we're not heroes, just people who like to help.

That's exactly what a hero would say...

My department is doing good, too, but there is definitely a decline in members across the region.. Hell, the age gap is there, too. My dept. has a lot of firefighters 38< yrs old, and then there's a few at <22 yrs.

Kinda sad. Nobody wants to do the job anymore, especially for free. Even if they do, they deal with all the "behind the scenes" stuff, or they realize that we DON'T save every house or life, and they just quit.. It's a shame...

Same here. I mean, the brotherhood is strong, and we've kept a lot of members because we all get together outside of the "work" side, but people don't realize that if we roll for a fire and it's extinguished after 15 minutes, we still have a 1-2 hour clean up (if we're lucky). Hell, even the simple medical calls keep us away from home for at least a half hour. Then there's cleaning the trucks/gear, training, schooling, public events, etc- all while you have a life/career that is outside of the firehouse. Not many people see that...

My favorite part has to be a toss up between the brotherhood, and the relief that people have when we get on-scene and manage to actually bring someone back or save their house..

I'm from northeast U.S. (New England-More specifically, Connecticut). You?

I'm in a rural area with a separate ambulance service, but we run an R-1 response (we have a GMC 2500 with a utility body as our Rescue). Any time a medical emergency gets toned out in our district, both the ambulance and our R-1 unit get dispatched. We also sometimes use it as traffic control, and some non-emergency calls.

I'd probably say that my least favorite part is saying the whole "there's nothing more that we can do" thing to a patient's family member. We just had a 40 year old male go down a few weeks ago. His wife found him.. Medic said he'd probably only been down for about a half hour, but it was too late for us to do anything.
That, and kids ("kids" is usually a given, though).

It's just dispatched for us. We have a main town, and within that town are five separate "towns", boroughs, districts, or whatever you want to call it. Our ambulance service covers all of the 5 districts, so each of us respond to our own medical calls within our district (unless it's the stupid 2 A.M. alcoholic disorder.
Yeah.. First snowstorm of the season, snow had barely covered the ground when a 19 y/o female lost control of her car on the highway. She drifted into the center [grass] median, and went under the guardrail. Managed to be unharmed, but now in opposing traffic. She exited her vehicle, and for some reason, did a walk-around to assess the damage. She got to the front of her car [in the fast lane], was struck by a vehicle, and landed directly in front of a second vehicle. Both vehicles doing appx. 66 and 70 mph. She was DOA. State police along with our FD had to look for parts along the highway. Not a pretty scene, and we spent a good amount of time cleaning bloody snow from the engine after that one..

Slightly before I joined the fire service, a group of five students from a high school (around 20 minutes away) got drunk at a party. They decided to drive after that (all in one car), and did 80 on a back road, on a snowy day about 2 weeks prior to Christmas. They failed to negotiate a curve, and before they even knew what was going on, hit a tree head-on at 80 mph. Four out of the five students died, the fifth was in critical condition, and was released a few weeks later.

I remember reading that the cat later died, not sure though.

I didn't even confirm it died, I just said that I wasn't sure.
People are r00d.

That is a completely different picture and you know it.

Who says it isn't any better? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Both are fine by me

But the swear word thing you can do without it, though. I once made a chat and there I just have a long list of string-replace and regex-string-replacers for smileys and links that I run for each comment. I'm not sure how I would do it for actual usernames that have to be pulled out of a database though.

Select Id from users where username in arrayOfWords

yup

pregmatchall to array

check matches against username validation function

put in array

where username in array

Oh, that makes sense, didn't think of that. Thank you!

Like your name, but if it's representative I'm a little disappointed with that explanation

If it isn't truthful/representative of you... well you fucked up didn't you? Getting a lot of notifications for a subject you don't know/care about

Oh no I didn't fucked up after all. When I registered on FJ I just graduated from IT School. Since I'm uncreative I simple named myself programmer and to my surprise met a lot like-minded people on FJ.

>>#20650 I'm pretty sure every comment gets split into individual words as you mentioned. I mean swear words also get censored and those have to be checked on a database too. So I guess you can check for usernames the same way. But I'm as unsure as you are.

But the swear word thing you can do without it, though. I once made a chat and there I just have a long list of string-replace and regex-string-replacers for smileys and links that I run for each comment. I'm not sure how I would do it for actual usernames that have to be pulled out of a database though.

Select Id from users where username in arrayOfWords

yup

pregmatchall to array

check matches against username validation function

put in array

where username in array

Oh, that makes sense, didn't think of that. Thank you!

Oh. Right. I was mainly looking at the back flippers and since the .gif never properly showed them I thought it made it look like the hind flippers from the seal.

>_

to be fair i thought it was two people at a glance