Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

How’s the ‘National Emergency’ Going?

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So now that we’re three or four days into a national emergency, I can’t help but wonder how it’s going. So far, I’m not noticing anything different. I’ve been going to work, watching television, surfing the web, and generally behaving normally. How about you?

The way people—including those in the government, media, and medical professions—have gone on about this H1N1 flu, you would think we were facing a calamity of epic proportions. So far I’m not seeing any actual evidence of society breaking down. From my perspective it’s a pretty inconsequential ‘pandemic’ and a pretty silly ‘national emergency,’ especially considering we deal with the seasonal flu—which is deadlier and more virulent than ‘swine flu’—every single year.

Whatever happened to SARS? Or West Nile Virus? Are they still around? They got this much media attention when they were new, but I don’t remember them being national emergencies. At least those were novel and different diseases. This one is just the flu.

Seriously . . . chill out.

Goodbye, GeoCities

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It’s a big year for technology farewells. In March I said goodbye to Microsoft Encarta, then in July I said goodbye to CompuServe. Today, I say goodbye to GeoCities.

GeoCities was among the first batch of free web site hosting sites, and lots of people got their web start there before they all moved on to LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, and FaceBook. I started on a site called Trailerpark, then moved to a couple other sites, then to Angelfire, then HyperMart before moving on to a paid HyperMart hosting plan. Angelfire is the only one of all those that is both 1) still around and 2) still free. HyperMart still exists, but is paid hosting only now.

Though I never used GeoCities personally, I was on the web in that era and lots of people I knew were on GeoCities. It was the most popular of the free hosting providers. It very quickly turned into a terrible wasteland of animated GIFs and horrendously clashing colors and backgrounds. Turns out that letting just anybody make a web site without any controls on what they do doesn’t really work out that well. (MySpace has started to learn this more recently.)

Another piece of web history disappears to the great Bit Bucket in the Sky.

Swine Flu a ‘National Emergency’

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So, President Barack Obama (D) has declared that the ‘H1N1’ virus, known colloquially as ‘swine flu’, is a national health emergency (in addition to already being a pandemic). I kid you not.

More than 1,000 people have died in the United States from the flu so far, which is about 1/36th the number of people who die from the regular flu in a regular year. Some early indications are that this flu season is a bit worse than usual, but I have seen no evidence whatsoever that this flu warrants half the attention it’s gotten. In fact, I have yet to see any facts presented by anybody that might indicate this flu is any worse than the regular old flu.

And guess what, regular flu ain’t that bad. It’s a virus, and it’s unpleasant, but unless you have a weakened immune system or are very young or old it’s pretty harmless.

I said it before: the government owes us an explanation. Why all the hysteria over a virus that, by all accounts, is just a minor variant of the regular flu and poses no serious risk to most people?

An Eventful Week

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It’s been an eventful week. I already talked about having to take our youngest cat to the emergency vet for a digestive blockage, which was a blast, let me tell you. Since then, we’ve been feverishly working to get all the paperwork lined up for settlement on our house in less than a month. On top of that, we’ve set up all the utilities (including the super-critical Internet access) to start on-or-around November 20, we have a quote on homeowners’ insurance, appointments next week to get quotes on blinds, a security system, and movers, and probably twenty other things all spinning around all at once.

Since that all wasn’t enough, I interviewed for and was offered a new job and put in my two-weeks notice at the old one. Now the chaos is having a multiplying effect on itself; the change in jobs means a whole new round of paperwork for the mortgage! Weee!

Anyway, the new job is a very exciting opportunity with a well-known technology firm (I’ll provide some more info over the next week or two). After five years at the same company, most of which on one project, it will be nice to have a change of pace. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s also a move from government sector work to private sector work, and the office will be much closer to home.

I thought this was funny though: the office is reasonable walking distance from our apartment . . . and we’re moving out of the apartment to a house 20 or 30 minutes away less than two weeks after I start. Oh well.

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Posted in: Life

Landing on Taxiways is a No-No

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I’m not a pilot—not even a private pilot [yet]—but I have a long-standing interest in aviation. Back when I used to have free time, I spent a fair amount of it flying in computer flight simulators like X-Plane. I was to the point (and probably still am) that I could take off in real-world weather conditions (which X-Plane downloads from the web), navigate successfully to my destination airport, and land safely. I even used to test myself with disaster scenarios—landing with one or more engines out, navigating in poor weather, instrument failures, etc.—and usually survived. Not always though ;-).

Because of this experience and my own interest in this field, I am more knowledgeable than many of my peers about aviation news. I, for example, was able to explain to my coworkers what a pitot tube does and why it’s important when we were discussing the crash of Air France flight 447 this summer.

That’s why I know that the pilots who landed their airliner on Taxiway M (instead of, say, a runway) at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Monday have no excuse. Runways have very, very different markings than taxiways—different day-time paint jobs, and different night-time lighting—and even I, with my very limited experience, can tell them apart from a great distance in the air. The article says nothing about the weather conditions in Atlanta on Monday, but even in poor visibility you don’t land unless you know what you’re landing on (duh).

Thank God this incident didn’t kill people. It’s not uncommon for aircraft to be sitting on taxiways (waiting their turn for takeoff) while planes are coming in to land, and usually it’s frowned upon for a landing plane to land on the waiting plane(s).

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.