It Has Been Done Before..

First flown in 1929, the British airship R101 crashed in bad weather over France on the morning of October 5th 1930, killing 54 people. At the time, it was the largest aircraft in the world at 777 feet. Its sister ship, R100, was decommissioned a year later.

The lift gas was Hydrogen, lighter than air but a little volatile to say the least.

The hangar where these two airships were built still stands at Cardington, England.

Did aviators learn from this disaster? No, they did not. The Hindenburg, 808 feet in length and only shorter than the SS Titanic by 78 feet, was started in 1931, but due to financial problems was halted and not resumed until 1935. May 3rd1937 saw the Hindenburg burst into flames, 36 people losing their lives. It too was filled with Hydrogen, but only because Germany was not allowed Helium by the United States, the only source at the time. It remains today the largest aircraft to ever fly.

It was at this point where it appeared to dawn on the world at large that maybe airships were not the way to travel. Aviators did learn this time, but the dream stayed alive.

No piece on airships would be complete without mention of the Goodyear Blimp. There have actually been 300 made since the very first in 1911. The current fleet are roughly 192 feet long, and are used as advertising and photography platforms. They are Helium filled and there has only been one crash, I think.

So, have airships finally found their vocation? Is the dream of a large luxurious airship gone forever? No, it hasn't.

The picture below is an artist impression of the next generation 'lighter than air' aircraft. The general idea is that it will enable 250 people to drift around in consummate luxury, much like R101 and Hindenburg attempted to do years ago. The questions are these. Even though the airship will be Helium filled, would you really want to drift around in an airship larger than most International airport buildings? Would you feel safe watching this thing pass over your house? This is Thunderbird 2 on steroids, a floating 'Canary Wharf'...

Next Time You Get Into Your Car..

.. think about what you are doing, or about to do.. the consequence can be tragic..

A Maintenance Nightmare..

Next time your power or telephone is not working,

.. spare a thought for the guy who has to fix it..

A New Look..

What can be nicer than sitting in a park on a warm Sunday afternoon, or a walk in a forest, or watching the sun go down over an azure sea. Well, it's all about to change. As fossil fuel resources run low, and use of them becomes more of a criminal act due to their effect on the world's ecosystem, we have to find new ways to power our world.

Welcome to the new look Central Park and Brazilian Corn Forest. Yes folks, this is how everywhere is going to look. I just hope that yellow is your favorite color. If we can get enough corn planted quickly, our reliance on fossil fuel will be over, and we can worry about converting carbon dioxide to oxygen later. The trees do it now but there will be other ways for sure. Nobody will feel left out either, because there is a nice crop just suited to back yards, window boxes and hanging baskets called rapeseed, and it has the cutest little yellow flowers you ever did see.
For those of you who live near the ocean or desert, your world will not be so yellow, and people in mountainous regions may even get to keep a few trees. Give a big welcome to your new noisy neighbors. If anybody told you that a high pole carrying a generator and three very large variable pitch blades was anything other than noisy, they were having you on, but you have to admit that they do look very high tech.


For the fauna and flora that we have grown to love so much over the centuries, it's a time for a quiet adios. We loved it, but it is just no use to anything anymore. Anyway, all we have to do is subscribe to the History Channel, and we will be able to watch movies of forests and all of the animals in high definition.

So bring on the yellow, whooshing world. We have a gas tank to fill.

Trains and Records..

TGV V150 of the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer), France's national railway system, has set a new record of 357.4 mph on track between Paris and Strasbourg. The engine was uprated to 25000 hp, and larger wheels were fitted for the attempt. It was hoped that the record set by a Japanese MagLev train of 361 mph could have been equalled or broken, but unfortunately fell just short of the target. Unfortunate it may have been, but when one considers that it was running on rails, and picking up off of an overhead Catenary wire, overcoming all of the friction induced by the rails, wire and air, it was a huge achievement. The French are not new to rail speed records, having first set the record back in the '60's for electric locomotives on specially prepared track between Paris and Lille. Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and Japan all have their own high speed railway networks, proving that there is still life in the railroad.

There is a speed record which has never been broken, that of a steam hauled train. On July 3rd, 1938, the London North Eastern Railway LNER 4468 Mallard, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, set a record of 126 mph. Notice that the front end design has not changed too much!

One more record that deserves a mention is that of the 'Rocket', designed by George Stephenson. In the year 1829, there was a competition for all railway locomotive builders. It was called the Rainhill Trials, and was sponsored by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Rocket was the only locomotive to complete the trials successfully, weighing just less than 6 tons while pulling a 20 ton load at a speed of 10 mph. It became the railway locomotive to haul the very first passenger service.

ET Phone Home..

From the point where you are standing, nowhere on this planet is further away than 12,000 miles. It seems like a long way, yet the world is very much a global village these days. Television, satellite transmissions, video conferencing and e-mail can bring all four corners of the globe right onto the screen you are looking at now. It is a small world. The photograph on the right shows just how small. This is one of the famous three pictures of 'Earthrise', and is seen here as originally aligned.

And if you think that is small, compare our relative size to some of the other babies in our Solar System. Note that size is relative, and not distance. We are the third rock from the left.

Our Sun is 93,000,000 miles away from us, and Pluto is at a distance of 3573,000,000 miles. The nearest star to our Solar System is Proxima Centauri, the smallest of a three star group known as Alpha Centauri. This group is 4.3 light years distance away, where one light year represents 5,865,696,000,000 miles.

We see Alpha Centauri as it 'was' 4.3 years ago. Incidentally, we believe that the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away from us!
All of the above is truly awe-inspiring, but what I find so strange is that we know more about space than we do about what is in our oceans and forests.

All distances approximate..

A message to the Rest of the World..

The English and French fought for centuries. It was a point of pride with both nations, bold French Knights pitted against scruffy yet highly effective English (Welsh) archers. Where the French went, the English were sure to follow, if only to upstage the French, proving that they were more ruthless.


Then one day they sat down together and produced this. It all seemed so heady in the concept and early design stages. Sometimes, the TV news would show huge pieces of airplane being carted around the English and French countryside. All of the parts arrived in Britain for assembly at Filton.

We watched Brian Trubshaw, BAC test pilot extraordinaire take her up for the first flight. Absolutely magnificent. For 30 years, aviation enthusiasts were enthralled by this white supersonic arrow. It left the most distinctive vapor trail of any passenger airliner, and you knew it was Concorde because no other passenger jet ever crossed the sky so fast.

Of course the noise of its four Bristol Siddeley Olympus jet engines were not so welcome, especially if you lived under the flight path near any of the airports that it graced, but you can't take away the achievement. Regardless of what follows Concorde in the future, this bird will always have been the very first.

This diagram shows the breakdown of who made what. A tribute indeed to two nations that had the longest tradition of war against each other. It is amazing what can be done when people and nations choose collaboration over killing.

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007..

At the time of writing, the public release of Microsoft's latest flagship operating system, Windows Vista, is but five days away. Best Buy and CompUSA stores are organizing Vista parties for the night of January 29/morning of January 30 in much the same style as happened for Windows 95. Other stores around the world may well follow suit.

Windows Vista is slick and good looking. Searches are faster, memory management is better, security is better, and graphics handling is impressive. I have been using Vista Ultimate since November 18 (beta testing prior to this date), and I can honestlty say that I do not want to go back to using Windows XP Pro.

Program compatibility is surprisingly good, as is native support for computer hardware. Microsoft have 19,500 device drivers lined up for release into Windows update to coincide with the public release. What this means is that there is a good chance that your existing peripheral devices like printers and scanners will still work (subject to the device manufacturers supplying drivers to Microsoft).

Hardware requirements are well in excess of Windows XP, depending upon which version of Vista one wants to run. Vista takes up more space, requires more memory, and a better graphics system than is found on older systems, but these computers may still be able to run Vista Basic. Most home users will probably opt for Vista Home Premium which now includes Media Center. For more on the editions available click on this link..

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx

Anybody wishing to upgrade a computer to Vista should click on this link..

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx

Question #1.. will you need Vista? Most probably not.

Question #2.. will you want Vista? Absolutely yes!


Microsoft Office 2007 will also be released. The four major components of MS Office get a major facelift with the advent of the 'Ribbon'. This is a context sensitive menu system that takes the place of the old drop down menus.

It takes a little time to get used to it, but what it does do is present many features that you may otherwise not have discovered in the older versions.

It has also been given a Vista 'look', and is very impressive. For more on MS Office 2007, go to this link..

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/FX100647101033.aspx

There is an online Office demo where you can see the new features in action.

Happy computing..

An offer too good to be true?

Spam e-mail is definitely becoming ever more prolific. Selling on the internet is big business for some, and the spammers have upped their game recently, devising new ways to beat spam filters. It appears to be working. I get anything up to 200 spam e-mails per day on just one of my e-mail accounts.

One of the methods used is the deliberate misspelling of product names. In this way, Viagra becomes Viaccgra, the result being that the spam filter does not recognize the word, but anybody opening the e-mail will know the referenece immediately.

Another way to sell something is to completely mislead the spam filters by advertizing perfectly good 'clean' products, but making the innocuous link to the order form point to some seedy porn site.

An example..

Check our price-list.

Special Offers:
MS Office 2003 PRO (1 CD Edition) + Acrobat 6 PRO Professional
109.95$
MS Office 2003 Professional (1 CD Edition) + OneNote 2003
109.95$
Microsoft(c) Office 2003 Professional (1 CD) + FrontPage 2003
109.95$

Come to site

The bold larger text is there for your personal safety, because that text in the original mail sent to me was actually a director to a hard porn website.

How do I know this? When I read e-mail, I use the mouse pointer much as one might use a finger on the page of a book. When the mouse pointer ran over the 'bold' text, it revealed the name of the website, which I can tell you now would not have shown you software prices or any order form.

Had I clicked on either link, I would have been taken to a hard porn site, and any attempt by me to close it down would have resulted in a barrage of popups, and some kind of trojan infection within my computer.

If an offer looks too good to be true, then assume that it is too good to be true and leave it well alone.

I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 as my mail client. Your preferred mail client may not do this, so take note.

Bridges, Bridges, Bridges..

The Øresund Bridge-Tunnel is 15,905 metres long, and connects Malmo, Sweden, to Copenhagen, Denmark. The bridge is 7845 metres, Peberholm (Pepper Islet, so called because the islet to the right is called Saltholm), which connects the bridge to the tunnel is 4,055 metres, and the tunnel including the collector points and toll booths is 4,050 metres. The Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel crosses the James River, Virginia, connecting Newport News and Suffolk, and comprises of a curved 3.2 mile bridge section connecting to a 4,800ft tunnel. Aerial photos of this bridge-tunnel have been mistakenly reported as the Oresund Bridge-Tunnel, but as one can clearly see, the two constructions are quite different.
The Water Bridge close by the German city of Magdeburg ties the Elbe-Havel canal to the important Mittelland canal, which leads to the country’s industrial Ruhr Valley. At 918 metres in length, it is Europe’s largest bridge of it’s kind.

The Technical Part..

This blog is authored on a home constructed PC with the following specification.

• Biostar T6100-939 motherboard
• AMD 64 3500+ processor
• 3gb DDR 400 RAM
• MSI NX6600 VTD256E video card
• 2 x 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache Western Digital hard drives
• 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache Western Digital USB external hard drive
• LG DVD/RW and CD/RW optical drives

The system is hard wired to a D-Link 624i broadband router and connects to the internet via a Speedstream 4200 DSL modem which it shares with three other computers.

The operating system is Microsoft 'Vista', and all posts are edited in Microsoft Word 2007, part of Microsoft Office Professional 2007. There is also a full complement of other programs which combine to make it a very versatile and powerful machine.