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Power Lost: Episode 1

Posted by WraithShade in The Awesome, The Bad

The events in this post occurred Between June 18th – 20th, 2010.

I got home before most of the storm had developed. I had seen a few storm clouds here and there, but it didn’t look like it was going to be a strong one. Boy was I wrong. While I was packing up my stuff for movie night at Josh & T’s, I looked outside and realized that it had gotten dark really quickly. That’s when I saw the trees swaying in the strong breeze, and the arcs of lightning jumping from cloud to cloud. I messaged J and found I was the only one confirmed to show up, so I messaged him back, saying I should probably stay home then with this big storm coming.

I then called Amanda, since the storm was getting even worse, with large swaths of rainfall shifting back and forth with the wind, to make sure that she hadn’t gotten hit by the storm, as she was making her way down to her parent’s house for the weekend. She, of course, still had sunshine and windows down in her car. While on the phone, I was kneeling on the couch, looking out into the storm through the big front window. A bright flash of light, followed almost instantly by both booming thunder and the darkening of the room. Whatever the bolt of lightning had hit, it had taken out the power.

For those who know me, I carry a small flashlight on me at all times, usually to help me read, or to help me get around in the dark (very, very useful in a movie theatre!). Well, for this weekend it became my constant companion. So at the time, I took it out, put it into “wand mode” (or “candle mode”, where you can take the head of the flashlight off, and set it upside down and insert the flashlight so it works like a candle) and went looking for the cats. They were both found in the bedroom, which at the time was a lifesaver. So I closed the bedroom door, so I knew where they would be.

Then I heard the beeping.

I have a sump pump. Most basements have this. Well, with the power out, the main sump pump was not working. But, I am lucky in that when I purchased this house, a second, backup battery-powered sump pump was installed. The beeping noise I was hearing was the backup turned on. So I went downstairs to check it out.

Doing this saved my basement.

With the heavy rain, the sump pump was filling in so quickly that the smaller backup pump appeared to not even be working. This, of course, threw me into panic mode. I ran for the bucket, brought it in, and realized that the bucket was too big to fit into the sump pump well. So I went to the next room and grabbed a small popcorn bowl, and knelt down at the SPW, and started scooping water into the bucket. I can tell you now with little embarrassment that I was freaking the fuck out. This was “ruining the basement” level of water being pumped in (and not pumped out). So I filled that first bucket, hauled it upstairs, and dumped it out the front porch.

In between the dumping of buckets, I attempted to call Amanda, then my dad (who apparently had his own house issues and could not come to help). Then I called Lee, who is currently holding the shared title of best friend ever (Josh and T also share this honor). Still pretty panicked, Lee said he’d show up soon, and then I went back to manually removing the inflowing water from the sump-pump well. Now, realize that without power, I was in a pitch black basement with nothing but a small flashlight to see, which I had to hold in my mouth while I scooped out water of a rapidly filling well.  As you can imagine, my brain was flipping out.

Luckily, the rain at this point was starting to taper off a bit. I’d say it had to have been around 9pm or so, though due to the high level of stress and adrenaline coursing through me… not to mention the raw muscle pain of hauling full sloshing buckets of dirty water up a flight of stairs and out onto the front yard, I can’t actually recall for certain the time. It was after my ninth bucket of water (that I was counting accurately) that Lee and Dave showed up. (Dave is another of my good friends. He is also Good PeopleTM)

They came downstairs with me and checked the SPW, and at this time the backup sump pump decided that it would finally join in the festivities, and started working. Though, to be fair, it was making an awful racket with the beeping (which Lee promptly found a way to turn off… why I didn’t see that little switch can probably be chalked up to how scared I was).

On the way over, Dave had stopped somewhere and purchased a $150 generator to help (it was really for his own house, but he used my need for an excuse to finally get one). Unfortunately it didn’t work (rattling piece inside), so he vowed to return it the next day, and we sat outside in the garage so Lee could smoke and we all checked on the well every few minutes to make sure it was still working.

At this point, a decision was made to go purchase a backup marine battery for the backup battery to the backup sump pump. Peace of mind so that I could actually get some sleep without needing to stay awake. So Dave and I left for Wal-mart while Lee and his kid stayed and watched the well, and made sure it didn’t overflow. Dave’s car was a little rough around the edges, and I was so nervous that I think I spent most of the journey quietly hoping that the car would survive the trip. When I got out of the car I did my typical ‘check for all items in pockets’ routine. Why I didn’t do it before I left… well, same story.

I had left my wallet at home. Crap. Normally I don’t do something stupid like that. I always have my wallet on me, but Friday night, with all the water and the rain, I thought taking it out and putting it somewhere safe was a good idea. So Dave ended up purchasing a $100 battery for me. I did mention he’s Good PeopleTM, right?

So we got home and tested it out, and it turned out it wouldn’t work properly because it was missing a place for a water-level sensor. After another half hour, they decided to head home for the night. So I was home, alone, and I sat in a pitch-black basement with only a small flashlight and a candle I had scrounged up to keep me company. Every time the secondary pump started up, it would make a long beep, and then make what I could only describe as a grinding motor-like sound while it sucked up the water. This make it almost impossible to sleep, since I kept having to check it to make sure that the pump was actually working and not just grinding itself to dust. Plus, I did not know if the backup battery was any good, since we’d never used it, and so I got only about a total of an hour’s sleep that night, and it was mostly the kind of sleep you get when your body just shuts down for a second, and you wake up startled as if you’ve forgotten something important.

By this point it was now Saturday morning, sunshine and all. I called Amanda to get her opinion on purchasing a generator, and then I went. Apparently I was the last person to think of this brilliant plan, because the only generator I could find was way more expensive than we expected by two times the amount. But, I had to have one, if only to save the food in the fridge and to make sure the pump would continue to work. (Where I live, the ground contains a lot of clay, which absorbs an insane amount of water. If you’d like an example of how much: It stopped raining Friday night, and there was still water trickling in Sunday evening.

So, I was ready to check out at the register, when I took another good look at the size of the box and realized that I would not be able to fit this thing into my tiny car. Crap. Panicked, I called Lee to see if he could bring his truck to Lowes to help me get the generator home. Billie answered, and told me he was still asleep due to being up so late last night. At this point I noticed a gentleman behind me in a fireman’s t-shirt, asking if I needed help. I am naturally suspicious of anyone who randomly talks to me, so I told him as little of the situation as possible. Turns out, though, that this guy was the real deal, a fireman who was stationed literally down the block from where I lived. He offered to drive the generator to my house on his way back to work. I accepted gratefully, and he helped me load it onto his truck.

Of course, I followed him very closely, took pictures of his license plate and truck, but sure enough, the guy came through for me. I thanked him profusely and offered him money for his trouble. He told me, “No, that’s okay, I’m just happy to be doin’ God’s work.” Surprisingly enough, I did not cringe (not externally, anyway), nor correct him. I thought that it was nice enough that he helped me out, no need to tell him of his mistake.

So after assembling the generator and filling it up, I finally had enough power for the fridge, the sump-pump, and a fan. And, I was able to get some well needed sleep that night. It was only about four hours, but it was more than one, so I wasn’t complaining. And Lee & Billie let me use their shower to get cleaned up that night, too.

Sunday afternoon the power finally came back on for good. I celebrated by packing in all the extension cords, taking a nice cold shower, and falling into a deep sleep until Amanda arrived home and woke me up. And so ends the tale of Power Lost. I’m sure it’ll happen again in the future, but for now, I’m going to enjoy having power again.

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Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man

Posted by WraithShade in The Awesome, The Awww, The Video

I can’t believe I haven’t shared this with anyone yet. It’s 12:15am my time, and I’m still awake, so I must share this right now, because if I don’t I’ll just forget again.

First of all, if you haven’t already seen it, you must go to Whitestone Motion Pictures‘ website, and watch the 22min short film, Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man.

Seriously. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Here is the low-res version (and the HD version is on Vimeo) for those who just can’t wait:

Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man from Brandon McCormick on Vimeo.

And if you didn’t immediately go searching for and find the soundtrack (shame on you) to this awesome short film, you can download it free from their website, just below the video itself.

Seriously. I’ve been singing “Yours Alone” over and over again. Music is my emotional compass; it steers me towards that which I must feel. And while I know that song wasn’t written and performed by some big-name band or group, I can’t help but let it move me.

And the story of the short film… It is so bittersweet. I do not remember much of the original Wizard of Oz, but this inspires me to find it and watch it all over again. No, not totally. I wish for it to be remade, by these people. Get on that, will you?

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Accident, Not my own.

Posted by WraithShade in The Bad

So, about an hour and a half ago, I witnessed an accident that took place right in front of me.

I was on my lunch break, driving south, along the road that leads away from my job. I had just been to the Martin’s Supermarket next door and had realized that my debit card was not in my wallet. Panicked, I searched my wallet, my car, everything near me. I don’t think I’d ever lost a debit card before. Then I called Amanda, knowing that she would be able to help me retrace my steps, work through all the places that we went over the weekend. She called a few places for me while I headed down the road to the bank, to place a freeze on our account until I could verify that I’d lost it.

There’s a funny three-way light system not more than 600 meters from the Martin’s, on the way to the bank, and I was in front of a large, brown minivan. When I turned left at the light (which is really not a hard left, but a slight shift to the left to follow the curve of the road) I stayed in the right hand lane (which is what you’re supposed to do at this intersection). The brown minivan had sped up a little, coming up on my left in an attempt to pass me, and then it started to switch lanes, cutting me off. I slowed, and honked my horn so she knew I was back here, and continued on. Not more than 10 meters down the road was a blue car, perpendicular to the road in an abandoned parking lot that sits on the south corner of the three-way turn, waiting to pull out into traffic. I couldn’t see the driver of the brown minivan, and I could just barely make out the blue car’s driver.

The rest happened rather quickly. The blue vehicle started to pull out, right in front of the brown minivan.

—-

Just so that you understand my next reaction, I’ll regale you with the tale of the only accident I’d ever been in while driving my own vehicle. It was back in high school, and I was taking my best friend at the time, Carl, to the burger king down the road for lunch, when we pulled up to a red-light. There were several cars in front of me, so we were all stopped. With the type of car I was driving at the time, a stick-shift Ford Escort GT, I had always made a habit of resting my hand on my parking brake when I stopped, just in case I couldn’t keep the car from rocking backwards. In my rear-view mirror I had seen a couple of band-buddies driving a large oldsmobile-style car, and they weren’t slowing down. Since I knew I couldn’t pull away and dodge the car, I did the next best thing – I pulled my parking brake. This was so I didn’t hit the cars in front of me (which would have made me pay for their damages), though at the time I had no idea why I’d done it. The olds’ hit my car (he hadn’t been going very fast, thankfully), my car did not hit any others, and everyone was physically okay. Not really much damage to my car, either.

But, ever since then, I’ve been so paranoid about vehicles hitting me from behind that I’ve developed the healthy habit of checking every mirror in my car if I do anything: changing lanes, coming to an intersection, etc. I am probably a little too safe of a driver, but I’ve not been hit since. I almost always look both ways twice, and while it may seem like a cliche, I just feel safer doing it.

—-

So earlier when I saw the brown-minivan’s rear end pull up, I knew she’d slammed on her brakes in time. My first reaction was: “is there anyone behind me that will hit me when I step on the brake?” So at the same time as hitting the brakes and tapping the horn, I glanced into the rear-view mirror. There were a few cars, but luckily they were so far back that they were able to slow long before getting to me. No one but the minivan was driving very fast, since we all had to slow down at the three-way intersection. Speed limit there, I believe, is 35mph, and we couldn’t have been going more than 20 yet. That was definitely a good thing.

When my eyes shot back to the front, it hadn’t been more than a half a second. The blue car and the brown minivan were parallel and had a little distance from each other. It truly looked like they’d been able to avoid colliding. I had breathed a sigh of relief, switched into the left lane like everyone else was going to do, and continued on, more or less just shaken by the near miss.

About halfway to my destination, a little bit of worry nagged at me. Amanda knows that I think about things way too much, and dwell too much on choices made. So I called her, told her what had happened. She told me that I should just go back and check it out, just in case. I was still fairly freaked out about not having my debit card, and not knowing where it is, but Amanda told me she’d call the bank for me while I turned around and headed back. By now I was panicking.

When I got back to the scene, both cars had moved slightly, the brown minivan pulling ahead a little and both parked on the side of the road. I pulled into the parking lot of the abandoned lot that the blue vehicle had pulled out from, and got out of my car. The driver of the blue vehicle was still in her car; she looked a little shaken up but she didn’t look damaged. The driver-side of her vehicle was, however. It’d had been a relatively light “tap” for them both, but it was enough to push her car parallel to the minivan. I hadn’t even heard an impact.

The driver of the brown minivan was standing on the sidewalk beside her vehicle, on the phone. She too was simply shaken up and yet unharmed, and she told me she’d never been in an accident before either. They’d already called the police to take statements and all that, so I stayed with them, going back and forth between both vehicles. The blue-car’s driver’s husband had shown up and was comforting her. The brown-minivan driver had someone else there, though I did not know who she was.

Eventually, the police officer arrived, got out of his vehicle and talked to the blue-car driver first (who still hadn’t left her car), taking information. I stayed back on the parking lot near my car, waiting. He then walked over to the brown-minivan driver, and got her information too. As he was walking back towards his vehicle, I came forward. He asked me if I had been hit too, and I told him I had not; I had been behind the brown minivan when the accident happened. I told him everything I could remember, and he took down my license information and statement. Then I asked him if there was anything I could do, or needed to do, and he said no, that I was free to leave.

As I was making my way to the bank, shaken but feeling better about going back, Amanda called me; she’d found where my debit-card was: an ice-cream parlor that I’d taken her and her friend to on Saturday evening. Sighing with relief, drove there, picked it up, and made it back to work.

—-

I am still a little shaky, even after writing this all down. I needed to, though, just in case I started to forget it and needed to tell someone else about it. Plus it’s cathartic to talk it through and try to see everything for what it was. I haven’t even eaten my lunch yet.

All I can really think about, though, is that if that brown-minivan hadn’t pulled in front of me and made me slow even farther down that I already had, that it could have been me hitting the blue car. Definitely shaky.

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Guild Wars 2: Skills

Posted by WraithShade in The Awesome, The Good

Guild Wars 2: looking better than ever!

I love Guild Wars. It’s the best No-Subscription MMO to play ever. I’m very much against the subscription method, as I do not want to waste my hard earned money every month. Instead of a subscription you purchase a campaign (of which there are three, and one official expansion), once, and never again. You can purchase expansion slots for your storage, or your characters, but I do not need more than the default.

Anyway, I played GW for most of four years, and I was an officer of the Arkangels Alliance (specifically the Arkangels Guild). I’ve stopped playing regularly due to burn-out (I have 10 titles – I’m a little tired), but honestly, how many times can you say you played a game for years?

Anyway, I’ve been keeping up with the developments of Guild Wars 2, and so I figured I’d share the recent post that came up concerning combat.

It sounds absolutely sweet! The dedicated slots thing actually makes me giddy. And the way they describe combat, and how it takes place in three dimensions (since GW1 is a flat-plane-combat game)… it’s just epic:

To illustrate what I’m talking about, I was watching two of our game designers–Jon and Isaiah–play the other day. Jon is using his shield to deflect the fire breath of a drake, when Isaiah hits the drake from behind with a skill called Devastating Hammer, launching it into the air. The drake is sent flying over Jon’s head, who immediately turns and uses a skill called Savage Leap to impale and finish the drake right as it hits the ground. This was a very cool looking (and effective!) sequence of events that flowed very naturally from how combat in Guild Wars 2 works.

Come on, guys! I wanna play this already!

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An underwater river

Posted by WraithShade in The Good

I saw something cool on Digg.com today. Though I knew intellectually that you can have rivers underwater (like a corridor of a salt-water current through a freshwater pool of water), but to actually see one that appears just as it would above group was just awesome.

Look! It's an underwater river!

(there are more images at the original page)

From the page:

If you are a professional diver you should visit Cenote Angelita Mexico. These amazing pictures were taken by Anatoly Beloshchin in the cave Cenote Angelita, Mexico. Here’s his description: “We are 30 meters deep, fresh water, then 60 meters deep – salty water and under me I see a river, island and fallen leaves… Actually, the river, which you can see, is a layer of hydrogen sulphide.”

One day, I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that with my own eyes.

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South Park + Tron + Facebook = Win

Posted by WraithShade in The Funny, The Video

I don’t really watch South Park all that much. I’ve only truly seen the first season (yes, the very first season) all the way through, and then here and there of all the rest of it.

However, I can’t pass up a good Facebook and Tron joke. Especially when it is coupled with South Park humor.

And thanks to io9, there’s a video online of the scene: Stan gets sucked into “Facebook” as a “Profile”. I love the “Ignore” running gag.

Apparently I can’t embed video, so use the link below.

South Park Shows Us How Facebook Can Ruin Everything — Even Tron – South Park – io9.

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