Yuumoushin.com (勇猛心)

What do you get when you mix video from Fox’s The Sandlot and dialogue from the movie based on Frank Miller’s 300?

This:

According to this article, cell phone usage on planes in Japan have caused quite a few problems:

The use of mobile phones and other electronic devices by aircraft passengers caused 48 troubling incidents in 2005, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has said…

In September 2001, an airplane flying at an altitude of 3,000 meters suddenly inclined 25 degrees to the right. Another airplane yawed from its position by some 120 meters. In both cases, the airplanes returned to their normal positions after passengers stopped using their mobile phones.

People use their phones to email a lot on planes in Japan. The last time I took a flight in Japan, the stewardess had to tell a female passenger down the aisle from me 4 times to turn off her cell phone. Even then, the female passenger kept “sneaking” peaks at her phone (until one of the male passengers next to her finally said something).

It was a nice day yesterday (something a bit of an aberration for Seattle lately), and I needed to do some shopping so I figured I’d go to a big shopping center south of the city (enjoy the sun and the drive). En route, there was a big trailer truck carrying a caterpillar construction vehicle on my right hand side. I needed to get over for my exit (which was about a mile away at the time) so I slowed down to let him pass. When he finally passed and I changed lanes (putting me directly behind him) something big…about the size of a passenger truck mat, shot up from under the back part of the trailer and slammed right into the grill of my car. Fortunately, it was the grill of my car (as you can tell by the pics below). At first, I thought it was something from the truck’s cargo so I chased him down, waved and honked at him until he pulled over to the side of the road. I also called the police and had them come out. Thing is, it wasn’t anything from his truck and WA law states that debris is merely an “accident.” Oh well. Fortunately, I have full cover insurance, and the car drives just fine. Even still, the adjuster looked at it today and the repair bill will be just over 2000 dollars.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of flying, but I do marvel at airplanes. Perhaps a lot of you can relate – that first time as a kid (or perhaps you didn’t get on a plane until much later) when you’re preparing for take-off, and you hear the engines roar. My father was in the Air Force when I was younger, so we’d often go to the base to watch some of the fighter jets take off (visually amazing, and the sound is intense). Anyway, lots of talk about Airbus lately, but mostly focusing on their financial woes. To their credit, they’ve created a pretty amazing plane. Imagine the sheer size of a 777, or an older 747 for that matter. Now watch this video:

The power needed to get this bad boy off the ground? Rolls Royce designed engines with power equivalent to 1000 Hummer SUVs pulling at once.

I made some adjustments to my pc this past weekend, which involved a reformat and reinstall of XP. I’m a backup fiend, and I try to keep my important documents on various mediums (just in case). Even still, after I finished my little project, I discovered that I had lost 3 or 4 folders worth of images. The disks I backed everything up on somehow got scratched and were unreadable (I should have checked first, but I assumed the external hard drive and disks were enough). Fortunately, I have copies in online photo albums, and a few friends still had copies that I had sent them. In the end, things worked out just fine.

My little anecdote above is for the following story: Computer technician accidentally wipes out info on Alaska’s $38 billion fund.

While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

I can imagine what he felt when he realized the scope of his blunder. And I’m sure we can all identify with the feeling – that “noooo…I can’t believe I just deleted that file” feeling, but 38 billion dollars worth? Ouch.

Nine months worth of applicant information for the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

And the only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.