Fashionistas vs The Military

 blather, dumbassery, humor, news  6 Responses »
Dec 182010
 

Here’s a story of liberal arts-types doing work that causes damage to the military. And for once, it’s not American lib-artists vs. the American military…

http://www.military.com/news/article/new-russian-uniform-gets-troops-sick.html

Russia’s sharp new military uniforms, created by a top fashion designer, have landed hundreds in hospital after proving too thin to withstand the ferocious winter cold, a state daily said Wednesday.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that between 60 and 250 servicemen have been laid up with everything from flu to pneumonia as Arctic chills sweep through the country’s northern reaches.

There’s a whole lot of failin’ goin’ on here. The fashion designer is a dumbass for producing such useless clothes; the Russian military has a whole bureaucracy full of dumbasses for accepting these uniforms.

See photos of these  uniforms here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101215/od_afp/russiamilitaryfashionoffbeat

They look just…

 Posted by at 3:32 pm

New: Avro “flying saucer” documents

 aircraft, awesomeness, drawings, new products, projects  4 Responses »
Dec 182010
 

Five new documents are available for purchase, all on the Avro (Canada) Project 1794/WS.606A/Avrocar VTOL “flying saucer” project. They are available for purchase for download or on CD-ROM, here: http://www.up-ship.com/blog/drawndoc/drawndocair.htm

Buy soon! Buy now! Buy often! The cats need food, the house needs heat, and none of it’s free. Buy stuff from Amazon!

 Posted by at 1:13 pm

“Photographing Stuff” is now available

 aircraft, blather, books, cats, critters, new products, photography, rockets, Utah  6 Responses »
Dec 182010
 

Well, it seems to be up and running. It’ll be a week-ish before my printed copy gets to me, but in the meantime, if you want to take the plunge, it should be available for purchase. Regular price is nine bucks, but it looks like MagCloud is running a pre-holiday sale, so it’s only $7.25 (plus postage, which was a buck and a quarter for the one heading my way).

The link:

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/Issue/144139

If anyone orders, let me know how well the process works on your end… and what you think of the final product.

Contents:

 Posted by at 12:47 am

Half a gigabyte

 books, photography  1 Response »
Dec 162010
 

That’s how big the experimental photo book is in Word, and it only has 25 photos. It’s currently *sloooowly* being converted into a PDF file; even though the book’s not done yet, I want to see how big the PDF file is. Too big, and I won’t be able to transfer it to the printer. Grrr.

Still needs a cover, a title, a bunch of explanations (the photos don’t have any text on or near them; they’re full-page untarnish images; at the back there is an index with thumbnails and explanations), and all the copyright and other gibberish.

The photos are all 10.25 by 8 inch at 300 dpi; what I sholuld probably do is slap together *another* little experimental print job, with one or two photos reproduced several times… all at 10.25X8, but at several resolutions. I want the best image quality possible, but if the printing is done at, say, 150 dpi, then there’s no good reason to have hugenormous files with greater resolution than that. Sadly, the MagCloud site is not exactly forthcoming on that little detail.

Ah, as I was writing, the PDF file was created… 47 megabytes with high-quality images. Not too bad, just barely transferrable.

 Posted by at 7:57 pm

Photo book finalists

 books, cats, new products, photography, Utah  2 Responses »
Dec 152010
 

I’ve decided to make it “eclectic,” which should help show off the capabilities and limitations of the printing process. It won’t have near as much in the way of landscapes or museum aircraft as I’d prefer, largely due to the fact that my photos along those lines are pretty high aspect ratio (very wide, not so tall), and while I could certainly put those images in the book, they’d be tiny and sad. If MagCloud or some other print service offers other options, such as 11X17 pages bound at one end, then that might be worth another look.

I’ll select somewhere between 20 and 30 of the following photos:

The following ones were initially selected, but have been passed over.

 Posted by at 11:17 pm

Gettin’ It Wrong: FW 198

 aircraft, drawings, history  8 Responses »
Dec 152010
 

In 1940, the British aviation press started yammering about a new German fighter, the Focke-Wulf FW 198. The design was unconventional but straightforward, with a layout similar to the Lockheed P-38 but with a single engine and prop at the rear of the stubby, extensively glazed, fuselage pod. Artists impressions and drawings, including the one below (from Model Airplane News, May, 1941), were used to illustrate this new threat.

Small problem: there was no such thing as the FW 198. The aircraft was, instead, actually the Dutch De Schelde S.21, a single-seat fighter and ground attacker that got as far as the prototype before the Dutch were overrun. The plane never flew; it was taken back to Germany and apparently used for some destructive testing.

The drawing is not entirely accurate, but it’s reasonably close. How the av press of the time could have this much info and get not only the name, but the nationality, of the plane wrong is a bit of a head-scratcher. At least when Aviation Week got it wrong about the Soviet atomic-powered bomber, the design they showed was actually a Soviet design. Just not atomic-powered.

 Posted by at 11:07 pm
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