This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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When I got Cronus I also got X-Plane and I’ve been playing with it a few times a week ever since. I always have it set to have real time weather and real date and time. I started at SeaTac and while I have tried a whole bunch of planes from the Hindenberg (not really a plane, I know) to 747s, but rather than picking places to start each time, I have always let it start me back up at the closest airport to where I crashed. And there have been some nice crashes. Recently though I have nearly always managed to at least crash near airports. And even made a few “landings” that might have been survivable by those on board, cause, well, the plane only bounced a few times, ended up right side up, and not that far from the airport. Well, they would have survived if they were very very lucky.
Tonight though for the first time I was perfect. Took off smoothly. Did a nice figure eight pattern over Olympia, Washington and then made a perfect landing! Came in slowly all lined up with the runway. Touched down without bouncing. Applied the brakes and rolled to a stop while still on the runway. Woo! Go me! It was in a Robin DR400-120 as seen in the screenshot above which I took right after landing. I’d mostly been flying the Cessna 172SP lately but this time I decided to try the Robin for the first time. Don’t know if it was the plane, the weather tonight, or just more practice, but it was my best flight yet. Woo!
I did cheat slightly though. It is night time and off and on during the course of the flight I did use the night-vision goggles option to see rather than just relying on ground lights. (Thus the green in the picture.) But hey, I landed! A nice soft landing too!
I need to get a joystick though. Using the mouse has its problems. But I seem to have mostly gotten the hang of it.
Over all since I got the program, I started at SeaTac, went out toward the east over the mountains, then one hour in a 747 got way far south, then in a fighter plane got back to the Pacific, now I’ve been working my way back north in General aviation type planes. Not far left to go to get back to SeaTac. But I’ll try to do it in the daytime. Hopefully when there is a high ceiling. One time earlier this week I tried when there was only a 500 foot cloud ceiling, and since I am still only doing VFR stuff, that really sucked once I was in the cloud.
Anyway, I’m having fun. And unlike Chessmaster, when I crash this one, I only crash the plane, not the program.
(via Digg)
Oooo… pretty! There is now a finance.google.com. As many of the commenters on Digg mention, there is not much really NEW here that you can’t get dozens of other places, and many of those places give even more info. But it is nice new and shiny. I like shiny things. And I really like how the dot bounces around when you move around. And how you can drag it. And the letters that go to the news stories.
Hmmm. Beta indeed. In the time I took to write this post, it appears to have gone down:
Wheeling and cawing in the golden hour the birds, they come to the PAC.
![image]() It took me awhile to watch this disk. I started it, then shoved it into my bag to watch on the plane… without any protection… when I tried to watch it again, surprise, it was all scratched up and wouldn’t play right… even after the toothpaste trick. So, I asked Cynthia if I could borrow her copy, she mailed it to me, and then I finally got around to watching more of it again. I finally finished the last of the four episodes on the disk yesterday. And guess what, my season two gaps continue to come up. Three of the four episodes on this DVD were new to me.
“What’s My Line, Part 1” and “What’s My Line, Part 2”: Kendra the Vampire Slayer shows up and helps foil a plot by Spike to revive Drusilla using Angel. I wasn’t a big fan of Kendra. The character really just didn’t work for me. But it was very good to fill in this hole in the Buffyverse that I’d missed.
“Ted”: OK, this is the one here that I’d seen before, and not only had I seen it before, but for whatever reason I’d seen it multiple times. Which is kind of annoying, cause I never really liked it that much. I guess it isn’t horrible, but I didn’t really need to see it again.
“Bad Eggs”: Another one that I had not seen. I was quite amused. Xander and Cordelia continue their closet thing, and everybody plays the egg game until they hatch. The Texas vampires were not that exciting, but they were a sideline. I liked the eggs.
Now I need to mail this back to Cynthia.
This is one of those video clips I’ve actually had a copy of saved on my hard drive for probably around a decade or so, so it is not new by any means. But it had been many years since I actually watched it. I stumbled across it again today. Gotta love the exploding whale.
Annotated transcript of the video
(theexplodingwhale.com)
The dynamite was buried primarily on the leeward side of the big mammal so as most of the remains would be blown toward the sea. About seventy-five bystanders, most of them residents who had first found the whale to be an object of curiosity before they tired of its smell, were moved back a quarter of a mile away. The sand dunes there were covered with spectators and landlubber newsmen, shortly to become land-blubber newsmen. For the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.
…
Our cameras stopped rolling immediately after the blast. The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere. Pieces of meat passed high over our heads, while others were falling at our feet. The dunes were rapidly evacuated as spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell.
(via Hugh Hewitt)
Note: Check out the actual video and the whole exploding whale site too.
Well, actually, most of what is reported here was in 2004. Some of it was after the Abu Ghraib pictures were public, some of it was before. And it looks like there WERE active investigations of the abuse from above. So I’m not sure how much of this is really NEW, but one thing about half way through the article got my attention…
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
(Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall, New York Times)
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein’s former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
…
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.” The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. “The reality is, there were no rules there,” another Pentagon official said.
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The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.
…
General Brown’s command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit’s most elite troops.
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General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.
(via Daily Kos)
If I am not mistaken, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is one of the brothers of a certain other person with that same last name who ran a company I used to work for.
At the moment I’m in Bellevue, not Seattle, and this is mostly about elementary, not middle, and we’re hoping to get into and figure out the private school route, but this kind of thing is why we started looking that route in the first place…
Parents may get less of a choice
(Tan Vinh, Seattle Times)
Seattle’s difficult school-closure process is under way, but ahead may loom another far-reaching — and potentially contentious — change: reducing elementary-school choice.
District officials say the popular choice system — which, since 1989, allows families to apply for slots in schools beyond their immediate neighborhood — may need to be scaled back to cut transportation costs.
The issue could come up for discussion as early as this fall, and if the School Board approves, students would have fewer enrollment options as early as fall 2007.
“We are not eliminating school choice, but we want to reduce it,” said board President Brita Butler-Wall.
SXSW to MPAA: STFU
(Derek Powazek, Just a Thought)
What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find “creative new solutions” to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them.
(via Boing Boing)
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Went to another building for a meeting a couple of hours ago. This is a shot from my Treo looking back toward my normal building from the 17th floor there. It goes up to 50 I hear, but we didn’t go that high.
I know I’ve posted a lot today, sorry. Don’t know what has gotten into me.
In any case, forget the Mini. It looks like after several years the Smart will finally be available in the USA! I saw one (with Mexico plates) outside of Pittsburgh a few years ago and instantly said to myself “I want one!” But they haven’t been available unless you wanted to import one yourself and go through all the attending hassle.
Smart Cars: Coming to the U.S.
(Nathan Edwards, pcmag.com)
Good news for the “smaller is better” crowd: The fuel-efficient Smart Car is (finally) on its way to our shores. Smart-Automobile LLC announced today that its Smart For Two Coupe / Convertible, available in Europe since 1998, is ready to be imported to the United States. Much of the delay involved learning how to modify the cars and tooling the proprietary Smart diagnostic system to ensure the cars meet U.S. safety and emissions standards.
(via Digg)
Um… or maybe still a Mini.
Or, more likely still, another Saturn.
Of course for now, the main goal is to keep my 1996 Saturn going as long as possible. It went over 170 kmil a couple weeks ago though, and I don’t think any car I’ve ever driven regularly (the Dodge Colt, the Ford Taurus or the Toyota Corolla) have ever made it to 180 kmil. We shall see…
Oh… and I still haven’t posted about Brandy’s car… maybe if she doesn’t post about it herself I will by the end of the weekend.
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