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Hooligan Moment #323: The Flaming Buttbuca

Over on Slashdot there’s a post about some guys testing the effects of filtering cheap vodka.

A comment on the Slashdot posting reminded me of the ‘Flaming Sambuca’s’ that were consumed on a houseboating trip one year. The Flaming Sambuca was a simple trick. Pour some Sambuca into a shot glass and light it on fire. After a second or so put your hand on the glass. The oxygen will be burned up by the flame, and the glass gets stuck to your hand by the vacuum. Then remove the glass and suck the vapours out, then down the shot.

One of my friends, in a fit of drunken creativity, created a variant of the trick where instead of using his hand, he stuck the drink to his butt. Thus was born the “Butt-buca”! Being drunk, there was much amusement in this and the round red hickeys left on their butts.

Later, after a post-houseboating house party, he was showing off the Buttbuca. This time, the trick went tragically wrong (for him). He left it on too long, the shot glass got stuck and he couldn’t get it off. All of us were rolling on the ground in pain because we were laughing so hard at him running around yelling “It’s stuck! It’s stuck! Get it off!”

Of course none of us wanted to get close enough to his ass to help him remove the shot glass. When he did finally get it off, there was this massively red hickey that left a mark for weeks.

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Patent insanity

Adding to the patent insanity, apparently now programming language operators are fair game for patenting. Seems a patent has been applied for the IsNOt operator in BASIC.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to different locations in memory, that is, the reverse of the existing “Is” operator in a BASIC programming language or a derivative of BASIC or BASIC-like programming language. In one embodiment of the invention, the memory locations represent objects. The new operator enables a user to determine if the left operand (e.g., a reference type) “is not” the same instance as the reference type listed as the right operand. The use of a single operand for this concept may increase the readability of the programming language.

Found at Slashdot.

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Forms with PHP

Over at ONLamp.com there’s a very good article with a number of good tips for handling forms with PHP.

Tip 7 looks like a pretty good one which I think I’ll use when I start redesigning some of my web database projects. I’ll have to check out this HTML_Quickform thing too.

PHP Form Handling by David Sklar — If your PHP program is a dynamic web page (and it probably is) and your PHP program is dealing with user input (and it probably is), then you need to work with HTML forms. David Sklar, author of Learning PHP 5, offers tips for simplifying, securing, and organizing your form-handling PHP code.

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You know you’re a geek when…

You know you’re a nuclear medicine geek when you look at the tail lights of one of the newer Honda Civic Coupes and see horizontal long axis slices from a cardiac scan.

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Going filmless, the final stage

This week we’re making the final long awaited steps toward going completely filmless in our department. Installation of a CD/DVD burning system to put patient images onto CD/DVD instead of handing patients a stack of films is expected to save the department a ton of money in film supplies and printing costs. It’s something we’ve been able to do before on a limited basis, but it’s always been very labour intensive. The new system is pretty much completely automated and so far is being very well received.
The other step is the conversion to digital in one of the last bastions of film: mammography. Last week we had the first of 4 digital mammography units installed, replacing one of our conventional film/screen units. This week applications training started. From what I’ve heard from the residents, images are great and far superior to regular film/screen. A few snafus with printing and workstation workflow, but probably nothing that won’t be solved with a little bit of training and tweaking. By the end of the year, our mammography department will be completely digital and we’ll finally be almost completely filmless after almost a decade of digital imaging.