|
Jeff's LunchbreakA skeptical blog discussing evolution, aviation, religion, and anything else I feel like.
|
Woohoo! My first patent:
Rotor Collective Pitch vs. Mu to Control Flapping and Mast/Rotor Tilt to Control Rotor RPM
I guess I'm now officially an inventor. However, when a kid can patent his swinging method, I question just how much confirmation a patent actually is.
It's a good thing I'm not superstitious, or I'd think I was cursed.
I live in Wichita Falls. Our local airport (SPS) has a few flights a day to and from DFW airport. Flying the connecting flight from Wichita Falls makes trips so much more convenient - I can spend my time reading instead of concentrating on all the cars around me. It might cost a little more, but if I'm going to be traveling by myself, once you factor in gas for a round trip to Dallas along with the cost of parking, getting the connecting flight isn't such a bad option pricewise.
There's one problem, though. DFW gets hit by a lot of thunderstorms. It seems like every time I try to fly out of Wichita Falls, on the way back home, my first flight gets delayed by weather, and I end up missing the flight from DFW back to Wichita Falls. Thinking back, I'd say that it's worked only once out of the five times I've tried it. I usually end up renting a car and driving back home. So, not only did I spend more for my airplane tickets to begin with, but I get stuck paying the rental car fee and gas on top of that.
Given my past luck, I'd pretty much decided on giving up trying to fly out of Wichita Falls. However, my brother got tickets to the Steelers game for this past weekend, and thought it would be fun for the three of us brothers and our dad to go watch it. So, this was a trip for just me, where my wife and daughter were going to stay behind in Texas. And it was in November. How many thunderstorms hit in November? So I decided to take my chances and fly out of Wichita Falls.
I think you can guess what happened. On the way home, I was supposed to land in DFW at 7:15, and then catch an 8:00 flight to Wichita Falls. I knew it was a little close, but I figured I'd be okay. Well, with a thunderstorm that just sat right over the area, we had to divert to Shreveport to get more fuel where we sat for a while waiting for the weather to clear, and we didn't get to DFW until after midnight. Just a little bit too late to catch my 7:15 flight. Anyway, I was too drowsy at that point to try to drive home, so I spent the night in DFW and flew back the next morning.
I'm not going to say that I'll never again try to fly out of Wichita Falls. However, I'll be sure that I never again schedule the last flight of the day from DFW to Wichita Falls, and to give myself a little more time between flights.
I've spent my lunch breaks this week playing around with a VB program I wrote. Well, technically, I borrowed some of the code from the Brightness Demo ©2005 by Tanner "DemonSpectre" Helland as the method to display the pixels on screen, but the actual image generation was something I developed. Go look at the Circle Gradient Pattern Generator on my Programming page if you're more interested. Initially, I made the program to generate a bunch of still images, like in the collection I have on my Artwork page. I'd always wanted to make animations with it, and that's what I finally got around to this week. Click on either of the two thumbnails below to see what the animations look like (Quicktime files, ~1.3 MB each). If you set Quicktime to loop the video, it should do so seamlessly.
I haven't quite gotten the program to where I'm ready to share it, yet, but I hope to next week. So, consider this a preview of an upcoming website update.
Update I've uploaded both videos to YouTube, if you don't feel like downloading a Quicktime movie. The quality isn't near as good, but at least it gives you an idea of what the animations look like. Both are available below the fold.
