Yum delicisous asbestos!

I'm employed again. Unfortunately upon returning to the same work site that I left, I find that they have begun asbestos abatement in the ceilings that I just spent a few weeks crawling in. Woo Hoo! Mesothelioma here I come! You know when the janitors vacuum the hallways in this school, you can literally see the haze of minute dust particles kicked up by their vacuums as they fail to collect anything but the largest particles of debris. Thank you Utah for spending so little on education; although I'm not sure lung cancer is going to have quite the disciplinary effect on your children that you seem to hope for.

I went and bought my self a P100 respirator, picked up a few books from the library on asbestos; and ordered a few asbestos testing kits. I'm not sure what I should do going forward. But I'm emotionally conflicted; my employer cares about me, and my coworkers. But sometimes makes really strange decisions:

On a previous job we were told some concealed areas had asbestos in them, and we were told to stay out of those areas. Also among the job site prints, plans, and spec sheets was a three ring binder full of information on the asbestos found in the building. I was reading it and came across a section saying that any maintenance worker employed to work on the building had to go through a asbestos training program. I asked one of the company owners about this, and he said that he would look in to it. The next day I found the binder gone, and I never got a response from my boss concerning the training.

Another example (I blogged about this before...) I was working on a job running electrical conduit from 10 and 12 foot ladders. I was approached by the general contractor who told me I needed to be wearing a harness. He and I called over one of the owners of the electrical company I work for. I was told to wear a harness and use a lanyard to tie off to a structural girder. I explained that I wouldn't mind doing that except that none of the fall protection gear that we had would stop a fall from such a small height. The strap around the girder would add a foot or two, the lanyard is six feet long, and stretches to twelve, and attaches to the harness at the top of my back. I'd have to fall from a height where my feet were about 15 to 20 feet off the ground for this setup to catch me. I asked my boss to buy a yo-yo (a piece of safety equipment). He and the general contractor told me to continue installing conduit without the safety equipment; they refused to deal with an employee who actually wanted safety equipment that would function.

This time no one even told us that there was asbestos in the ceilings. I still don't know what's up there or weather it friable. Naturally I'm scared for my health; maybe if I know more about it I wouldn't be. Hopefully I can find out some stuff soon.

Swashbuckling Censors!

Old Man Murray an influential (during the 90's) gaming and r3view website has had it's Wikipedia entry deleted! (You can still view the deleted article on the internet wayback machine.)

If you don't know why you should be upset RockPaperShotgun.com will educate you.

Inside joke

Frabjous is now 0.9875 standard Bovia.
*This is not a comprehensive number, it is merely a superficial measurement.*
It has been years since Frabjous has had an opportunity to be greater than one standard Bovia. He could potentially reach 1.0625 Bovia within a few weeks!

Time for everything.

Ask and you shall receive right? - I've been wanting some time to finish various house projects, and to really start turning this house into a home. Well guess what I've been laid off.

My employer has some work on the horizon; but right now - zilch. So most everyone got laid off for a month or two. Getting laid off isn't something I wanted, but I'm going to make the best of it.

So I get to update the ol' brag sheet, and look around a bit. Ideally I'd like to find some temporary electrician work. In addition to looking for work though, I'm going to spend some time painting, welding, cleaning, etc... and it will be wonderful.

OS's

So i finished installing WOW on Ubuntu. And it plays just fine; but with the new Cataclysm update, wow can now use some of the more advanced features of my video card. Unfortunately either OpenGl or the gnu/linux version of the video card drivers aren't up to the task yet.

So I'm installing winBLOWS again.

Maybe I should do a small Gentoo installation and virtualize my computer so I could run, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and 'the operating system that is only useful for games' all at the same time.

Bleeding Edge

So some time ago when, what I consider to be, the second generation of SSD drives first hit the market. I went and bought one. It's a Gskill Falcon 128GB (230 MB/sec read 190 MB/sec write). It was bleeding edge at the time, and is still quite a fast boot drive.
Unfortunately like most bleeding edge hardware, the software support is usually quite primitive, as in just barely usable. Well time has passed and several new firmware revisions for this drive have been released, including a trim program. I've been reluctant to update the firmware because the drive manufacturers in there wisdom made it so that a firmware update destroys all data on the drive.

Brilliant!!!

But the SSD delays have gotten a bit too long for me to ignore, it needed trimming. So after three hours of burning boot disks, rebooting, changing things in the bios, swapping around SATA plugs, and general hair pulling I'm happy to announce my success! Firmware version 2030 is now installed, and I'm off and running reinstalling my operating systems.

For good measure I updated my motherboard BIOS, and increased the overclock on the processor as well. Fun times!

E-reader

In the past few days I've been thinking about getting an e-reader. I've been trying to read in bed, and I was thinking that an e-reader might be much easier to hold. With a paperback, I spend a bit of effort holding the spine open and twisting back and forth to comfortably see the page. Then again; maybe I've just gotten soft. I remember a time when I used to hold a book over my head for what seemed like hours every night before falling asleep.

Then again I also really like the idea of carrying around thousands of books in a tiny little gadget. We'll see.