Sunday, September 16, 2001

WTC Updates
Today's Discussion: 2 messages; 1 new topic.
Last Update at 9/16/01; 9:55:41 PM

DivX:) for OS X Released! 

Mich came through as promised. I'm sitting here at home watching Full Screen DivX:) movies on my Mac. I'm sure that running 10.1 makes a big difference in performance, so your results will vary. Rocks the house!

Aviation 

For over one and half years now, I've been a member of the Aviation community with our little outfit RotorJet. We fly helicopters. To read and hear what is happening to the big airlines is very disconcerting. Aviation you see, is completely a spreadsheet business. You know exactly what your costs are, down to the minute based on actuals such as fuel prices. Seats are sold in a fashion similar to the equities markets, prices are driven solely by supply and demand of destinations and routes. The big variables are weather and equipment failure. Both these variables should also be calculated into any airlines business model. We know for example, that there are an average of 10 days a year we cannot fly due to 'icing conditions', but we keep triple that margin.

Last year while on vacation I read the book Hard Landing, an excellent account of the commercial aviation industry and it's fight for profit and power for those that run those companies. These companies run razor thin margins, leveraging their assets against mountains of debt. In the past almost every airline has at one point or another called on it's employees to 'pitch' in by forgoing wage increases.

Corny as it sounds, the fabric of all airlines is the communities of folks who make them run: Pilots, Flight Attendants, Mechanics, Ground Personell and management. Just like the commecials tell us. In the past, when airlines fell on hard times leaders of those companies would sit down with their employees and figure out how to make it work through collective sacrafice. Airline folks love their jobs so incredibly much that this tactic has often been succesful. For SouthWest airlines, it is the culture of the company.

To See Gordon Bethune of Continental Airlines annoounce 20% cuts in flights and request governmental support for the industry really shook me up. I believe that the American Airline industry has been living on borrowed time for far too long and the recent terrorist disasters has upset the airline's precarious balancing act.

Air Transportation is an incredibly important part of the US infrastructure and thus directly related to the economy. Forget how much money the airlines are bleeding, this is an issue of global importance.

The government must step in to keep our planes in the air and keep them there as safely as humanly possible. Although it may sound un-American, I also believe The State must actively participate in running the airlines, at least until we have the country up and running again, which will be severly hampered if we can't fly. Even a 20% reduction in flights will have a direct and negative effect on the economy, more so than computer screens representing data of valuations of companies. Because Wall Street, in my view, isn't the backbone of the US. In order for our country to work, it has to fly. And that, is the American Way.



Sunday Thoughts 

Sunday afternoon and it's been raining on and off again here in Belgium. Christina and I decided we'd seen enough of the tragedy on TV and watched a movie together. The Kid, starring Bruce Willis. Can be classified as a 'feel good' movie. It felt good. Good to lay on the counch with the embodiment of the love Patricia and I share. 11 years of flesh, blood and brains, with a whole future ahead of her. Somehow there's still an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach about just that. The Future.

Our connections have been hampered by hardware failures at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, making work, email and even fiddling around complicated. I hadn't used Pine for my mail in a while :-)

Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 4:51:36 PM~Frans just called to update me on the hardware. They'r bringing in a new 12000 router and some 7500 motherboards. Hopefully that will solve the connectivity problems.

The outage has given me time to look at other sites than I normally cruise around. Luckily my machine at home is on an ADSL line and running Radio Userland's aggregator. I can also post to my desktop Website and will be able to move those posts over to my main site when the routers are back on line.

Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 10:54:53 PM~We're back up, the hardware looks stable (Murphy?) and fingers are crossed :-)

Saturday, September 15, 2001

WTC Updates
Today's Discussion: 2 messages; 1 new topic.
Last Update at 9/16/01; 9:55:41 PM

Targeting Release of DivX:) for OSX on Monday 

Mich: The quicktime component is ready, it is certainly running smoothly on ibooks, pb 500 and G3/G4's with OS X 10.1 developer preview (didn't test it on 10.0.4 anymore). It is based on the ffmpeg code and thus also able to play opendivx from projectmayo.



News Addiction 

Patricia and I awoke too early this morning. Especially for a saturday in the country where it's extremely quiet. First thing she said to me, "I couldn't sleep, too many images, thoughts, news reports..." The Washington Post is running a piece about this very problem we may all be suffering from: The Fear Of Missing Something on TV. My take....turn the box off, it's salt on the wounds with nothing new to report. I will turn it on again when there's a real reason. For now I am happy to listen to voices.



An Interview with God 

Picked this up from Doc's NewsFeed. It's very well done.



Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan 

"New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. WOuld they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. [...] The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops."



Quote of the Day 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. "A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]



What is Taliban? 

Now that this radical group is being focused on by the entire world we need to learn about them. CNN has an exstensive background piece.

Friday, September 14, 2001

Today's Discussion: 2 messages; 1 new topic.
Last Update at 9/16/01; 9:55:41 PM

Latest Updates 

I have to write about some other things or my head willl clog up. I'm going to leave the link to Cruise's Updates site in place for now.

US Attacked carries frequent updates on the situation worldwide. You can add it's RSS Newsfeed to any number of personalization tools like Radio UserLand



DivX:) on OS X 

Mich is about ready to release the first version of DivoX:) A library for OS X that enables playing of DivX movies under quicktime. Yesterday I tried it out on a recent build of OS X 10.1 and I was completely blown away. Just like you've seen DivX on the PC and Linux, now on the Mac...a true thing of beauty. Mich is aiming for a release today, I told him anytime, as long as we makes a weblog to do it with :-)



Grand Canyon 

Here in Amsterdam friends and family can see the effect this disaster had had on me personally. The problem for many of them and most of the world who have never been to New York, or seen the World Financial center and the twin towers is the size and scope of what has happened. For them, watching the events unfold on television is comparable to never having seen the Grand Canyon in person. The vastness and size just doesn't translate.



Fighting Back 

Scobelizer: "Monday I'll be purchasing stock with $1600 in cash I had in money markets as well. We must show solidarity behind our markets. We can't let the terrorist actions continue to burn away our economy."



Sorenson vs ON2 

Tim is reporting on the new Soenson codec and the ON2 opensource projects.