» B3TA fixes the world

Common sense
Peel of the safety labels and let the problem resolve itself.
(Sun 25th Sep 2011, 22:50, More)

» Conspiracy Theories

Concerning tinfoil hats
from an engineer's point of view
berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/
(Mon 5th Dec 2011, 20:24, More)

» Kids

summer camp
I don't have kids on my own yet, so here we go with some fun stories while looking after other's.

I've been involved in youth activities from my local church since wee age, but to defend myself, i've never been one of the god botherers, it had some sort of youth-centre function - meeting your friends,having a good time and even learn something some time. Like a scouts group, if you want something to compare, but without the sleeping in tents, making fire with your fingernails thing. I've went there as a child and as I grew older I changed sides an became a counsellor and looked after a group of children myself. (Great training for leading skills: If you can handle 8 ten-year-olds - a whole IT-department bwahaha) The highlight of the year has always been the two week summer camp, from which many legend stories have derived. Off went a group of 30 7-14 year olds guarded by a hand full of 17-25 year olds and as it's been from the church, the priest also went with us, being the only "real grown-up" to some youth hostel in the austrian mountains for two weeks of hiking, swimming,etc.

It's always been like a sport for the kids to wander around at night without getting caught or doing other nonsense and us on the other side to lurk in a dark corner to catch them redhanded and send them back to bed. Especially as puberty hit hard, the boys fancied to visit the girl's rooms for a game of spin the bottle, truth or dare or something equally thrilling in the wee hours. So we conspired with the girls from one room to invite the boys for the night while we would hide somewhere in the room to jump out with the good old BOOOO! unexpected. It went better than any of us could have imagined: I sat in the closet with perfect view around the room, while a fellow counsellor laid under the bed of one of the girls. Boys came, they chatted merrily away the usual teenage stuff, quite hard for us not to give up our hidings with stifled laughter while listening. One of the boys sat on the bed under which my fellow was lying, with his feet dangling from the edge - the perfect chance. My fellow jumped forward from under the bed, grabbed his ankles and tried to pull him under the bed. The boy, thinking the proverbial monster from under the bed had him, shrieked like a banshee, took one of his slippers to hit the "monster" and after I fell laughing out of my hideout and turned the light on, was white as a blanket. Minimum amounts of weewee my be involved by all participants, what a laugh.

The second story also involves scaring the crap out of the kids (I may add, that other fun activies also happened, besides our sadistic streaks...). Highlight activity on summercamp was having a bonfire till late in the night with barbecue, classical bonfire-and-guitar hits howled altogether and when as the fire went out we packed up and went for the "night-trek" to some place in the woods which had carefully searched for in the days before. Usually someone telling the scary-stories and some people hiding in the bushes for strange noises, etc. You could always pick those pissing themselves the most with fear (usually boys) as they where boasting how the weren't afraid. One year we decided to add a little variation for new thrills as many of the kids were with us the years before. As we went through the dark forest, one by one the counsellors "disappeared" silently into bushes beside the path, before the kids could notice. When suddenly one pipes up, that they are alone. We where standing a few meters besides them and nearly pissing ourselves laughing, I swear, I could have touched some of them, if I've reached out of the bush. They fully believed, we abandoned them in the woods at midnight. Some righteous panicked, one even threw up by fear, but then happened what I'm still proud of today. The elder kids, which were also some of my group, took the little ones, made them pair up and march home, full crisis management. Maybe I've really learned them some values and behaviour paired with common sense.
It didn't stop us from running the other way around the hill where the forest was situated to jump out of the bushes to give them another shock.

For a length of two weeks which always went over far too fast a quite impressive post, but I don't regret any of those years.
(Thu 24th Apr 2008, 11:14, More)

» Creepy!

Paranormal activity
Watched it alone, at night, in my dark living room, on my laptop with headphones and my dog was rustling in his basket - never watched again and still getting goose bumps and makes my hair stand up at the neck thinking about it.

My personal favourite horror movie so far - because you don't see the evil creature and therefore leaves all to your vivid imagination, too many good stories are ruinied at the moment some bad CGI-monster enters the picture. And the scene where she gets pulled out of bed is every kids - sticking your toes out from under the duvet in bed - worst nightmare come true.

kthanks
(Fri 8th Apr 2011, 23:51, More)

» Bodge Jobs

Nearly sunken yacht
Regularly going on sailing toerns and as it is the case with chartered yachts, they are often held together by bodge jobs. During season they are returned on Saturday morning by the last crew to clear the port by afternoon with the next crew for the next toern, so no time for big repairs in between or the charter company is loosing money.

During such a trip we often entertain ourselves with discovering such "repairs" or trying our own luck to keep the boat afloat - usually we return the yacht in a better shape than before. So the story:

We are leaving the beautiful port of Rab on the Croatian island Rab, which I can only recomend to everybody visiting this corner of the adriatic sea and reach open water just some miles southwest. On of my fellow sailors was eagerly waiting for this, as he had to use the toilet, which is only allowed at the open sea. On his return he pops up the hatchway and signals our skipper to come down with him, as there is "water poring in". Lots of yachts have been sunken by people forgetting to close seacocks (fnar!) or burst hoses from the installations going to the outside below the water level. We all get a little nervous as there is clearly a splashing noise from inside the boat, skipper commands us to turn the boat around and head for the port and bail water out of of the bilge, we can see already ourselves in the live raft gnawing each others limbs of in despair.

So our skipper goes down and has the honour of giving the water inside the boat a little taste test (yummie!) to give us the all-clear as it happens to be fresh water. We discover the the cold water hose under the sink in the bathroom disconnected from the faucet and as the water system is powered by a little compressor pumping the water out of the fresh water tank as long as there is no resistance (faucet open), it happily flooded our ship with water we already had abord. So the first bodge fix was to turn the compressor of - viola, no more water in the bilge.

At port I manufactured a plastic disk from a bottle cap with a pocket knife which fit into the fitting and closed the outlet, but as only the hot water was now connected to the faucet it would again start to pour from the now disconnected hose as soon as you turned the single handed tap from hot to cold. So the floating hose was bent 180 degrees like you do with a garden hose to quickly stop the water and wrapped to itself with some layers of duct tape. Held for the rest of the trip.

As we have a victory beer to soothe our nerves from the leak alarm in the nearest bar, I am awarded with the McGuyver medal with silver ribbon for saving us from a wet grave by a bodge job, crafted by my fellow crew from a beer mat and a stripe of duct tape, which I still have as a souvenir from this legendary toern. What was to follow, was fixing the binoculars, the dinghy, some drawers in the kitchen, the echo-lot and fixing us with lots of carlovacko beer which is sold in convenient 2 litre PET bottles with yacht-saving caps.

Ahoi!
(Tue 15th Mar 2011, 22:53, More)