Wednesday August 22, 2001

Doncha just hate cell phone envy? You think you have it so good with your motorola startac slung smartly on your hip or nokia "just like the matrix" silver surfer tucked into a convienent recess...and then you go to Europe and see how cell phones & service really should be! They have a little sim card, so if the battery wears out on your phone from sending a thousand SMS messages in the last hour you simply over-power an underling, pop the sim out of their phone, put yours in and you're live and taking calls again without a burp. Here in the US we have wonderful features like "send SMS messages ONLY to other XYZ subscribers....neat!" US cell phone companies are still operating under the delusional hypothesis that sooner or later they will be the one and only carrier and there's no reason for system interoperability. Meanwhile across the pond Britons to Send 1 Billion Text Messages in August. SMS, in case you haven't been keeping score, is like instant messaging without having to sit at your computer all day or like a one second phone call ("dinner party @ 8 CU there") without being interupted.



dBay Debbie's Page of Incredible Aeronautical Crap!...I like the "surly teen plane" in the list of 737 family line.



One of the engineers I worked with at Vicinity is an avid Ham Radio Operator and has created an interesting site for N1RZ Six Meter Path Data tracking. I can only pretend to fully understand what's going on here, but since it is map based I think it's cool (and there's FAQs to learn more).

It's great to find new and surprising hobbies on the internet. I bought MS Flight Sim a while back and during the process of trying to find an updated driver I ran across a whole parallel avaition universe where flight sim pilots, and air traffic controllers (they can simulate anything), go to work at night flying "real" routes and logging "real" flight time in the pursuit of higher and higher rank (and simulated pay) in a totally simulated airline. Here's some of the links:

And of course you can really improve upon your simulation environment!

And for the hardcore math-aviators out there here is a great collection of Aviation Formulary from Ed Williams.