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.
Wheeling and cawing in the golden hour the birds, they come to the PAC.
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.
Why GarageBand is dangerous and should be outlawed in any state where I am present. Press play on the above at your own risk. I can not take responsibility for any long term damage to your ears or brain which may occur.
For the first time in quite a long time… a new graph!
Sam’s Email Backlog
In May 2005 I started tracking how many emails were still unanswered in my inbox. As usual, I am very far behind. Soon after I started also tracking the age of the oldest unanswered emails in my inbox. That one is even sadder. For completeness, I added a third grapoh showing the number of emails in my unsorted spam folder. That is where all the automatically filtered spam is, but I look through it periodically to find items falsly identified as spam. That seems to be running about 1 in 1000 messages in that older. Anyway, here are the three graphs.
Of course, sometime I should update the old graphs too!
Obsessed tourist ‘marries’ dolphin
(dpa on Bangkok Post)
Tendler, 41, has been visiting the city on the Gulf of Aqaba two or three times a year to spend time with her 35-year-old underwater sweetheart.
“The peace and tranquility under water, and his love, would calm me down,” the Israeli daily quoted her as saying.
Last week Tendler finally plucked up the courage to ask the dolphin’s trainer for the mammal’s fin in marriage.
(via Daily Kos)
So a few hours ago I went out and drove by what will be my apartment in less than a week. They had cleaned up some stuff, but clearly were not done fixing up the place to be ready to move in. Nearby I found a place to get the money order I’d need to move in. (Easier than a cashier’s check given my bank’s closest branch is Indiana.) That taken care of, I went looking for food. Right across the street from the apartment complex is what looks like a little strip mall. It has a Barnes and Noble, a Circuit City, a Sports Authority and a bunch of other stuff. I discovered though that it also had a hidden indoor Mall type area. Mostly a food court (although a nifty one with non-chain type places and a wide variety of food). But some other stores. And… at one end between the food court, a grocery store and a board game store… was this:
There was a whole area in the mall filled with people playing chess. With chess clocks and nice sets and all. (Not hundreds of games or anything, but there were probably around six games going.) The highlight was the giant chess set. Two people were playing and there was a croud of people on all sides watching. The giant board plus some of the other stuff was obviously set up as a semi-perminant feature. You do NOT see this in Palm Bay.
Maybe I’ll like this area after all. :-)
Which reminds me, a couple days ago, since I have a usable computer again, I decided to once again start playing chess, not just against people on ICC where my rating has fallen so low that it is hard to find opponants now, but against the computer again. I’m working my way up through the Chessmaster 9000 personalities starting at the lowest rated and working my way up. I’ll play one until I win, then move up to the next one. The first bunch should be easy. They are really really bad players. And then it will get harder. Hopefully this way I’ll actually improve again. I seem to be a much worse chess player now than I was a number of years back… and I was never very good.
I’ve been considering posting the games I play. But does…
[Date 2006.2.16]
[White Abulsme]
[Black Cassie]
[TimeControl 120+12]
[Result 1-0]
1.e4 g6 2.Nf3 Na6 3.Nc3 Nb8 4.Bd3 Bg7 5.O-O Bxc3 6.bxc3 f5 7.Bb2 Kf8 8.c4 b5 9.Bxh8 bxc4 10.Bxc4 c5 11.Ng5 d5 12.exd5 Ke8 13.Qe2 Nh6 14.Nxh7 Bb7 15.Nf6+ Kf8 16.Rfe1 a5 17.Nh7+ Ke8 18.d6 Be4 19.dxe7 Qd6 20.Nf6+ Kxe7 21.Nxe4 Ng4 22.Nxd6+ Kd7 23.Nb5 Ne3 24.Qxe3 Kc8 25.Qe8+ Kb7 26.Re6 g5 27.Qe7+ Nd7 28.Qxd7+ Kb8 29.Re8# 1-0
Mean anything or have any interest to anybody reading this?
Didn’t think so. :-)
On 30 Apr 2005 at 00:33 UTC Matt sent me an email with the screenshot above saying he was the 30,000th visitor to my site and asking if he got a reward or prize or anything for it. Well Matt, here is your prize: You get mentioned on this post. (Took me awhile to get to that email, oops.)
As I post this Sitemeter is showing 58,435 vistors since July 13th 2003 when I first turned on Sitemeter. At the current rate that means about two weeks until it hits 60k. Who will it be this time?
(Of course, I must point out, sitemetere is flawed in several ways, most prominantly that I still haven’t put it on all the really old pages on the site. But that’s OK.)
The little snail that could – Snails are faster than ADSL
Calculations that were conducted after the experiment, explicitly proved that in spite of the relatively, very slow, speed of the biological carriers, the Snap system succeeded in transferring data faster than any other conventional technologies, existing today.
(via BoingBoing)
I was going to post a quick picture of my office from my cellphone, but then I saw this and had to post it instead:
The ahhhhhh page
This page plots the number of results obtained from google for words of the form a{n}h{m}. For example aaahh would be represented by 3,2 and is found on the grid below at 3 down and 2 across. Hover over the square to see the number of google results, you can also click to see the results in google for yourself. The actual numbers that you will see will vary from what I found over time.
The results are coloured based on the log of the value. Cells that are bright red have more than 8000 google results.
There are a vast number of different variations of this word on the net. Even though I have examined so far up to ah(50,50), I have not reached the region where zero hits are common. In fact in the whole 50×50 grid there are only 16 zeros. Update: I’ve extended it to 60×60 now and at last there are places where there are several zeros together. Still there’s seven results at ah(60,60).
(via Digg)
That is just awesome. It reminded me someone of one of the old Abulsme charts I used to have up on my wall in college which is now in a box in many pieces after it got wet, dried, and started to crumble. I really do have to get some of those charts from back then online sometime. Or new versions thereof that are even better. Yeah, that’s it.
In any case, this post will make 10 days in a row of posts. Which is better than I have done in a long time. I figure I should savor that, as I will probably miss tomorrow (Sunday) as I will be back in Florida for a quick visit and will be spending as much time as possible with Brandy and Amy, and as little as possible online. But we shall see.
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