Bested By The Technolobast

I’ve got a couple of posts ready to go but i can’t get to them through the mobile version of WordPress to post them. Today’s post is therefore going to consist of me telling you this. Smallbedroom; you get what you pay for.

All The Fun Of The Fair

Want to know why I enjoy my job?

Those two and the other ten people that I’m responsible for at work. This gets slightly soppy, but keep up.

People say that you don’t work for a company, you work for your boss. I’ve found that to be true right up until I had an actual team of my own – now, I love my job because of them. Yes, they run me ragged, and yes, some of them are massive pains in the arse, but I wouldn’t trade them. I get annoyed when they don’t do as well as they should, frustrated when despite their efforts everything goes wrong, and I take masses of pride when they soar – it’s a bit like being a parent, only you don’t have to keep them after their shifts end. Do I come to work because I have the best boss in the world? No; I come to work to do the best I can to make sure they do.

I get it wrong plenty, of course. Using the wrong tone of voice here, forgetting to send an email until it’s too late there; I’m by no means perfect. But I’m trying; and they still listen to me, do what I ask them to do and seem to be (mostly) enjoying themselves. Hopefully that means I’m doing something right.

Oh, and if it’s any of them reading this, I don’t mean a word of it. You’re all horrible, mean spirited sods that are trying to drive me into an early grave. Get away from here before I set the dogs on you. Great big slavering dogs with hyper-rabies.

Pretentious Drivel

I’ve been thinking about heroes lately. Not the Petrelli filled series of the same name, no, but personal heroes. And strangely, I realised that a hell of a lot of mine are writers.

Is that odd? Because writers don’t really do anything directly to the world, do they? The word “hero” usually brings to mind people the sort of people that win the Victoria Cross by leapfrogging over a German machine gun nest whilst carrying two injured comrades and hurling grenades at a Panzer, not some bloke curled around a typewriter snarling at the world.

Why writers then? Because I’m easily influenced. Because I read things and they change the way I look at the world, without necessarily changing anything that’s in it. Regardless of whether you agree with their point of view, can you really read something by, say, Hunter S. Thompson, without the way you think of America being altered? Whatever you may think of the man himself, do John Simpson’s memoirs not make you want to immediately rush off around the world to see if he’s right about how everything is?

Not saying that these are my particular choices you understand, but they definately have an impact.

 

 

 

I never said these would be long or coherent posts.

February Resolutions

I don’t do New Years resolutions. I never keep the things and then i just feel bad. However, there are a couple of things I need to stop doing, so here are some non-New Years Resolutions:

1. No swearing at work. I’ve done far too much swearing, I need to expand my vocabulary. There must be better phrases i can be using.
2. Get rid of caffene. I went hyper to a ridiculous degree last week, and too much Red Bull on friday kept sleep well out of my grasp. Can’t be doing me any good.
3. Make some effort to listen to new music. Stop relying on Ben making compilations and go look for stuff.
4. Get work brain back in gear. I’ve not worked nearly hard enough this year so far; time to wake up.

That’ll do for now.

Blatant Theft

There’s a passage in Transmetropolitan in which Spider talks about walking down the street and falling in love for just a split second with a passer by. Just for that instant that your eyes meet, there’s a tiny spark of connection before your brains kick in and remind you that you don’t just fall in love from the tiniest bit of eye contact. And then you’re off on your way again, all the background noise fades back up, and it’s like nothing at all happened.

Happens every day when I’m in the city, where people seem so much more alive than in Grantham. That town feels like it’s collapsing under the weight of it’s own stultifying averageness. I love this city, despite it’s many flaws, and the fact I need to live so far from it and all the friends I have there pains me more than I let on.

Morning, city.

Countdown

You know what? I’m going to start using this again. No, really. I’ve just written something over on Facebook about being nearly 30, so what i’m going to do here is write a post a day until i get there. It won’t be easy, because i’m lazy, but it can be done. So far today, i am tired and at work. Yes, I am THAT interesting.

Talk About The Talking About The Passion

www.tatp.org

Have you been here? No? You should. It’s very good.

Tee Hee

Yes, well done to the housefull of people next door that successfully blagged free internet from me for a day because I forgot to turn the MAC address filter back on after I’d been messing with it. You’ll find now that you will be able to connect to my network but you’ll get nothing out of it as you are unrecognised scum.

Pay for it like everyone else, y’theiving basts.

King of Wishful Thinking

Oh yes, I am back. For now. In all likelyhood I will forget I’ve got this thing and/or become bored. I may even ditch it entirely and start using a tumblr again, as they’re probably more fun than one of these, but I think this might end up being a bit more longform.

So, since the previous post I have changed job twice, and spent about three months out on a secondment that involved travelling to and from Telford once a week. Have you ever been to Telford? I wouldn’t bother, it’s not much fun. Worked with some perfectly nice people, but living out of a hotel one night a week with no-one else around that you know is really not that fun. The last time I was down there (which must’ve been early 2006) we were there for a full week and there was about ten of us, so we did end up having a good laugh. I could only stomach the bleakness of sitting in the hotel restaraunt alone ONCE in my time staying there, so I ended up ordering room service. Nothing like watching Futurama in your pants and eating a burger. Telford itself appears to consist of the place I was working, the hotel I was staying at and the shopping centre that has an Asda in it. If there’s more to it then I apologise to the residents of Telford, but I really couldn’t bring myself to explore.

So yes, back now; been given a new team (who seem like a gobby lot, which usually proves way more fun than if they’re quiet) and raring to go. And that’s about it really. I could have used the tumblr really…

Talk About The Aircraft

This post was one that I originally wrote for www.tatp.org but that really doesn’t fit in with what we’re trying to do over there. I say “we”, I’ve not contributed a lot there for a couple of weeks. It’s mainly Ben and Darrell at the moment. Anyway, here’s this:

As a boy, I bought every issue of the popular partwork “Take-Off”. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of the damn things any more, which is a real shame as aircraft have always been an interest of mine – begun, I think, when I played my friend’s copy of F-19 Stealth Fighter on his dad’s PC. More on that later – for now, here’s some facts about my favorite planes.

A-1 Skyraider

A bit of a weird anachronism this one. The Skyraider was designed as a divebomber and entered service in the 1950s. That’s weird because, as you can see from the pictures, it’s got a big propeller on it’s nose whilst all the new aircraft around it were being designed around jets. Still, the Skyranger found a niche for itself in Vietnam as a seach and rescue aircraft, with it’s low speed allowing it to both escort the helicopters that were picking up the downed pilots and also to help locate them in the first place.

Somewhat terrifyingly, someone in the US thought it would be an excellent idea to equit this small, slow propeller driven aircraft with nuclear weapons, and 193 AD-4B aircraft were in service. Now I’m not sure how familiar you all are with nuclear weapons, but the blast radius of a nuke is “big“. Which means that if you’re dropping one you probably want to go “quite fast” to get out of that radius. If you’re flying a Skyraider you would probably have had trouble, so the USAF’s tactic was intended to be that you lobbed the bomb whilst in a climb, allowing it to travel further and enabling you to get away without being vaporised. Thankfully it seems that no-one ever had to test how effective this would be. I’d strongly suspect you’d end up with singed eyebrows as a minimum, along with a fair few tumours to deal with.

X-31

The American X-planes have always been a source of fascination to me. All of them are designed to prove or disprove the usefulness of a particular concept. The X-1 is famous for being the first plane to exceed the speed of sound – which people were concerned about, as they thought it might set the entire atmosphere on fire. You do have to admire the Americans for going ahead if that was a concern, don’t you? Anyway. The X-15 was a rocket plane that was dropped from a B-52 and intended to provide information for the space program by going up to ridiculous heights. The X-29 had backward wings. But the one that always stands out for me is the X-31.

The X-31 looks like a fairly ordinary aircraft at first glance – it’s got normal wings, a normal tail and what SEEMS to be a normal engine. What you can’t tell just by looking is that the engine can vector the thrust around across two axes. This means it can do absolutely crazy maneuvers (have a look at this YouTube link to see what I mean). It was a pretty bonkers idea but it worked brilliantly and a lot of the learnings from it have been incorporated in the F-22 Raptor, though that can only vector it’s engines up and down and not side to side. I love the X-31 because, like most of the X-planes, it’s the culmination of some very serious types sitting around and working out calculations and then going:

“Well let’s chuck it all in a plane and see if it works.“

Ace.

F-19

Now strictly speaking the F-19 doesn’t really… well… exist. You see the Americans went from the F/A-18 Hornet to the F-20 Tigershark (which never actually went into US service) and skipped over the 19 designation. There was an open secret that the US was working on a stealth aircraft, so there was a natural assumption that work had begun on it prior to the F-20 and therefore the aircraft carried the F-19 designation. This was so widely assumed that Microprose released the game that started my aircraft fixation, and Tom Clancy included an F-19 in his novel Red Storm Rising. Considering Clancy prizes himself on his accuracy, it must have been a REALLY popular rumour.

However, there’s never been an F-19. The stealth aircraft that everyone was assuming to be the F-19 was actually the F-117 (which was only called THAT due to a beureaucratic cock-up – it’s not a fighter and should probably have been called the A-something or B-something really). When Microprose released the Amiga version of F-19 Stealth Fighter it gave you the choice of flying the fictional F-19 or the real F-117. This version of the game also changed the Iraqis from being an allied nation to a hostile one, presumably because we’d finished selling them guns by then and were busy bombing them.

As I mentioned before, the F-19 got me into aircraft. Both by being fun, and by having copy protection that consisted of identifying aircraft by their silhouette. As a result I got really good at identifying 80s NATO and Soviet aircraft and ended up knowing LOADS about them.

Su-25 Frogfoot

For those not in the know, Frogfoot is not what the Russians called this attack aircraft. All Soviet aircraft were given “reporting names” by NATO which began with the letter corresponding to their presumed function (e.g. F for fighter, B for bomber, though NATO got the designation of this one slightly wrong).

The Su-25 is the Russian cousin of the A-10 Thunderbolt, designed for close support of tanks and infantry. Like the A-10, it’s got widely spaced engines in case of damage, a titanium “bathtub” that the pilot sits in to protect them from ground fire and is pretty horrendously ugly. Unlike the A-10, it has the fantastic ability to run on pretty much any fuel you put in it. Aviation gas is obviously it’s preferred tipple, but petrol, diesel, ethanol and probably vodka will all get this beast up in the sky. It wins out over the A-10 in my book because it just seems like such a product of it’s country of origin.

“We are running out of avgas, comrade.”
“I have a still behind the hangar. Come, let us refuel the aircraft and get drunk at the same time.”

Still in service to this day – despite former president Yeltsin doing some serious damage to the fuel stocks.

There’s loads more I could go on about and another time perhaps I will – for now I must fly. Ha ha.

Phil Catterall is not proud of that joke.