Information Echo

Anyone who frequents the sort of websites that deal with debates or discussions or have been into aviation for a period of time has likely come across this debate before.

However, for those who haven’t seen it, I pose the following question. Provide your response, and the reasoning behind it via a comment, if you feel so inclined.

“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

(Don’t be tempted to Google the question untill after you have posted your opinion)

Now that I’ve got a workspace downstairs thanks to the herculean effort of making sense of our basement, I’ve made myself quite comfortable - Satellite TV, a heater to keep my toes warm…and a PC to surf around and stay on top of things while I’m puttering with my toys.

The PC in question belonged to a former neighbour before I picked it up at their “moving sale” as they were vacating. It’s nothing spectacular, but it is +1.5Ghz’ish with 512 ram, a NIC, a burner, and all the other junk that comes on a standard integrated motherboard. Far more then what I need to simply surf around the net, but powerfull enough that doing so isn’t going to become a tedious process, either.

The fact that I picked it up for a mere $10 makes me smile, as well.

After all the times I fixed this PC in particular for the teenaged girls who owned it, I guess I deserved to finally get their spoils for a good price after the fact. No matter how many times I cleaned up the disasters they created, subsequently installed an Antivirus program, Anti-Spyware software, and preached to them how they needed to use Firefox and stop using spyware-ridden filesharing programs…it always got completely undone, and a month later Windows was functionally useless again.

Anyhow, that aside, since the girls had passworded everything to the hilt (and the underlying Windows installation would require some work to make it usable again, that aside), installing a new OS was in order.

I hit the Mandrake (Er, Mandriva now) site and got a fresh live CD. 20 minutes, 699 megs, and a blank CDR later I had the ISO burned, and was ready to fireup the box.

But it won’t.

It hapilly boots from the CDR, comes up to the boot menu, starts to load the Kernel…and resets. No amount of retrying results in any more positive result.

So, I think to myself… perhaps this is some sort of hardware/software compatibility issue. The PC is afterall some Hewlet Packard POS.

I try the full distro install disc instead.

No joy.

I figure I’ll try Ubuntu. Ha! I’ll beat this yet.

Same result.

Hmm. Apparently this thing insists on running Windows…and only Windows.

Grr.

I threw my hands up in the air, pushed the PC back under my workbench for another day, and got my Mac (and a cold beer) instead.

And all was well with the world again.

frus?tra?tion?

Pronunciation[fruh-strey-shuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

4. a feeling of dissatisfaction, often accompanied by anxiety or depression, resulting from unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems.

I think I’ve got all 4 of those covered with my current project of attempting to clean up our basement of 6 years of accumulated stored crap that has managed to simply pile up since we’ve lived here.

I think I’ll add a number five.

5. A feeling of utter hopelesssness when you spend an hour working on something and realize that you have barely made a dent.

Ugh. Isn’t home ownership grand?

Since the spectacular Canadian Thanksgiving weekend 2 weeks ago it seems like we have been stuck in a perpetual stretch of absolutely terrible weather. Rain, rain, and more rain..and when it’s not raining, it’s windy.

The cold weather is one thing (it is fall, afterall) but the combination of everything together is making for a downright miserable fall so far.

Not only was I hoping to fly this weekend, but my new model aircraft (see a few posts back) is actually going to happen after the fact, and may be ready to fly this coming weekend if everything goes as planned.

If the current weather forecast holds up, neither will happen.

My issues with the weather aside, a friend who went flying with me a few weeks ago snapped this picture of my model in flight earlier in the day when we were up flying it, previous to heading to the airport.

Neato.

It’s a plane pretending to be a boat.

If you havn’t seen the video below, take the 10 minutes and do so. You don’t believe your eyes.

NTSB report on the situation here.