Up & Down & All Around

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

Reflected Starfighter

My car has a music control conveniently mounted on the steering wheel. It consists of a Source button and two pairs of controls: +/- for volume and ^/v for going to Next and Previous songs or playlists.

Or is that Previous and Next songs?

My first instinct was that the Up arrow would move up in a list, as it would on a computer screen. So Up would go to the Previous song.

But it doesn’t. It follows a more natural logical route: Up goes to the Next song.

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Posted in Baylands | 3 Comments »

Our East Coast Correspondent

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

Glider in the Sky

Norman writes, “Graupner Cumulus, a 1960s design long out of production. Hobbico came out with a later model which resembled it, but not in the same class performance-wise.”

I started this blog for the same reason I often do things: I couldn’t figure out why people write blogs.

Writing a blog, it seemed to me, is like standing blindfolded on a soapbox in a public park, shouting things into the air. Maybe there’s a crowd here. Maybe not. I wouldn’t know.

But this same sort of puzzlement led me to start a computer bulletin board back in the last century. Why do people devote their computers to things like this? I wondered. So I dedicated a computer, wrote an amusing welcome message and started a few discussions.

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Posted in Elsewhere | 3 Comments »

Men With Hats

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

Men With Hats

After looking at this website, my friend Rand writes in an email:

So is it me or do all all RC planes come with hats for the pilots to wear ;)

Though I’ve never found a hat in an airplane kit, looking at the Faces pictures (which total 61 people as of today—I added 13 pictures this weekend), I count 34 people wearing hats and 27 without. That’s 55%.

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Posted in Baylands | 8 Comments »