Roll Over, Play Dead

Morph’s bowl and bed are still in the kitchen.  Even though he’s not coming home.

My coordinates this weekend:  28.767, -80.696

My goal:  A mallard

I imagine a lot of you haven’t heard quite yet, but my man Morpheus has moved on to a better place.  It wasn’t without tears and it certainly wasn’t easy…after all, Morpheus outlasted every female relationship that I’ve had.  Sit back and think about that for a second:  Morph was there for me, even through the Big D.  Now that is some serious shit.

Every day, sure as clockwork, he’d be sitting in the kitchen under the table on his bed, just looking out the window and waiting for me to get home.  I didn’t even have to finish parking before he’d be out of his spot with his nose up to the glass and wagging his tail…just couldn’t wait until I opened the door and got his baby gate down.  Grabbing his bone, trying to knock me over to get me to play with him.

The relationships we build with animals are rather interesting but I have to say that I don’t fully understand it.  When speaking of a pet, personification is guaranteed, though to say Morpheus wasn’t loyal would be a crime.  He’d jump up on the couch and sit with me while I ate, or he’d crawl in bed with me at night…or when I went for a bike ride, he’d sit in the recliner near the sliding glass door and just wait…wait until I opened the screen door on the porch.  He stuck with me even though I was away for so much of the day; he seemed grateful for the little time we did get to spend together.

I’m happy to have had the chance to spend time with a pet as cool as Morpheus, and I hope his new owners realize how lucky they are, too.

I’ll miss ya, Morph…you and your outside-crossed eyes.

This article is pretty unreal….it’s an analysis of the Therac-25 accidents, a series of problems that occurred with radiation machines, eventually killing 5 people, one of whom died 3 weeks after his treatment:

Three weeks after the first ETCC accident, on Friday, April 11, 1986, another male patient was scheduled to receive an electron treatment at ETCC for a skin cancer on the side of his face. The prescription was for 10 MeV to an area of approximately 7 x 10 cm. The same technician who had treated the first Tyler accident victim prepared this patient for treatment. Much of what follows is from the deposition of the Tyler Therac-25 operator. As with her former patient, she entered the prescription data and then noticed an error in the mode. Again she used the cursor up key to change the mode from X ray to electron. After she finished editing, she pressed the return key several times to place the cursor on the bottom of the screen. She saw the "beam ready" message displayed and turned the beam on. Within a few seconds the machine shut down, making a loud noise audible via the (now working) intercom. The display showed Malfunction 54 again. The operator rushed into the treatment room, hearing her patient moaning for help. The patient began to remove the tape that had held his head in position and said something was wrong. She asked him what he felt, and he replied "fire" on the side of his face. She immediately went to the hospital physicist and told him that another patient appeared to have been burned. Asked by the physicist to describe what he had experienced, the patient explained that something had hit him on the side of the face, he saw a flash of light, and he heard a sizzling sound reminiscent of frying eggs. He was very agitated and asked, "What happened to me, what happened to me?" This patient died from the overdose on May 1, 1986, three weeks after the accident. He had disorientation that progressed to coma, fever to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and neurological damage. Autopsy showed an acute high-dose radiation injury to the right temporal lobe of the brain and the brain stem.

Now I really feel like an ass.

Nerds kill people with wacky programming:

Wired News: History’s Worst Software Bugs

And check this out:  the CIA had a hand in creating the largest manmade non-nuclear explosion in history by purposely supplying the Soviet Union with faulty computer equipment that controlled much of its gas and oil supply lines.

That’ll make you think twice before screwing with Poindexter.