National Fire Safety Week

A while ago I posted about National Fire Prevention week. As NFPW is only 5 weeks away, here's something in the spirit of the season.
YU has been putting up new signs around the whole uptown campus. New building signs, floor signs, etc. I think, and this is not sarcastic in any way, this is a very good thing. However, they also put up new floor evacuation plan signs. Or rather, sign holders. So I put in what I feel is a good evacuation plan:

This is on the 16th floor of Belfer Hall. There are 15 other floors with empty signs. Let's hear your ideas in the comments for other evacuation plans and I'll put 'em in the other floors' signs.

Demons and Ogres and Giants Oh My!!!!\

There is an online role-playing game that I was addicted to in my summer after my junior year of high school called Runescape. I now only play this game on very rare occasions however one time I went online and discovered about 210000 people logged in. There are two modes of game play f2p (free to ply) and p2p (pay to play). The p2p get tons of more things than those of us who don't pay. It costs five dollars a month to be a member. On the occasion that I saw the 210000 people logged in I checked how many of them where members and the number was 84725. Now with a bit of math (84725)x(5)x(12)=$5083500. Now this is the amount of money based upon the people logged in at that particular time. They have servers all over the USA, and Canada, as well as in London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Sydney. Also, I have no idea how much they make of the ads on their site.

Crooked Pictures

I have heard a complaint about my taking pictures diagonally from the man in the crazy getup seen below. Now I do this sort of thing on purpose because it lets me fit more into the rectangular frame even though it gives some photos a blair witch project sort of unprofessional effect (this one in particular is blair-witch-like).


See, I am fully capable of taking normal pictures (these are from the Getty Museum, LA CA).







There actually was an earthquake when I was taking this one (hard to hold still).


Just kidding, when taking pictures the way I like to you get about sqrt(2) times extra room. Had I taken the above picture normally you wouldnt have seen the detail of the road in the close foreground or the deepness of the sky near the top edge.

It especially helps taking closeups of tall buildings like this one.


Critique Please? (comments/emails)

Can I help you?

I've been going to a lot of stores recently (shopping? No, I've been shopping!). For some reason, in almost every store, someone thinks that I work there, and asks me for help. This happened in Kmart, Target, IKEA, Bed Bath and Beyond, Linens and Things, and probably some others that I'm forgetting about. The strange thing is that in most of these places the helpy people wear some sort of obvious uniform: IKEA, for example, BRIGHT yellow shirts. And the clothes that I wear do not even remotely look like the uniforms (I don't even own a yellow shirt!). I'm up for suggestions from the peanut gallery as to why this is regularly happening to me. And, check out this Improv Everywhere "Mission" where they made use of the obvious uniforms [link].

Also, here are some pictures of the LIRR vending machine's Hebrew language option I blogged about last week. I payed more attention this time, and there were three different machines. They all had the Spanish option, but one had two Asian languages, one had Italian and German, and this one had French and Hebrew (of all languages to put together. I guess it's better than German, though. Or Italian. Really, they may as well just have put Arabic). Without further ado...the pictures:

[Photo credit: Yoni. Look closely in the pictures...]

The Color Pink Is Toxic

Today I attempted to run a network cable to my room. In the process of doing this I was required to move some of the toxic, pink insulation stuff laid down. So I geared up gloves check, flashlight check, walky talky check, breath mask check, hat check, and lab goggles check. The results of all this, is that you get to see yet another one of my wacky photo shoots.

Now for my first miracle surgery I ...



Licence and registration please

Welcome Back to Edison

Now that I'm back in NJ its time to show some old footage of the crazy Edison Municipal workers piling dirt on our lawn and climbing inside their garbage trucks.

The long story:
They thought we were planting crops between the sidewalk and the road so the snow plow "plowed" our lawn. When we cleared up the confusion they replaced the dirt.

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Remember stamping on your stuffed garbage can so that the junk will fit in? Turns out that's part of a sanitation engineer's job description.


This man deserves a Darwin Award.

How do you say LIRR in Hebrew?

As most people living in the US these days know, when you go to any sort of automated system - be it phone tree, ATM, self checkout, etc. - there's always the option to get the instructions in Spanish. A few weeks ago I was taking the Long Island Railroad and I noticed that the LIRR vending machines have a few language options. English (for now). Spanish (surprised?). And Hebrew. It wasn't like an option bar to scroll down through 70 languages - it was a little button on the bottom. Spanish. Hebrew.
I tried it and it worked. VERY cool. I can't imagine there are that many native Hebrew speakers in the NYC area who would require this, but I'm not complaining.

Karate Odyssey

This is my last week of Karate Camp so you finally get to stop hearing about karate. This past weekend I went to Long Island for Shabbat and then helped Eli and Stacy to move into their new apartment. To make it to Long Island by Shabbat I had to go straight to the train station from work, and because of this I found myself on the train platform wearing a full black gee and my black belt. I took off the black belt and crammed it into my bag, I then untied my gee (I couldn't fit it into the bag). I therefore was standing on the train looking like a ninja. Then I walked thru Penn Station at rush hour, getting the up down looks. NEXT TEXT IS IN THOUGHT BUBBLE "What religion is that guy wearing the black robes? Wait a second he is wearing a kippah! But, what's with the robes, ummmmmmm?"

New FastDigest Restriction Enzymes!

Apparently no-one is safe from spam.


So not even my temporary mailbox at KGI is safe from spam but hey! at least it was much more interesting than your typical credit card application.