With pride, I publish the latest greatest program (an xsamplex exclusive!) in the program contest:
10 DIM VP(11)
20 LOCATE 10, 12 : GOSUB 500
30 FOR X = 1 TO 11
40 LOCATE 10 + X, 12 : PRINT CHR$(VP(J));
50 NEXT X
60 GOTO 10
500 RESTORE 600 : FOR J = 1 TO 11 : READ VP(J) : NEXT J : RETURN
600 DATA 72, 69, 76, 76, 79, 32, 87, 79, 82, 76, 68
Heh.
Regarding last nights unfortunate miracle crash at Pierson Airport, Toronto, naturally it’s all over the news today (all of the passengers survived!).
Here’s one thing I wonder about (and I noticed that it hasn’t crossed the mind of the analysts on TV, yet): since this was an international flight between Paris and Toronto with no stopovers, the plane would not have been flying on too much fuel. Did the Air France crew know this: A two minute 52 seconds (!) evacuation before the plane complete went up on fire is a long still a wait, particularly since plane fuel is so extremely volatile.
Update: Bonus link, the Airbus A-340 is one of the safest planes in the world
O
ver at CNN an exciting article about the Ivory Billed Woodpecker (Wikipedia). Apparantly doubters recalled their article (to be published in a science magazine) after hearing an audiotrack of recently published video footage.
All nice and well, but looking at the advertisements on that page (see screenshot: the advertisements aren’t there anymore), it doesn’t really surprise me why this pretty bird almost became extinct. ‘Call now 1-800-WOODPECKERS to get rid of those pests’
Stay tuned: here I will start a new revolution called ‘LTVlogging’, which stands for ‘Live TV Logging’! It’s like sitting in front of TV except for that you’re sitting in front of the computer. Entries are descending order (earliest entry down). Refresh often. Or come back. Whatever. Who cares.
7:55 PM: Doctor Who just finished! CBC has big banners anouncing the movie for today: it’s Attack of the Clones. Yay!
7:56 PM: My favourite commercial is up!
7:57 PM: ‘Summer Fun!’ (KFC commercial). Some woman yelling picknick.
8:00 PM: Scrolling starts! Yellow text Episode II. It goes too fast, so… uh… ‘There is unrest in the Galactic Senate etc, etc.’
8:02 PM: Senator Padme’s craft is landing. Great Landing!!
8:03 PM: Giant explosion!!!! It exploded. The Senator is not dead… Padme was in disguise!!!!
8:06 PM: ‘Imposible to see the future is’, says Yoda when asked by (what’s his name again?).
8:07 PM: Padme is going to be protected by the Jedi: Kenobi and Anakin. Jar-Jar welcomes them. Padme smiles at Anakin and says the famous words “My goodness you’ve grown”.
8:10 PM: Kenobi warns Anakin not to jump into conclusions and that have to follow the orders of the Council by protecting Padme. Anakin seems to be impatient.
Anakin tells Jar-Jar about how he cares about Padme. Kenobi spoils the fun by saying that he has to be careful with his emotions. Duh!
Th
inking back about the movie ‘The Village’, the one we saw yesterday, I mesmerized about why it didn’t catch on with me: while the storyline is good, the climax isn’t the climax that’s being expected. The movie doesn’t fullfill its expectations.
Take for example the classic movie ‘The Planet of The Apes’: the most shocking scene is the last scene, where the camera pans to a half-buried statue which the audience immediately recognizes as ‘The Statue of Liberty’. This was a shocking (and dramatic) climax: during the movie, we as viewers were intentionally left thinking that Charlton Heston landed on a planet with a primitive civilization (‘The Apes’). The moment the ‘Statue of Liberty’ comes in the picture, we all suddenly become aware something ‘terrible’ must have happened to Earth.
Of all movies I’ve seen, I haven’t felt the same effect of that particular ‘Statue of Liberty ‘ shot and I’m sure that that’s exactly the problem with ‘The Village’. A shot of Bryce Howard looking shocked in front of high rises would have been more appropriate.
We saw both ‘Constatine’ and ‘The Village’ today. While I was aware of the clue of ‘The Village’, I had never seen it.
I’m not sure if it was worth seeing: maybe Nigh Shyamalan should concentrate on finishing off ‘Unbreakable’. As for ‘Constatine’: while the effects are pretty good, the storyline appears to be lagging. And from experience speaking: I noticed that the twins were called ‘Angela and Isabel’, which struck me as ‘weird’.
I mean, wouldn’t most parents give their twins ..uh.. ‘twins names’?
Seen (and read) the buzz about IE7? Holzschlag,, … and well, everybody who has a blog nowadays. Some of them are in anticipation. Some of them are waiting for something spectacular from Microsoft’s hands. And some of them, well, if you get paid by the company itself, wouldn’t you be writing positive news, just to keep the buzz going?
There’s a couple of questions I’d like to ask the IE7 team:
To support future CSS extensions and to remain true to standards: have you rewritten the IE7 engine? Has this ever been under consideration? Is the main codebase still based on code from Mosaic (Self link to a 2003 posting)?
If so (Still Mosaic based), don’t bother going along with the buzz: I think it’s impossible to build better CSS support on technologies from an Older Age. Also: If you run IE7, do me a favour and grab a snapshot from the About Explorer box.
Believe it or not, it is: today marks the (open air) concert of Creedence Clearwater Revisited. Radio mentioned more than 12,000 visitors to be expected, which is like, almost more people than live around this area.
Yeah, I know, that’s not funny.
The good news is that I’m not into Creedence Clearwater but that the music can be heard from where I sit right now. (Pardon me, it’s actually Dr. Hook playing: I guess later it’s Creedence Clearwater).
(Update 23:04): it looks like they’re (CCR) finally playing
One of the items we bought for the homefront was Magic Baking Powder (From Kraft). It’s basically soda and it is used for leavening batters. Perfect for example to get your white cake going: in those cases you definitely don’t want to use other agents like yeast. Note, baking powder does perfectly well in scrambled eggs too: a half a teaspoon makes more out of the eggs. Trust me.
Before I came over here, I had never heard of baking powder before: generally, I was taught to make cake using plain sugar, eggs and flour and milk. In those kind of recipes, it’s the beating of the eggs that makes the cake rise: imagine my surprise when I saw the effects of soda. No more 20 minutes of beating eggs!
For the chemistry gifted (and the ones that are familiar with this stuff): baking soda is plain NaHCO3 (sodium bicarbonate). You may remember mixing up soda with vinegar when you were younger and looked up amazed about the bubbles. Well, magic baking powder is the same, except for it has (extra) dry acid, which gives notably better leavening results than plain baking soda while using less of it (soda is generally saltier too).
Just a couple of minutes ago, I saw the BBC new ticker say that ‘NASA is grounding the Space Shuttle program because of foam that hit the shuttle’. You’ve probably seen the succesful launch of the Discovery, yesterday. Currently it’s still breaking news so no (actual) link available. The NASA site mentions nothing at all except for that the shuttle was going to dock to the Space Station tomorrow, as scheduled apparently.
I think I’ve mentioned it before here, but I don’t believe the Space Shuttle should be part of the US’s active space program: the technology behind the Shuttle is too old. As a teenager I was amazed when I saw the launch of the first Space Shuttle, the Columbia. I was shocked when leading scientist Richard Feynman (then part of the board investigating the circumstances of the Challenger explosion) likened NASA’s mentality to a Russian Roulette game. I was reminded of Feynman’s words when news broke that the Columbia was gone.
“A kind of Russian roulette. The Shuttle flies and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. You got away with it, but it shouldn’t be done over and over again like that.”
Over and over again. Maybe it’s time to focus once again on unmanned flight, particularly looking at the successes in that area. There’s a lot more exciting (scientific) things to learn about our Solar System by landing spacecraft on comets.
update: BBC got the scoop.
Since my vacation is officially over, it’s time to return to the normal programming (and the job). On the personal plate are the following plans and corrections:
There’s still some Postgres coding stuff hanging in my head, some Postgres XML tools and other fun stuff. Point is, there’s so much fun to do that it’s killing my brain and time.
Last night, when returning home both my wife and I thought it was awfully quiet at home. For (almost) three weeks, my dad stayed around the place enjoying a long break from busy life in The Netherlands. We all had fun, I think, pets included. There were a couple of misunderstandings and a couple of bad luck situations: things that pop-up because you find out that a 3 week vacation is actually a long time.
The best kept secret in my dad’s travel plan, is that going over Frankfurt once again proved to be a good choice: travelling by train from Holland to that airport is almost straighforward (and fun and not too expensive either). While Air Transat definitely had its problems (rudder problems…), their service was actually nothing to complain about. Perfect.
We’re defying the Law of Coincidents once again: yesterday we dropped dad off at the airport. Waiting for my wife to return from her accompanying duties for my wheelchair-bound senior, I spotted the same woman once again. No really:
Hey, I know you because you are in a picture I made!
Luckily, I’m not superstitious or religious.
