Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/10/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]times have changed...my youngestphysics/chemistry major (Reed) who is now an artist- glass-blower indulged in creating fire-breathing dragons made fom shopping carts and old car bodies for the senior thesis parade and a motorized reclining chair for campus commuting.. t > From: "Barney Quinn, Jr." <barney.quinn@noaa.gov> > Reply-To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us > Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 16:22:52 -0400 > To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us > Subject: Re: [Leica] I am so stupid I can't believe it! > > Brian, > > Good for you! To keep this temporarily on topic I shot with a pair of > IIIf's in my college and grad school days. I went to Syracuse University > in the early and mid-sixties. Syracuse approached the housing or the > animals - er athletes - differently. Rather than keeping them in a > centralized barn, which seems to have been Maryland's approach, Syracuse > distributed them four per floor through out the men's dorms. Horses for > courses. Do you want major damage to one building or light to moderate > damage to all buildings. > > Before I continue let's have full disclosure here. My undergraduate > record has more than one blemish on it, and I thoroughly enjoyed > creating each and every one. :-) Second semester of my freshman year > some members of the football team who will be nameless except to say > that every one of them went on to become brand name athletes were having > a pick up lacrosse game in the corridor outside my room. I was > desperately trying to study for my Calculus final. To this day I don't > believe that I went out into the hall and told them to knock it off > because I was trying to study! Nor do I believe that I lived to be > typing this. I understand the economic and PR importance of collegiate > sports, but having said that I also have to say that it was very > aggravating when you asked one of the prize steers how they did in a > particular course and they replied, "The coach fixed it for me." This > happened more often than one might think. > > Barney > > Brian Reid wrote: >> >> Most of you know that there has been something wrong with the Leica >> Users archives for several weeks, since the middle of September. Some of >> you know that I've tried for weeks to find and fix the problem. >> >> Just now I have found the problem, and fixed it, and I am slowly >> restoring the archives. I can't entirely decide whether this episode is >> because I am stupid, or because God is punishing me for something cruel >> that I did in 1968. >> >> Let me first tell you what I did in 1968 that makes me fear Divine >> retribution, and then I will tell you what the problem was. >> >> I went to the University of Maryland. I lived in a dormitory called >> Cambridge A. That was the men's honors dorm. Across the quad from us was >> Bel Air B, the football player's dorm. During the spring semester of >> 1968 the men in the football player's dorm brutally harassed the >> eyeglass-wearing scholars in the honors dorm. And this being a state >> university in the era when the football coach ran the university, we had >> no resource save to put up with it or to solve the problem ourselves. >> >> I took charge of the "solve the problem ourselves" venture, and for one >> week we made their lives miserable. We waited until the week of midterm >> exams, figuring that the easiest way to hurt a football player was to >> get them declared ineligible by the NCAA, and that flunking midterms >> would be a good way to do that. Every night, mysteriously, their dorm >> lost power. Their water supply kept getting turned off, so they couldn't >> shower. Their phones stopped working. Their radios were somehow >> mysteriously jammed. Bizarre smells permeated their building. >> >> After three days the university physical-plant people figured out how we >> were turning off their water every night, and they welded the manhole >> shut. So instead of turning off the water to the building, we went into >> the building in the middle of the night and turned off, individually, >> every plumbing fixture. We turned off every sink, every toilet, every >> shower, every drinking fountain. Anything that was supposed to have >> water was turned off. >> >> Naturally, after 3 days of us turning off the water main and the >> university turning it back on again, they were programmed to look for >> some sort of a water-main shutoff. It took them 5 days to discover that >> there was nothing wrong with the main, but that every single fixture was >> independently turned off. >> >> What on earth does this college prank of 34 years ago have to do with >> Leica Users? Well, it turns out that the reason I haven't been able to >> fix the archive problem is that there's nothing wrong with the archive. >> The archive mechanism is working perfectly. It's just that every message >> was being individually deleted before reaching the archive mechanism. >> >> For the entire time that the Leica Users archive has existed, messages >> that contain the word "unsubscribe" have not been added to the archives, >> because in the past, such messages have been misdirected requests to >> unsubscribe, and I wanted neither to clutter the archives with them nor >> file away the evidence that someone couldn't follow instructions. >> >> Sometime in the middle of September, in order to be helpful and >> "clarify" things, I caused this line to be added to the end of every >> Leica-Users message. Notice its second word: >> >> -- >> To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html > -- > To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html > - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html