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Archive for March 2010

Here’s how he did it

March 13, 2010 @ 11:12 By: gordon Category: Seen on the 'net

A couple of days ago I posted a link to an incredible video on YouTube of a flight taken from the perspective of a small camera mounted on the nose gear of a 747-200. In the video, the nose gear is lowered well-before the main gear, which led a couple of people (including myself) to wonder how they did it.

According to a new “making of” video, it’s really not that complicated because there are controls that allow them to manually lower each landing gear independently.

Brace yourself for a little sleep deprivation

March 12, 2010 @ 17:34 By: gordon Category: General

You’re probably going to lose an hour of sleep this weekend and there’s not much you can do about it. (Well, ok, you can sleep in, but you’re still going to be missing an hour.)

That’s right, Sunday morning at 2am most of North America switches over to Daylight Saving time in a futile attempt to save energy. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s evidence that energy consumption actually increases, as do accident rates in the week after the clocks are set forward.

I wonder if the slow drivers will be driving even slower on the Queensway next week.

Probably.

(more…)

Why must they drive so slowly on the Queensway???

March 11, 2010 @ 16:55 By: gordon Category: General, Out and about

I’ve been grumbling about this for a while now and a couple of recent incidents have prompted me to stop grumbling about it in private and rant about it in public on the Internet (again), so here goes…

If you’ve driven on the Queensway, you’ve almost certainly encountered slow drivers puttering along below the posted speed limit for no obvious reason. The roads are clean and dry, it’s not raining or snowing, and there isn’t an accident or something else causing traffic to slow down.

They’re. Just. Driving. Slowly.

And chances are that they’re in lanes other than the right-most one.

“So what?” you might ask. “As long as they’re travelling between 60 km/h and 100 km/h they’re not breaking the law, so suck it up.”

No. Bzzt. Wrong.

(more…)

Nose gear point of view

March 06, 2010 @ 17:33 By: gordon Category: Seen on the 'net

Usually, flying videos are taken from cameras mounted in the cockpit with the pilots or mounted on the nose. Gadling featured a video taken with a camera that was mounted on the nose gear of a 747-200, which is definitely worth watching.

Pop-up irony

March 02, 2010 @ 14:12 By: gordon Category: Seen on the 'net

A colleague asked me about pop-up website surveys that some websites have. Every nth visitor is presented with a popup window when they visit a site that asks them questions related to their visit. She didn’t like my answer of “annoying” in response to her question of “what are they called?”, so I did some Googling to see if there was a formal name and came across a page at SiteExperts.com about them.

Ironically, their page about pop-up surveys tried to pop something up that Firefox stomped on: