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I just stumbled across this survey on the Australian Broadcasting Company's site. The survey was conducted in the USA, Canada, UK, Israel, Austrailia, Korea, Russia, France, Indonesia, Brazil and Jordan and covers a wide spectrum of topics. The results are very interesting and occasionally surprising.
Just a few pictures from the Tullahoma airshow that I added to the gallery. Was a nice airshow and a gorgeous day last Sunday.
Note: Remeber that you can add your own comments and view comments made by others in the gallery. The recent Layne Reunion album has several new comments that I just noticed. Pictures with comments are indicated with a * next to the title.
So I was browsing my AvFlash newsletter earlier and noticed this snippet:
Later today, President Bush will head for Camp David, and the standard Prohibited Area there will be expanded to a 10-nm radius for tonight and tomorrow. Don't even think about messing with this one: AOPA says federal security officials told them this is a "highly sensitive" visit, and enforcement actions will be "severe in the extreme" -- meaning that military patrol aircraft are authorized to shoot down violators. Most operations are banned within a 5-nm radius, with restrictions on flights up to 10nm out. All aircraft departing from private airports/air fields within that outer ring must be on a heading away from the center of the prohibited airspace, the NOTAM says
These TFRs (Temporary Flight Restrictions) are popping up all over the place and sometimes with very little warning ever since 9/11. Eventually someone is going to get their wires crossed and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and some innocent people will die. And not the big airplanes that are actually a threat but the little ones that are of no threat what-so-ever. The big guys stay pretty well informed and have redundant systems and such but a little guy up enjoying the scenery with his family and pick the wrong day to have electrical trouble, get lost and wander into one of these zones and poof.
For some reason, the little general aviation (GA) airplanes have born the brunt of suspicion since 9/11 even though the evidence suggests that GA is an insignificant threat. Remember the little airplane that crashed into the White House? Or the teenager who flew into the building in Florida? The building in Florida was damaged, but not the White House. How many people died in those "attacks"? Two. The pilots of each airplane. Don't be fooled by the hyperbole on television about those "dangerous" little airplanes. And finally, consider the photo below. Honestly, how dangerous can something that can actually get hung up in power lines be? I say we surround the president with power lines. Problem solved.
For a long while now, I've been wanting to upgrade my computer at home (not to mention my laptop). The current machine is a pre-Jobsian Motorola StarMax 3000... the 200Mhz model if memory serves. It's sole purpose these days is to see how much abuse it can take from a 3 year old boy and 5 year old girl before it dies completely. I gotta say, it has held up quite well to this point. Still, 6 years is pretty old in computer years and so Sue and I were thinking about getting something new.
My last 3 machines (Performa 6200, StarMax 300, and Powerbook G3), have all been Macs and so I'm inclined to stay with Apple. We both really like the the 1GHz iMac with the 17 inch flat screen and a SuperDrive. This machine will do everything I want and then some. In particular I really like having the Apple GUI wrapped around a UNIX system with the Apache webserver, PHP and other doodads that make it very easy to mirror my site locally on my laptop or home machine. I still have to download and install MySQL, but it's pretty pain-free. It makes playing around with pr3d4t0r.com locally before I commit changes to the server at work really easy. The other thing we want is the SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) so we can hopefully move a lot of the video of the kids and so forth onto movies we can make in iDVD. I played with iDVD a few weeks ago at CompUSA and it was a blast and really easy to use. There are several other reasons that I'm leaning towards the iMac, such as the very small footprint, compatibility with all my old software, stability (Mac OS X is rock solid) and plain ole aesthetics as well. But the web development using Apache and the DVD authoring are key. The wide aspect ratio TFT display (1440 by 900) is pretty important too, I may actually use it to watch DVDs... they look great on this machine.
Still... the iMac is a $1800 machine and every now and again I gotta admit I look at the Windows users with a little envy. Mostly when some kick-ass game comes out for Windows that won't be released for the Mac for 6 months... if ever! I have a Gamecube for games, but some games just don't translate well to a console. Every now and again there is some little quirk that is due to a difference between PC and Macs. For example email that comes from my boss is formatted to small on my Mac, but looks great on his and every other PC, and so I have to view it as plain text to read it right. Not a big deal, but annoying. The world is pays increasingly less and less attention to the Mac and so maybe I should go ahead and jump on the bandwagon and make my next machine a PC? The drawbacks are that I'd have to replace a lot of expensive software (Photoshop, Office, Quicken, etc) with the Windows equivalent. I'd also have to move things like email, and my iTunes and iPhotos libraries over too, and I'd have to setup Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc on the Windows machine or split partitions and have Linux installed on one of them.
I don't know. I'm conflicted and so I'm hoping some of you readers out there might like to tell me which platform I should choose and why. What am I forgetting that makes one platform a better choice than the other? Here's a chance for all you Windows people to tell me what makes your platform so much better and for all the Mac people to remind me why it is that I switched from PCs to Macs all those years ago.
Looks like I didn't fix have quite everything fixed from my brush with rm -rfv ./ As late as yesterday evening, the ability to post comments to my blog entries was broken. I have that fixed now so all of you that wanted to make comments about the sanity of the same guy who accidentally deleted his entire web site being trusted to handle liquid nitrogen, can go right ahead.
This is cool. Literally. How to make ice cream in 30 seconds using liquid nitrogen. Can someone point me in the direction of the nearest liquid nitrogen supplier? I'd love to give this a try.
Just a quick note to mention I finally got around to updating the Layne Reunion web site. There is a recap of last Saturday's reunion along with some pictures available there.
I haven't blogged much about the whole Iraq thing lately beacuse I think anyone who reads this with any frequency knows what a sham I believe that whole situation to be. But it's pretty sad to me that the people in this country aren't terribly interested in seeing evidence that validates the whole reason behind this war. That is to say huge (or even tiny) stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. There were, after all, over 200 US and British troops killed in the name of eliminating this phantom threat, not to mention over 3000 Iraqis. You'd think there would be more of an outcry. Then again, who wants to admit that they've been duped.
So anyway, this whole WMD search, if it weren't for the human cost, would be pretty funny. Watching all of these politicians backpedal is quite amusing. The Whiskey Bar has a collection of quotes regarding Iraq's WMDs arranged in chronological order that makes for some interesting reading. Check it out.
What a fun afternoon... I deleted my website earlier today. Unintentionally of course. And then spent the rest of the afternoon piecing it back together. But, seeing as I didn't have a really good back up, there may be a few things missing or misconfigured. For the most part, pr3d4t0r.com is mirrored on my laptop, but there are a few items that I don't keep up to date locally, such as the gallery. I know that it is missing pictures and I'm going to put some of the newer ones back, but not all of them, unless there is a specific request. So, anyway, sorry for the interruption. I hope that everything is back to normal soon. Oh and if you see anything missing or broken, please let me know and I'll get it put back together as soon as I can.
Another smaller reunion of sorts took place this weekend at Hidden Hollow Resorts in Walker County, Georgia. My mom and her kids met her and a couple of her sisters and their families out there for the rest of the weekend. I had a good time, except for a few little problems.
First: Hidden Hollow is a pretty nice nature-ee resort thingy with a pond and canoes, paddle boats, horses, cabins for roughing it, or not really roughing it, volleyball net, horseshoes, walking trails, fishing, etc. But I thought it was a little over priced. That wasn't a real big deal, but the woman who runs it would not let us divide up the cost and pay individually, she had to have it all paid for by one person which made it a real pain. She grumbled that each time she used her credit card machine that it charged her a percentage and it didn't seem likely that we would be able to explain the distributive property to her in a reasonable amount of time, and so we accepted this inconvenience.
Second: They had this rope swing that went out over the water that my sister, brother and cousin were using. It looked like fun and so I decided to try. The first several attempts were great (except for the torture ladder for getting out of the lake). On the last attempt, something went horribly wrong and my foot whacked on the tree or a root or something. It smarted and my toe bled a little bit but it wasn't that bad... until I got home. Now it would seem I have one regular foot and one Super Sized (TM) foot. I don't seem to be able to walk so well. So, hopefully, I don't stub it, or get it stepped on and it'll be better soon.
Other that that, it was a great little get together. Good food and family and good times... sounds like a theme restaurant commercial or something, but it's the truth.
For those who somehow didn't know, I've been helping plan a reunion of the descendants of Henry Miller Layne and Martha Pickett Layne that took place on Saturday. The original location was Whitwell Park in Whitwell, TN. But a combination of bad weather and an trophy presentation that was forced to move under the main pavilion along with us, forced us to move to our alternate location at Whitwell High School. I was very apprehensive about moving. I thought that people might end up confused, and there was a few mixups, but as far as I know, everyone made it from the park to the High School.
Even with the initial confusion, roughly 75 people attended. Everyone who spoke to me was very gracious, and commented on how well organized everything was. Personally I felt like a chicken with it's head cut off! Also a great many expressed appreciation of the work that I've put into our genealogy on the web, and I thank you. But, a lot of information was compiled by other family and I just made it available on the web.
Anyway, I just wanted to write a short note to thank everyone for coming, for filling out my annoying survey, for all your donations, for the food, and for sharing all your memories and time with us on Saturday. I'll have a full accounting of the events of the day along with a few pictures on the Layne Reunion website later this week. It was great to see everyone!
It's been a lot of typing, but I finally cracked the 5000 mark. There are now 5015 individuals and 920 different surnames listed in my genealogy database. Thanks to everyone that has helped me get this far. I'm always trying to add to my family knowledge so if you have anything you'd like to share, please do.
May's results are in and I'm still not in the Top 10. Perhaps you all need help finding my page.
Based on the number of requests for a person's main page (getperson.php) the top ten ancestors for May 2003 follow:
10. [-] Annie Smith - A gggggg-grandmother. That's a lot of g's. Annie married Higgins Coppinger of County Cork, Ireland
9. [-] Daniel Lafayette Layne - A great grandfather. A prominent figure in Sequatchie Co., TN during his life.
8. [-3] James Tate - A gggg-grandfather. "The Major", James, moved to the Warren County area of TN around 1800 from VA and was very influential in the area.
7. [-] John (Lain) Layne Sr. - Another gggg-grandfather, John Lain Sr. was a very early settler in the Marion / Sequatchie Co., TN area.
6. [-] Martha Pickett - A gg-grandmother wife of Henry Miller Layne and mother of 15 children
5. [+2] Carrie Lee Hamilton - A very popular cousin continues her top 10 reign.
4. [-2] Christina Miller - Slipping a bit, my ggg-gradmother. Christina was born in Germany and moved to Allegan County, MI sometime around 1850.
3. [+5] Daniel Lee Layne - My maternal grandfather. Known as Leander, he was born in Daus, TN in 1907. Jumping several spots this week.
2. [-] David Pickett - A gg-grandfather and also brother of gg-grandmother Martha Pickett
Another newcomer at number one this month. Number one for May is...
1. [-] Henry Miller Layne - My gg-grandfather and husband of Martha Pickett. The two of them are responsible for not a small percentage of the population in Sequatchie Co., TN and surrounding areas. Also the reason for a reunion of Layne's this Saturday in Whitwell, TN.
Last night Alex, my daughter who has finally embraced the concept of phonics, explained that she is very interested in being a cheerleader. "Oh that sounds great Alex. Let me hear something.", I said. "All right Daddy.", and she began jumping, and spinning and twirling around the living room while shouting this chear:
"Give me an N! Give me an R! That gives... NER!!"
I don't know about you, but I'm fired up!!