baitcon and random links.

baitcon was way cool, but either something at baitcon or something from a coworkers from the previous week finally caught up with me and i spent most of monday afternoon and evening with a fever and most of tuesday asleep. (stupiddumbsick is when you can't manage to follow all of the plot of a young adult book you're reading.)

so, yay baitcon. hooray for seeing folks. the site is outstandingly excellent. hooray for folks who came up with fabulous and peculiar ice cream flavors. hooray for folks sharing their talents.

in the absence of more cogent analysis, i provide, instead, a random link collection:

awesome drag performance youtube link of the day:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PWEbL133hP8
(tandi iman dupreee and friend doing "holding out for a hero")

awesome foriegn advertisement youtube link of the day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXZZknJWtGg
(encouraging young engineers)

excellent essay about airline security from a pilot.
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/07/16/a-pilot-on-airline-security/

nifty del.icio.us tag display thingie.
http://kevan.org/extispicious

just the thing for gamer households with chore-based issues
http://www.chorewars.com/
(see also http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/20)

yar! piracy report.
http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php

oops. container ships fall down go boom.
http://www.containershipping.nl/casualties.html

anonymous hatred. or, thank you $HIGHER_POWER for taking care of my brother and sister-in-law

so, there's someone out there who i hate but i have no idea who it is.

i don't hate them as much as i would if someone had ended up dead or even just seriously injured, but still. (which is to say, this story doesn't have a tragic ending -- it's dramatic enough without leaving the ending in doubt for you, gentle reader)

see, my eldest brother was riding his motorcycle the other day. his wife was riding as a passenger.

he was coming up to an intersection where he had the right of way -- the side-street traffic had a stop sign. there was a car coming up the side street. it completely ignored the stop sign and blew thru the intersection. my brother slowed, fishtailed, and then made a conscious decision to lay down the bike rather than hit the car. he told my sister-in-law "we're going down" and intentionally low-sided, and both he and my sister-in-law went skidding/rolling along the pavement. he missed hitting a phone pole with his body by about a foot. she went about 20' further than he did. he managed to crawl over to her as the couple riding on a motorcycle with them stopped to help.

the car never stopped.

my sister-in-law broke a couple of bones in her hand and her helmet sacrificed itself to save her head. both of them have some impressive bits of roadrash. but they're okay. bruised, battered, broken, swollen and sore, but fundamentally okay.

and it was pretty much a matter of luck. there are a lot of ways this scenario could've played out that would've ended much worse. i'm not sure that in his situation, i'd have managed to drop my bike rather than slam into the car.

the car never stopped. even with a motorcycle crashing to the ground and bodies sliding on the ground in the car's wake, the car didn't stop.

drunk? high? oblivious? unlicensed? any or all of the above, i suspect.

they didn't get the plate number, afaik. on the whole, i'm okay with the decision of the other couple to stop and help rather than pursue and identify. if there'd been more folks with them, maybe someone could've gotten the info. but for now, it's one of life's mysteries.

it's a testament to how lucky they were that there's a humorous bit of the story -- after skidding along the pavement, my sister-in-law came to rest in poison ivy. this is what you call "adding insult to injury". whatever higher power one might choose to believe in saved them but is not entirely lacking in trickster nature, i think.

but yeah, there's someone i hate but i have no idea who it is.

today, i can see how vigilantes start.