How I Burned My Fingers

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Simple: I did a dumb thing.

About a week ago Thurdsay, while making dinner, I burned the first three fingers on my left hand. Since then, the burns have gone through a series of nasty, ugly, painful stages. They’re healing now, though, because I finally started taking care of them.

How I burned them is an example of how relatively smart people can do seriously dumb things. In this case, I’d put about a half cup of water in a 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup and stuck the thing in the microwave to boil. I always boil water in a microwave (if one is available). I wasn’t thinking very well — there was a lot on my mind (as usual) — and hit the Minute Plus button twice. So when I removed the cup of boiling water 2 minutes later, it wasn’t just boiling — it was superheated. As I was moving it from the microwave to the counter top, I added about 1 teaspoon of beef bullion powder. The superheated water immediate boiled over the top of the cup and onto my fingers. I put the cup on the counter, shook the hot water off my hands, and proceeded to clean up the mess I’d made on the countertop, cabinets, and floor.

I didn’t realize how badly I’d been burned until much later. It hurt, of course, but I was busy doing other things and tried hard not to pay attention. Later, I bought some Bactine and kept spraying it down. The skin was red, but I didn’t think much about it.

The next day, my forefinger was blistered and puffy. My middle finger also looked pretty bad. More Bactine. I was volunteering at an equine endurance ride and I was busy. The blisters burst and reformed multiple times. (Hope I’m not grossing you out too much.) It wasn’t until the weekend was over and I really had a chance to clean up and look at my fingers that I realized how badly I’d been burned. My first two fingers probably had second degree burns.

I won’t go into more gross details about the skin on my fingers and the stages it went through. I will say that I finally started putting Neosporin (a triple-antibacterial salve, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it) on my first two fingers and wrapping them in special knuckle bandages. If I’d done that a week ago, I’d be all healed up. But I didn’t, so I’m not.

I’ll probably be almost as good as new within a few days. I suspect, however, that my forefinger will be scarred because of my stupidity. No hand modeling in my future.

Lessons learned: put containers of boiling water on the countertop before adding ingredients.

Quick Note to Commenters

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Comments are moderated.

Because of the amount of spam and the number of inappropriate comments this site receives, all comments from new commenters are moderated.

Much of the moderation is done automatically with spam prevention software. This software will automatically delete comments coming from blacklisted IP addresses, comments containing too many links, comments containing certain “bad” words, multiple comments submitted from the same IP address or commenter within a short period of time, and comments meeting other proven criteria that I don’t know or really care about.

This two-layer automated spam prevention system catches over 5000 spam comments to my four blog-based sites each day. This gives you an idea of just how bad the problem is. It should also help you understand why I don’t manually review every single comment myself.

The few comments that get through the automated system are manually reviewed. A few of them are true spam that I delete.

Others are comments by visitors who seem to have commented solely to advertise their business or service. Even if these comments are appropriate, if the commenter name field contains a company name or Web site name, that comment will be deleted. My blog-based sites do not exist for other people to advertise their products or services. If you don’t use your name or something that looks like your name in the Commenter Name field of the comment form, don’t expect your comment to appear here. Exceptions are possible but very rare.

Finally, a handful of other comments are nasty or inappropriately critical, abusive to me or other commenters. I don’t take that crap from anyone, especially on my blogs. If you have something critical to say, say it nicely. Don’t bash me or others by calling us names or insulting us.

The comments that make it through this entire moderation process are the ones that appear on the site.

Keep in mind that I go through the manual moderation process every 12 to 72 hours, so you might have to wait up to 3 days for a comment to appear. It all depends on how busy I am and whether I have a good Internet connection when on the road. Be patient.

I’d love it if more commenters would sign up for Gravatars so their custom icons would appear beside their comments.

I really appreciate reader comments, especially those that add to conversation here on this blog. I hope those of you who comment continue to do so. And I hope this message encourages those of you who have not yet commented to add your thoughts as comments to posts on this site.

Defining "Tragedy"

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More humor from the ‘Net.

Here’s another funny I got from a friend. I don’t know where he got it, but if this belongs to someone who doesn’t want it shared, let me know and I’ll pull it down.

George Bush and Dick Cheney, while visiting a primary school class, found themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked both men if they would like to lead the discussion of the word “tragedy.” So Mr. Cheney asks the class for an example of a “tragedy.”

One little boy stood up and offered: “If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and knocks him dead, that would be a tragedy.”

“No,” said Mr. Cheney, “that would be an accident.”

A little girl raised her hand: “If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy.”

“I’m afraid not,” explained Mr. Bush. “That’s what we would call a great loss.”

The room goes silent. No other children volunteered.

Mr. Bush searched the room. “Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?”

Finally at the back of the room little Johnny raises his hand. In a stern voice he says, “If a plane carrying the President and Vice President of the United States were struck by a missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy.”

“Fantastic!” exclaimed both men nearly in unison. Mr. Cheney continued “That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?”

“Well,” says little Johnny, “because it sure as hell wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”

The Super Bowl is Coming!

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Developments around the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale.

I’ve been doing flight training down at Glendale Airport for the past few weeks, working on my Instrument Rating at Silver State Helicopters. Two or three times a week, I drive or fly down there in the afternoon, spend a few hours sitting in a simulator trailer with a flight instructor, and fly or drive home.

The drive is long and boring. I found the best route though, thanks to my friends Ray and Robbie: Grand Avenue to Litchfield Road to Glendale Avenue to the airport. I can do it in just over an hour sometimes. It’s about 50 miles each way.

University of Phoenix StadiumGlendale Airport is just 3 miles or so from the University of Phoenix Stadium, where Super Bowl XLII will be held this Sunday. The other day, while waiting for the Glendale Tower controller to clear me across the runway, I overflew the stadium area. The grass was outside, looking rich and green. The top of the stadium was closed. A ferris wheel was under construction in the parking lot on the west side of the stadium and there were lots of party tents and other things going up.

The Super Bowl is apparently Glendale‘s chance at the “big time” and they’re doing everything they can to make it a big party.

At the airport, things are also changing. Glendale Aviation, which had been the FBO there for years, expanded its building and added a corporate hangar large enough to accommodate three small jets. (At least that’s how it looks to me.) It’s now called LuxAir — I guess you need a foo-foo name to attract football fans arriving by jet. Of course, since it’s the only real FBO there, there’s no competition at the airport. It’ll probably make enough money this weekend to cover the cost of the building addition and more. But it couldn’t have been timed any better; crews are probably putting on the finishing touches inside as I type this.

Last week, the ramp was completely full of small airplanes, like Cessnas and Pipers. Apparently, the guy who owns the hangars and shades evicted everyone while doing some upgrades, then raised the rents beyond what local pilots were willing to pay. Few planes went back. I guess their owners would rather roast their wings in the hot Arizona sun. But yesterday, the ramp was almost empty. They’d moved all the little planes under the shades or to the more remote parts of the ramp, leaving plenty of room for incoming jets. Even the DC3 that had been sitting there for months (if not years) had been towed to the far reaches of the airport ramp, tucked into a spot between the hangars and perimeter fence like a broken down truck in someone’s yard.

Inside the terminal, the lobby area’s furniture — a mixture of chairs and tables normally used by one of the flight schools for training and briefing — have been removed. In their place are leather chairs and tables, arranged in little chat groups. I can’t tell you how comfortable they are because I don’t know. They’ve roped the whole thing off with yellow caution tape so no one sits on them until the big money starts arriving. I’m willing to bet that next week, when I return, all that nice furniture is gone.

It’s almost as if Glendale Airport is putting on airs, like Scottsdale Airport.

Glendale Airport’s restaurant, which had been closed for months, reopened last week. It’s the same old place, but with new owners. I haven’t eaten there, so I can’t rate it. I’m sure they expect to do a good business over the weekend. Rumor has it that they’re going to do a buffet. Rumor also leads me to believe that they’re doing a buffet because they can’t deal with table service and they’re taking the easy way out.

Yesterday was my last afternoon at Glendale Airport until after the big event. I canceled Friday’s lesson so I could get an early start out to my weekend gig in Parker, AZ, chasing race vehicles around a desert racetrack with a film crew on board. Wickenburg is one of two area airports outside the 30-mile TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) that’ll kick in around Glendale on Sunday afternoon, before the game, so even if I get back late on Sunday afternoon, I don’t have to worry about landing at my home base.

But I doubt whether Wickenburg will see the big jets. There’s plenty of room at Glendale and, thanks to the inability of Wickenburg’s Airport Consultants and Manager to plan for the future, only two jet parking spaces at Wickenburg Airport.

The above image of University of Phoenix Stadium is from Wikipedia and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License (cc-by-sa-2.0). In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it under this or a similar cc-by-sa license.

On Avatars

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Why can’t they look at least a little like the person they represent?

Like so many techno-geeks these days, I’m involved in a bunch of social networking sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, RedBubble, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc. And all of these sites give each member the ability to include an avatar — an image to represent that user.

Maria Langer AvatarMaybe I’m not very creative, but my avatar is a photo of me. It was taken by photographer Jon Davison during one of our flights last September. It shows me in one of my favorite places: at the controls of my helicopter, flying over the Arizona desert. (I think I’m over the Little Colorado River Gorge in this shot.)

The way I see it, my avatar is supposed to represent me. What could represent me better than a photo of me doing something I like to do?

Evidently, not everyone has the same idea. While many of the avatars I see in Twitterrific are photos or drawings of the people they represent, quite a few are not. And in other social networking sites — MyBlogLog comes to mind — the majority of avatars don’t bear any resemblance to the people they’re supposed to represent.

I find this bothersome, especially among my Twitter friends. Why? Well, in most cases, an avatar is the only visual representation I have for a person. If the avatar features purple hair or a goofy cartoon face — you know who you are, folks! — that’s the image I have of that person. And it’s a lot tougher for me to take these unrealistic avatars seriously.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I find it easier to communicate with people I can take seriously.

A few more notes on avatars:

  • Some people seem to like using their Second Life avatars as their social networking avatar. While I could write a dissertation covering my thoughts about Second Life — starting with, is your first life so bad that you need a second one? — I’ll just say that Second Life avatars are generally a highly stylized version of how people want to look. While few of us are supermodels, surely there’s a decent photo of these people somewhere that they can use online.
  • Some people use glamour photos for avatars. I have a colleague who does this. When I met her in real life, I didn’t recognize her. Let’s face it, we only look like our glamour photos in our glamour photos — after they’ve done the photo shoot and brought our faces into Photoshop for some digital plastic surgery. Every time I see this avatar, I have to remind myself that she doesn’t really look like the photo. (Of course, it’s also made me want to get a glamour photo.)
  • Some people use photos of their pets as avatars. Talk about going to the dogs! Do the dogs really look better? Or do they just identify with their dogs? Ditto for cats, birds, and miscellaneous wild animals.

Of course, none of this has to do with special-purpose avatars used to promote an idea or cause. An example is the Frozen Pea avatars that many of us wore on Twitter for a few Fridays to raise awareness and funds for Breast Cancer Research through the Frozen Pea Fund. I was a single pea for the day. My favorite avatar was one Twitter friend who created an image of his head sticking out of a pea car.

But I’d like to start a movement among serious social networkers. Be proud of your face and show it off as your avatar! It doesn’t have to be a full-face shot; it can be creative. (Some of the best avatars I’ve seen show only part of a person’s face.) But it should show you, as you really are.

I’d just like to see who I’m tweeting to.