Screw up ...

Major screwup at Airbus - BusinessWeek Online - MSNBC.com:

Fear factor: Yet others say the situation is no surprise, because Airbus's corporate culture openly discourages employees from alerting managers to potential problems. 'If you tell them bad news, they simply don't listen,' says Andrew Walker, a former top engineer at the factory in Broughton, Wales, where the A380's wings are built. 'No one dares tell a high executive that something isn't possible, because he risks losing his job,' says a local union leader at the Toulouse factory who asked for anonymity.

*Sigh*. I've been there.

Me: "We have a big problem."

Them: "Shut up and quit being so negative."

*Sigh*.

One great thing about listenig to people's work-related problems all day is that sometimes you notice a pattern that wouldn't otherwise be apparent.

And then you can fix it!

Or sometimes you notice a way to fix about five problems at once!

Efficiency! Cool!

© 2006 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Leet

LearnLeetspeak.com - Leetspeak to English Translator

th12 12 PREtTY |_|5ef|_|L Ph0r Reg|_|lAr pE0Ple l1kE |\/|eH th@ r |\|0t E><peRT2 0|\| lEeT-5PEek.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2:

So every once in a while, usually when I've smoked a little too much weed and I'm feeling kind of malicious, I like to crank call old Agent Sculley and just frig with his head. I'll call him at like 3 in the morning and ask him if he's got Prince Albert in a can, or I'll tell him I'm a telemarketer raising money for the Unemployed CEO Foundation, or I'll do the one where I pretend I work for the phone company and I'm down at the end of his street and please don't pick up the phone cause if you do I'll get shocked, then I call back and when he picks up I scream like I'm being shocked and I go, 'Ow! Ow! Ouch! Hey! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Hey! I told you not to pick up the phoooooone!!! G-g-g-g-g-g ... aaaaaaaarghhhhh!!!'

This is funny as well, shit. It's a fake diary/blog by Steve Jobs. It is PFF.

Hmm. That gives me an idea ...

GameDaily BIZ: MS: Blu-ray Disc Difficult to Manufacture

GameDaily BIZ: MS: Blu-ray Disc Difficult to Manufacture:

Majidimehr noted that Blu-ray discs are more like 'open-face sandwiches' and he said that because the bits are close to the surface 'scratching can become a big problem.' He continued, 'So when Sony and others first introduced Blu-ray in Japan they put it in a cartridge to protect it, and of course nobody wants a cartridge around their discs... so then they went through a long process of trying to figure out how to protect that layer and they've come up with different surface material to try and provide that protection, but as you try to coat the disc with a protective layer you also contaminate it so that reduces yields and the number of good discs you can get out of a production run.'

I read somewhere (I wish I had posted this - or maybe I did!) a list of formats that Sony has tried to introduce - and every single one was a failure in the marketplace.

That doesn't bode well for Blu-Ray.

All of Walt Disney World on DVD

Relive The Magic - Welcome!

I ordered this set of DVDs - 17 when I ordered it - but now I think it is 18 DVDs.

I have to say ... it's horrible.

It's shot by a kid walking around WDW with a camcorder on his shoulder - and he holds it at an angle the whole time.

I searched around for a review of the DVD set before I ordered it and I could find one - so I decided to go for it.

It was rather disappointing.

Fortunately, I bought it from the LaughingPlace.com store, and they refunded my money without any questions!

They told me some people like it because it has stuff that you can't get anywhere else. Well, you might like it too, but watching a kid walk around at an odd angle was too much for me.

You know - all you Disney videographers out there - learn to hold the camera still sometimes! Also, unless you have a soundtrack you need to keep going, it's often better to pause, change the view, and then start again. It's much less jaring than all that zooming in and out and swinging around.

(Note: 7/17/2006 - it's on sale for $50.00! That's great for 18 disks. If you're super diehard you might want to get it. But seriously, unless you are super-diehard, it will rip your eyeballs out.)

Great Hackers

Great Hackers:

When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.

There are too many great paragraphs in this article for me to quote them all. You really should read it.

I'm not sure I agree with everything 100% but it would be pretty dang close.

The Internet is a Series of Tubes Song

www.myspace.com/tedstevensfanclub

This is a song a guy wrote made from Senator Ted Stevens' comments the other day that the "Internet is a series of tubes." The funny thing is that it stopped playing for me half way through because some of those internet tubes got clogged.

Space shuttle returns safely to Earth - World - Times Online

Space shuttle returns safely to Earth - World - Times Online:

Discovery touched down safely in Florida this afternoon, marking the revival of Nasa's manned spaceflight programme after three years tinged by disaster and persistent doubts about the safety of its shuttle fleet.

After 13 days in space and a journey of 5.3 million miles (8.53 million kilometres), the space shuttle's tyres hit the runway at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 9.14am local time (2.14pm BST) to be greeted by Mission Control: 'Welcome back Discovery and congratulations on a great mission.'

I'm certainly happy the astronauts made it safely back to Earth - but one successful space trip does not a successful shuttle design make. After all, there were 100 successful trips interleaved with the other two tragic shuttle missions.

Hopefully (but I doubt it) NASA will continue to be super-careful and go through all of these examinations with the same thoroughness after every flight.

One Laptop Per Child

IEEE-USA Today's Engineer - One Laptop Per Child

An article by Mary Lou Jepsen who is driving the effort to make the $100 laptop. The display itself is pretty amazing:

The display I've devised: a 7.5" diagonal 1200x900 pixel display. That's higher resolution than 95 percent of the laptops that ship today. It's 200 dots per inch (dpi). It has a sunlight readable, and room-light readable mode — these in black and white. Our target: a display as readable as a newspaper with the backlight off. Then, when the backlight is turned on — the display becomes color — color resolution is ~800x600 color, and in some of our designs we can achieve 1024x768 color at very low power consumption. The entire display consumes about 1W with the backlight on, and about 0.2W with the backlight off. This at $40 instead of the usual $130 for a regular laptop display which consume ~7X the power of our display and is not sunlight readable.

Surprising rules on credit cards

Surprising rules on credit cards - ConsumerMan - MSNBC.com

This is a fun article on minimum and maximum limits for credit cards - there are none, except your credit limit.

Taking sex from films violates copyright laws

Taking sex from films violates copyright laws - MSNBC.com:

SALT LAKE CITY - Sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws, and several companies that scrub films must turn over their inventory to Hollywood studios, an appeals judge ruled.

Editing movies to delete objectionable language, sex and violence is an 'illegitimate business' that hurts Hollywood studios and directors who own the movie rights, said U.S District Judge Richard P. Matsch in a decision released Thursday in Denver.

Happy Fourth of July!

When I was a wee-lad (age 16-18) I went to Disneyland every weekend to watch the amazing Rod Miller play the piano at Coke Corner. Then each weeknight I taught myself to play ragtime by slowing down a player piano and looking at the notes. Between watching Rod play (upside down, usually, from the top of the piano) and practicing at home a couple of hours a night, I learned to play. It took a couple of years before it sounded like music but since I had nothing else to do in my latter years of high school it was fun.

I have posted a ragtime medley by me of "The Stars and Strips Forever / God Bless America" at my web site:

Stars and Stripes Forever / God Bless America

It's about half the speed that Rod can play it.

Happy Fourth of July!

-- Stephen

© 2006 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.