Corridor 9

Today was quite an eventful day. While working an extra, I was on the nozzle for one of the more dangerous fires the city has seen in quite a while. One of the local businesses downtown rents its upstairs floors out as living space, and on the top floor of a 4 store building today we had quite a large fire.

Being at the downtown station, we usually have 2 fully staffed trucks that will respond to structure fires but today that wasn’t the case. Our second truck had been training out at Station 3 on the Hazmat truck. That only left me, another firefighter, and our officer to cover the initial response for the downtown area.

We’ve always talked about a fire downtown and how hazardous a situation this could become due to the construction of the closely spaced buildings. As we were toned out, the engineer of our truck looked out the window and saw the smoke rising from what appeared to be the roof of the building. As the scene of the fire was so close to the station, we actually arrived before we were fully geared up to make entrance. It didn’t take long thoubh before we grabbed the longest preconnect on the truck and made our way through the front door, to the back of the building, and up 3 flights of stairs.

Upon reaching the 3rd floor, I called back for water and made an the interior attack. The black acrid smoke billowed out the windows as we entered the kitchen area. Because the fire was getting such a steady stream of oxygen, it was burning hot and fast and as I entered the room I could see fire on the roof rolling over my head and walking up both walls.

Since the fire had self ventilated I wasn’t too worried about getting steam burns so I put the nozzle on a wide fog and opened it up fully to cool off the ceiling area, let the steam do its magic, and push some of the smoke out the window. This cooled off the room considerably and really helped improve the visibility. We finished extinguishing the hot spots before making our way back down the stairs to a rehab area since we knew that our work was far from over. It took members from the entire department a number of hours to overhaul the affected fire area, place salvage covers over filing cabinets and computers to protect them from water damage, and make sure there were no more hot spots that could rekindle later during the day.

In all, we were exceptionally blessed by a number of factors; the building construction had been updated to include sheet rock walls, the fire station was so close to the scene, and the fire ventilated out the nearest window versus spreading through the attic. These factors coupled with the wonderful amount of teamwork by both on-duty as well as off-duty personnel all made this a successful operation.

You know the old story; the mechanic who fixes Porsche’s while driving an old Chevy Citation or something. Well, thats about how I feel sometime. In all my computers, only 1 of them has been completely new. All other computers have been pieced together with old equipment.

The pain finally hit after one of the parts on my laptop was stressed beyond it’s design and cracked. One of the hinges on the laptop screen is toast, and the other one doesn’t have enough tension to hold the laptop up sufficiently. This is not a good situation, especially since I’m relying on my laptop to get me through an upcoming HazMat class.I was able to find a piece on Ebay to replace the broken one, but after looking over the whole system I can tell that it’s in dire need of replacement.

As most of you know, I try my best to take care of my equipment. This wasn’t always the case, but in the past number of years, I’ve done everything I can to protect this laptop. I keep it virus clean as well as handling it with kid gloves to make sure that the case or screen doesn’t get damaged. While inspecting the broken hinge, I’ve found a number of cracks in the case at various points.

I can only hope it lasts another year and a half.

I ripped apart my server and Kristie’s machine over the past few days playing with various pieces and parts in different configurations. Unfortunately I was only able to use the CPU out of her machine. The ram wouldn’t fit, and I simply wasn’t willing to take my server offline for 5-6 days to get everything running the way it should. Oh well… this machine is getting to it’s end life anyway.

I did have a chance to play around with the installation process a bit on her machine prior to ripping it apart. After installing the entire system as far as I could without having a real IP 4 times, I’ve pretty well got it nailed down. I’m still a bit concerned about the mail setup, as well as the Gallery and Wordpress setup. Unfortunately, these 3 pieces can’t be setup correctly without a true net connection.

Luckily, I’ve got it setup to dual boot right now though, so I can work on the system during the day or night, and still boot into my current system to keep my mail flowing and have the blog up and running.

Just with it wouldn’t take so long.

Ok…. so um… I know that donations are just that. Nothing says you gotta give love or anything, but this is simply sad. I’ve had this blog running for almost 2 years now and not a single person has donated.

It would be different if only a few people saw this, but to date I’ve had 167343 hits… thats 167343 that this page has been shown. Now, I know for a fact that roughly 9500 of those hits have been unique meaning that at least 9500 different people have read this blog. That doesn’t account for 2 people sharing the same computer, or people forwarding my stuff to others.

Anyway…. my point: In all that time, and with all those hits, not a single person has decided to donate. If everyone that saw my page would have donated a dollar I’d have nearly $9500. Quite honestly, I’d have been happy with everyone donating $.25. At least I would have enough that I wouldn’t have to cannibalize Kristie’s computer and build a Frankenstein machine.