BZZT

[caraig]

Today was interesting, insofar as Things Jon's Never Done Before.

I've always had a healthy respect abject fear of electricity. I'm not sure where this comes from, but it's always been something I've been wary of. Maybe part of it comes from the electrical safety videos they showed us in college, maybe it's growing up in the Vacuum Tube Age, maybe it's that you can DIE from brushing up against a naked CRT assembly, maybe it's something else altogether. Put in this light, even simple car batteries make me nervous. (Thankfully, I'm not terrified about consumer electronics batteries.)

So today I had to replace the battery in my parents' car prior to it being sold. And all the time all I (mis) heard was 'ZZT... ZZT... ZZAP!... ZZT....'

Every electrical safety tip was vying for attention in my mind. Don't let yourself be grounded, don't get in the way of the electrical flow, don't let yourself touch any terminal without insulation, so on and so forth. Well, despite seeing sparks when I connected the ground terminal, the only excitement was when I discovered I'd left the lights on from my initial test a few days ago. That had been when I realized that a year-old battery that hadn't been charged or run in all that time had more than likely gone bad.

Beyond that, nothing else. I had considered going to see DaVinci Code but my lack of enthusiasm at the prospect kept me home. Oh, well. I'll wait to see A Scanner Darkly. Now that looks pretty good!

Pax.

Comments

[rantmaster.livejournal.com]

A Scanner Darkly was very confusing to me, on seeing the Trailer...I needed to go to IMDB.com to get any idea what it was about. :P

It certainly 'looks' interesting, the way they're doing this odd...animation? What would that process be called, anyway?

[caraig.livejournal.com]

It's a type of rotoscoping: they film the movie live-action, and then have animators paint in the individual frames. It was pretty famous as done by Ralph Bakshi in Wizards, the original Lord of the Rings, and one other swords-and-loincloth fantasy movie, I forget what it was called. Scanner Darkly seems to be using computers to do it in this case.

[ahicks.livejournal.com]

They also did some rotoscoping in 'Heavy Metal' - the bit with the WWII bombers.

[buran.livejournal.com]

I liked DaVinci Code. Long, though.

I accidentally touched a wire to both terminals of my car's battery a month or two ago. Lots of sparks!

[caraig.livejournal.com]

There were a few sparkies when I put the ground terminal into the battery. (The positive terminal was already in.) But fortunately that was it!