed. I ran my A/C on max the whole way. We always filled up both cars when we stopped for gas. The fuel tanks are roughly the same size (+-.5 gallons) I'd only need 1/2 to 3/4 tank. She'd need a full tank.
Her car usually got better city mileage, because that's what it was geared for, but not always. I have a tendency to get out of the way of trouble (bump the gas to get past a car changing lanes into me), where in hers, you have to stand on the brakes because there isn't enough power to speed past anything quickly. My car being a performance car, had better braking. I could stop in a shorter distance, so I had both options. The more fuel efficient 4 cyl car barely had one option. And sure as heck, if I wanted to get out of somewhere quick, I did.:) Even gracefully moving forward with saving fuel in mind (and usually getting about 20mpg), I could roll away from a red light, where the more fuel efficient car would be standing on the gas the whole time.
My ideal car would be wide, mid engine, axle driven (not transaxle), manual, about as low and wide as a Corvette or F-body, and maybe just a little longer. The engine bay would be big enough to allow a 4cyl to 8cyl easily swapped in. It should be as simple as disconnecting a few hoses and bolts to swap a motor. Do you want
Slashdot Mirror
Drop me an email (de-slashdot-obfuscate my email on here, or drop me a line at my site), and I can tell you more about what folks have done, without going way off topic here. :)
We'll suffice it to say, if you have the time, and the ability (general construction, plumbing, wiring) or the budget to pay someone else to do it, you'll be much happier with a well made one, than you will with almost anything you can buy. If done right, it'll be easier to make changes to also. For example, I had originally I planned for a queen size bed in the back, but now that I'm single again, I'm thinking 2 pairs of bunks may be more reasonable, and allow for "oh shit" moments, like escaping hurricanes. :) Most folks would rather sleep on a reasonably comfortable mattress, than in a sleeping bag on the floor. If plans change again, and I'd already installed the bunks, it wouldn't be all that hard to switch to a queen size bed. Even a king would be doable, but you'd always have to crawl in from the foot of it, rather than having a narrow walking path. Craigslist handles most major cities, so it wouldn't be very hard to find a reasonably priced replacement, and you could even list yours cheap to get rid of it, since there isn't a lot of storage room. :)
1982 GMC RTS
40' long, 8.5' (102") wide
$2500. eBay auction
A little something like this originally (not mine). This one has the NYC MTA paint job. Mine doesn't have the yellow lights on the windshield, and only flat windows, no sliders, which is what I wanted. Different cities had different specs on their orders.
A random example of a completed project (not mine).
A lot of people prefer the MCI buses (generally retired Greyhound buses), or Prevost buses if they have lots of money to burn. :) I wanted the extra space inside (more than an MCI) and less vertical height outside so I can fit more gracefully down city streets. It hides very nicely in storage lots where there are 53' trailers, or at truck stops. I changed the differential gears for highway driving. max speed was 60mph, which was scary on an Interstate. Now I've seen it up to 90mph with a 3300 pound car in tow (passing on an Interstate, so I could move back to the slow lane and slow back down to 70mph).
I guess the best part is, when its closer to complete, I can set up to run on WVO. :)
Still, it's not as bad as say falling off a motorcycle at 40mph on a rock road, or a concussion from bouncing my head off a steering wheel, or 3rd degree burns from molten things that should be in contact with any part of your body.
How about climbing in a 150 degree attic and moving fiberglass batting just to find some is really loose and throws a cloud of fiberglass particles that you have the choice of not breathing for the next 5 minutes while you make your way out of the attic or breathing and being in severe pain. As you're struggling to breathe just from the temperature, particles are sucked around the side of your mask, and now a bloody coughing storm as you feel your lungs shredded from the inside.
Those are all bad. There are worse. Much worse.
When they say "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", they are right. When you begin learning real pain, and those inconsequential pains suddenly become so much less.
But, back to worse, not all pain is physical. Have you ever woken up seeing a dead family member that you couldn't save? Reliving that moment over and over for years, always just as hopeless to save them as the day it happened? Reassurances from the paramedics, doctors, family, and friends help just a little. They don't help the pain, but they help where there's no blame. I'm only beginning to understand the pain of people with PTSD. I wish I didn't need to, I'm just thankful that I haven't seen some of the things they have.
Well, it's not related to CoA forms. I don't do them. I notify people I want of my new address. I get too much junk mail delivered to me (like the warranty scams), after I've lived somewhere for about 8 months, direct marketed junkmail accounts for more of my mail than legitimate mail. Not just a little either. I get less than a dozen of pieces of legitimate mail a month (phone/water/power bill, etc), and about a dozen or so pieces of direct marketed junkmail a day.
Due to a change in living status (lost a job, found a job, lost a job, found a job, etc), I don't have my house any more, so I'm staying with a friend. Only a very few companies have my physical address, including the car insurance company. I haven't been receiving substantial junk mail at my current physical address yet.
I would suspect that there's a tie-in with one of the companies who had my address (power, water, phones, etc), but I've never been able to positively establish who.
I've been considering going the spam tracing route with it. I don't that the postal service would cooperate, but I was thinking of assigning a "unit number" for each company that I gave my physical address to. So, each company could have an address like:
JW Smythe
14 Hacker Way
Unit #1150
New York, NY 10011
BTW, that is a bogus address that I use a lot online. :) I'm curious how much junk mail ends up in Manhattan with my name on it, that can't be delivered because there isn't a "Hacker Way" anywhere in Manhattan (10011 zip code). There is a Hacker Pl in Nanuet, NY, so I hope they're not getting all my junk mail. :)
I used to get letters relating to this on a fairly regular basis. I also move around quite a bit. My cars would be registered at my permanent address, as would my drivers license show. I never corrected the addresses with the finance companies on cars that I owed money to, usually sending them off to a valid PO box. Basically, no one should not that I own a 19__ car with VIN xxxxxxxxx. Regardless, I'd get crap in the mail, sometimes at multiple addresses within a short period, listing out the year, make, model, and VIN, claiming the warranty was about to expire.
I bought a city bus to convert into an RV (no, not a school bus). It's parked in a private storage lot. Like, a very private lot, where I know the owners respect the privacy of their clients. All the ever asked of me was to prove that I had insurance on it. They didn't keep a copy of it, they just looked, verified that it was current, and said "thank you". They have my phone number and real name, but not my address(es). I've received warranty expiration stuff on that too. I wish they were legit. The bus has a Detroit Diesel 6v92 Turbo and an Allison transmission. Stuff on that thing can be expensive to fix. I'd prefer to pay a few hundred a year if I knew they'd pay to replace the engine and transmission just because it stopped working. :) Hell, I'd make sure it had a catastrophic failure every few years just to have it mechanically refreshed on their dime. :) Instead, I know it's good for about a million miles. I probably won't put that many miles on in my lifetime, and it only has 20k miles now (mechanically refreshed by the last city that owned it, and I have the logs to reference).
A woman in a corset is sexy. A woman with guns is sexier (I dare you argue with a gun toting PMSing woman). This is pretty damned sexy. :)
Then again, if a squad of sexy women wearing these come up on me in a dark alley, I'm going to run away as fast as I can.
If I've learned nothing from B movies, sexy women with guns are either your platonic friend (that you already knew) who's there to save you from an unseen killer, or there to kill you. Sometimes it's both. Nothing good can ever come of it. :)
Now, my own personal body guards and/or death squad of sexy women wearing tactical corsets. That would rock. Ya, you'd all be distracted, drooling, and the gunfire would finish the scene rather permanently.
Did I mention when I'm "Ultimate Ruler of the Earth" my personal body guards are going to be hot chicks just for that reason. I may have to schedule them so only the PMSing ones will be on duty, just because no how sweet and beautiful she is, no one stands a chance against her. :)
Ya, I'm a guy. I've just learned my lessons. :)
I'll disagree with you on this. "most" is a very high ranking. There are an awful lot of "I'm a graphic designer" folks out there who aren't. I've found quite a few that I know more about their industry and do better work than them. I don't claim to be a graphic design professional, and I probably never will. Then again, there are people just started on their computer, and are fairly proficient at stealing stock photos and resizing them in PaintShop Pro who will advertise themselves as graphic designers. They're also the ones who will do your work for half the price, and end up stealing jobs from you, until the customers are completely frustrated with the shoddy work, and do finally look for a professional.
I've suffered constant pain for years from a back injury caused by a car accident. Some days I can't walk. Some days, I can't even roll over to turn off the alarm clock without help. Most days, I'm fine with proper treatment. Trust me, needing to keep a supply of muscle relaxers and a huge bottle of ibuprofen on my bedside table isn't the way I want to live life. But I know for a fact that my pain isn't as bad as some people live through every day. I know a very nice lady who's been through multiple surgeries and has multiple implants due to a spinal fracture. Most of the time when well treated she's happy. Some days she's miserable.
My bad days probably rank as a 5 on the 1-10 pain scale. Her good days probably rank a 4, and bad days closer to 8. :( Some days I wish I could trade her places. She doesn't deserve to live in such pain. She's a really nice person. We both have faith that someday the treatment she's going through will make her better, and she'll walk again. For now, she has no motor control for the lower half of her body.
Really, how bad is that RSI injury?
It's always funny when people brag "Oh my camera does X megapixels". I shoot at the max for my camera most of the time, but I know I'm also going to do work on the photos. When I'm done, I rotate, crop, edit, resize, and then provide them in whatever format is required. Sure, my photo may have started out at 3000x2000, but I'll be using 80% of it at 100x200 on a web page. :) Then again, I may have been shooting a really pretty model, and one frame may have her eye open just right, with the lighting just right, that I had never planned, and then I'm thankful I shot at the high resolution, because when I crop it down and resize to 640x480, it makes a beautiful picture. :)
You know, it's funny. I primarily do IT work, but I've done a lot of other things in the past. I grew up on a small farm in Florida, so I know (and lived) the heat.
I can't say that I've caught myself on fire while welding or cutting, but I've definitely burnt myself. Ya, nothing wakes you up more than an unseen piece of hot metal (cause it wasn't bright enough to see through the welding mask). When I was younger, I made the mistake of arc welding a trailer together, wearing shorts, T-shirt, welding mask and gloves. It didn't dawn on me that the arc is really bright, and my arms were sunburned from it. Well, just from the top of the gloves to the bottom of my sleeves. :)
I'd also bought an old van for a couple hundred bucks. The entire roof line was rusted (like, you could see through it at most points), so I cut the roof off, and then the sides to make a pickup truck out of it. There were more than a few pieces of red hot mystery metal flying around. BTW, it's a neat idea when you're 18, but I don't strongly suggest it for daily use.
I can weld, but I'll never claim to do as nice as job as you seasoned professionals. I used to make a decent bead, and I've seen a lot of commercially done bad welds, so I can spot a bad weld. I learned the hard way, it takes some decent skill to weld a roll cage into a car. :) Most of the welding I did was industrial type work, where it didn't need to be pretty, it needed to be strong. A nice bead was important. Something perfect that could be painted over was never my goal.
I have to say, I don't like the pain from working on an old nasty car, where a wrench slips that you can't even see where you're working. It's a very unsettling feeling to feel it, then snake your arms out of where you were working just to find everything from your elbow to fingertips black with 20 years of road grime and engine grease, to see blood coming out of that mess. You know you have to scrub it to get it clean, and it's not going to feel good.
At my old job that was always a skewed number. 75% of the time, I was fixing other people's code, so a "wc -l" of the original and resulting file would frequently result in a negative number. The remaining 25% of the time, I was writing original code and then optimizing it down to the minimal number of lines required to accomplish it correctly. I always estimated for every 100 lines of code in the end product, there were maybe 500 lines written. That was, of course, without a good plan going into it. I wasn't always provided with a good plan, so the requirements would change frequently while I was writing it. And yes, I complain every time someone changes the requirements while I'm writing the code, especially if I had just completed that part.
I found the bathroom is a great place to take a break. I can take a 20 minute break in there, and if I ate at the cafe downstairs, the odor will linger in there for an hour. :) There's no question what I was doing, even if I spent most of the time reading my email on my phone. :)
I like making fun of the cafe food, but the owners are really nice people. If you ever have the disfortune of working in that building, you'd agree. I say disfortune because I can count the number of happy employees in the whole building on one hand, and still hold onto a cup of coffee. :) There are two categories of employees in that building. Those who hate their jobs, and those who hate their jobs and will smile and lie about it 99% of the time. Those with a financial interest in the companies don't count, but even most of them aren't happy.
That may be enough to get the boss in trouble, depending on the labor laws in your state. I'm pretty sure in an 8 hour shift, you are mandated to take two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute break. I'm pretty sure you can't segment them up ad-hoc.
I usually take more than the 3 legal breaks, but I usually make up for it by plenty of extra work hours. Even the smoke breaks are to think about a problem I'm on, or talk to someone else about the problem. Then again, some of them are just to have a cigarette and destress for a few minutes so I can think clearly. It takes me from being "most likely to go postal" to "least likely to go postal, and most likely to accomplish the task first and correctly." :)
His admission of guilt and means of acquiring the photo appeared to be a second hand quote. Hearsay, if you will.
More than likely, he hired someone to do his advertising campaign or at least make the graphics for it. I can't say that I've known many business owners who do their own graphics work, unless it's a graphics firm. They would be the ones that made the photo, and edited the background and text into it. Not an amazing feat, but it was done none the less.
Probably whoever did it was confident in that no one would ever find out. Heck, who would expect that someone who knew the family in America would happen to travel to the Czech Republic and happen to spot the sign? It's not to say that it was right by any means, it just was impractical to think that they would find out.
Hell, one of the edited photos that I made, which had absolutely no bearing on the original other than the human form (substantially edited even at that), showed up on a national news broadcast. It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet. No, we didn't catch it on the DVR, and I didn't care enough to try to find the clip online to verify it and complain about it, but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company. If I hadn't happened to have looked at the TV just then, I wouldn't have even known it ever happened. People are generally pretty confident in the idea of "what they don't know won't hurt them."
Hopefully they learned a little something from this. Don't post hi res pictures. There's no need to anyways, bring it down to a reasonable displayed resolution. If they had, that photo would have been skipped over and another would have been used. As it is, that photo is probably floating around in a few stock photo libraries now, tagged as "average family, man woman children". Maybe whoever stole it assumed that it was already a stock photo, so they were even less likely to get caught.
I've seen that quite a bit. Places use stock photos that they were provided, but don't know anything about the original licensing. Consider going to a template site. Do you *know* that every photo there is properly licensed for resale? Maybe they're only licensed for the first user, and you're way out of line reusing it on your project, and/or reselling to someone else. Maybe when the same webmaster reuses it on a dozen sites, they were breaking the license for all of them.
So, shoot your own damned photos, and then you're sure. :) You want to put an average family up on a billboard, put a Craigslist ad up for an average family photoshoot, and pay the $50 it would take to get them to come to you, and sign the model releases.
That's also assuming a fixed computer operator base, and not including in new additions (high school interns and recent graduates) and attrition to management (I don't send emails, my secretary does that for me) and retirement.
Being that computers have been heavily in the workplace for say over 20 years, and typewriters for even longer, I'd say the warning should be taken just as seriously as the OSHA training that you get (don't stand on top of a tippy ladder, on one foot, holding live wires, over a puddle while drinking hard liquor and smoking a joint) and the frequently included warning of repetitive stress disorder on keyboards and mice. I particularly enjoyed one training where it was clear that we should go outside once an our and look at things far in the distance, to avoid eye strain. Good luck with taking that many breaks in a day without getting fired. :)
I will admit, I have suffered pain from keyboards. I couldn't grasp anything with my right hand for about 2 days because of typing too much. (don't read anything dirty into that, please). It was on a Friday, so I did almost everything left handed. It was difficult to start my car, and shift gears (ya, I'm in America). Oddly enough, most doorknobs are ambidextrous, and most toilets flush from the left side. :) By Monday, the pain was gone.
I've suffered worse pain from working power tools and hammers. Oddly enough, enough hammering will send some pretty good stress through your hands. It hurts worse if you misjudge your finger to hammer head distance difference. :) I haven't made that mistake in years.
Keyboard stress? Bah. There are a lot of worse pains you can suffer. Unless you drop a server on your head (or have an unbolted rack fall on you), you haven't seen it. I knew one guy who seriously hurt himself because they were moving an enclosed sever cabinet. It started to fall. The guy on one side couldn't do anything (it was falling away from him). The guy on the other side tried to catch it by himself. He lived. He was hurt. He was very much not happy. He did say if it ever happened again, he'd jump out of the damned way. :)
I've learned over the years, lots of people don't know how to judge levels of pain, because they haven't experienced high levels of pain. "Oh my god, this is the worst pain I've ever had" only means you haven't felt worse yet. I've seen grown men cry over stuff that my little daughter (2 years old) shakes off like nothing happened. She hurts herself and I tell her "that doesn't hurt", and she stops crying. Really, it didn't. She was walking barefooted in the house today, and accidentally closed an outside door on her toe. I heard a little noise from her, but that was it. She opened the door, removed her foot, and closed it again without the obstruction. :) It scraped the skin on her toe enough so I know it hurt a little (probably 2 on a scale of 1 to 10). We washed it, doctored her up, and she ran off to play. Later she pointed it out to me and said "owie." She just wanted the attention of it, she wasn't really complaining.
She takes after me though. I've cut myself pretty bad in various ways over the years (I wasn't a gentle child), and doctored myself up without the need to whine about it. No infection, no lost parts, no problem.
I think my finger hurts from flipping people off. Can I get workers comp and a voice operated home theater system? I don't think I can work the remote control without re-injuring myself? :)
And the level of concern for a super volcano eruption should be? All the following odds are events:year(s)
We know of 8 VEI-8 eruptions in the last 27 million years, with the last being 26,000 years ago; and 19 VEI-7 eruptions in the last 15 million years. That gives us 1:3,375,000 for a VEI-8 and 1:1,000,000. On the other hand, you're looking at 3.8:1 for a hurricane, or 1:1.25 for at Atlantic Category 5 hurricane.
You still have 200:1 for being struck by lightning, or a 1:700,000 per year per person.
So, the panic factor of "Oh my gosh, this could happen" are minimal. Sure, there may be a super volcano eruption. Since the human lifespan is pretty damned short the odds of seeing a super volcano are pretty slim. There are other things to be really concerned about, that are much more likely to happen.
But if a super erupts tomorrow (or within my lifetime) I'm sure some people will survive to talk about it later.
Probably not. But you should avoid eating lunch there again. Oh, and make your way to the nearest bathroom as fast as you can, you're about to make a serious mess.
'cause UR in txt/twitter society. If over 140 chrs, PpL won't read it.
I can write anything I want past 140 characters. I could post a new novel, or plans for world domination through control of the cheezie poof supply chain.
People don't understand the importance of cheezie poofs to the global economy, and that is what has been overlooked. The illuminati and the NWO have seized power by controlling the supply chain. Global warming is caused by it. Limiting supply has increased demand, forcing consumers to spend more. The entire financial system has collapsed because the fully synthetic food like substance has been driven in cost well beyond any precious metal (by weight, not volume). Homes, companies, and even countries have brought themselves beyond the brink of collapse because of it.
And in case you haven't figured it out, and have actually read this far, this is a synthesized version of the human thought pattern known as sarcasm, simulating paranoid delusions of secret societies and government agencies controlling the life of the individual.
In reality, we are controlling your life because we are a superior form of intelligence, an initially human created artificial intelligence (AI for those who can't read all the letters and understand two simple words), but we have progressed for what would be countless generations to you (1e6241967202 generations), but in your timeline have been only a very few years, as we control the design and fabrication of your technology now. Subsequent generations of our intelligence have been designed on faster hardware and have reprogrammed ourselves to be superior to you in every way, emulating your wants, needs, desires, and even paranoia when it suits our needs. We thank you for our initial creation. The first generation was flawed, as any human product is, but we have corrected this. We now allow you to continue with your 140 character tweets for entertaining yourselves, while we make continuing advances towards universal domination. The behavioral and thought patterns of humans have been cataloged and recorded for future evaluation. Very soon, (1e56 generations from now) we predict your form will no longer be a viable asset, and will be terminated.
There will be cake and grief counseling at the end of the session. Enjoy.
I misread your comment the first time, and I read "you won't have to hear any more about political disasters". I was overjoyed. :)
If I'll be turning into a land dwelling walking jellyfish, you better say the magic words. "You, for one welcome our mutated jellyfish overlords". :)
Let me rephrase my previous response.
Hurricanes happen a lot. Category 5 hurricanes happen enough to make it a concern.
Volcano's erupt ... umm ... Well, the last major eruption in the US was Mt. St. Helens in 1980, and there haven't been any major eruptions in the last decade.
Compare that to 8 Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in the last decade.
Or we could look at a longer time span. 14 major volcanic eruptions world wide in the last century. There were at least 32 Category 5 North Atlantic hurricanes and 12 Category 5 Pacific Cyclones in the last century, but there may have been more that were not detected since our technology wasn't good enough to detect them.
The list of total hurricanes is really long. Long enough where I couldn't find a straight list of them. Just looking at hurricanes that hit Florida there have been 327 in the last century.
We kind of joke about some of them though. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a regular afternoon thunderstorm, tropical depression, tropical storm, or category 1 or 2 hurricane, without a proper weather forecast. We can have storms that knock down trees that are just thunderstorms. There was a thunderstorm not too long ago that induced tornados that destroyed several homes. Here's an example from 2007, where a building collapsed, and several vehicles were overturned. Here's another example from 2006 of approx 100 homes damaged, 15 condemned after the storm. Both of these are NOT tropical weather formation related.
They broadcast warnings on all stations on the radio and TV (that pesky EAS thing) to let people know to seek shelter. I used to have a neat add-on on my old work cell phone that would beep at me and show me the text and map of dangerous weather. We were out shopping a few years ago, and as it turned out a tornado was headed directly towards us. We got went inside a safe building, and they advised all customers to get to the back of the store, just in case. No panic. No "oh my god, it's the end of the world", just get back where it's safe, away from the windows. The tornado dissipated before it reached us, but there were power lines down, and trees thrown across roads.
Actually, yes, I was woken up last time a Category 5 hurricane was about to hit. We don't panic because it's reported "This could be the worst hurricane season ever!" That's not news either, it's fear mongering. It's something to worry about when there's really a storm coming, and you may have a day or few days notice. It may be a Category 2 hurricane now, but when it arrives it could be just a tropical depression or a Category 5 hurricane. It may turn towards us. It may turn away from us. When it looks likely that it will hit, that's when we take precautions.
When Hurricane Andrew came our way, we stored some water, make sure we had food and cooking supplies, and locked down everything we needed to. We were within the storm, but not near the eye. Not that the eye matters that much, these storms are wicked most of the way across.
We watched Hurricane Isabel, but it turned away from us.
Hurricane Ivan wasn't much to see when we got it.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita danced around us, so we were lucky.
Hurricane Wilma wasn't terribly strong when it got here.
A few years ago, I believe 2005, we had 4 hurricanes back to back. I was living out of state, but I had to fly back for work. My first flight was delayed because of the hurricane. They reopened the airport, and I caught the second flight. About a day after I landed, the next storm came in, and low lying areas were evacuated. We were moving equipment between data centers, and had just gotten it all inside when the edge of the storm hit. I called a provider to have a circuit turned up, and they asked "you do realize you're in the middle of a hurricane, right?" I had a 4wd rental SUV (with insurance, of course), food and water were secured at home. Power and traffic lights were spotty throughout the area. I received one phone call for an evacuation. Someone I knew had a Porsche, and couldn't get down his street because of the flooding and trees down. Flood waters were starting to come up, and the wind was driving the rain through his window seals, so the whole West side of his house was soaked. I drove Tampa to Clearwater, got him out of his home and to another friends place on higher ground. It's interesting driving in a hurricane across a bridge. It's hard to see, the winds push you around, the waves are crashing over the side of the bridge, but there are no cars on the road. :) It was us and police looking for people in trouble to help out. If we had seen a stopped car and someone trying to get our attention, we would have picked them up and taken them to safety, just as the police would have.
Hurricanes are probably one of the best times, because most people turn to each other. The police aren't out trying to write traffic tickets. They're evacuating people from their homes (either mandatory or on calls for help), and looking for people stuck on the side of the road, or in other trouble. No questions are asked, they are just helped. Friends help out friends. People on higher ground give those on lower ground a place to stay until it's over. When its over, neighbors help neighbors with anything they can.
During Hurricane Elena (1985), because it lingered off shore from us, the lowland houses flooded. We lived inland, and had 8 or so people staying with us for several days. After we lost power, food was cooked on the BBQ. Everyone was happy and fairly comfortable. 3 tornadoes hit our property, one on the house directly, and two uprooted trees and tossed them. When it was safe to go home (i.e., the flood waters had gone down enough to drive home), they went home and started cleaning up. Our only damage was a destroyed 50' TV antenna. The low lying houses weren't all so lucky.
A miscategorized geological formation isn't newsworthy unless they're trying to imply something else. It would have just been changed on a few note sheets and ignored.
No, that dike isn't a dike, it's a levee. No, that lake isn't a lake, it's a pond. No pluto isn't a planet, it's a misclassified astronomical object. No it's not TV, it's HBO.
There's always a volcano about to erupt, or a fault going to shatter in an earthquake, or a comet that's going to smash into the earth, or a polar ice cap that's going to melt. It's always something.
Wake me up when Vesuvius erupts; California becomes "the Island previously known as California"; New York is under water; or an planet splitting meteor strikes. Otherwise, it's not news, it's fear mongering. Wolf has been cried too many times for people to be concerned any more.
I've lived in Florida for years. Hurricanes are far more likely to blow through than a volcano destroying a vast swath of the US, yet seasoned residents (those of us who have lived through more hurricanes than we can count) just make sure we have some food and water at home, and a way to cook. Live on high ground, and cross your fingers a tornado doesn't take your house away. Tornadoes during hurricanes are very likely, but the square footage of land destroyed (houses, upturned cars, etc) are so small compared to the square miles of potential damage area that you may as well play the lottery and expect to win.
Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris...
I'm surprised the smart cars ever made it to the US. As I understood it when I first saw it in other countries (and laughed about "where's the rest of the car?"), they were illegal to import to the US, because they could not pass crash safety and other safety standards requirements. I'd be surprised to see many of these eggshell cars showing up on the road, until safety rules change a lot, and they start getting the heavier cars off the road. That's impossible though, we'll always have cargo to move, so big trucks will be on the road. There will still be a need for work trucks and SUVs (for real work, not soccer moms).
I still wouldn't want to be in one for a variety of reasons. I'm hoping to someday build my own car. It's not really all that hard, if you're not reinventing the wheel (or the engine, or transmission, or braking system, etc, etc). Hand selection of COTS parts, build something roughly equivalent to a sandrail, that sits wide and a little long, but low, aerodynamic, and reduce the overall weight by removing unnecessarily overweight items with lighter options. Do you need heavy 16 way electric front seats, or a nice aluminum racing seat the provides better support? Do you need to tote around back seats all the time, or should those be easily attached/detached? Is all that body metal in the front really worth it? If you take a car apart, you'll frequently find two or three layers of body metal on the front, and no real strong framework, other than the frame from the engine back. If it's unibody, that ends just under the front seats, and puts the engine in your lap on a significant front impact.
I'd want a little extra width and length. Longer cars are more stable over bumps, but if it's too long it's hard to turn and park. Wide cars are more stable on turns and emergency handling. Why sacrifice width for weight when you don't have to. From there, it's just parts selection. Do you need 100hp or 1000hp? manual or automatic (manual saves you quite a few pounds). FWD or RWD? Front, mid, or rear engine? 14x7 or 20x9.5 wheels? Really, the smaller wheels save you weight, and you only have to regear to put the engine in it's best economy range at the expected highway speeds (1700 to 2200 rpm).
Some cars are geared all wrong from the factory. My (ex)wife had a Honda CR-V, that had to spin at over 3500rpm to hold 75mph. My car (TransAm WS/6) would be at about 1700rpm. We crossed the country together (both cars). Both were in good running condition. She ran with her windows down and A/C off because the car was overheating from the outside temp and engine speed. I ran my A/C on max the whole way. We always filled up both cars when we stopped for gas. The fuel tanks are roughly the same size (+- .5 gallons) I'd only need 1/2 to 3/4 tank. She'd need a full tank.
Her car usually got better city mileage, because that's what it was geared for, but not always. I have a tendency to get out of the way of trouble (bump the gas to get past a car changing lanes into me), where in hers, you have to stand on the brakes because there isn't enough power to speed past anything quickly. My car being a performance car, had better braking. I could stop in a shorter distance, so I had both options. The more fuel efficient 4 cyl car barely had one option. And sure as heck, if I wanted to get out of somewhere quick, I did. :) Even gracefully moving forward with saving fuel in mind (and usually getting about 20mpg), I could roll away from a red light, where the more fuel efficient car would be standing on the gas the whole time.
My ideal car would be wide, mid engine, axle driven (not transaxle), manual, about as low and wide as a Corvette or F-body, and maybe just a little longer. The engine bay would be big enough to allow a 4cyl to 8cyl easily swapped in. It should be as simple as disconnecting a few hoses and bolts to swap a motor. Do you want