April 27, 2004

• There are many, many, many already, ranging from the entertainingly offensive to the merely juvenile.
• Man...I got this forwarded to me from some lefty group as "irrefutable proof" our troops are abusing Iraqi kids -- the text said something like "Sgt. So-And-So Raped My Mom and Killed My Dad". It's kind of like those ultra-conservative groups that used an Onion article to bolster their claims that Harry Potter is Satanic. Yes, utter retards exist on both sides of the political spectrum.
• There's a Mefi thread going on where various people (including #1) are posting their attempts. Some are rather good. It's very weird to go somewhere and see "Hello, Monkeybashi!" jumping out at you. Shoutouts in Iraq?
• de Carabis: you got forwarded the alleged original, then, rather than the product of this site.
• This story explains the background to the picture referenced by De Carabis and used as the basis for this new site. Metafilter discussion here
• And btw, I have to say in any case it is probably poor judgement on the part of the soldier to write out a sign and hand it to an iraqi kid and have his picture taken with them. Did they even know what it said? Most likely not. And no matter if it's controversial or just a "Hi Mom" sign, it's still a bit distasteful IMO.
• Hey, lookie, them kids got a new flag! Just got up this morning, and there it was!
• Thanks, genial. Snopes is following the situation as well. I really do hope it's a Photoshop, and it looks that way to me...
• Is there anything the Internet can't do? Can it make me a cheese sandwich?
• genial: All of the photos Boudreaux sent from Iraq, Gustafson said, disappeared when the computer she kept them on was destroyed during a lightning storm. "I had one of those cheap store-bought surge protectors," she said. Uh, yeah, the rest of us make our own surge protectors in our basements, from scratch. I want to believe, but this story sounds curiouser and curiouser. Power surges typically don't destroy computers, unless the lightning actually hits the computer. A spike usually knocks out the power supply, which is replaceable. It would be unlikely to knock out a hard disk. Although an unsophisticated person might conclude that because the computer wouldn't power on, it was 'destroyed', and discard it. And the nephew is supposedly aware of what the sign said, but refuses to defend his cousin, or produce a copy of the original picture? I just don't know about this. BTW, typical consumer-grade surge protectors are, in fact, crap, because the MOVs on which they are based wear out over time, and eventually silently fail. ZeroSurge or Brick Wall are more expensive, but much better choices. (And very similar: Brick Wall licenses ZeroSurge technology).
• Power surges typically don't destroy computers, unless the lightning actually hits the computer. My dad and I both had our PCs knocked out (hard disk and all) by lightning strikes before, although not at the same time. And my dad built both PCs (and many others) from parts - he's definitely not unsophisticated, leastwise not about computers. So it's not impossible. We now have a very expensive surge protector. And *cross fingers* no problems since then.
• Wolof: You ordered a cheese sandwich?
• Alnedra: that's interesting, and disturbing. Not what I've heard elsewhere, but maybe I'm wrong? We're in agreement that you need a *good* surge protector.
• We live in an apartment block, which is about 14 stories high, and the two times were during very bad electric storms (monsoon season). So the height of the block might have been a factor, attracting numerous strikes.
• I've worked at a place that had, not a direct lightning strike, but one that grounded between two of the buildings in the complex. A large amount of the equipment ran on serial comms gear with cabling between the buildings. The induced current from being near the strike was enough to cause widespread failures in equipment up to 100 metres away, and one or two bits nearer than that actually had holes blown in PCBs as a result of the surge. It was Not Pretty.
• Believe alnedra is correct -- a cousin lost a computer to an electrical surge during a bad storm about 2 years ago. Same storm, a good eighty feet from my cousin's residence, a bolt of lightning hit a tall evergreen as apparently the steam of suddenly heated tree sap caused a violent explosion so a huge fissure ran all way down the trunk from top to ground -- and hunks and chunks of tree debris were flung outward, one being expelled with sufficient violence to break a window in the front of my cousin's house.
• My partisan effort.
• Hey — what's up with the comment ordering? My 10:12 comment is between de Carabas's at 05:04 and Wolof's at 06:39. That's not chronological!
• And where's my sandwich?
• It's what I'd be preoccupied with.
• For us imperialist Crusaders...
• Wolof is a USB Cheese sandwich okay? I had a computer wiped out by a power surge (presumably from lightning) that came through the phone line (computer was unplugged). Wiped out everything but the HD. Weird thing was, that the same thing happened to a friend of mine during the same storm, across town. His computer was unplugged, and the whole box was killed except for the HD.
• f8x: arf!
• Since I'm a Christian, I had to cut that one off at the pass. Let no one say we're humourless, or without a sense of irony.