Truth is Stranger Than Fiction – Episode 1

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(or WTF of the Day)

I was driving along in New York City the other day… no, that is not the WTF… anyway…

I was stopped at a red light when I happened to look over at the garbage truck beside me. WTF?

Cheap Date?

Cheap Date?

What’s the story behind the plaid shirted, child sized doll strapped to the under-fender of a garbage truck?

Other interesting things I’ve seen this past week in which I do not have a corresponding photo to show is a mailbox shaped like a small block Chevy V8 (Maine).  I’ve also passed one of those fish shaped mailboxes with a rope tied to it’s tail that led to a “stick fisherman” silhouette a few yards away as if it was catching the fish-box (Delaware) — that one made me laugh out loud for a good five minutes.

I’ll be posting more when I can find the friggen photos.  I have filled up an 8gig card and working on another 2gig one.  That’s about 1500+ pics with a few videos tossed in the mix.

Frustrations

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I have been trying to take the final test in my Private Pilot’s license, known as a “check ride”, for nearly a month now.  The first delay was due to thunderstorms.  The next delay had to do with the airplane I had been using this whole time breaking down and being retired instead of fixed.  After an hour of two of familiarity training in the replacement plane, a Cessna 172 m, it went in for repairs for over a week.  In the meantime, the company also reorganized, so red tape slowed everything down.  A week ago, my scheduled check ride was in process: oral interview went fine; computer problems were being overcome with a printer I yanked out of storage; a 1/4 inch splinter that jabbed itself under my right thumbnail was painful, but still workable; even the weather was turning from crappy to nice… and then came the pre-flight check of the airplane.  The alternator belt had snapped in two.  Wonderful.  On the bright side, a new belt was already strapped in place just for an occasion like this so that the propeller need not be taken off in order to fix it.  A mechanic is called out and we can hopefully finish my test.  Unfortunately, after waiting for a mechanic to check things out, he declared the alternator bearings shot and nothing would get fixed for 3 or 4 days anyway.  Test postponed… again.

Which brings us to today.  I prepare yet again for a check ride, staying up late and waking up early to go over the flight plan, weather information, map checkpoints, fuel calculations, etc.  I drive out to the airport early to fly out to some other airport where the test will take place… and… the keys to the plane are not on their normal hook.  In fact, they are nowhere to be found in the office nor in the airplane itself.  I don’t really panic about that since the weather is not cooperating anyway.  I wait at the airport for 5 hours hoping the weather will clear up enough for me to fly out and take my test.  I wait in vain as I see the sun for 5 minutes during that whole time and by afternoon, it is raining and we postpone everything until Monday.  The keys are still missing, but I found out one of the resident mechanics has a spare and I can borrow it if need be if the missing keys are not found by Monday.

On a side note,  I really like Jack Johnson.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ncrQTD28f4[/youtube]

Bootable USB Flash Drive

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I recently had the need to install an OS onto a netbook that doesn’t have a CD drive.  How does one get a bootable USB flash drive?  I have a laptop with a DVD drive so that I can take a CD and copy it to a USB flash drive, but just copying the contents won’t make it bootable so that you can install an OS. I spent a few days researching the subject and after numerous trials, I found two solutions worthy of mention.

For Linux ISOs, I found UNetbootin to be extremely easy to use and works quite well.   I would use this solution even if a CD drive was available since this means I would not have to burn a CD/DVD and could just (re)use one of the many flash drives I have lying around ($12, 4GB drives ftw).

For Windows, specifically WinXP although it also works with Vista and a few others, I highly recommend USB_MultiBoot_10.  It was the only series of programs that would reliably copy a CD onto a USB flash drive and make it bootable.  It was more complex than using UNetbootin, but I suppose that cannot be helped.  At least it worked!  This would even allow you to set up things for unattended installs which is very handy!

Automobile Gadget Holders

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We have so many portable electronics these days: cell phones, mp3 players, GPS units, dashboard cameras, Sirius Satellite radio handsets, DVD players, hand held game units like the PSP and Nintendo DS, and the list goes on.  So many portable gadgets that can be used inside a car and yet we have no standard means of securing them and providing power for a all of these devices in any kind of standard fashion.  Where are my “cup holders for gadgets”?  I’m so very tired of suction cups falling down, weighted dashpads sliding off the dash, air vent mounts blocking my AC or just letting my expensive device dangle by it’s power cable because there’s no place to put it while using it.

I want to see the auto industry provide us with the gadget form of a cup holder.  Instead of holding our favorite beverage container, these gadget mount points would provide us a means to secure our portable electronics so that they can be used in a hands free fashion and yet won’t slide around the car or dashboard while in motion.  I envision several anchor points around the car so that the driver and passengers can enjoy them.  We don’t even have to develop a new standard for these anchor points since we can use the same design as picture cameras already enjoy  with tripod mounts.  I wish every car contained several female anchor points for a 1/4-20 screw with a small depression next to support an anti-self unthreading mechanism that could hold a few pounds (this is what all cameras already use as a universal tripod mount, so a standard already exists… use it!).  Put a couple of these anchor points on the dashboard, a couple in the center console and a couple for the back seat would also be nice.  I also want USB power supply ports near these anchor points as well so I can plug my portable device into the car’s power supply.  Lets move away from requiring the old, clunky 12 volt interface we currently use to power/recharge our devices and adopt the much more portable USB cable.

Aftermarket device holder manufacturers can make us flexible stalks to mount on these anchor points to hold our various devices if our device doesn’t have a means to mount itself directly to these anchor points.  Some of these flexible stalks could even incorporate a USB power cable to help ease the cable jungle that might develop.  Maybe even provide an “audio IN” jack near the front console mounts as an easy means to plug satellite receivers and audio player devices into the car’s stereo system, too.

C’mon automakers, give me my gadget anchor points already!

Paradise Lost

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I was flying the other day, practicing a long distance, cross country flight plan with my instructor in the copilot’s seat when we came upon my next landmark used to make sure I am still on my planned route.  On the air chart, it’s simply listed as “stacks”, but upon seeing them in person, my first thought was “nuclear power plant”.

What kind of power plant?

What kind of power plant?

I pointed them out to my instructor and asked him if it really was a nuke site and he said “If that were true, we wouldn’t have been allowed to fly near it.”  What on earth could it be with water cooling towers like that?  It had a rail yard like a coal plant, but the cooling towers and the nearby river seemed to tag it as a nuclear power design.  It was a mystery for sure, one that had to be looked into later.

After returning home, I decided to find out where that power plant was located and whatever story was behind it.  Since air sectional maps are on a scale of 1:500,000, many small locations are omitted.  I scanned the satellite maps on Google until I found what I was looking for.  As it turns out, this is a semi-famous power plant.  It was one of the largest coal powered steam power plants in the world when it was built in the 50’s, has a song written about it, and even grew it’s coal strip mining earth-moving operation so large as to wipe the town of Paradise off the map… literally.  The nuclear-like water towers exist as part of the sulfur scrubbing process to help clean up the “dirty” coal being used from the surrounding area.

Seeing the area from the air shows the kind of scar such operations create and leave behind.

Surface mined coal leaves its mark.

Surface mined coal leaves its mark.

Mooveetyme

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I was listening to some soundtracks of movies in the car (yay for having an mp3 6-disc player) and did a heck of a lot of driving around today so I got to hear a bunch of them.  While most of the tracks I have are themes and background music, there’s a few that stand out where the music was a big part of the movie itself.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a really good movie and has a lot of old time folksy music in it.  One of the aspects I like about the movie is that it’s script borrowed a lot from Homer’s Odyssey.  It was fun to pick out scenes from the movie that mirrored ones from the book (like Jon Goodman playing a character with one eye).  It’s a funny movie and well worth renting if you haven’t seen it yet.

Delmar O’Donnell: Them syreens did this to Pete. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad!

[Discussing how to counter Homer Stokes’ campaign for governor]
Junior O’Daniel: We could hire our own midget, even shorter than his.
Pappy O’Daniel: Wouldn’t we look like a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies, bragging on our own midget, doesn’t matter how stumpy.

I like a lot of different music styles and this one contains a bunch that you don’t get to hear often.  Some are so catchy that I hum, sing or whistle their tune for days after. One of my favorite tracks from the movie is Big Rock Candy Mountain. I whistle along with it every time I listen to it.

… not to be confused with Candy Mountain. (Warning! Loss of brain cells may result!)