Random Anecdotes

“I once knew a girl who dated twelve guys at once.”
“D’oh! Did she?”

…get it… 12 :laughing: I made that one up myself.

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:laughing:

:rofl:

:smile:

:smiley:

:grinning:

:slightly_smiling_face:

:neutral_face:

:sweat:

:disappointed_relieved:

I didn’t get it! :sob:

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“Twelve” in Italian :sweat_smile:

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Aaaaaaaah! That’s nice! Eheheh :clap:

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You made me curious and I checked on reddit. (Sorry Milan I promise this is the last one, even if this is interesting as a way of laughing about stereotypes… there was another one even funnier, but not suitable for children…)

The 3 Spies

There are 3 Spies that get captured. One spy is French, one is German and the other is Italian. Their captors come into the cell and grab the French spy and tie his hands behind a chair in the next room. They torture him for 2 hours before he answers all questions and gives up all of his secrets. The captors throw the French spy back into the cell and grab the German spy. They tie his hands behind the chair as well and torture him for 4 hours before he tells them what they want to know. They throw him back into the cell and grab the Italian spy. They tie his hands behind the chair and begin torturing. 4 hours go by and the spy isn’t talking. Then 8 hours, then 16 and after 24 hours they give up and throw him back into the cell. The German and French spy are impressed and ask him how he managed to not talk. The Italian spy responds, " I wanted to!, but I couldn’t move my hands!".

EDIT: Glad everyone likes this joke. I want to give credit to a great friend of mine named Ron* who told it to me.

*I guess he’s not the one we all know…

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No Game of Thrones for the young’uns!

Other than that, I’d be proud of a daughter like yours (or any other, too :slight_smile:).

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Well, I am :smiley: so, to get back in topic, here’s a new anecdote.

:open_book: Shaving is good for your heir

Ah, the joys of going bald. You can always shave yourself and, if you’re lucky enough, you can always say you do it because it’s more comfortable, sexier, whatever rows your boat.

And, if you have a small child, freshly shaven hairs are very entertaining. You’re smooth if caressed in a direction, itchy in the other one. Pretty cool, eh?

So, my daughter was lying on the changing table, flailing her arms around like the six month baby she was, and I took her hands and began to caress my beard and hair with them. She laughed, so I kept on, face down on her belly, passing her hands on my head to make her laugh. That was fun for a good minute.

As I stopped and raised my head, I saw her. HER FACE WAS ALMOST BURIED IN MY DANDRUFF.

She didn’t seem to mind, luckily :joy:

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Nice title! :slightly_smiling_face:

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She probably thought her dad was magical and could conjure snow!
:snowman_with_snow:
:wink:

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My daughter was the other way around…
It was a hot summer day and I was walking around in shorts and bare chest. She needed to be changed so I laid her down on the changing table, took of the dirty diaper, threw it away while holding her tummy with the other hand so she wouldn’t roll off. I reappear in her line of sight, which makes her giggle, so I smile back at her and say something nice and that’s the moment she decided to projectile-spray crap on me.

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:open_book: The bloody night stand

January 2018. We officially left Zurich, it’s our first night in Lugano. However, as the furniture in our new apartment wasn’t ready, we booked a night in a nearby hotel.

My daughter (yep, most of my anecdotes come from them) sleeps like… well, have you ever seen that video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge swinging around? Let’s say it moved less than what my daughter is used to at night.

So we were quite worried, because on a new bed, without any anti fall bed guards to protect her, we feared she could fall down. So we put some chairs and pillows all around her hoping it would work.

The next morning I wake up quite early and out of curiosity I go to check if everything’s fine in the daughters’ room. I notice some stains on the pillow, so I turn on the light. There’s blood everywhere. Sprays of blood on the pillow, on the bed, around my daughter’s head (who is laying face down) and on the night stand. I turn my daughter around, and she has blood on her face and a big bloody mark on the forehead, 2cm long and almost half a cm wide.

“Oh no”, I think, “she hit her head on the night stand’s edge and wounded herself”. I panicked, called my wife, didn’t know what to do.

Well, it turned out that the mark wasn’t a wound. It was a booger. She had picked her nose while sleeping, slightly wounded herself and bled out of her nose. Her fingers were bloody too, and she probably touched the night stand.

I took a pic of the whole setup (I’ll post it as soon as I find it) and sent it to my mother-in-law, because she’s an anxious person and I love to scare her :stuck_out_tongue:

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:open_book: Lucky Slide

I inherited the passion for photography from my parents. They took a lot of pictures. Half of them were in black and white. I have fond memories of my childhood when we developed and printed our pictures, turning our bathroom into a dark room.
The other half were color slides. We spent so many family evenings in front of our projection screen…
We had hundreds of slide magazines in our storage room. One of my dreams, since the late nineties, was to save all those slides from the insults of time, managing to digitize them.
I hoped that, sooner or later, a good technology would have been affordable enough to proceed.
A good scanner with enough resolution was common and relatively cheap yet, but due to the huge amount of slides, I needed something better. I needed a professional scanner for slide magazines, in order to scan 50 or 100 pictures in one shot. I had about 10,000 slides, spanning from 1977 to 2006, which meant 200+ magazines.
In the early 2000’s I put my eyes on the Reflecta DigitDia 3600. It was insanely expensive, but it was exectly what I needed. It was a modified slide projector: a magazine loader, a lamp, but with a scanner instead of the projecting lens. The resolution was still low for my needs, though.
In 2006, the DigitDia 5000 came out. It was still expensive, about EUR 2500.
But I had a plan… I thought that most of the people bought this device to scan their collection, then they would have sold it. So my plan was to look for an used scanner on eBay, scan my slides, then resell it at the same price I bought it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any used scanner. I browsed eBay for months.
No way.
In the meantime, the prices for the new item were slowly decreasing… EUR 2400… EUR 2000… EUR 1600…
At a certain point, I started to think it was the right moment. I was afraid that the demand of these devices would have decreased, and so the prices would raise again.
The new model, called DigitDia 6000, came out. The online shop I was lurking on made discounts for the old model, so it was the right time*.
I also discovered a great thing: that shop had a covering insurance. For a bunch of euros, you could buy an insurance that had these conditions:

50% of refund if you give the item back within 1 year
25% of refund if you give the item back within 2 years
100% of refund (or item change) if the item broke within 2 years

I couldn’t believe at my eyes. The DigitDia 5000 was on sale at about EUR 1000.
My plan was to scan all my magazines within 1 year, and then give the scanner back and get EUR 500 refund. It was still a very expensive operation, but the only alternative was to let my childhood pictures be lost forever.
(well actually it wasn’t the only choice: I could have sent my slides to a lab and pay to have the job done, but -curiously- I never thought of this option).

I bought the machine.
I decided to load one magazine into the scanner every evening and letting the process run by night (it took several hours to scan an entire magazine).

I scanned only 4 or 5 magazines, when the scanner broke.
The sale of the 5000 was over, but I had my insurance and asked for an item change. So the e-shop had to send me a new model, the DigitDia 6000, for no charge.
It was fantastic, even better!
I scanned all my 200 magazines in 200 nights.

On the 200th morning, I woke up in a good mood. My very long work was over!

I went into the room in which I kept the scanner, to discover it was stuck on one of the first slides, and the process wasn’t completed. I was very angry, since this machine jammed quite often. So this discovery wasn’t something new. The thing that was new was, this time, that the scanner didn’t work anymore. It was totally blocked, refusing to communicate with my PC. So I manually scanned the last 50 slides with my old A4 scanner (which had a slide tray capable of scanning 4 slides at a time), and I sent the DigitDia back, getting so a 100% refund.

So I actually had all my huge collection of slides scanned for free!

(*)

*I was right to think this. I’ve checked today: they stopped the development of these devices. Today, the DigitDia 6000 is still the last model, it has the same jamming issues (according to the reviews) and it is still quite expensive.

https://www.amazon.it/Reflecta-65660-Digitdia-6000-Scanner/dp/B005LOJ1KA/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1532795298&sr=8-5&keywords=reflecta

I know this is a long message, but I think the spirit of this thread is to tell a nice story, and not to give quick informations

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Wow, that’s some dedication! :smiley:
And what perfect timing at the end of it all!

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I’m surprised there was so much breakage in a device that’s clearly intended to be used a lot.

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Yes, indeed. The serious breakage at the end is actually a concern if you’re buying an used scanner. The reviews in the link I posted are in italian, but somebody mentions them, too.
In my case, that occurrence simply turned out to be a lucky strike.

The jamming issues are really bothering, and well known among Reflecta customers. Here some technical details:

Summary

As you can see here:
http://www.jostark.de/Files/DigitDia_FAQ.pdf
and here:
Slide scanning equipment: what to buy? | Lightroom Queen Forums

the jamming issue is a known problem.
The reflecta scanners use the same chassis and achitecture of the Reflecta projectors. They were, in my memory, the first projectors which were compatible with different kind of magazines.
You could use a round magazine like this or a standard magazine like this.

Actually the Reflecta machines gave the best results with their proprietary format trays, the Paximat Magazines:

https://www.scandig.com/media/images/braun_paximat_36s_02.jpg

These were arguably the best magazines ever made. Very compact, they held 50 slides (like the universal ones) with half of the lenght; the slides were very stable inside the tray, they had a nice plastic cover for transoport, and, most of all, the projector (or the scanner) NEVER jammed.

Unluckily, ALL the slides from the 60es till the 90es of the families of all the world were stored in universal magazines.
So, to be sure to avoid any jamming problem, I should have put all my 10,000 slides in Paximat magazines. Manually, one by one. What a pain! I definitely preferred to cope with the jammings.
The universal magazines are veri stupid. They are big (so my collection took a lot of space), and once you take them out of the box they are really unstable. The slides move inside them, and a common accident was, during a projection session with friends, to drop all the 50 slides of the magazine because of a single awkward movement during the tray change.
Ok, game over, lights on, let’s pick up the slides, take off the dust, get mad about sorting the slides again. Not to mention that the slides were not like floppy disks or VHS tapes, which had only one introduction possibility! The slides were square. and had two sides. So you had 4+4=8 different possibilities to put them into the magazine, and only one was the right choice.
The Paximat standard was the best one, but nobody used it. And it was expensive (a paximat tray was 5 to 10 times more expensive than a universal one).

I had 2 round 100 slides magazines, 1 50 slides paximat magazine, and 200+ 50 slides universal magazines.

I kept some slides unmounted in magazines. So, since I had to load them in magazines for the scanning, I loaded them in the paximat or in the round magazines, since I discovered that in the paximat I had 0% jamming, while in the round ones the occurrence was acceptably rare.

But for all the other slides (95% of the total) I decided to leave them in their trays and to cope with the jammings.

There were some tricks… look at this picture:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/slides-slide-magazine-28673962.jpg

You can see clearly how the slides move inside the magazine, as they are not parfctly parallel. It is important to put the scanner/projector slightly tilted, and to “comb” the slides with your hand in order to have them parallel. This reduces the occurrence of the jamming.

I also noticed that the mount is very important:
https://www.gri.it/images/support/2d_diapositive.filigr.jpg

I had a bunch of slides taken by my grandpa in the 60es. They had a mount like the one depicted in d). They are much more solid and thick than the normal plastica mounts of the eighties. I think that the original universal magazines were conceived for this kind of mounts. The slides were perfectly contained and stable. And no jammings! So the issue of jamming, which ANY projector had in the 70es, 80es, 90es was due to a bad design change of the mounts!
In the 70es, often the slides had paper mounts like in c). These mounts were awful. ALWAYS, I say always jamming. Luckily I had only a few magazines loaded with these kind of mounts.
The 90% of my slides were in thin plastic mounts from the 80es-90es like in e) and f).
I think the Paximat magazines were conceived to be used with these mounts to overcome the problem of jamming.

Anyway…
I’m very happy I’ve done this job. I’ve made a fantastic present for my parents and siblings. And my slide collection is finally easily usable, and preserved.
Coping with the jamming has been an issue, but I made it.
Sooner or later I will start to scan the other half… 10,000 shots which come in prints or in negative film.
The problem with prints is that you can scan max 4 of them at once with an A4 scanner.
For the films, I’ll have to buy a film scanner. The problem is that films were cut in small chunks of 5 frames each, so I can’t automate the process.

Well, let’s see. maybe one day.

News about the Limoncello Affair… we’re in our chalet for holydays… and tonight we’re enjoying a limoncello made by my father with his own lemons he grows in his garden…

here it is:

His friend came and decided it was time for a contest with his famous limoncello (the same of the anecdote of 3 years ago).
Here’s the contest:


(I blurred the label of the commercial one).
Well, he had to reluctantly aknowledge that my father’s was better.
:smile:

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:open_book: The neighbourhood cat

My father and his wife has always had at least one cat. Some years ago they had a cat called “Nico”. He was very wild, always roaming. He oftend spent many nights away from home.
They were afraid, so they decided to make a collar with their mobile phone number, just in case.
Often people called them “your cat is wandering here, here, and here” (all places very far from home)
or “your cat is sleeping in the engine compartment of my motorhome, I have to leave and I don’t know what to do” or even “your cat scared to death my rabbit, she’s got a PTSD as stated by my vet, you have to pay me his fee” (true story, eventually the home insurance of my father’s wife covered the vet expenses…).
Anyway, one day this cat had been run over by a car.
They buried him.
Some days after the event, they noticed this sign attached to a light pole:


(it says: “goodbye little friend. niko, you’ll be always in our hearts”)

In the next days, they started to receive a lot of sms by strangers… some just made condolences, some were angry with the driver of the car, one offered a contribution “for the cremation of the cat”, one wrote a long and moving message writing that their cat had been “very sympathetic with them in a very difficult moment of their lives”…
So actually they discovered, after his death, that their cat had a parallel life in which he had many human friends unknown to them.
Then somebody opened a Facebook page for the cat (my father and his wife don’t have facebook at all) and made a petition of protest for the accident and for cars speeding in that road… until a national newspaper, on the local section, published an article about these facts:

(the title says: “Neighbourhood cat ran over by a car: the rage of the residents”)

Every year, in the annivcersary of the death, new signs on the poles appear…

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That is like the most normal thing for cats that are allowed to leave the house, though.

Yes, I suppose. And I suppose it is normal he also had some enemies. The rabbit PTSD part is my favourite, though. I think that’s not so “normal”…:sweat_smile:

Awwww :blush: That’s a lovely anecdote!
It’s amazing how he came to be appreciated by so many people.

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