Cannabis Report Survey Responses photo 344058 740 0 right The Cannabis Report logo photo I was recently sent a candidate survey from the a href http txcann com Texas Cannabis Report a I will post a direct link to the survey whenever it goes live on their site but in the meantime wanted to ensure people had full access to my positions u strong Do you support any of the following Please explain your specific stance on the issue strong u strong Hemp legalization strong Yes I absolutely support the legalization of hemp I do not support placing any unique taxes or restrictions on the growing or selling of hemp hemp products or hemp related industries strong Marijuana penalty reduction strong Yes I fully support marijuana penalty reduction I do not believe there should be any penalties for growing possessing using selling or distributing marijuana to adults strong Medical marijuana strong Yes I support medical marijuana It is an absolute travesty that any government would attempt to impose restrictions on a substance that has been medically proven time and again to treat myriad of problems without any significant side effects Medical marijuana at an absolute minimum should be legalized in the State of Texas immediately strong Affirmative medical defense in court for marijuana patients strong Yes I support affirmative medical defenses I do not support placing any penalties on marijuana and thus this becomes a moot point However and speaking within the law states that allow medical marijuana should not be able to pursue charges of any kind against medical marijuana users regardless of whether the individual can produce state issued identification cards or not The right to treat oneself should never be infringed upon strong Marijuana legalization strong Yes I completely support marijuana legalization While I do not believe that any restrictions or taxes should be placed upon the adult use of this plant I would be willing to accept the recent Colorado legislation as a step in the right direction strong Releasing non violent marijuana offenders from prison strong Yes I have stated this position time and again and spoke extensively about it at Texas NORML People should not be in cages for non violent drug offense ever period Furthermore all people who have been convicted of non violent drug offenses should be immediately removed from prison I would further add that such people should be restituted by the state for unjust and inhumane imprisonment strong Growing marijuana at home whether medically or recreationally strong Yes I support the right to grow marijuana at home for any purpose desired be it medical or recreational Much like my position on the legalization of marijuana I do not believe that any restrictions should be placed on growing marijuana at home That stated I would be willing to accept the recent Colorado legislation as a step in the right direction this legislation sets a limit to the quantity of plants that can be grown at any one time

About openFace photo 36005 740 200 right The first openFace logo photo Welcome to openFace strong online archiving software strong It s been over three years since I decided to embark upon my own personal content management system CMS specifically for powering my personal archival space on the internet a href http www kevinludlow com www kevinludlow com a My first version of such a strong software package was designed under the guidelines that database designs were not only unnecessary strong but also that they provided gaping security problems to the average user As a result my first CMS which incidentally has powered a href http www kevinludlow com www kevinludlow com a for the past several years was designed such that the administrator could use databases for support but that the resulting website would be built and hence all pages would actually be static Given the system was driven by pluggable modules it was titled staticMOD Though the staticMOD system worked well it became more and more clear that in order for a CMS to be truly dynamic it could not rely upon the administrator to build new database remarks into the static pages After coming to that sad realization strong I discontinued building the finer features of staticMOD strong strong In the summer of 2006 I began working on new concepts for how a true personal archival package should be built strong and specifically how it should differ from the typical content management system The system should avoid more technical features commonly used for allowing administrators to set up slashDot style websites and should rather focus on the aspects truly desired by users photo support video support personal blog contact capabilities and etc Additionally that all aspects of text should be taggable in a wiki like style thus allowing visitors to truly learn about the website owner s world After over a year of here and there planning strong the first bits of code were written on the 19th of July 2007 strong From then on the software package has slowly been transformed into the vision I have had for it all along Some of the more interesting features in my opinion deal specifically with how entities are em tagged em throughout the strong openFace strong system For example say you are looking at a scanned photo over 80 years old of relatives perhaps your grandparents strong openFace strong has the unique ability to not only let you discern who is who in the picture it will also tell you roughly or in most cases exactly how old the individuals are in the photo Additionally you have the ability to click on the individual and read more about them and how they pertain to my life The same profile display will link you to various stories about the individual any video footage I may have of them some personal information and of course will allow you to view all images with said individuals As far as the look of strong openFace strong goes it may strike you that the website has a remarkably similar look and feel to Facebook Though I suppose it is safe to say this is no coincidence no portion of Facebook was used to design this website Additionally no codebases external or otherwise were in any way borrowed from Facebook I simply feel that of the social networking sites available online Facebook is the only one that has done it right as far as a clean interface goes My imitation of that cleanliness is nothing shy of flattery to the web layout team over at Facebook To expand on the previous statements all code was written from the ground up in Linux shells using nothing more than VIM The codebase is primarily written in PHP though it also relies heavily upon JavaScript CSS and of course HTML To date the entire codebase including comments is in excess of 16 000 lines The entire API is also documented with the help of Doxygen Though there are still many features and functions on the way some of which are even discussed in the former paragraphs I hope you ll enjoy the first new version of my span style text decoration line through content management system span personal archival system strong openFace strong

Yet Another List albeit this one is only 19 entries I m told it is to remain anonymous 1 He has a great head of hair that is probably healthier than yours 2 He knows how to plan a great date down to timing the music There s a reason the song ended when you got out of the car 3 He s cuckoo for math He once etched the Fibonacci Sequence into a cabinet he made 4 Kevin is a problem solver 5 He has a healthy dose of arrogance 6 He has the ability to bullshit about anything and make you think he s smarter than he is 7 He has all the right equipment and knows how to use it to your advantage 8 He s very romantic poems rose petal baths etc and loves surprises 9 He likes launching rockets I m sure you can view many of his rocket launches on his website www kevinludlow com 10 He blows his nose A LOT 11 He s furry 12 He rode around on a baby blue Vespa in college 13 He and a friend who will remain nameless once took turns shooting each other with a CO2 powered paintball gun from about 20 ft apart It hurt just to watch 14 Kevin once went late night lobster hunting with a self crafted broomstick spear off the coast of Mexico which is very illegal 15 The word illegal bares no relevance to Kevin 16 He speaks excellent Spanish and will even start to speak English with a Spanish accent around native Spanish speakers 17 He built his own levels in Counterstrike 18 He was an extra in the movie Varsity Blues 19 Kevin is making the term Renaissance Man cool and acceptable again

Howard Ludlow Sr Slide Collection As some of you already know or have possibly noticed popping up on Facebook over the months I have finally taken on the arduous task of digitizing and restoring all of my grandparent s Momma and Poppa old slides In truth I actually started this project a few years ago but was not satisfied with the quality of output that I getting and ultimately shelved the idea A dear friend of mine Mark Holzbach a href http www austinforum org speakers holzbach html http www austinforum org speakers holzbach html a was kind enough to provide me with his Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 and SF 210 Slide Feeder finally making the process both bearable and of exceptional quality I am very pleased with the final result The complete collection is a little more than 6 50 GB The file prefixes were consistent with how my grandfather Poppa had the boxes originally labeled and the slides were all scanned in the order that they appeared in the original carousels There was no post editing done to the scans aside from the built in Nikon VueScan filtering and so some are upside down inverted etc strong About the Slide Set strong In total there were 1 869 slides that were part of the collection The date range of these slides appears to be from about 1973 1988 The locations are vast and span the North Atlantic Canada parts of New York and New Jersey Eastern and Western Europe Scandinavia Russia and Northern Africa namely Egypt and Morocco I would say that most of them take place on various cruises and other water transports though certainly not exclusively It s also worth noting that Poppa was very interested in shooting photos of locations and scenery as opposed to people As it happens he was actually very good at composition in my opinion but the downside is that probably less than 15 of the photos are actually of people or at least people that are recognized by my family strong Digitization and Restoration strong photo 36255 740 0 right Poppa on a boat 7 26 1975 BEFORE infrared processing and and chrome color correction photo photo 36257 740 0 right Poppa on a boat 7 26 1975 AFTER infrared processing and and chrome color correction photo The Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 allowed me to capture very high quality image data I initially intended to scan all of the photos in RAW format but ultimately decided against this calculating that the 500 GB or so of data that would be required would be very difficult to mobilize and would not justify the benefits given the otherwise VERY high quality of scanning Instead I wound up scanning each slide at 4000 DPI and stored them in 100 uncompressed JPEG format The lack of compression makes this more or less equivalent to TIFF data there is no or should not be adjusting of the color pallet The complete dataset wound up being 6 50 GB of JPEG data or about 3 477 MB per photo essentially the same as any high resolution photography these days The scanner also utilizes a technology known as digital ICE which incidentally was invented by a friend of Marks Essentially after each slide was scanned it would be rescanned using an infrared light Unlike traditional white light used for scanning infrared is capable of detecting depth This is used to automatically detect dust and similar particulates as well as scratches on the physical film Once the process finished a proprietary software program I purchased called VueScan compared the infrared layer of data to the color layer and automatically eliminated the granular imperfections The final step was to apply industry standard color corrections to the various types of slide film Kodachrome Ektochrome etc photo 36254 740 0 right London Wellington Arch 4 17 76 BEFORE color correcting photo photo 36256 740 0 right London Wellington Arch 4 17 76 AFTER color correcting photo The blended result of these technologies is a wonderful restoration of the entire photo set Aside from physically improving the slides under a microscope I m not sure they could be restored or preserved any better I should also note that I did not use any sort of cropping on the slides The reason for this is that I occasionally find the algorithms to detect the edges of slides not to be very good I wanted to preserve the entirety of the slides and so you ll note that almost all of them have the slide frame scanned around them If you zoom in and look very closely you ll even see the frayed edges of the film against the slide frames In the few occasional instances where no slide frame is visible these were slides that simply had no lip Also if you are interested in printing any of these photos just open the photo in a graphic editor of your choosing and crop as desired The quality is FAR great enough to produce very nice prints Even 16x20 prints of these slides should print without any pixilation strong Storing strong photo 26043 644 0 right Some of Poppa s original notes photo Several years ago I carefully moved all of the slides from their carousel trays to specialized air tight acrylic slide containers The slides have been placed back into these with all of the notes that Poppa kept on them I will be getting these notes typed up sometime soon The slide containers only hold up to 50 slides each so there are quite a few of them Each of these slide containers was then placed into air tight photo boxes available at craft stores such as Michael s Upon the completion of my company warehouse hopefully to be open in early summer 2012 I will be storing these slide boxes in a fireproof safe in my hidden room There will be some irony should they burn I realize this but that s about as safe as I can think to make them strong Additional Photos strong photo 26079 644 0 right One of the air tight acrylic slide boxes photo I am still hoping to get any remaining family photos slides or the like from old boxes or books in order to have them digitized and add them to my collections I would also like to note to anyone reading this that if you DO have photos in those old sticky magnetic photo books please note that the glues are only accelerating the destruction of the photos You may want to consider removing them from those books as I did for my parents 2 years ago and storing them in proper photo containers until they can be digitally preserved This is especially the case given the pervasiveness of modern scanning technologies and methodologies

The Engine Failure The plan was for a solo XC from AUS gt AQO gt LZZ gt BMQ gt AUS Total time planned was 3 5 hrs including FSTB gassing up and eating lunch I think the flight was about 160nm round robin Preflight was completely normal oil was just a tick below 5qt gas looked fine instruments were okay and the mags checked out The left one dropped just slightly below normal so I leaned out the plane for about a minute per our procedure and rechecked it It tested within the norm the second time I departed Austin at 17 51Z a bit behind schedule but I was okay with this Very smooth departure and climb I even got routed over my property and then Mueller so I was really enjoying my views I probably reached my planned altitude of 6 500 just after the towers on Hwy 360 I leaned the mixture out as always waited for the brief drop in RPM and then a few ticks back to the right Around this time I was switched over to Houston Center for flight following on 134 20 photo 21130 521 520 left Climbing past 5 000 feet on my way to a planned 6 500 photo Around 18 35Z just getting over the intersection of HWY 281 in Marble Falls and still at 6 500 feet I noticed the engine was starting to lose power I couldn t hear it or feel it but I saw it on the tach It was dropping about 100 RPM for 1 2 second every 15 20 seconds or so I just began monitoring it and after a minute or so alerted Houston Center to my finding They asked if I wanted to declare any emergency and I said no I just wanted to say it in case the problem got worse and I needed more attention They asked me to keep them updated and business was as usual The problem persisted About 2 5 minutes later the problem got worse and I started noticing the engine dropping about 300 RPM for 1 2 seconds every 15 20 seconds with the 100 RPM drops interspersed between those I immediately alerted Houston Center to the problem with something to the effect of Houston Center Cessna 67796 My engine is definitely having problems now probably going to have to land They quickly started giving me very close attention and asking if I had power and such I replied yes but that the engine was suffering power losses At this time we established that I was a student pilot on a solo XC I had already located a bunch of fields by this time and as HC noted Horseshoe Bay was just a few miles off to my west about my 10 o clock according to Houston Though I tried to remain calm I m sure they could sense some panic in my voice by this time Still I kept doing things as needed and now treated the situation as an emergency assuming that the engine would die at any moment I went through the emergency checklist though it didn t seem to fix the 300 RPM drops I was still communicating with Houston treating the situation as an emergency and the problem was still persisting I definitely had Horseshoe Bay in my sights just a few miles off to the west and was just a little below my previous altitude I informed them that the problem was still continuing and that I would be heading for Horseshoe Bay Though I had them handy I requested the runway configuration airport elevation and the CTAF All three were given to me Just as I started my left turn and about 1 second before my heart would momentarily stop the engine lost almost compete power I can t be sure but it dropped down to about 1000 1200 RPM basically just above idle and held there for a moment before jumping back up At this point I told Houston that I had a more severe problem and that the engine was probably about to die They passed me over to Horseshoe Bay and those guys started bringing me in They cleared out all other traffic and told me either runway was mine for the taking I was still around 5 800 feet at this time PA is 2 100 about 3 miles west of the field and more or less on a perfect left line for a left downwind to runway 35 the preferred runway was for 17 but surface wind was only about 3 kts so I stuck with 35 I told Horseshoe Bay that I would be making a long extension of my downwind in order to lose my excess altitude I probably went about twice as far as normal before turning base doing the best I could to calculate all of the differences quickly in my head The engine seemed to be working with me at this point but I was also making a lot of adjustments to it so hard to know for sure I turned base still a bit too high but plenty far out On final I quickly got down to a good altitude slowed enough for flaps and added a notch The other two notches came in at my discretion as I basically was landing by feeling it out I put it down on 35 and it was actually a really nice smooth and otherwise uneventful landing Taxiing didn t seem to be much of an issue either The guy waved me to a spot and was happy to see me We called Houston Center immediately to let them know and also Flight Service to alter and close my flight plan photo 21110 521 520 left N47796 on the ground at Horseshoe Bay after my failed engine photo

New Website Progression Updates It s been a couple of months since I finally decided that it was time for a full overhaul of kevinludlow com and there have been some pretty significant changes already made to the architecture of the site I was joking to DaveG just a couple of days ago how significantly my CMS architecture skills have improved since I first developed the concept back in 2005 and even since formally releasing it in 2007 The size of the codebase has been significantly reduced and puts much more strain on the SQL server for larger more complex operations as opposed to parsing data via code after simple queries Additionally most all of the original Javascript used has been replaced with jQuery or removed entirely While I m thrilled to have done this it s not entirely an original design flaw When I first began coding the system the jQuery library was not yet available and developers were essentially limited to the Prototype Scriptaculous packages To this day I contend that those packages are hugely bloated and should not be used for web development projects given the complexities that they add to the maintenance of projects This was especially the case in 2007 when I first released openFace given processors were that much slower and front end Javascript weighs a browser down Fortunately jQuery provides an excellent balance of functionality and programmability while still remaining pretty light provided one avoids their various UI packages In parallel to this development which is really just in my spare time I have been hiring people to take on the arduous tasks of scanning photos digitizing movies digitizing old audio recordings and etc As of this writing I already have 11 254 new photos that will be added to the website once it is fully launched though I m guessing it will be closer to 17 000 new photos once I m finished

Exploring Ancestry Dot Com photo 24479 603 0 right The cover to my grandfather s 1939 DeWitt Clinton high school yearbook photo This is definitely u NOT u an endorsement for the website ancestry com namely because they traditionally spammed the hell out of people for business however my dad recently signed up for their system and started building all sorts of artifacts pertinent to my grandparents Suffices to say it has some pretty phenomenal digitized records available on it While the hand written census tract data is cool enough it s all been scanned they even had pages from my grandfather s yearbook at DeWitt Clinton High School and other similar types of documents I don t know exactly where they get some of their data from and I m guessing that one of the benefits to ancestral research is that the population was significantly smaller a century ago That might not seem significant but it makes fuzzy data matching much easier to do Incidentally they got his date of death wrong despite that fact that such records are readily available in this day in age Again I suspect it s due to having TOO MUCH data vs the limited record keeping we did a century ago Their overall UI UX is lacking quite a bit for my personal taste to non developers this just means it s not especially convenient to navigate but the information and records available for digital consumption are excellent I will definitely be using their site to gather additional information for my own family philanthropy work and to anybody especially interested in this type of research would at least recommend you check them out on a trial basis if for no other reason than to grab the documents and images they ve collected for you

The Spaghetti Blender photo 35355 741 0 right Taken about 10 minutes before Dayna flew over the handlebars and smashed her face photo In the late winter of 2001 Dayna and I took a trip up to visit her parents in Irving Texas Her family wanted to go over to the park and so they got her and I a pair of mountain bikes that we could ride around on Probably not more than an hour or so into our riding around Dayna somehow managed to slam on the front breaks causing the bike to flip forward She landed square on her face on the sidewalk below and to say the least was screaming in pain Her mom and I took her to the emergency room in Dallas and after a number of x rays and what I assume was a rather painful examination they concluded that she had broken her jaw and would need to have some wiring done It should be pretty obvious but there are lots of things you can t do when you have a broken jaw Some of them are worse than others but near the top of that list is eat solid foods Since you can t really apply any pressure to your jaw it s near impossible to chew Fast forward a week or two Dayna and I were back in Austin and she was really getting tired of not being able to eat anything Incidentally she had been living off of Broccoli Cheese Soup from Jason s Deli and was desperate for a change I felt awful for her and so one night invited her over to my house as somewhat of a dinner date night She was hanging out on the couch while I cooked a full meal of spaghetti and meat sauce I prepared it just as anyone would boiling the pasta cooking the meat simmering the sauce and mixing it all together Finally I was done Dayna was a bit confused as to why I would have gone through this effort seeing on how she couldn t eat it But I had a plan I took the entire meal and tossed it into my blender still piping hot I hit puree and let the blender do its thing What was left was this steaming hot pile of mush with little chunks of meat in it The excess starch in the pasta gave the meal a really interesting consistency We both sat down to have our mush meals only to find that they were about the worst tasting things we had ever tried Unfortunately and despite my best effort to give Dayna a good meal we couldn t eat them I still got credit for the nice gesture but for future reference blended spaghetti is NOT a good meal

The Dagley Bush When I was just 14 years old and a freshman in high school I had a friend named Ben Dagley He was two years older than me and thus a junior at the time I played football in high school and consequently was introduced our local version of Fellow Christian Athletes called Student Venture This was a pretty common thing to be exposed to in the Texas high school football system Ben was the student leader of our group While I m the furthest thing from being religious today we had a great group of guys There were about twenty of us in total Ben and I became very close friends albeit this would eventually dissolve by the time I graduated from high school and moved on to my life in college Ben had a dear friend named Brian Williams Brian was similar to Ben in many ways but he and I always had a great time together namely as he enjoyed my general attitude of pranking people hijinks and various shenanigans Incidentally Brian was working on becoming a fire fighter a field that would soon become very important to me In the State of Texas at least in 1994 it was only legal for fireworks to be sold within 2 weeks of New Year s Eve and 2 weeks within the 4th of July It was the summer time school was out the 4th of July was upon us and fireworks were being readily sold Ben s family lived on pretty typical suburban cul de sac The back of his house however was part of a unique system of alley ways Unlike more traditional alley ways there were three of them all next to one another with a large dirt field in between them This made for a large open area that we could play in drive our trucks in and use for parking at his house among other things His was the last house on the alley way before it made a sharp turn So in essence and even though his family didn t own the land they had an enormous side yard Immediately adjacent to this side yard was a detached garage and between the detached garage and their main house but still on the alley itself was a giant bush This bush had probably been growing for a few decades It was an ornamental style bush Perhaps shrub is a better word for it It was truly massive and it was a nice feature to this otherwise unusual part of their house on the alley way Ben Brian another friend of ours named Daniel and I had all just come back from eating Neither Daniel nor I could drive yet and so Ben and Brian drove us around Upon arriving back at the Dagley house we parked in the alley way something that we commonly did Again there was ample parking back there Ben went inside of his house to speak with his parents Brian walked over to his truck to work on something or another which left Daniel and I in the dirt area of the alley way together We had purchased a variety of fireworks and were setting off some of the BlackCats M60s and other similar munitions that don t fire into the air but rather make a large boom upon exploding We had a number of smoke bombs too For whatever reason I thought it would look cool to see thick colored smoke emanating from the Dagley Bush I lit the smoke bomb and to the best of my ability tossed it right into the center of the bush I will remind you it was a good thing that Brian was eager to become a fireman At first the bush smoked as I had hoped it would As bright purple smoke filled the entirety of the bush and leaked out around all of the pointed foliage the core of the smoke bomb was emitting a white hot flame a flame that had no business being in the center of a bush in the middle of a Texas summer Within seconds the bush was fully ablaze Flames shot out from the bush several feet high Neither Daniel nor I could do anything Brian saw the commotion and came running around the corner shouting orders at the two of us Go and grab that shovel Warn the others Turn on the hose while I reel it out were among the phrases he shouted at us By now the flames were high enough that everyone inside of the house could see them and came running out too The bush sat along the Dagley s wooden fence It took caught fire almost as quickly as the bush did We all did our parts to stop the blaze with Brian spraying it down with the hose It felt like hours but was probably only seconds the fire was put out In the end the bush was almost entirely destroyed What remained of it were just some burnt out innards They were probably gasping for their last bit of carbon dioxide as they choked on the less desirable carbon monoxide and simultaneously saw their brethren burned alive The fence was far better but certainly had a number of boards burned to a crisp Mr Dagley Ben s father was less than thrilled But as Ben was our religious leader I can only imagine that he was in a pretty difficult position with me He did have a stern talk with me and made sure I was aware of just how stupid my actions were He noted how quickly the fire spread and how if Brian hadn t been there to help put it out it very well may have burned down their house He was right The truth is that I just didn t know a giant flame would shoot out of the smoke bomb When I d seen them in the past it just seemed like they got hot on the inside and released smoke Since I d run through that smoke before I knew it wasn t especially hot or anything Certainly not to the point that it would catch fire Unfortunately I was just a bit ignorant of how smoke bombs started their initial process with a giant white flame shooting out of them I helped replace the fence and apologized to the entire family for burning down their bush They were extremely forgiving and felt that I had learned a fairly important lesson that day I did It didn t stop me from playing with fireworks but to this day I always know where the hose is first

The Massive Headwound In the early summer of 1998 Aaron Duke Sac Jon Willis Willis and myself took a day trip to Surfside near Galveston Our intentions were to fish for the first few hours of the day have a lunch on the beach and then head over to a fishing spot we d found along side the channel weeks earlier We probably left Katy sometime around 8am and would have ultimately arrived sometime around 9 or 9 30 Though I think Aaron had surfed a handful of times before neither Willis nor I ever had Nevertheless we wasted no time getting into the water and began our morning of surfing To the best of my recollection both Willis and I tended to stick together as we were both learning this new endeavor whereas Aaron actually did have the ability to climb up on the board and ride a wave even if for just a few short moments All in all things were going pretty well for the three of us even Willis and I were finally starting to get the hang of it after just 30 or 45 minutes of practice After several attempts some successful most failures Willis and I began another trip out towards the breakers We ultimately started walking side by side but somehow or another he wound up getting 20 or 30 feet in front of me Without much warning a huge wave came through and though I didn t actually see it Jon s board came loose from his hand and flew back towards me I guess the same wave wound up turning me around as well which was probably to my advantage but before I could think of anything I remember taking a hard blunt shot to the lower right quadrant of my cranium I immediately sank to the four or five foot murky Gulf of Mexico sea floor and instinctually cupped the back of my head I m not sure how long I was underwater for but it was strangely enough a rather peaceful feeling It wasn t until I surfaced unaware of where any of the boards now were and brought my cupped hand in front of my face that I was aware of the trauma my head had experienced The real hint was the abundance of blood in my hand and even now on the surface of the water I m not sure how long it took Aaron and Jon to realize what had happened but it wasn t long before the three of us were back on the beach examining the depths of my wound Given the fairly uninhabited part of Galveston we were in and the fact that we d just driven over and hour and a half to get there I wasn t particularly fond about the idea of turning back Jon suggested that I probably needed stitches and while he was probably right I never did get them Instead we concocted the idea to soak my t shirt in our ice water cooler for a few moments and then to use the freezing t shirt as a tourniquet on my head I waited patiently while the others carefully constricted the freezing cotton shirt to my head and tried not to think about how serious of a wound this may or may not have been Though I wasn t opposed to the guys continuing to surf they politely packed things up and having turned down medical attention we proceeded to fish for the rest of the day instead From that day onward I was commonly called Massive Head Wound Harry from the great Saturday Night Skit This name would later be shortened over many years to Massive Head Wound and eventually just Massive When we finally arrived back at the Duke s house that evening tired sunburned and slightly damaged there was just one last thing to do remove the tourniquet This part does get slightly painful to speak of As the cotton t shirt had been tightly affixed to an open wound and then left to sit under the hot Galveston sun for about 8 hours the surrounding blood had dried and crusted over causing it to adhere to the wound Slowly and ever so carefully Mrs Duke began separating the cloth from the giant head wound The way I can really describe it is like ripping a band aid off of a hairy part of your body only the band aid was a giant cotton shirt and the hair was the shard remains of my scalp Though I have never actually seen the wound due to never having shaved my head to this day I can still feel the two or three inch scar on the back of my head