Afraid of flying?

Friend of mine is a self-declared aviophobic.

To make matters worse, before every trip he has to make, he trolls accident databases to figure out the safety histories of the exact make and model of the aircraft he would be flying in.

That doesnt help at all.

Flight is unnatural for terrain-bound animals like humans, hence the prospect of putting ourselves at the mercy of mechanical contraptions which will carry us thousands of feet in the air makes us always wonder what could happen if those contraptions fail and we are left high and dry without a way to safely get down..

My personal belief is that the fear of flying is not entirely due to the awareness of the statistics of avaiation accidents, but the natural tendency to be skeptical about putting oneself in a vulnerable situation without any reliable means of safely gettng back. The amount of publicity that each air accident gets doesnt help either. If every car crash, every train wreck were to get the same amount of publicity and recreation of the gory details, i bet a lot of the aviophobics would never even drive a car.

Cirrus, the makers of the Cirrus SR series of (some really beautiful) planes have an innovative way of ensuring the safety of the air passengers in the event that the aircraft encounters a severe mechanical or airframe failure in flight. It is called the CAPS (Cirrus Airframe Parachute System), which is generically also known as a BRS (Ballistic recovery system). It uses a solid fuel rocket to quickly deploy a large parachute that is attached to the airframe so that when the plane fail to fly, it can float down, minimizing the risk of attempting to land in places where a safe landing is not guaranteed.



BUT Corey Liddle was flying a Cirrus which had a CAPS installed.

The airbag in your car will not save your life if you drive off a cliff. Each safety mechanism is designed to save you in the event of a specific life-threatening scenario.

Flying has typically three stages to it. Takeoff, Cruise and Landing. Just like driging on a freeway has three stages: Entering on an on-ramp, Cruising and Exiting on an off-ramp. Things can go south in any of these three phases.

Airplanes are reliable, probably even more reliable than cars - Can you imagine walking around your car in the morning looking for oil drips, nasty dents, under-inflated tires, checking the oil level before you start for work in the morning? This is what (good) pilots do before every flight. In addition, they perform run-up checks of the engines and subsystems before every takeoff. Imagine carrying a checklist of systems to check and verify for your car before entering a freeway.

Every pilot is first and foremost, a human, he/she watches the same shows that you and i do, he/she hears about and reads about every accident (maybe more) that you and i hear about. So next time you think you are afraid of flying, remember, there are probably one or two people sitting in the cockpit who share your apprehension. What sets them apart is the knowledge, tools and techniques which can minimize or eliminate the risks.

You are always in good hands.

Remember the time when $EX was safe and FLYING was dangerous? Well, those times are long gone.

Microsoft Yahoo acquisition - Whither my photos?

One big question arising out of the impending acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft is what happens to Flickr..
See Tris Husseys blog and also Mark Evans.

Scott Gilbertson says this.

The real question is, if not flickr, where?
Flickr, although not much innovation has happened to it since the Yahoo acquisition, still has very powerful community features which few other sites can beat.
In my limited knowledge, the closest to it would probably be SmugMug, which has a terrific UI, extensive APIs which can enable technologies like NitroDesk to complement, and a fairly robust sales mechanism.

However, this does not mean others need to worry, the world of photography is big enough for a lot more sites, especially sites with slants towards specific needs. Flickr was (now why am i already assuming past tense..) good for community building. SmugMug is good for showing off and selling.. PlanetEye is great for looking at your pictures in the context of location. PicasaWeb is good for sharing.

I think PlanetEye, SmugMug, and the likes MAY see a deluge of photo-refugees if the deal goes through.

But i strongly believe that being owned by Microsoft is not at all a good reason for hating Flickr.

For all the bad things you say about MS, you are still probably viewing this post on a windows machine.

-peace

NitroDesk now supports Picasa!

NitroDesk has finally added support for Picasa. Makes life much simpler now.

I am a big Picasa fan, and i think it has got the simplest interface for photo management without forcing me into a rigid folder structure. Also, the image processing there is golden.

Now i can click a button in Picasa and through NitroDesk send any number of my photos to any of my albums (or create new albums in) Flickr, PicasaWeb, SmugMug, Live Spaces, FaceBook or ShutterPoint..

NitroDesk must be started and running for this to happen though..
Nice :-)

Sager NP5792 Photos

Review coming soon here!
Specs:

• NP-5792
• Intel "Penryn" Core 2 Duo T9300 @2.5Ghz 6Mb LII
• 4Gb
• 200Gb @7200 Sata3 Seagate Momentus
• 1650X1080
  

For now, here is just a slideshow with the photos.



For original photos, go here

Photos Uploaded QUICKLY using NitroDesk Photographers Edition

Some quick facts:

• Fan Speed: Can hear it, but not annoying


• HDD speed: Excellent


• Right palmrest warmth: higher than normal, but good for your Carpals.


• App loading speed: Fast with Intel TurboMemory


• Graphics speed for Vista x64 : Blazing


• CPU Capacity: Runs Win2K3 in 4 VMs without a burp, with still gigs to spare

Note: If you plan to run Vista 64, Dont get anything less than 3Gb, Vista x64 on bootup and no apps running takes more than a Gig


(Disclaimer: I am not a gamer, so dont really get high on FPS and all good stuff)

Spend more time Clicking, less time uploading..

I am a photographer, at least i like to think that i am.
I take hundreds of pics when travelling, much to the disgust of my family.
But the time i spend shooting is nothing compared to the time it takes me to upload my pictures for the world to see.
You see,

• I have to first open picasa, select the good pictures, upload them to Picasa web.
• Then i login to flickr, select the good ones again and upload them there.
• Then i login to smug mug, up load my pictures there again
• Then comes my Live Spaces account,
• The best ones i put up on Shutterpoint in the hope that some professional photographers would leave me some tips, or a buyer might leave me some cash.
• Finally, if i have time or energy left, upload some to my facebook albums.

If i add up all the minutes i spend setting up and shooting, it will probably just be a fraction of the time i spend uploading.

All this, of course until NitroDesk came along :-) (http://www.nitrodesk.com/)
Using the free BETA version, now i can select my good pictures once, select one or more destination online albums and let the computer do the uploading. It could take the whole night for all i care, but in the morning, i know my photos will be where they deserve to be..


Oh wait, if i change my mind, i can always transfer whole albums from one service to another.
And later, when i suddenly realize i cant find my best photos on my computer anymore, i can always get a backup of my entire online assets from any of the sites i have uploaded them too.


Boy, am i spoilt now !

Adventures in silverlight

Typically when you are downloading XAML to show in your silverlight application, you would use a downloader and call createFromXamlDownloader.
This takes the XAML content that the downloader has downloaded and parse that into a XAML tree which you can then paste into your object hierarchy.
Here is the rub: if your downloaded XAML has event handlers for anything other than Loaded or OnLoad, and you are trying to wire it up to a javascript that you have linked in your original pages, you are in for a surprise. the events dont fire or if they do, they dont seem to call the script handlers correctly.
This may be a security thing - i am not sure. maybe you can wire handlers only to script that you have downloaded in the same downloader? Who knows.
Anyways, the only way i seem to get it to work is by getting the responsetext from the downloader and calling CreateFromXAML with that text.

All is well that ends well.

Black Friday like never before..

Got up today at 6.15 AM. This year, for some strange reason, i wanted to see what Black Friday was all about in Seattle. Reached Frys by around 6.50. There was not a single parking spot. For those familiar with the Frys parking lot in Renton, imagine how many cars would it take to fill the whole lot. Finally found a little spot to park and went in. What i saw inside knocked my breath away! every aisle in Frys had a portion of the queue. The serpentine queue extended from the checkout stands all the way through the XBox area, around the cafe, through the small electronics, into the PC components and a did a few crazy loops around the graphics cards area.

Of course buying the bulbs for the kids bathroom was out of the question. Get in the line, and you would be looking at 2 hours of shuffling towards checkout. In fact, you could do all the shopping you wanted right in the queue. Just get in the queue with an empty cart, and pick up the things you want when the queue reaches each section :-)

Anyways, did the usual rounds at the CPU and Motherboard section, left a few pools of drool there, and the remaining drool at the Camcorder section. Got out in about half an hour, happy to be alive and without the need to waste 2 hours to save 10 bucks. It also looked like people didnt care if the things they bought were on sale or even whether they saved money. I bet if people analyzed the savings they made, they might as well have gone and flipped burgers at McWhatevers to earn more than that in two hours. Some people were smart though. They pulled off whathever they wanted from the shelves and just went and sat at the cafe. They would probably chill out there for a few hours until the queue thinned out.

From Frys straight to Best Buy. No crowd there (not a real one anyway). But then the two things i was interested in either wasnt marked down or was sold out. I wanted a Blu Ray player (out of stock) and a zune (same old price as a week before).

From there to Circuit City. It was looking more like Bharat City, packed with people from good old India. I think CC would have done better had they put Bollywood movies on the display TVs, they would have sold millions of TVs.

Anyways, by about 8.30, i staggered out of there, exhausted, relieved that i had nothing to buy on Black Friday..

Never again

-g