Lee has a good week (and a riddle)

On Thursday, 27 June 1996, I correctly answered the following riddle, sent to Riddle du Jour by Doug Mattox of Rolla, MO:

Decapitate me and all becomes equal. Then terminate me and I become second. Cut me front and back and I become two less than I started. What am I?

The answer is below, but here's something to make up some spoiler space. I won a 1996 Parrothead Club Caribbean Soul T-shirt for my trouble. And my home page was linked from the "Previous Riddles" section for a week and the "Sphinx's Hall of Fame" for who knows how long. I've been answering their riddles (or at least attempting to) for several months now. I probably get the correct answer about 30-40% of the time, but I was never selected as a winner. This time I was one of 93 people to answer correctly (out of 1316 who guessed). I don't always pay attention, but I'm pretty sure there has usually been more people with the correct answer when I've gotten it right before.

I'm sure this page will seem silly in a few weeks, but I'm writing it shortly after I found out I won, so I'm still excited. It's been a good week, as my (Useless) Super-Hero Generator was selected as a Surfers' Pick by Tony over at Yahoo! on Monday, 24 June 1996. I don't know how he found it since I haven't gone out of my way to advertise it, but I'm not complaining. 8)

Okay, I've wasted enough of your time. The answer is the word "seven."

What, you don't get it? Okay, here's the progression:

seven
 even (equal)
 eve  (2nd person, according to the Bible)
  v   (Roman numeral five; two less than seven)

Gee, do you suppose my (Useless) Roman Numeral Convertor gave me an advantage? :-)

[This is an early example of what one would later call a blog post. This was posted as two separate pages -- one for the question, one for the answer -- to my personal web site back on 28 Jun 1996. Now I'm putting here, therefore saving a whopping 3 Kb by removing it from my site after twelve years. And yes, it does seem a bit silly now. Oh, and the Riddle du Jour and Yahoo! destinations are long since gone, but the links are maintained for posterity. — 8 Oct 2008]

Tip of the Moment (washing machine hoses)

Tip of the moment: Replace both washing machine hoses at the same time.

I came home from lunch one day to find water coming out from under the door. One of the washing machine hoses had burst and been shooting water out for up to three hours. Two days later, the other hose did the exact same thing. We had to replace the floors in three rooms. If I had been thinking straight when the plumber was there the first time, I would have had him replace both hoses. It's hard to think straight while you're trying to clean up a flooded house.

[From my "Past Tips of the Moment and Past Thoughts" page. This was the fourth tip and eighth post overall. At least we got some nice hardwood floors out of it. — 28 May 2009]

[A more complete account can now be found in the 14 May 1996 entry. — 17 June 2010]

Pong found

[Originally posted to rec.games.video.arcade.collecting as "Pong found & help needed."]

Well, I'm *this* (| |) far away from being able to join VAPS. Today I finally bought a copy of Atari's Pong. (I figured I'd start at the beginning. 8)

I collect Atari 2600 cartridges. This is the only extent to which my finances have allowed me to collect video games. (Otherwise, I'd have a house full of coin-ops.) When looking at a local thrift store, I saw Pong standing there. I looked closer, and it said "Atari" and "Syzygy Engineered" on it. Wow, an original Pong! It was $40 and the electronics guy said it worked. I didn't have the money right then, knew my wife would kill me if I just brought it home, and didn't have a way of getting it home by myself anyway.

That evening I discussed it with my wife and we (okay, she) decided I could get it if the money didn't come out of the bank accounts. (This was incentive for me to finally sell my old computer.) A week and a bit later, the computer was sold, but I hadn't cleared out a space for the coin-op yet. Monday evening, she asked if I'd bought it yet and I said no, but took that as a go ahead. 8)

Today I went back to buy it with a coworker to help. We started to look around, and discovered they'd removed the TV and taken the cabinet outside! Aiiigghh! It didn't look like it had been outside long enough to get rained on, thank goodness. Unfortunately, one of the paddle knobs, which I'd noticed had been loose before, was
missing.

I went inside and talked to the people there (and found out their electronics guy was "no longer with them"). They said they'd tested it and it didn't work. Further discussion revealed that the TV didn't work. We went back and examined it. We came to the conclusion that it didn't seem to be missing any pieces, it was just empty because there wasn't much to it. I got it for $25 and we hauled it home.

[VAPS is the Video Arcade Preservation Society. It was a group of people owning arcade video games at home. They established a web site in the early days of the Internet. Being able to join it seemed like a big and unattainable honor at the time.

This post was originally made to ask a bunch of questions of coin-op collectors about my new acquisition. For the sake of the blog, I've edited them out. —11 June 2009]

Flood

[This appears to be an e-mail I sent to friends. Unfortunately, the only copy I have of it is not as an e-mail, but a text file called "flood.txt" that I apparently prepared separate from my e-mail client. I determined the date by pulling out my old calendars, where I'd noted it.]

Yesterday, I went home during my lunch break. As I pulled into the carport, I noticed water trickling to the side of the house. After going through a few possibilities, I came up with water being left on inside the house. It was about this time I saw the water was indeed trickling from underneath the door. I quickly opened the door to about an inch of water on the kitchen floor. Water was shooting up from behind the washer in the laundry room, soaking half the room.

I immediately tried to shut off the water at that valve. It wouldn't turn. I grabbed some pliers and a wrench and went to the turn off the water to the house, but couldn't find the valve. I called some plumbers, but no one could get there immediately. Finally, I started thinking a bit straight and used a rubber-backed bathmat to block the water spraying up in my face and managed to get the valve closed. Then I called Dorothy and waited, dripping, for her to come home. Thankfully, upon calling our insurance agent's office, they suggested having a carpet service come to get the water out of the dining room carpet before it spread. This hadn't occurred to us yet. We spent the afternoon cleaning up.

What happened is the hose from the water tap to the washer burst. (I'm glad it was the *cold* water.) This happened sometime between roughly 8:30 and 11:30 AM. Thank goodness I went home during lunch. We'll have to replace three rooms' floors: the dining room, the (newly tiled by Dorothy) kitchen, and the laundry room. We'll also have to replace the carpet in the living room and hall, at least, since it all needs to match.

BTW, the cats seem to be unharmed. We later had visions of one of them eating or using the litter box in the laundry room when it blew, but upon recollection, neither was wet. They were a bit agitated, but seem okay now.

Dorothy has two theories on why this happened:

1. We booked a trip to Disney World for later this year. It was just after we paid for our plane tickets to Australia that the tree fell on the house and we had to get a new roof. Therefore, big trips cause personal disasters.
2. We threw away the chain letter she received. We're both "rational human beings," but the letter, which we estimate arrived Friday, said to mail out 20 copies in 96 hours. It's an interesting coincidence. If you sent us this chain letter (there was no return address, but it came from Huntsville), please don't do send any more. We will still throw them away.

We've learned a few things from this:

1. How to turn off water to the house. We should have learned this a long time ago. Now we even own a water meter key.
2. Turn off the water to the washer when not in use. Dorothy says this is too much trouble (and the valves are hard to reach), but we will probably at least turn it off when we go on trips. Thank goodness it didn't do it Sunday. We spent the day in Birmingham with my mother and grand-mother.
3. The floor under the carpet in the dining room isn't hardwood.
4. Always go home during lunch.

[This also became one of my "Tips of the moment." The day after I wrote this (two days after the first hose burst), the other hose burst under the same circumstances: I came home from work to find water leaking out from under the door again. I had to call the plumber and carpet service to both come out again. I think the plumber didn't charge us that second time, but I forget. If this happened now, all of these years of home-ownership later, I wouldn't bother to call a plumber just to replace a washing machine hose.

One thing I left out of this is that when I called my wife, I just told her to come home and didn't explain anything. She was worried to death, but luckily it was a short drive from work back home.

Rather than replace the carpet, we opted to have the hardwood in the living room and hall refinished. We also expanded the laundry room and had hardwood put down in the dining room. It wasn't until August that the repairs were finally finished. — 17 June 2010]

[Incidentally, no collectibles were harmed by the events related in this post. Thanks goodness! —2 July 2010]

Tip of the Moment (laser surgery)

Tip of the moment: Don't walk on fresh laser surgery wounds.

I recently had some laser surgery done on my foot. Although the doctor insisted I would be able to walk on it, it began bleeding profusely the next day. He insisted it was okay and I should just walk on my toes instead of my heel, where the bleeding wound was. I couldn't seem to convince him I was doing this already.

[From my "Past Tips of the Moment and Past Thoughts" page. This was the third tip and seventh post overall. — 28 May 2009]