• Having every meeting at an Iranian Pizza Hut
• Using your personal airline miles numbers at every hotel if you’re using a cover

Now, before you start accosting your friendly neighborhood flight attendant to see their ADIRU maintenance records, consider this little tidbit buried in the article, “It’s not clear what caused the ADIRU to shift into failure mode, as this is only the third time that it has happened in over 128 million hours of operation”.  128 million hours of operation and three bugs?!?  Think about that success rate.  That’s 14,611 years of flight time!

I’ve been working on and with software for the majority of my life.  We’ve got a certain amount of liberty developing websites (looking at you, everyone I’ve every worked with).  If a feature crashes once in a while, or the entire site becomes briefly unavailable, most often it goes unnoticed.  In the worst case scenario, we might have some unhappy users.  When avionics fail, metal tubes filled with people drop out of the sky.  On the web we might miss the occasional edge case when validating user inputs.  These guys are contending with “a high-energy atmospheric particle striking one of the integrated circuits within the unit.”  The reliability of these kinds of integrated systems given the complexity is absolutely insane.

So my hat is off to you, mission critical software engineers everywhere.  You seldom receive the praise that the media heaps on your web counterparts, but I, for one, appreciate you keeping me from a fiery death.

Read the whole story here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoZIwtgEqKY

I’m generally not a huge proponent of collections.  The having of things has never much appealed to me.  But surfboards represent a very different proposition.  Aesthetics tempered by functional considerations, a surfboard is art that demands to be used.  Look at this room.  This one room represents an enormous swath of our collective knowledge around the technical application of fluid dynamics through the lens of each shaper’s particular vision.  With enough money and time (and a great deal of understanding from my wife), I could certainly imagine ending up with a room like this.

This pic came from an amazing pictorial from Surfer Magazine about unusual surfer dwellings.  Check it out.

Meet Bob Kramer and see if you have a similar reaction.

Like chocolate and peanut butter, so too do Kanye lyrics perfectly pair with moments from Saved by the Bell.  What a wonderful time to be alive!

http://kanyedbythebell.tumblr.com

There are big waves, and then there is Teahupoo. Happy new year, everybody!

Powered surfboard?  You bet it is! The WaveJet has got to be the one of the coolest bits of technology I’ve seen in a while (if you don’t surf, just move along and do whatever it is you people do for a few minutes).  I know that purists will be against the idea of a powered surfboard, but we can’t fear change.  And they are the only chance we have of suppressing the filthy cheating stand up paddle board guys.  Anyway, here’s what I’ve gleaned so far:

•  30 minutes of power from rechargeable lithium batteries
• Self-contained propulsion system (not your arms)
• Capable of up to 8 knots (that’s metric for freaking fast), depending on the model
• Ranges from short boards up through rescue boards. The rescue boards for lifeguards make a ton of sense when you think about it.
• Propulsion is activated and deactivated via a remote control button on a wrist band.
• Steve Walden designed the board shapes so they probably won’t suck.
• Fills an interesting niche for waves too big to paddle into without a tow in

The last time I was on Oahu we surfed the North Shore and I bumped into the WaveJet gang and Steve Walden having lunch.  Really nice guys who are clearly stoked on their boards.  I hope these turn out to be as cool as they look.  Check it out.