Legendary Firefighter Red Adair Dies

Every now and then, someone comes along who is truly one-of-a-kind. Legendary firefighter Paul “Red” Adair was one of them. He revolutionized the art of putting out some of the hottest, meanest fires anywhere: oil well fires. Adair died Saturday at the age of 89.

His daring reputation for never having met a blowout he couldn’t cap earned him the nickname “Hellfighter.” That inspired the title of the 1968 John Wayne movie based on his life, “The Hellfighters.”

Mr. Adair, who never showed fear in life, joked in 1991 that the hereafter would be no different.

“I’ve done made a deal with the devil,” he said. “He said he’s going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won’t put all the fires out.”
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Joys Of Pregnancy

Kelly was telling me how he’s starting to feel enormous from the pregnancy. “I’ve got three months left!” she complained.

I thought about how early Hallie had been. “Well,” I said. “I hope you get much bigger.”

She agreed. Then we both realized that this is the last time I can get away with saying that.

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Smack!

I had just pulled into the parking lot of Char-Grill, ready for a tasty Friday afternoon burger. A black Jeep Cherokee in front of me stopped to look for a parking place. Before I know it, the Cherokee is backing up straight for me. I lay on the horn for a second or two but its no use. She backs right into my left headlight, crumpling the hood.

I traded contact information and insurance information but decided against filing a police report. I’m going to head over to the body shop to see what we’re looking at to fix it.

And just what is it about my cars that attracts Jeep Cherokees?

Bookunmarked

I installed the Googlebar into Mozilla yesterday. It seemed to have worked fine until this morning, when I realized all my bookmarks are now gone. Oops.

I think it had to do with my not being root when I installed it. Instead I sudo’d, which dorked up the paths when it upgraded, it seems.

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Bird With A Word On The Olympic Team

Indiana Pacers president and basketball god Larry Bird sums up my feelings on what’s wrong with our Olympic basketball team (not that I’m a basketball team president or god or anything).

“Sometimes I think we go for names, and not players,” Bird said. “Every one of those guys is the go-to guy on their team. When you’re the go-to guy, you’re always doing something. But when you’re not, you’re just standing out there and don’t know what to do.”

Read the rest. Then email it to Larry Brown. Maybe there’s time to save our gold medal.

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More Basketball Woes

It took a miraculous half-court buzzer-beater shot to lift the U.S. Olympic basketball team to an 80-77 exhibition-game win over Germany. Germany’s team is essentially a one-man team of Dirk Nowitzki, who scored 32 points in the game. The team failed to even qualify for the Athens games.

Some people are wondering if this U.S. team will be the first to lose at the Olympics. Looks to me like they’re on track to do just that.

I don’t know if shows how well other countries have adopted basketball or just how sucky the NBA has become. I’m guessing its the NBA.

Windows 95 in less than 8 MB

Now that I’ve got the cool QEMU emulator running on my Linux box, I’ve been in the mood to experiment with different OSs. One of the first was Windows 95, which runs just fine inside QEMU.

I created a ~200MB disk image file for the Win95 install. After I confirmed it ran, I wanted to figure out how to reduce the size of that disk image. It was then that I remembered this very cool page telling how to whittle down Windows 95 to under 10 MB. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Windows 95 image just over 7 MB in size! Granted, it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking, but those pieces can be added in as needed.

One interesting hack I’ll try is copying my Win95 image over to my USB keychain drive. The combination of my USB drive and QEMU is like carrying a whole computer on my USB drive. I can take it to any host computer with QEMU installed (Windows, OS X, Linux) and boot it like it was its own machine.

I also discovered a Zaurus port of QEMU last night, but haven’t tried that yet. I can only imagine how glacial Windows would be running inside an i386 emulator on a PDA!

(Incidentally, if you wish to create your own “Micro95” disk image, you’ll need to ensure the msdos.sys file gets copied from the host installation to the micro installation. The creation script missed this file and my Micro 95 wouldn’t boot without it.)

Italian Basketball Team Smokes NBA Players In Exhibition Game

The Italian national basketball team crushed the American team in a pre-Olympic exhibition game, 95-78. The Italians, using the foreign concept of “defense,” thoroughly stunned our team of NBA players.

No word on whether defense will be outlawed at the Summer Games to give the American team a fighting chance. However, Olympic committee officials are considering awarding a seperate medal for SportsCenter-worthy dunks.