These words were uttered by Julius Caesar who was taunting Titus Vestricius Spurinna, an Etruscan haruspex who had warned Caesar that something bad would befall him. In this case, Spurinna had the last laugh, so to speak, because later in the day Julius Caesar was assassinated by his enemies.

Other notable things that happened on this date in history:

• Christopher Columbus returned to Spain in 1493 after his first trip to the Americas.
• South Carolina became the first American colony to set up its own independent government in 1776.
• The first World Contact Day with organized in 1953 by the International Flying Saucer Bureau
• The Godfather was released in 1972
• symbolics.com, the first .com domain was registered on the Internet in 1985

As well, one of my good friends celebrates her birthday today. Happy birthday to her! 😉

I was visiting someone in an old age care facility recently and was quite surprised with how cleverly the elevators there operate. The facility has two floors and residents are able to move about the facility pretty much at will. Access in and out is carefully controlled to minimize the chances of someone wandering off.

Some of the residents have Alzheimer’s. One of the characteristics of Alzheimer’s is a tendancy to wander. Thus, one of the goals when designing a care facility for people with Alzheimer’s is ensuring that there aren’t any dead end corridors that could end up frustrating them while they roam about. Elevators pose a special problem because of the potential for someone to get frustrated, or even trapped, if the doors close and they can’t figure out how to make them open again.

Some places use access controls such as swipe cards or keys to control access to elevators, but in this facility the elevators are designed to minimize this problem while allowing the residents to use the elevators on their own. Rather than requiring someone to push a floor button, they detect when someone enters the car and automatically go to the other floor where they patiently wait for people to exit. Very clever.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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: