A Weekend of Crashes

This weekend was a lot of fun. Saturday night I got to fly Leo’s Walkera 60B electric helicopter. That’s one piece of impressive (and scary) machinery. Although it feels easier to fly than my 4#3B, I still “managed” to crash it. Luckaly the blades can be easily replaced, and after tightening a bunch of screws and replacing a pin in the main gear, it was good to fly again. We flew 3 times, and had to repair the helicopter after each flight I hope I can treat you with good shots of the Walkera 60B next time, there are not many high-quality images of it online.

Mine are real.

As Seth Godin pointed out, “Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.”

Just to let you know, all my mail is hand typed, including the “Kind Regards” and my name at the end. You may find it silly, but I think it shows that you care. I always think about my greetings, and I even try to vary them every now and then. Having a default greeting underneath every mail, wether the content of that mail requires it or not is just plain silly.

Almost just as silly as the disclaimers people put in the mail, thinking that it has any legal value, or even thinking somebody actually reads those.

Next time you receive a mail from me, keep in mind that my greetings are actual, meaningful, honest greetings, personally written from me to you. You may have noticed that I am never “yours”, because then I would be “truly” lying.

And yes, it als gives me an opportunity to leave them out, or tone them down. You’re allowed to check your mail now. Go and feel special.

Macbook Pro Screen update issues

My wife has this great Macbook Pro 15″, and I “don’t mind” using it every now and then. I noticed that when running on batteries, screen updates are a bit strange:

• When scrolling down a webpage, the page get garbled. Scrolling the garbled piece out of the window and in again sometimes fixes it.
• When resizing a Finder window, the icons in the window flicker a lot, you can see them being cleared and redrawn.

I noticed more people having these problems on several forums, and I also read that resetting the PRAM could fix it. Well, I just reset the PRAM and it seems to have fixed it, indeed.

I used the method mentioned on Apple’s support page, which tells you to shut the computer down, and boot it up holding the command, option, P and R keys. As soon as you see it shutting down after you’ve started it up, release the keys.

This is all I did, and it seems to have fixed it.

Anything you say…

…can and will be used against you.

I got an email with a great link to a blog post containing 2 links to great presentations on why you should never talk to the police, even if you’re honest, or want to help, or have an alibi, or whatever. Never, ever answer any questions, no matter how trivial. Although this is an American presentation, it definetely applies to a great extend on Dutch and probably a whole lot of other European laws aswel.

Thanks to Pim for sending me this link. I really enjoyed the talk by Professor James Duane, he is a great presenter and a very articulate speaker. I’m jealous of the people in his class, it must be one good teacher.

Censorship: here to stay

For those of you who think that media and information are free and uncontroled, guess again. Lately I have been seeing more and more incidents of large corporations hiding information, and even telling other people to hide it for them. I think this is plain wrong, and the guys involved should have been fired or punished otherwise.

If you have information which is of interest to the public, and somebody is making you sign a paper with which he can force you to shut up, you should think twice (and then not do it). Not because of the money, not because of the information itself, but for the sheer principle. Information should not be controled in that way. By anyone. It is dangerous.