Instead, he should have sent it to me.
Staten Island man pours life savings into ads proclaiming doomsday on May 21
More than $140,000 blown on ads for the bogus end-of-the-world on May 21.
May 22 is going to be entartaining.
May 132011
May 132011
A computer doesn’t have to be an extension of Skynet for it to try to mess with you. Consider:
Travelers warned not to rely only on GPS
Where we learn that a Canadian couple relied on GPS to lead them from Boise, Idaho to Jackpot, Nevada. The wife was discovered 48 days later surviving on bits of trail mix and snow; the husband has been missing since March 22.
GPS-based mapping is only as good as the map it’s based on. And sometimes… maps suck. I’ve seen maps that were quite clear that There Is A Good Road Here, when in fact it was a dirt trail that a camel would balk at.
And it’s hardly rare:
SatNav danger revealed: Navigation device blamed for causing 300,000 crashes
Hell, it even makes for entertaining commercials:
[youtube tZXM_g3mqew]
Come ON, people. It’s sensible to assume that your co-workers are mere seconds from trying to stab you in the back. You know that your boss is looking for a way to screw you over. The government wants nothing more than to ruin your life. So why assume that the GPS machine has your best interests at heart? It doesn’t. It wants to kill you.
UPDATE: From THIS news article, it looks like the Canucks were trying to get from Boise to Jackpot via Mountain City, Nevada. Wikipedia calls Mountain City a “ghost town.” Apparently there are forest roads that lead from Mountain City to Jackpot, but even Google Maps does not suggest them, but instead says to bop on down the road to Elko Nevada and then turn around back north towards Jackpot:
May 132011
Scaled way down from the full-rez version, and even so it’s still moderately ginormous. Note the frozen waterfall.
May 132011
May 122011
In going through my digital photo files, I’ve found these numbers for number of photos and total filesize, per year:
2002 (incomplete, data lost): 221 files, 104 megabytes
2003: All data lost
2004 (incomplete, data lost) : 2446 files, 2.39 gigabytes
2005: 1646 files, 1.13 GB
2006: 1725 files, 1.24 GB
2007: 4362 files, 9.96 GB
2008: 19413 files, 65.1 GB
2009: 29261 files, 122 GB
2010: 22612 files, 107 GB
2011 (so far): 13426 files, 59 GB
Conclusions: 2002 through 2004 were bad years for data storage. 2008 was a big year in delusions of photographic adequacy, followed up by a similarly delusional 2009. 2010, however, saw a decline in the bulk of photography. 2001 has gotten off to a big start, but that was due to a long trip.
Total: 95,112 photos, of which I’d estimate approximately 100 to be “really good” and a further 500 or so to be “pretty good.”
May 122011
… sorta. Some guy (not me) has a Gemini boilerplate capsule for sale on eBay, for the low, low buy it now price of $42,900:
***AUTHENTIC GEMINI CAPSULE BOILER PLATE #313***
May 122011
Someone (not me) has a great big ol’ SR-71 for sale. Claims it’s a wind tunnel model; I doubt it. Maybe a movie prop?
***8ft SR71 FIBERGLASS ENGINEERING/WIND TUNNEL MODEL***
May 122011
I’ve been working for a year with a busted tripod. The attempt to fix it into functionality is HERE. But while functional, it was seriously flawed; so I finally broke down and bought a new one before this last trip. So I had a busted tripod I had no use for.
Until I came *back* from the trip. I came back with a new part that Made It All Better.
For starters, the busted tripod:
The “head” of the tripod simply unscrews from the tripod itself:
What made the tripod funtional again is that while in Illinois I came into possession of a new head for the tripod. “New” is here used in a rather ironic sense… while I’ve no paperwork on it, this item manufactured by “Zak Engineering” of East Moline, Illinois has a patent number stamped on it: 2424499. This patent was filed by Harry S. Pasturczak in 1945 and granted in 1947, which would date it to the late 1940’s.
It’s a beautiful piece of work. Manufactured largely of aluminum with steel componants (which seem to be coated in zinc chromate), the only non-metallic part is a felt pad and two (paper?) bearings. I partially disassembled it, cleaned it (it needed little cleaning) and oiled the sliding surfaces. It works like a champ: squeeze the trigger on the pistol grip, and it pans and tilts with ease; let up on the trigger and it locks up good and solid. A dial adjusts it so that when the trigger is released it can still easily pan. A knob at the back of the grip adjusted the tension in the system. The pistol grip can yaw 45 degrees or so left and right, and the camera mounting platform can tilt independently. The beauty of that is that it will allow a camera to point straight up… something none of my other tripods have ever permitted.
Luckily, the photographic industry has kept certain standards over the decades: the base of the heads threaded directly onto the tripod… and my Nikon D5000 threads directly onto the mounting platform.
See photos of the restored tripod after the break…
May 122011
Preliminary results are in for the performance of the ads. In order to generate something resembling a living income, I’d need to bump up page views slightly. Just a little bit. A minor amount. A factor of only 50 or so.
Gah.
Any suggestions?
Since I started the blog, there’s been a grand total of *one* day when viewership was that high. And that was based on THIS blog posting. The reason why it generated so many views was because it got picked up by FARK.com. Sadly, I post news scoops about internet memes only once a decade or so.
Sales of the drawings & documents have been falling for a few years now; I made a major strategic error with the Dirt Cheap Documents. As soon as I offered those, sales of the other documents essentially ceased. It makes sense… why spend five bucks for a document when you could spend 50 cents for another. Sigh. And Aerospace Projects Review has similarly crashed… the last issue only sold about 40 copies. Bleah. This is why I’ve been more focussed on getting the display model biz up and running again, and working on books for actual publication. But if I could get the blog viewership numbers up, I’d start offering up new high-rez drawings and docs *here* for free, converting from a “selling” business to an “advertising” business. But after three years of the blog, I’m still two orders of magnitude low. Once again… suggestions welcomed.
May 122011
Taken at Red Rocks:
