Our Dumb Mistakes

[Amgine]

... As a teenager, while hunting deer with my younger step-brother Bobby, I witnessed him urinating on an electric cattle fence...
After the convulsions went away, and the screaming subsided, and I quit laughing enough to check, he seemed to be OK...

Does he have any children?

I know of an entire fraternity which is reproductively challenged as a result of an initiation involving pissing on a running lawnmower.

Our best and brightest, our college educated.

[infromthepound]

In the early days of USB the connecting cables were individual instead of one block and not that well marked. (Stupid idea, some still are).
It was not that obvious how to do it on one motherboard and I connected power and ground the wrong way round.
Smoke, and I needed another motherboard.
JB

[prehistoric]

[...An electric mower?
Or was it blade-related?

Just in case you are serious, it was a gasoline burning mower. The problem was the spark plug.

I also have a story about an extremely embarrassing incident which happened to a guy in the army. I got it from the man in the next hospital bed. He was out on an artillery range at Ft. Sill when he pulled the pissing on an electric fence stunt. (They didn't keep cattle there, but they did have buffalo. Maybe these require stronger shocks.)

He was alone at the time. This meant he had to get in the jeep with his pants unzipped, and drive himself to the hospital. By the time he got there swelling meant he was in no condition to either walk or cover himself. He drove up to the emergency room entrance and leaned on the horn. Then he had to explain why he was there before they called for MPs.

Something that happened in the confusion of the accident required stitches. This meant he had to avoid erections for a week or two. He was given a can of Freon to cool things off. One problem developed when nurses from other floors came to visit my friend in the next bed. (He was popular with the ladies.) To be polite, they tried to pay a little attention to the man in the other bed, who really didn't want to explain his problem. He had to ask them to leave without giving much explanation in order to use the Freon.

[Dewbie]

prehistoric wrote:

Just in case you are serious, it was a gasoline burning mower. The problem was the spark plug.

I also have a story about an extremely embarrassing incident which happened to a guy in the army...he pulled the pissing on an electric fence stunt.

I believe the clinical term (in both cases) is Erectrocution.

[Karl Godt]

When logged in as root on my Pentium 100 running Basic Linux, I tried to erase a directory using the rm command and wiped the whole drive instead. I make full backups to USB drive and DVD now (I didn't then).

Did such similar with one Xubuntu full installation . Must say i don't miss it .

[Ibidem]

As a teenager, while hunting deer with my younger step-brother Bobby, I witnessed him urinating on an electric cattle fence...
After the convulsions went away, and the screaming subsided, and I quit laughing enough to check, he seemed to be OK...

A saying I heard from my first college ag teacher:

"There are three kinds of people in the world:
Those who learn by reading,
Those who learn by seeing,
And those who just have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."

A little thing he mentioned: the wrong way to test an electric fence for current is with the inside of your fingers. Besides the shock itself, sometimes the current makes your hand curl closed around the wire. A trick that's sometimes helpful is to hold a blade of grass near and listen--if your ears are good enough! If you must use your hand, use the back.

Also, it's annoying to have a mower that won't turn off when you release the handle: there's a small jolt when you disconnect the spark plug to stop it.

But my biggest oops was the time I drove through a "puddle", on the downhill side. I thought it looked reasonable to cross, as I always had managed to do so previously--until my car stopped 1/3 of the way across. Wading across a hundred feet of knee deep puddle is not fun; less so when it's in pouring rain an hour before finals...
(Nothing like a jumpstart and starter fluid in the air intake to get it started again!)

[akash_rawal]

I felt really helpless when I committed the mistake of mounting all drives in /tmp, forgetting to unmount them and shutting down the system.

I was wondering, why was puppy taking so much time to shut down

Next boot discovered that none of the linuxes were bootable.

Had to buy a new CD to run puppy and discovered that all my linux partitions were empty.

From that day I never mount anything under /tmp.

[Flash]

Why did mounting the partitions under /tmp cause them to disappear when you shut the computer down? If you'd simply unplugged the computer, rather than shutting it down in software, do you think the same thing would have happened?

[akash_rawal]

Why did mounting the partitions under /tmp cause them to disappear when you shut the computer down? If you'd simply unplugged the computer, rather than shutting it down in software, do you think the same thing would have happened?

I think all files in /tmp are deleted one by one while shutting down.

Strangely only linux partitions were emptied, my data on ntfs partitions were intact so I was able to recover the system.

In this case it seemed safer to cut off power supply than shutting down the computer.

[rcrsn51]

I think all files in /tmp are deleted one by one while shutting down.

I once made the same mistake by mounting a digital camera's memory on /tmp, then shutting down Puppy while the camera was still turned on.

I couldn't figure out why all my pictures were disappearing.

[Sylvander]

If you try to copy [e.g. something huge?] to a "partition_file_system that is NOT mounted....
The Puppy will copy instead to /tmp...
And during the session, at the next auto-save [or manual save]...
The pupsave file will now hold/store that "thing" [in the latest version of /tmp]...
And so the available space in the "personal storage" will begin to diminish...
Until things return to normal at reboot->[because the contents of /tmp have been deleted].

[Galbi]

Just to avoid situations like Prehistoric had I prefer to ask 'silly' question to confirm I understood right. But people (bah, mostly my wife) complains for asking nonsense.
Even I feel like an idiot, it's better to spent ten seconds in a stupid question than hours of work (or worse, money).

[Ted Dog]

:...my younger step-brother Bobby, I witnessed him urinating on an electric cattle fence...
After the convulsions went away, and the screaming subsided, and I quit laughing enough to check, he seemed to be OK...

He He, Joined 4H as a city kid just to be near the 'cowgirl of my dreams' Part of the introduction hazing was peeing on the electric fence, I fail for it. Was complaining to my Dad (former farm kid) about my issue with mean farm boys, he was laughing so hard on my lack of knowledge before I could finish my story, he left the road a few times.
Well my dream cowgirl was not used to wearing a dress and forgot about that as she crawled over the backseat, that irritated my mom her 'being unlady like' on our way to the school dance.

[linuxbear]

:.. electric cattle fence...

A long time ago I was riding my bicycle home on a wet path in the Bavarian alps. I was going too fast and did not make a curve. Bike went down and I went into the electric fence!

....Moral of the story? too many beers and bicycles do not mix!

[SFR]

I'd like to join the club with excellent and brilliant:

Code: Select all

a=''; rm -rf $a/*

"Hmm, let's see how 'rm' will interpret this" - I was thinking.
"I have frugal install, PUPMODE=13, nothing bad can happen anyways."

I just forgot about couple of things: /initrd and /mnt

Fortunately, thanks to quick CTRL+C and my "backup-mania", damages are minimal (well I hope, but only time will tell for sure), no medical assistance was needed this time.

Greetings!

[starhawk]

Just curious: what does that nifty command do, exactly?

(Og no code good!)

[bark_bark_bark]

when i was 4/5, I rode my scooter down a hill really fast. When I tried to stop I slammed my face in to the side of parked pick-up truck. My face had been badly scraped and it was bleeding.

I also when I was 5, fell down the stairs and broke my colarbone.

At that time I never payed attention to where I was going, and I was very clumsy.

[SFR]

Just curious: what does that nifty command do, exactly?

(Og no code good!)

Deletes EVERYTHING.

EDIT:
Basically, if the "a" variable wasn't null, but e.g.:

Code: Select all

a=/tmp; rm -rf $a/*

only /tmp would suffer.
However the idea itself to mix 'rm -rf' with '/*' is the height of folly...
...that's why I'm here.

BTW: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... 0-rf%20%2F

Greetings!

[linuxbear]

What's wrong with "rm"? rm -rf /windows is goodness

[Karl Godt]

Another one :

Code: Select all

cp /mnt/whatever /dev/whatever

is like dd ing to /dev/whatever

I once accidentially rm -rf a Xubuntu partition .
Considering that not as a mistake ..