I'm so stupid... Was: Head Cleaners

Well, let's see. ---- There was the time I was working on mains wiring (helping my parents with their house) and we had something - an outlet box, I think - to work on. We wanted to flip the breaker for that circuit before working on it, but for some reason we weren't sure which circuit it was on. I said something like "well, let's find out", stuck a screwdriver in the corner of the box (metal boxes, properly grounded) and leaned it over to touch the hot wire. It worked, in that it flipped the correct breaker. But I was idiot enough to be looking right at it as I did this. When I could see again, I found that the screwdriver had a semicircular piece chewed out of its shaft, about halfway through, and the room smelled of vapourized metal - steel and copper, presumably. I've never taken that drastic an approach to flipping a breaker since, and don't expect to unless something fairly precious is at stake (say, someone is being electrocuted, that's about the level of severity that could lead me to crowbar a mains circuit). As far as I know, the screwdriver is still in service. (It was last time I had occasion to work around that house, which was years ago.) ---- Then there was the time I was trying to debug a problem with a packet-filtering firewall. The packets just weren't getting through. I stared at the rules, my boss (himself a sharp geek) stared at the rules, one of the owners stared at the rules (the company is owned by two people, the founders - a geek and a businessman), the person who did most of the firewall stuff stared at the rules, and then someone else, who didn't do diddly with firewalls in general, said something like "um, aren't *those* supposed to be over *here*?". Sure enough, the rules were (liberally paraphrased) pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT1 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT2 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT3 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT4 pass from INTERNAL to EXTERNAL port PORT1 pass from INTERNAL to EXTERNAL port PORT2 pass from INTERNAL to EXTERNAL port PORT3 pass from INTERNAL to EXTERNAL port PORT4 and needed to be pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT1 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT2 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT3 pass from EXTERNAL to INTERNAL port PORT4 pass from INTERNAL port PORT1 to EXTERNAL pass from INTERNAL port PORT2 to EXTERNAL pass from INTERNAL port PORT3 to EXTERNAL pass from INTERNAL port PORT4 to EXTERNAL I've rarely had that duh! a moment. (At least I had some company.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B