How To Build A Fixed-Wing Aircraft

I'm sorry I'm bombarding POAS with so many posts today...but this one is cool and worth a look.

Sketch Your Own Furniture

During the summer of 2005, I interned at Apple Computer for three months. Every summer, Apple holds an iContest for the interns to come up with innovative ideas involving Apple products. You can design anything you want, ranging from marketing to modification of hardware. There were some good ideas, and there were some awful ones. Most of the awful ones made it to the final round, and my only consolation is that the team who won actually had a really neat product.

There were some good ideas being thrown around. Zack for example came up with a client/server central database system for hospitals to allow doctors to easily interact with lab tests using Xserve RAID. Neil and Ryan fiddled with GPS in Powerbook (thanks Ryan!), and Kevin "Fan Boy" (the team that won) came up with Gestures!, an image recognition software that can trace the movements of hands via a camera and map the result to a command in Mac OS X. The best of part of Kevin's demonstration during the final round was that a middle finger at the camera will do a 'kill -9' on the active window.

Being an idealistic sop that I am, and knowing that Apple and PIXAR are very close (or were, I don't know about now), my proposal was iHolo, a three dimensional drawing environment where the user actually interacts and views his results in three dimension. Currently we are mostly translating the idea of two to three dimension via clever use of alpha channel or stereograms. iHolo will allow the user to draw in the air, and view his results realtime in the sensor area where he is drawing as well as in a holographic screen. Of course, we don't have the technology for the latter, but the iContest did allow concept projects. Needless to say, I didn't make it to the final round, since it didn't involve existing Apple products. iHolo was by no means an original concept...just something that I'd love to have when I was a kid.

So enough with the introduction. Sketch-A-Furniture is almost exactly what I was going for with iHolo interface-wise, except the result would not be plastic resin but displayed within the user's drawing area and on the holographic screen.

Trip To Taiwan

Click here for an image of the plane that I will be riding in December.

This week I finally saved up enough to buy a ticket to Kaohsiung for the winter break. Prices jumped (oh how they JUMPED) since last month and I ended up paying 400 dollars more for my travel in December. My roommates think I am a little crazy...

I was discussing my itinerary with my grandmother over the phone a few minutes ago. I will arrive at Kaohsiung at night around 2340h. She started listing names of people she could call to pick me up from the airport, and I said "It's alright grandma, I can take a taxi. It's not like I don't know how to speak Min Nan."

"No, no," she said, "we had some incidents recently of women being kidnapped and murdered at night by taxi drivers. We are not letting you taking a cab."

Initially, scenes from the Bone Collector vaguely popped in my mind, and I shuddered. But then I remembered the news and felt a great sadness. The incident happened back in summer of 2005, during my last visit to Taiwan. The woman was brutally murder by an unknown assailant. To this day we are still not sure whether the perpetrator was a real driver or posing as one. The case is still open.

When I grew up in Kaohsiung I was very young, and I remember that it didn't seem so bad back then. But youth can give a false impression of the circumstances, especially since I was living in one of the most polluted city on the island. Taiwan has been going through a political mess since the demise of Chiang Kai-Shek. I've heard many stories of cunning people gypping money out of vulnerable individuals. Rape and murder became prevalent in the news. A few months ago, when my grandparents were visiting in the U.S., my grandfather's bonsais were stolen right out of his patio. On the ninth floor. My grandparents think that Taiwan is morally getting worse, and that people no longer hold considerations for others. I don't know if that is the talk of nostalgia or truth. It is hard to say, watching the news, because for all I know most of the negative information were censored twenty years ago. My mother has stories of her classmates from dissident families disappearing without a trace. No news, no reports. Maybe it was always like this, people just didn't know it.

Hopefully, this visit will make a difference in my grandfather's health. We are very close, in the fact that we were both born on the same birthday, and he is the only engineer on my mother's side of the family. We always have this weird mutual understanding of each other. I remember how we would spend our time together on his bonsai farm, not speaking at all. Because we understood that people change and stay the same, and given the fact that people are inherently crazy and destructive, tending to plants seems like the only good thing we can do for this world.

Sleeping In Airports

The Budget Traveler's Guide to Sleeping In Airports

I'm not kidding. That is a real link. With reviews and EVERYTHING. It's too bad that people aren't allowed sleep in the terminals anymore unless they have a valid ticket in hand. Several reviews were dedicated to sleeping in train stations near the airports.

I think I'm going to attend the Paris Air Show 2007. If I can't get NG to fund my trip, I might invest some purchased vacation hours to the journey. Anyone who's interested in going, let me know. The event is in June of 2007. The trade show (aka stuffy businessmen convention) starts early in the week (13th of June), and the general public show starts on the 22nd. If I don't go as NG representative then I'll go for the general public. Price to CDG is quite expensive: Last time I checked (a few days ago) a round trip to Paris is about 1000 USD. I can't wait for the A380 to come out so the fare prices will eventually be cheaper...

Mariscal-Sucre Airport: Quito, Ecuador

Fernando and I were discussing about possibly planespotting at Mariscal-Sucre in Quito, Ecuador before it shuts down in 2010. I've never been to a Latin American country, and having friends in other countries means that I don't have to worry about "being" a tourist during the visit. UIO is one of the few airports located at the heart of a city surrounded by mountains. Kai-Tak International (currently closed) was one of those infamous airports, surrounded not only by mountains and dense buildings, but the landing strip was built on water. If you check out Giancario Giuliano's videos on FlightLevel350.com, with the proper connection you can get yourself 100 feet away from the runway. Of course, one might want to invest in a nice pair of ear plugs for the noise...

Ferrofluid

Image above taken from Wikipedia.

No, the image above is not from Digital Blasphemy, nor was it rendered in any sort of simulated environment. This is a scene from some Japanese anime made partially into reality. Coming from a computer graphics background, the image is another interesting peek into the capabilities of nanotechnology.

Basically, ferrofluid is nanoscale ferromagnetic particle suspended in fluid. It does not exhibit magnetism unless it is acted upon by an external source of magnetism. It is also widely used in today's technology, ranging from printer ink to paint used on military planes for RADAR deflection.

TechEBlog posted a link to a YouTube video where Japanese researchers attempted to "sculpt" the liquid into some interesting visualization. The result is some seriously eerie images.

InterFlight Studio

The Zim sent me a link to a specialized furniture designer website called InterFlight Studio which was later featured in OhGizmo!.

If you really, REALLY like to have a piece of the metal birds as your everyday household appliance (and you have a lot of money), you can purchase these custom made furnitures made out of airplane parts. They have desks constructed out of engine casing, a lamp made out of piston, and lots of tables and benches made out of wings from various planes.

A table made out of parts from an engine of a Boeing 727...

...or a bench made out of wings from a Boeing 707.

Their main office is in Miami, Florida. Visits by appointment only. All images taken from InterFlight Studio.

A380 delayed...again

:(

Aviation Week published an article today that the delay for A380 is definite. There will be layoffs, and budget cuts, and the first delivery won't happen until the second half of 2007.

You can read about it here and here.

*sigh* Sadness is the Bing.

Looks like the A380 isn't coming over to LAX (or the United States) anytime soon. I guess I won't see my first A380 until next year when either:

1.) I take my mother to Toulouse for her graduation present, or
2.) I manage to bum a ride with the avionics people at NG to the Paris Air Show 2007.

Here's hoping.

A380 Flown by Journalist

Aviation Week came out with an article from a journalist who flew CN001. Read it here.

Photojournalism

The Mur made a comment once that you can tell if it is Bing's room by the fact that there are random crap on the walls. The habit started while I was in high school, when my mother had subscriptions to the New York Times and various other magazines. Plus, I didn't have a car. If anyone has ever lived in Tampa, one would know that living there without a car is like having your limbs cut off in the middle of nowhere. Being in the IB program didn't help my after school social life either. Luckily high school was only four years.

For some reason my mother never really read the stuff she subscribed, so I took over the papers and in between studying, would browse through random articles in search of interesting pictures. This past weekend, I went back to Tampa *shudders* to search for a piece of official document. I had the palmcorder with me, so I took some pictures of my infamous room so my friends will know what The Mur meant by "walls of random crap".

When I made the clippings, I was not particularly interested about the political aspect of the articles. I was more drawn to the way the photos depicts the human condition. The clippings have yellowed due to age and exposure...most of these articles are almost ten years old. My room is by far the least sterile part of the house because of these newspaper clippings.

Collection Preview

Haunting Faces

Mourning is one of the hardest thing to capture and even harder to revisit.

Aftermath of a war...

An adorable photo of a Buddhist child holding a cat.

Her hardship is etched in her eyes.

Unification of one Korean family separated by two governments.

Pictures by photographers during the Vietnam War who didn't make it out alive. The article mentioned "...as if they were seeing their own deaths through the photographs they have taken..."

This is one of my favorite pictures. The sadness on this armed man's eyes is indescribable.

Protests

A mother braving the soldiers to figure out the fate of her son.

My friend Fernando should be proud that I have something related to Ecuador on my walls (and the fact that I'm actually acknowledging his true nationality instead of calling him a Colombian like I normally do). The Ecuadorian farmers were protesting against then President Fabian Alarcon.

Debating gender equality regarding Jewish services in Israel.

Culture

Amish kid on rollerblades.

A familiar celebration of life, from an alien, alien world.

DJ Twisty-Tie, this is for you.

I don't think I was a Kubrik fan at the time since I didn't watch enough of his movies to make that judgment. I just liked the way he stared like a madman in that picture. Next to a famous picture of Duke Ellington and one of my military aircraft information cards on SR-71 (and you thought I only recently got into aviation).

Harlem Week. I didn't take a good picture here, but I love the look on that little girl's face sitting on the steps.

My artsy-fartsy side. Every music major must have Foss somewhere in any way shape or form. It's about as fashionable as Corigliano or Stockhausen.

Most beautiful women aren't stick thin, Andrei Sakharov was a cutie, Herbert von Karajan was an awesome conductor, and I'm a total dork.

Barefoot street soccer!!!

Random Ads

Apple embedded a chip on the base of my brain when I was an elementary student playing on an Apple IIe. Since then I'm inexplicably drawn to Apple no matter how unhappy I am with them at the moment.

An ad from Daimler Chrysler, one of the contributors for...Airbus. *ducks* The caption says: "Thanks to Nelson Mandela, future generations of South Africans will grow up unable to read this."

Ah...good ole' Dell. *insert snide comment here*

Random Comics

It never ends, does it?

The fate for all computer science majors.

A Small Tribute To Horace Bristol

If any of you have ever read Grapes of Wrath, then you might have heard of Horace Bristol, a photographer who was supposed to collaborate with John Steinbeck to produce a book describing the hard life of migrant workers. Well, Steinbeck decided to cut off the partnership and embark on his own project, and the resulting product became the bane for most high school students in the US.

I consider Margaret Bourke-White and Horace Bristol as two extraordinary photojournalists of the 20th century.

Finally...

I couldn't resist, but these are my stuffed animals that I've had since...forever. The koala bear was given to me when I was four, and the lion I've had since I was born. My mom had to cut off the whiskers on the lion so it wouldn't poke my eyes out.

Alright, I think I've bombarded you with enough pictures. Thank you for viewing the random crap on my walls.