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Wednesday, June 27th
Intervention


A new phenomena is sweeping the criminal scene.
YouTube also. [One guess as to how I found out about it...]

The trick is called "key-bumping", and it's cheap as hell:



As someone who devoted a lot of time to learning to pick locks the "real way", this kinda hacks me off. All you do is saw down the "valleys" of a key all the way, place it in the lock except for one notch, apply pressure, and snap it with a hammer. [The principal is explained visually, somewhat, here] That's it!

How can this work?! I think I know. When you snap the hammer, the key goes in the final notch, meaning all the little peaks push up all the pins well above the [sheer line]. When each of the pins then falls into the full-sized valley that follows the peak, the pressure applied allows the lower half of the pin to fall, and the upper half to catch as a result of the applied torque on the key.

I know this is probably just sounding all jibberish, but what I'm getting at is how incredibly cheap this is. The actual technique is called "scrubbing" [details here]. It's the cornerstone of advanced lockpicking, and some idiot has now bastardized it, much to the apparent delight of the YouTube community.

BAH. I'm going to look into possibly making one of these, to test the doors in my house. If it works as well as these people claim, it could be very useful. I'm thinking not so much for home-invasion purposes, but for getting people into dorm rooms. It might be kinda cool to be that guy. (Sorry that was so technical... I kinda spent my night researching it on the ol' YouTube and just got progressively more irate...)

In much happier news, I think I saved a baby bird the day before yesterday!
I was driving to Lizz's, and I saw something flapping around in the middle of the road. This always depresses me way-big-time, because I think it could be injured-past-the-point-of-no-return, and I have this terrible moral dilemma whether to automotively-euthanize it or just leave it. Which is incredibly morbid, but I worry that maybe it'll die all slow an painful and scared in the road...

Case in point, I think way too much.
This time, it just got to me though. Right or wrong, I was going to do something. So I pulled over, turned around, and parked on the nearest side street. I approached the little guy and saw that he was just gimpy not because he was hurt, but on account of the fact that he was a little baby bird. The parental birds occasionally swooping down in its general direction seemed to confirm this suspicion.

I ran up to him, but he just kinda sat there, like, "What?"
There was a car coming. I panicked. I didn't know what to do!!
So I kinda scootched him over into the middle of the lane with my foot. That way oncoming car's middle-section would hopefully go over him, as opposed to the wheels going over him. I then preceded to hop out of the road, not wanting to get smashed myself.

He made it! I then wondered what to do next. I was just gonna grab him, and carry him to safety, and take whatever bird-disease I incurred as a result of the contact and bear it with pride... but I second guessed myself. I thought maybe the person-smell would cause him to be ostracized (this is only with eggs though, Lizz told me), or maybe he'd hurt himself in the struggle.

I ended up just making noise and yelling at it, scaring it across the road, and finally up onto the curb, and then eventually the sidewalk. It was embarrassing as hell, but I felt so much better about the entire ordeal...

Just a note to the bird-classification of animals as a whole:
When it comes time to push the babies out and have them fend for themselves, HOW ABOUT WE NOT PUSH THEM INTO THE ROAD?! Come on... unless you're training them to be some type of ninja-bird (admittedly, this would be cool) they don't stand a chance. Cut the poor kids some slack. Puberty and near-death-experience wrapped up into one?! That just isn't fair.

I'm leaving for the wet and not-so-wild Pacific Northwest on Thursday, and I will be there a week following. Perhaps I will blog from there, inbetween doing nothing outside in the rain, and doing nothing inside, watching the rain. It could happen.

Hope summers are going well.
I gave my lecture speech about lightsabers of all things, so I can't really complain.
Though there are some nagging projects that need doing:

  • New Lightsaber
  • Possible Short-Movie with Sean
  • Possible Graphic-Novel Progress with Thomas
  • Student Senate's Webpage
  • Improvements to Schrodinger
  • ...unpacking the remaining boxes of crap I brought back from school...



As was observed by Tom
on June 27th, 2007 at 01:20 AM



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