How have we lasted as long as we have without a taser knife? OK, it’s not a functional taser knife but it’s a clear proof of concept. Can taser swords be far behind?? I certainly hope not.
As with many irresponsible and wonderful things, Warren Ellis saw it before I did.
I’m leaving work (and it was light again!), and taking the elevator down 11 stories when the phone in the elevator starts talking to me. There’s a brain-damaged phone in there in case the one guy other than me in LA without a cell phone manages to get himself or herself stuck. It’s a one-button, programmed-to-dial-the-elevator-company, speaker phone. Apparently it will also take calls.
Now, here’s the thing: the company that called the elevator phone (the voice I was hearing was obviously taped) was selling mortages. I spent the 45 seconds I was heading downstairs listening to some company’s mortage pitch. Note that “hang up” is not an obvious choice of actions this phone can take. Nor should it be. If I’m delivering someone’s baby in a stuck elevator, I don’t want to bump the thing and disconnect myself.
So this is either some diabolical company who knows that people are going to stay in the elevator and can’t hang up, so calling the speaker phone at the end of normal business hours gives them free advertising, or it’s some bozo who isn’t being very careful with their wardialer (don’t they have to have elevator phones on a do-not-call list?).
I suppose there’s also the possibility that this is one of the mortage company’s competitors trying to discredit them by placing false heinous ads in their name. I think that unlikely, because I can’t have any worse opinion of mortage companies involved in any kind of direct mailings, but I could be wrong.
I do want all of you to sue these bastards blind if their intrusive advertising gets me so upset that I have a heart attack and can’t call out of my elevator because they’re selling me a mortage on the emergency phone.
My sweet baby points out this impressive bit of hackery for identifying fonts.
Andy Hoover points out this radio-controlled Airbus 380. I haven’t been able to see the video yet, but the pics are very cool.
The brouhaha over Nature‘s claims of Wikipedia‘s fidelity heats up. This is the official Nature response. It includes a link to Britannica’s statement.
A beautiful radio exchange from AVWEB‘s Short Final.
I’ve been able to get up in the air twice this week, once purely for training and once for a little training and a little fun.
Training first: my primary CFI, Andy Hoover, took me up Thursday (30 Mar) and beat up my IFR skills. One of the sad facts of life of flying in SoCal is that we really don’t get a lot of hard IFR days to keep current and safe without going up and getting under the hood. Even though Andy’s spending most of his time flying for American Eagle, he’s good enough to come round every couple months and work me out as well. He really had a sadistic streak going this time; we did an ILS at the top of the green arc to a hold, then a partial panel ILS into Bob Hope – featuring some patented SoCal vectors in lieu of a hold, so it was basically a partial panel hold. We finished off with a different failed instrument instrument for the VOR-A into SMO. Nothing the way it usually works, and all of it went pretty well. After a couple years of this I seem to have a little of it down.
Today, I worked off my PDT disorientation by taking an early afternoon jaunt out to the inland empire. First stop was San Bernardino (SBD) to work some engine out landings. It’s an old military base with a 10000 ft runway, which makes it a great spot to practice things you need a big margin for. Unfortunately, SBD was pretty crowded. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern most of the time I was there, with a few more at the peaks. I hung around for a while shooting touch-and-goes and practicing uncontrolled field radio technique, and working landings in up and downdrafts. Good fun. Spotting someone out in their warbird doing a quick aileron roll for the fun of it en route only improved my mood.
After I got tired of that, I went next door to Flabob AIrport (RIR) for some lunch. Flabob is a great little GA airport. It’s a cool little field, but it’s really odd going from the 10000’x200′ runway at SBD to RIR’s 3200’x50′ strip. From wide, long strip illusions right to short, narrow strip ones. Whee!
There are many, many interesting little planes tied down at Flabob and an active pilot community that seems to have good relations with the surrounding community. It’s the site of EAA chapter 1 – where that very cool organization was founded. It’s always an interesting place to drop in to. I walked around, took some pictures and had a practically free chicken-fried steak sandwich. Hard to imagine better.
The trip back to SMO was uneventful – well as uneventful as getting into SMO ever is.
Apparently the Encyclopedia Britannica has worked up a bit of indignance at having Wikipedia compared favorably to it. I suppose they see it as being unfavorably compared with Wikipedia. The BBC has a story on it.
There’s a new grap release. It really is a very little thing. Unless you’re compiling grap under g++ 4.1 or later, you don’t care about it. But the nice guys at Debian are moving to that in the near future and the sooner I fix my dumb typo in grap_draw.h, the better. I’m not going to change the FreeBSD port for this.
Update: I changed the CHANGES file to properly attribute the changes from 1.38 to 1.39 on 23 Mar 2006. The checksum of the dist file changed, but no code did.
Today, for the first time I can remember, I left work while the big glowing round thing was still visible. Actually I do remember leaving work one other day when it was up, but that was when I’d been up for 40-odd hours (and for that matter, forty odd hours) so I think it doesn’t count.
I think I may have some kind of problem.