A thought occurs to me…

The Pope has been dead for a while now and he has been sitting at room temperature out in the open for a day or so. I’m guessing that the temperature inside St Peter’s Basilica must be pretty high, due to lots of people passing though it.

Isn’t the Pope going to be a bit, shall we say ‘ripe‘ come Friday? The last thing we want is for the Pope to explode due to decomposition gases at the funeral, showering the great and good and assembled masses with decayed holy entrails.

On the other hand it might make for some of the best TV in ages.

“And finally tonight, we have some slowmotion footage of the moment when Tony Blair has hit by a flying kidney in the Papal explosion at the funeral of JP II earlier today”

Did they embalm him?
Or is he laying on top of a cold slab or something?

Enquiring minds demand an answer.

Ahh Spring.

Spring, when a young pisshead lady’s fancy lightly turns to sitting outside Heathway station shouting out
“Slaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag!”
and
“Oi! Frigid!”
and
“Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooor!” To any other young lady that dares to walk past.

This coming from two aspiring young alcoholics wearing skirts so high and tops so low they were on the verge of exchanging places.

Oh the fun the young ‘uns have today.

I was on a roll as well…

Earlier today I picked up an Intel StorageStation networked disk storage box for £3. I got it home to find that the disks are missing and that the OS was stored on one of the missing disks. No real problem, google shows that the device runs FreeBSD and an OS image was on Intel’s website.

The OS image needs to be loaded onto the box via TFTP. but you can’t do this unless there is an OS running and listening for an update… I’d just figured out how unfundge the image and write it to a harddisk, when the drive I was about to write it to fell from it’s perch and shorted the power lines out. No flashes or bangs, just the sounds of the drives spinning down. Fingers crossed, it is just the PSU that had died. I’ll have to borrow a space to check.

So, so far, I’m down the cost of a new ATX supply just for trying to fix a £3 piece of junk. Bah!

RCA cleaning silicon

I’m sure the RCA process for cleaning silicon wafers was invented when Werner Kern got drunk in the lab one day and decided to have some fun…

How else would any sane man come up with the idea of taking a half litre each of several of the most corrosive things you can image then heat them up until just below boiling, then chuck in something that makes it fizz and froth and pump out ammonia fumes?

That’s just step one.

Step two is more of the same but using something even more corrosive and toxic – hydrofluoric acid. This stuff eats through glass at about the same rate warm water eats through ice. Oh, and it boils as it does it and pumps out toxic gas.

Step three is tame in comparison, it just sits there looking like water. Still nasty and corrosive as you find out when you get some on your gloves / skin.

You go through all this to get a nice shiny, contaminant free silicon wafer, atomically flat – an almost perfect mirror. Then you drop it on the floor watching as all your good work comes undone.

Rinse and repeat.

Fire! A true story.

Back in the heady days of the early 90s, our garden consisted of a patch of grass, two fishponds, a rather large wooden shed and three of the largest sycamore trees I’ve ever seen. The shed had seen many years and the years had not been kind to it. To make room for a new shed [another story] the old one had to go and so did the trees. Barely teenage me was given the job of disposing of these.

FIRE!

Bad idea.

The shed came down quite easily, I only broke one thumb demolishing it. Back from the hospital and a day later I piled up most of the wood and lit it. To say I was not quite prepared for the size and heat output of the fire is a humongous understatement. I ran back to the house, grabbed the hose and spent most of the evening keeping the fences, etc, damp with it. Another fire of similar took care of the rest of the shed and most of the grass in the top part of the garden.

Now for the trees. Have you ever tried to cut down a large tree with a small tenon saw? It takes some doing. It takes the better part of a day. You can’t get all the way though the tree with the saw, so it also leaves the tree in a somewhat unstable state. Stupidly I threw a rope up in the tree and start pulling on it. The tree started to fall. Towards me. Oh shit. A ton of ex tree missed me by about an inch. My Mum’s response to this was something along the lines of “Well it missed you.” A talent for stating the obvious that lady.

Cut forward to the evening of the next day. The tree is chopped up, a fire has been laid out, consisting of lots of tree, a few bits of shed and some newspaper. It was lit, taking warning fro the previous two fires; I kept well back with the hosepipe handy. It smoked a lot. It crackled and spat a lot. It went out. Green wood doesn’t burn. Ever resourceful, I got the jerrycan of petrol. Soak the tree, stand back and throw a match.

*FOOM!*

*Crackle* *smoke* *spit* *Go out*

Now I did something very silly. I threw on more petrol. The fire wasn’t completely out.

*FOOM*
*OH FUCK!*

I’m now holding a burning jerrycan of petrol, one of my shoes was burning quite happily and I’m being chased around the garden by a burning stream of petrol issuing from the bottom of the jerrycan. I dunked my foot into the smaller of the two ponds and dropped the jerrycan in as well. Burning petrol floats, so now I had a pond on fire and a tree that was scorched and blackened but very much not on fire. I did the only sensible thing and ran indoors, hoping it would all go away.

The pond eventually burnt itself out; thankfully there were no fish in there. The pond liner had started to burn so bits of tree were used to fill in the hole-that-was-the-pond. The rest of the tree was allowed to dry out over the summer and finally burnt on bonfire night.

The other two trees remained in existence for some more years, until the new neighbours moved in and helped cut them down. I gave my assistance in burning them. I steered clear of the petrol this time.