When most of us think about base jumping we think of high rises and bridges. Well, two crazy base jumpers in the UK decided to take a dive off a 205ft tall roller coaster. To me that doesn’t seem all that tall to be doing this from. I’m sure Thorpe Park, where the event took place, gave their blessings for the two men to proceed.
You can see the two scale the Stealth roller coaster, which, in itself, looks extremely dangerous, although you can see they have safety harnesses on. Once at the top they jump off and then deploy their parachutes. The first guy lands hard, too, on his stomach. Hmm…you’d think since he was a professional he would have landed better The second guy, though, does things much better.
I’m sort of mad and frustrated at the moment. Damn technology
All I wanted to do was use my MacBook, which I hardly use presently, and put Windows on it via Apple’s Bootcamp so that I could, at least, use it at work. I knew I’d need to have a copy of Windows XP or Vista, of course, so I had already planned on buying an OEM copy for this purpose. But…
Bootcamp is no longer available for free It comes with freaking Mac OS 10.5 only, now. And, naturally, my MacBook only came with 10.4. So, now I have to buy a freaking damn copy of that, too. Damn you Apple–that’s a freaking Microsoft tactic. So much for “think different”.
Right now, I’m slap damn tired after spending about nine hours painting in my kitchen and living room. In tact, I can barely type at the moment–that’s how sore my muscles are. I know, I’m too young to feel like this, but painting is a lot of damn work.
One good thing, I suppose, is that I had taped everything during the week, except for the high ceiling, which was a serious pain to do as I’m scared of heights. I might love roller coasters and stuff, but, at least, you’re strapped in there–you definitely aren’t on a ladder My hands were sweating and my knees were trembling a bit everytime I went up. Oh well, at least I did it, I suppose.
Another good thing is that I had plenty of help. In fact, both of my parents showed up and my brother was even helpful. It worked out great, actually. It was a good family bonding experience believe it or not. We had a good time even though it was a lot of work. My brother had some fun, too, taking a picture of me without my shirt on, which, by the way, I did all the painting without a shirt on–my fat gut, as you can see, was hanging out Oh well. Bastard.
Something else to mention is that this was my first time painting, and I’m surprised how easy it is but yet how much work it really is. I think I did pretty good with a roller, too Also, I did most of the taping, like I said.
The first picture (the one with a shirtless ogre) below is the before and the second one is of the after. It looks good here, but now that it’s drying, it’s starting to turn more pinkish orange. Hmmm…I guess we’ll see in the morning what it looks like.
For about six months, now, I’ve had the idea for doing a rollercoaster-related site–a dictionary for roller coaster terms. Cleverly, I came up with the name Coastionary. Well, only recently, thanks to Railwolf’s awesome help, was I able to realize this idea. Thus, the Coastionary was born!
Of course, it’s nowhere near final completion. In truth, it’ll always be a work in progress. But, right now, I’ve still a lot of things to do besides add more rollercoaster terms. I plan on making this site as extensive as possible–like a real dictionary. So, I want to get just about every entry where it includes an example picture, pronunciation key, and any other pertinent information. So far I’ve added near on to 200 terms–and I still am thinking of more to add all the time.
However, I don’t want to make any public references to the site until I’m sure it has most of the bugs worked out of it. Still a lot of work to do!
It’s strange how there’s a completely different dynamic to things in the morning, particularly when you just got up from only having two hours of sleep at 3 AM and have to drive somebody to the emergency room. And you definitely get to see things that range on a scale from creepy-pathetic all the way to utterly get-me-away-from-that-nasty-hooker-sitting-across-from-me. Yeah, it’s interesting. Anyway.
It was about two thirty in the morning when I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed the lights on out in the hallway–I saw the light coming in beneath and around my door. I didn’t think too much of it, though, as I assumed my brother had turned them on to go to the bathroom–he has night blindness, so I didn’t think it too out of the norm. I went into my bathroom, used Mr. Toilet, and then went back to my bed. About fifteen minutes or so later, my brother was knocking on my door.
I wasn’t precisely mad and I wasn’t exactly happy, either about this. He said, I think this is funny, “hey man…”. How do you respond to this when you’re trying to get some sleep? I just said, “Yeah…” Then, I heard him say, “I think you need to drive me to the emergency room.” He said was having pains in the small of his back and that he thought his appendix may have ruptured. So…
After giving a tired, heavy sigh, I got my keys and pulled on some clothes and we got in the car and went to the hospital. There weren’t too many cars outside when we arrived, which I hoped meant there wouldn’t be that many people in the waiting area. And there weren’t really. However, we arrived at about 3 AM and he wasn’t seen until about 4:30, then we waited in the waiting triage area until 5AM when the doctor showed up to look at my brother. It wasn’t until about 6 AM that my brother was discharged.
The doctor at the emergency room thought that, from where the pain was located, my brother probably had a kidney stone–a small one, since his urine contained no blood. Anyway. When we got back to the house I decided to go and take a shower–to get that damn hospital stink off me. Then, I laid down and slept until about 9:30 when it was time for me to get up and go to work
Yes, I went into work, which was fine with me. My brother called in sick to his and stayed home. When I was out at lunch–picking a copy of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 for the Xbox 360 and shopping for some food–I came home and he told me he couldn’t keep anything down–not even water. So, he called up the doctor and is on his way over there.
This morning, when he went to leave to go on his three-day hockey trip, my brother was flagged down by one of the neighbors who had some rather disturbing news to tell him: There has been some break-ins, she said, in our area. She saw this on the news, I guess, and just wanted to let us know about it, which was very much appreciated. Now, with this said, we have, of course, no security system whatsoever to speak of. Naturally. And, to make matters worse in that regard, we have a back door that could easily allow access for a thief, because it has windows right near the lock. Oops. That was dumb for the builder to have used that type of door there–at least, there is a locked storm door they’d have to go through first…
So, you can imagine I–Mr. Techno-Geek here–was freaking out, thinking about all the expensive electronics I have that a thief would just love to get their hands on. In fact, during my lunch hour, I decided to go home to check if everything was all right. And it was. However…
I was in the bathroom and, as I was taking a leak, I saw something white outside on the ground through a gap in the closed blinds–this was from the corner of my eye, now. So, I peaked outside and saw a small piece of white foam. Then, I saw something else that perplexed me for a second until I realized what it was. It confused me since it–a wooden saw horse–shouldn’t have been there.
My bathroom is right at the back corner of the house on the side. And that’s where said saw horse was. Hmm…Yeah, I was thinking that somebody had put it there to try and get into the window by standing on it. But, then, why not just break the window on the door in the back and simply go in that way? It’d be a hell of a lot easier–hell, it’s what I’d do
Anyway. My plan is to take the saw horse and put it in the scrap pile where they’re building a pair of houses behind me. I’m going to do that when I get home tonight after work–that way nobody will see me. Makes me wonder, is that where the saw horse originally came from? I don’t see why somebody from over there would have dumped it in my yard, though.
Today hasn’t been my day–so it seems. It started off OK, I suppose. My brother had to take his car in for service; I had to drop him off when it was ready. That was at, about, 11 o’clock, which was fine since it got me out of bed, and it was kind of nice just getting out for a bit. Then, I came home and farted around for a while. The only thing I’ve had to eat all day has been some chicken soup. So, just ten minutes ago, I thought it would probably be a good idea to put something in the oven–that something being a Red Baron pizza I had bought on Wednesday when I was out at the store.
I went to get the pizza out of the freezer, turn the oven on to pre-heat, and get ready to put it in when, upon opening the box, I got quite the surprise: my pizza was all clumped to one side! Looks like at some point it had gotten thawed out completely. Damn store I got it from either had it sitting out somehwere or, more likely, some jackass had left it in their cart and had then decided not to buy it and put it back, having already had it unthawed. Ugh! Then…it gets better.
I called my dad to tell him I’d just gotten Small Favor, the latest Harry Dresden book, since he likes to read them like I do. I was talking with him when I heard what sounded like something ceramic shatter. Want to take a guess as to what it was? That’s right: my pizza stone I received for Christmas, and have only used five times, broke in half! And I had used it according to the directions, like I always do–put it in the oven while it pre-heats. I did that! Pampered Chef owes me big on this one. Obviously, their product was defective–as defective as my Red Baron pizza!
You can see from the photos below how truly messed up things got with that friggin pizza. I’m going to show the photos to somebody next time I go to the store: I might get a free pizza out of this, one never knows. I’ve got proof! As for my expensive pizza stone, which has worked great up until this point, I’m going to let, like I said, Pampered Chef know about this. They really should send me a new one. I mean, something like that should last a long time.
And yes, like the hungry idiot I am, I still ate it
It seems like the guys at WordPress seem to come with a new version every week, but this time they’ve done more than just an incremental update, it appears. The new 2.5 version has a lot of features I’ve been wanting to have available to me without the use of third-party plug-ins, such as a built-in image gallery.
I just got done with the upgrade, and I had no problems with it. The new dashboard, though, gave me a shock–it’s so much cleaner looking and they’ve moved things around quite a bit. But, I’m slowly getting used to it. One thing I give the WordPress guys credit on is on how simple they’ve made upgrading; it always seems its a breeze (the only part I dislike about it is the backup procedure, though, if one uses the available plug-in for backups, I’m sure it’s a lot easier and quicker).
Next, I’ll have to try that new built-in image gallery feature to see how it turned out. I’m sort of psyched about it, actually. I used to have the script simply known as Gallery and thought it was very cumbersome and way too complicated to maintain. If the WordPress gallery is as easy to use as WordPress itself, I’ll be one happy camper–doh, I mean ogre.
The second guy, though, does things much better.
Also, I did most of the taping, like I said.
