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Category: LifeStream

  • AIBF – day 2

    so, this morning was the dawn patrol and mass ascension… the dawn patrol was pretty damn cool, but, the mass ascension was indescribably amazing…

    it was pretty much impossible to count, but, there were definitely over 100, but definitely not 200… and there were a few “special shapes”, like a cow, a bottle, a scarecrow, a kettle of some kind, a couple that were what looked like bees maybe, and an american flag…

    there are 13 pics and 3 vids, whittled down from a collection of over 350 combined that i took… the videos were the hardest to narrow down to the best of the best, so, i settled for the ones that best showed just how big this whole aerial display was.. check them out before i delete them tomorrow… 1, 2, and 3

    a few more besides what i commented on above, all the pics from this morning’s set start with “2a-“…

  • AIBF, day one, second event

    the “Fiesta Challenge Competition Flight”…

    a bit underwhelming, i must say…

    it was cool, at first; a whole bunch of ’em taking off at once, but, there weren’t THAT many (c’mon, people, you said seven hundred!), it took up a very small section of vision, and they only went a very short distance and then landed (except for one blue one that darted up, leaving the others wayyy behind, headed north, and last i saw him, vanished over rio rancho), so, the main entertainment was over pretty quick…
    at least from where i was standing… for this sort of event, my location is not close enough, it seems, because it is starting to look like this thing does not do well at long distances… or maybe i’m just doing it wrong… either way, i keep getting these pics of specks, ranging in sharpness from fuzzy to blurry, which isn’t very interesting…

    anyway, to be fair, the whole thing really officially starts tomorrow and i see some very cool stuff coming up on the schedule, so, as i am wont to say, we shall see what there is to see when the time for seeing comes… (wish i could remember what that is from…)

    this time, there are 4 pics and 1 vid… the pics are rather similar, but, it is kind of cool how you can see a helicopter in the vid, though…
    they are all in the ABF subdir and the files from this event all start with “1b-“, as previously mentioned…

    btw, i made something of a connection… i was thinking of those window air conditioners growing up in hellishly humid dallas suburb summers… the underside would be practically an upside down puddle of condensation… the water forms into droplets in random places, and the drops fall, usually more than one drop at a time, sprinkling whatever is underneath… that is what the balloon launches remind me of, as you watch many of them inflating at once, some get to fully inflated and then “drip up” into the sky…

    big day tomorrow, including the first dawn patrol and the first mass ascension… no idea what the dawn patrol will be like, but, the mass ascension should be mind-boggling…

  • The Onion | Son, We’d All Like To Lie Around All Day Being ‘Clinically Depressed’

    the text-only link i use in the title will be dead in a week or less, after that, try this one…

  • some quotes

    i love quotes… i love words, i love good writing, and i love thought boiled down to its irreducable minimum, so, quotes sort of wrap it all up into one for me… “the wisdom of many, the wit of one” i think is the way someone once put it… i have a db in my psion filled with great quotes and RefDesk.com’s thought of the day email keeps me well-stocked with consistently great quotes…

    so, anyway, i came across this page today, which has random quotes at the bottom, so, i reloaded a few dozen times…

    some favorites…

    Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
    Rich Cook

    When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
    Sir Winston Churchill

    If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”
    [sounds like a jack handey deep thought to me – i_p]

    Free speech only goes so far until you need the right to bear arms.

    Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.
    Will Rogers

    We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

  • cool, “Vinyl Data”

    Vinyl Data [via BoingBoing]

    “One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That’s right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70’s and early 80’s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.”

    alas, no mention of the TI-99/4A…

  • Psion 5mx vs Palm Pilot and Pocket PC

    [moved from my LiveJournal, where there are also comments on this post that i did not move here…]

    Psion 5mx vs Palm Pilot and Pocket PC

    a couple years old, but, still great info…

    my psion 5 is in the mail right now 🙂

  • two news bits

    [moved from my LiveJournal]

    FREE IBM PCs FOR ALL OF UK
    via Nybble

    Nobody in the UK need ever pay for a personal computer again – from this week new IBM models will be delivered free of charge to any home that wants one.

    US computing giant IBM is working with British start-up company Metronomy to supply a free IBM PC, which would otherwise retail for around #800, to every household in Britain. It is anticipated that around two million of the computers will be given away over the next three years, with an initial 200,000 being shipped in the first few months of 2004. The only catch is that users will be subjected to one minute of TV-style ads coming on to their screens every 20 minutes. If the user wishes, the ad break can be delayed by a maximum of five minutes to allow completion of another operation such as a secure online purchase of an airline ticket.

    Initial advertisers include Churchill Insurance, part of Royal Bank of Scotland, which is using its TV ads to sell to the PC user market. In order to continue to access the new PCs, users will have to install a CD each month to update the advertising content. This will enable advertisers such as Churchill to trial a variety of ads with different types of customer. Future free software could also include the kind of bGsoftphoneb application that enables computer users to make free international telephone calls over the Internet.

    and Yahoo Photos news

    Paul Festa
    CNET News.com
    December 24, 2003, 10:25 GMT

    Yahoo has eliminated storage limits on its photo site, but cut the ability to store very high-resolution pictures for free

    Changes to Yahoo’s photo and storage sites have elicited cries of bait-and-switch from users, even as the portal giant opens its photo site to unlimited storage capacity.

    In its ongoing effort to balance its free and paid services, Yahoo this month divided its Briefcase file storage service and its Photos storage and retail site, adjusted storage limits and restricted some downloads to paying subscribers. Previously, Yahoo lumped picture files and other files under the same storage system.
    As part of that change, Yahoo eliminated its 30MB storage limit but restricted users of its free service from retrieving what it termed “really high-resolution” images — or anything above 480 by 360 pixels — unless they paid for the SBC Yahoo Internet service or Yahoo’s premium Plus service.
    That restriction has riled some users, who say their only
    high-resolution copies of some photos are stored on Yahoo’s servers.
    “I would say I lost about 70 full-sizes images,” said Henri Dubois-Ferriere, a Yahoo subscriber in Lausanne, Switzerland. “The original versions have now been ‘kidnapped’ by Yahoo… Converting previously free services into paid services is one thing, but this is worse, because a previously free service is withdrawn with no warning, in a manner that makes users lose data they had entrusted to Yahoo.”
    Yahoo countered that it had warned users of its Briefcase and Photos service changes by running top-of-the-page banner advertisements directing them to an informational page.
    Those banners started running in August, Yahoo said. The company has been implementing the changes over the course of this month.
    Subscribers like Dubois-Ferriere who may have missed those banners still do have a free workaround for getting their pictures back — a 60-day free trial of Yahoo Plus.
    Yahoo has been tinkering with charging for its Web-based services for years. The recent elimination of the 30MB limit for photographs is the result of company research that showed that the limit was stunting use of the service, as digital photography becomes more mainstream and higher-resolution cameras come down in price.

    i THINK that is good news for us, considering the panic over PSO screenshots and such that we had to go through…