There is nothing worse than finding a serious accident. The worst one I’ve come across didn’t look so bad at all, there was a car on its side and a rather shaken looking old lady and a policeman.
I pulled up when I realised the policeman was being violently sick.
Then I saw the other car. In the trees. In bits.
That was probably the worst thing I’d ever seen and would gladly erase the memory if I could.
I was about 10 years old when I saw what was left of a young boy who was struck by a tractor trailer and dragged over 100 yards while riding his bicycle down a busy 2 lane highway in town. He was still alive when they lifted him into the ambulance, but he didn’t survive the 2 mile trip to the nearest hospital. It’s the kind of image that has never left my mind after all these years.
I remember a smell from when I was really young. It’s sickly sweet and not very pleasant.
It was not until I was a whole lot older that I realised what the smell was.
My father used to own a garage. Not far away from a notoriously bad corner that used to have a lot of serious accidents.
Dried blood in an enclosed area is not a smell you forget apparently.
Looks like the people who were stopped for the bicyclist weren’t involved. It was a hit and run 
Edit: What is it with the hit and runs in this town? This is at least the fifth so far this year!
I was a cigarette away from being the guy who found the dude who blew his brains out in a porta potty. He’d been in there basically overnight and a bit of the morning…
I thank God I was spared that olfactory connection.
I’ve had similar conversations after Sandy and Katrina. If your house floods every couple of years, it’s no longer insurance. The reason some of these places, like the Outer Banks, are covered with condos is because the insurance is artificially low. Gosh, if it wasn’t so cheap to insure them then maybe there might be some public land left out there.
I own a house in a 100 year flood zone, with about half the property being either an annual flood or 10 year flood zone. The house itself is over 100 years old and is build on a small rise and on a tall crawl space. When they didn’t dredge the Mississiniwa on time (every 4 years) the property flooded every year, up to the bottom step of the stairs. But the house was built to take it. And now that they’ve dredged again the water stays where it should. But flood insurance wasn’t available because it was a 100 year zone, and it only flooded because the government stopped doing something it had been doing for 60 years or so.
The point being, I can’t buy flood insurance for that home at all because of the federal program. Makes no sense to me.
Big brass ones here by Delta. Took 30 people into the island and 180 back off, gotta wonder about the composition of the 30.
So, let’s say you’re one of the bigwigs at a big credit reporting agency and you’ve been alerted to a major data breach that can affect half of the people in the United States. Do you sell some or all of your stock just a few days before it gets announced or do you weather the storm?
If your the bigwigs at Equifax, you sell your stock and raise a big red flag as to why you did that.
< voice = whining >
But don’t you believe them?
Well, that’s a problem. A article on Fast Company says that the major voice assistants like Siri and Alexa are susceptible to the DolphinAttack. The microphones pick up a very broad range of frequencies, so if you play a command in the ultrasonic range that people can’t hear, the voice assistant will still act upon it.
Anybody remember that old joke about one of the first demonstrations of voice recognition on a Windows computer? It went something like this:
Person announces they’re just about ready to start the demonstration.
Somebody in the audience calls out “Format C colon”, followed by someone else yelling “yes enter”.
It was a very short demonstration and that should give you an idea of what can be done. You’d never know it was happening because you couldn’t hear the commands being given. Apparently, it’s up to the software for the vocal assistant to filter out frequencies that shouldn’t be allowed. As of the end of last month, all of the voice assistants were vulnerable.
I’ve accidentally tripped the Google Voice Search quite a few times that showed up on my phone sometime this year. I’m not sure how it’s happening. It might be when I press the button on my Bluetooth headset just a moment after the other person hangs up because I’m trying to hang up. Whatever’s causing it, I would really like to uninstall it so I don’t have to spend time trying to get it to stop bothering me. Now I have another reason to not use that feature.
Is it me, or is the USPS package tracking service down more than it’s up?
I think it’s you. I’ve never seen it down…
It’s still down.
I really need to go back to reading Not Always Right with an ad blocker. Lately, the ads have been for cars or insurance since that’s what I’ve been researching. After clicking on the “random” button a few times today, I get a story that happens to have the word “gay” in the title. The ad that popped up for “Into” magazine featured a person that bears more than a passing resemblance to Frank-N-Furter.
I wonder if I can skew the ad results so that it shows me mostly ads involving squirrels, chipmunks or daffodils. Better yet, all three.
In an extremely ironic turn, I’ve just broken a tooth, and it was hurting enough to wake me up at 2:30 this morning.
Nope, I’m not exaggerating or stretching the truth, I checked the time as soon as I woke up and it was exactly 2:30
It’s that time of year again: time to pumpkin spice all the things!
Current outdoor temperature: 92°F. Feels like 96°F
I’m drinking hot tea and wearing a fleece because of how the A/C is set up in my office.
Right there with ya, @dakboy. I have a space heater in my office, for those chilly <70° in the office / >95° outside days.
Voice recog have its uses and places to use.
Using it in public is asking for major butthurt. Using it to order goods just because you’re too lazy to work the computer will also result in butthurt. Using it to control a PC will also result in butthurt.
Using it to dictate and type a letter is the Right Thing.
But that’s just me.
