Scott, the fireman

Today my wife was grilling some chicken for dinner when she yelled to me that the chicken was on fire. I walked over from my chore of planting a tree and sprayed some water on it from a squirt bottle. When that failed, I turned off the burners and sprayed more water on it. I fired up the grill after the fire was out and went back to my task. My wife then called again a few minutes later and said the grill was on fire. This time, I ran over and tried to put it out with a squirt bottle, but that was fruitless. My wife told me to get a hose to put it out (she was more put together than I was to think of what to do). I ran and got the hose which happened to have a fire hose type nozzle on it and I put out the fire by dousing the grill with water. My major concern was that if the propane tank got too hot, it could explode.

Luckily since I used water to put out the fire, my wife salvaged dinner and finished the cooking in the oven; it was quite tasty despite the fire. After we looked back on the fire, my wife pointed out that it was a grease fire and she expected me to use a dry chemical fire extinguisher. I didn't even think about using a fire extinguisher, so we're lucky that my wife managed to remain calm under pressure and tell me what to do.

I think I'll stick to my day job and let the professionals put out the real fires.

Counting my lucky stars

Last Saturday, we left for the airport at around 5:15 am to catch a flight to Oakland (to surprise my mother-in-law for her birthday) and as we're driving down I-15, I noticed some "road hazards" (cars that were going slower than 60 mph in a 65 mph zone), so I moved over a lane to the left. Up ahead, I saw flashing yellow light and just thought it was CalTrans doing some work. As we got closer, I started seeing debris on the road and what appeared to be a burned out car in the far right lane. There were no CHP cars around or anything, except a private ambulance that had its lights on (the yellow I saw before). (I now know it was a private ambulance because it was a Type II ambulance and San Diego Fire/Resuce uses Type III ambulances. I managed to only run over a small piece of debris and we kept moving. Looking back on this, I'm surprised it didn't turn into a huge disaster. The "road hazards" I mentioned above were right on target to slam into this mess. However, I couldn't find any reference to this accident in the online versions of the San Diego Union Tribune or mentioned on any of the Web sites for the television stations.

I keep thinking back to have bad an accident this could have been and feel quite lucky.

Just call me Jack

Yesterday, I went to pick up some takeout and after waiting a bit and hearing them call "Jack" a few times, the cashier called me up and gave me my food. Hmmm, last time I checked, my name wasn't Jack. I paid by credit card and showed the cashier my driver's license to verify the name on the credit card and she entered my name as Jack. Scott, Jack, what's the difference?

No wonder governments are so inefficient

I went to send a complaint to my local councilman and visited his Web site. He had a contact form, so I filled it out to complain that vegetation has become overgrown on a stretch of sidewalk that we use making it more difficult to walk our dog and push our son in his stroller. I hit the submit button multiple times using Safari and nothing happened. I went to Firefox, filled out the form and something happened. "Page Not Found". Wow, that's great. So I looked at the source and whoever worked on the page had uncommented the line for the testing server and commented out the line for the production server, thereby causing the form to goto a server that would appear to be only accessible internally.

So I sent email and got an auto-response. It was a pleasant auto-response that had a paragraph in it that disturbed me:

You have been automatically added to receive via email our eNewsletter
that keeps you up to date on issues in our community and the City. The
eNewsletter is sent once a month and contains information on things
going on.

That's great. There was no unsubscribe link and I didn't ask to be subscribed to a newsletter. Isn't that in violation of the CAN-SPAM act? Or are government officials exempt? Or since I sent email, that automatically meant I agreed to receiving crap? I made the mistake of using my regular email address; damn. I would just block email from the city, but I receive email from CERT.

What's better if you look at past newsletters, there is a link to update your preferences; it doesn't work.

Thanks Mr. Councilman!