Unmanned aircraft crashes in Afghanistan
One of Canada’s new unmanned surveillance aircraft crashed on landing Friday, due to a failure of the parachute. The aircraft lands by deploying airbags and a parachute to slow its descent.
Typical of Canadian aircraft, it’s powered by a snowmobile engine.
No, seriously. It is.
Many thanks to the Canadian military for perpetuating a national stereotype. (heaves sigh)
Link: Canadian Forces’ new unmanned spy plane crashes in Afghanistan
My new baby
It was a truly magical moment when by baby emerged into the world. I get all (sniff)… I get all choked up when I think about it.
Here she is…
And her first words–oh it’s so sweet–her first words were a friendly suggestion to register my copy of Windows. Isn’t that adorable?
In the ‘cool stuff’ category
Warning: if you’re not a computer geek and you have no interest in computer gadgets, reading this blog entry will cause your brain to dissolve into a liquid, leak out your ears, and stain your shirt.
Because I’m upgrading from a desktop to a notebook shortly, I found myself with an ickle problem: what to do with my 60GB hard drive? It’s nearly full of vids, music, and photos. I couldn’t possibly squeeze all of that and the 20 gigs on my primary drive into my notebook. Well here’s the answer…
This brilliant little gadget is a drive kit for mounting a hard drive or CD-ROM drive externally. You can mount pretty much any IDE drive inside the box, which plugs into a USB 2 port. For Macophiles, it also comes in a Firewire version.
With a transfer rate “up to” 480 megabits per second with USB 2 and significantly less than that with USB 1.5, it’s slower than an internal drive. Notebooks, however, don’t give you the option of mounting extra drives internally, so this is a nice solution. And it comes in a purty two-colour box.
So now my media has a new home, and if/when I get another hard drive, I can use one of those removable drive trays in it to swap out the drives as needed. Nifty.
Dude…
In a frenzy of fiscal foolishness, I put in an order for my new baby. Here she is: Dell Inspiron 1100. Isn’t she cute?
After it arrives, you’ll find me blogging at the beach or in some trendy café. The downside is that I have to live on Mr. Noodles for a while.
I have to admit, it’s going to be hard to let go of my current desktop. It’s been my trusty workhorse for two and a half years. I can’t believe that I can get sentimental over a box of circuits and buggy software, but hey… I’m a cubicle-dwelling geek. When I think of the computers that I’ve had over the years… [insert wobbly flash-back transition]
The first computer that I bought was a 386DX. It had 40 MHz of pure power. Okay, it’s not impressive now, but it was a perfectly adequate computer back then. Painted the case black and even bought a (oooh) CD-ROM drive. Very leading-edge. Sold it to a friend.
Then I bought a 486DX 66. Where did that one go? Oh yes, my brother bought that one.
Then there was the P133. It died a gruesome death at my hands, unfortunately. It was an accident, I swear.
Then there was my Pentium notebook. That one’s still limping along.
Then my P3 desktop.
[flashback ends]
Okay, that’s enough of that. I can only hope that my P3 has a good life with its new owners. *Sniff*.