I was watching a special yesterday on Flight 191 which crashed 23 yrs. ago. The special was based around the horrible maintenance that American Airlines devoted to their DC-10 fleet. Their poor habits in maintaining their aircraft killed 270 people and basically put McDonnell-Douglas out of business (they were bought out by Boeing).

The whole cause of the crash centered around a pylon that held the engine to the wing of the aircraft. When the pylon snapped (due to poor maintenance) it severed the main hydrualics line that supplied hydraulic fluid to the wing. This caused the wing to dip and the plane to stall, the plane rolled over and nosed into the ground.

After the accident McDonnell-Douglas released a statement that they had never anticipated a complete loss of hydraulics in one wing because the chances of something like that happening were slim. Well, they weren’t slim enough.

I think any idustry where there could be a mess up can relate to this crash. The remote possibility of something going wrong should cause some alarm and a jump to fix it. Had American Airlines stepped up to the plate and taken better care of its fleet this probably would not have been an issue. If the engineers at McDonnell-Douglas would have taken the time to produce more possibilities for errors, then this may not have been an issue. But, some of the problem layed in the way the FAA put out its plane requirements. There was no “stick-shaker” on the copilots side of the aircraft. The “stick-shaker” warns of a stall and had this been installed, the copilot (who was flying the plane due to power loss on the pilot side) would have known they were going into a stall and tried to save the aircraft.

Little things make all the difference.

Dunstan Orchard went through the code he uses to produce the layout that he uses. It is a fairly interesting way of taking content in plain HTML form from a database and making it into a good looking site.

His code has given me some ideas for a project that we are about to start here at work. I think that I can implement his idea into the project to make for cleaner output and easier manipulation, we’ll see how that goes though.

I must also say that Dunstan’s method of displaying the header is quite interesting. He has ninety versions of the header illustration, ninety!!

I just read an interesting article on the future of hospital technology and if we will ever get to the point where the paper use is done away with. The author of the article came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to completely get rid of paper in hospitals because of the need of so many people to have certain information. An example is that you cannot give every nurse a handheld computer because the costs would just sky rocket.

There is a company in Austin that is focusing on developing technology just for medical use. They specialize in software and hardware that enables doctors to move from patient to patient with all of the patient’s info stored at a central database accessible through Bluetooth or some other wireless technology with a handheld device. Their products still somewhat hinge on paper though as all of the non-doctor staff uses paper to checkin on patients and perform routine visits.

It will be very interesting to see where medical computer use goes from here.

Well, a friend is going home for a week or so and asked me to watch her parakeet. Of course, I said yes. It’s not hard to keep up with it, just have to give it some food and water. I have been trying to teach it to whistle different songs but I don’t know how well that’s going. At night the bird is fairly quiet and in the morning it’s the same but when I come home from work the thing goes nuts and can’t stop whistlin’ and singing up a storm!

I am working on an archive system for posts that I make here, it’s going pretty well. I am basically making the archives dynamic (using mod_rewrite to make them look like directories). I thought about going the static way but I really do not want to get into the whole re-building/Movable Type ordeal. So, the archives should be up by the end of the week, hopefully with a database restructure, depending on how in depth I feel like getting.

There is a great article in this month’s issue of Wired magazine about Pixar and their rise to success and what the future holds for them. It is a really intersting look into how the company works and what works for them. Since they are led by Steve Jobs they have somewhat of a creative force behind them.

In other news, I went to Wal-Mart with a friend last night (this morning) so that she could pickup the Avril Lavigne cd. We listened to most of it and I have to say that my hat is off to her. There are a few reasons why I like her…

1. She writes her own music…

A big plus in my book, it takes a lot of talent to be able to write your own music.

2. Her music actually means something.

She is not the average teenage girl rocker, she writes good lyrics that have a meaning and aren’t just for her to show off on MTV (*cough*Britney Spears*cough*).

3. She does not lipsync.

When she sings on TV or in concert it’s really her voice, which means, when you buy her CD and you listen to it, she’s gonna sound the same when you see her live.

Anyway, that’s my $.02 on that.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Simpson’s season finale, it was a good episode, not great but good. But now that it’s over there will be no new episodes to watch for the summer, just reruns.

In other news it looks like a draft may be on the horizon. According to Congress.org the legislation could be effective as early as June 2005. So what does this mean? Well, it states that the draft would no longer be avoidable by those going to Canada or those in college. This whole thing is kind of scary because it means that those who are drafted did not have a voice in whether they went to fight or not. It would also have serious reprecussions on the American people supporting such an action. If this whole deal goes through I smell another Vietnam, which I think no American citizen is wanting a repeat of. You can keep this from being reinstated by contacting your representatives.

After about 2 hrs. of searching yesterday, my co-worker and I finally figured out why foreign characters were being thrown into our CSV. We did not even think about the CSV being exported from a Mac, but that turned out to be the problem. We exported it in Windows format and everything worked like a charm.

My internet connection at home is still somewhat messed up. I am having problems downloading files from just about anywhere. I tried getting some music from iTunes and it continually times out. If you are going to run a successful network don’t you think that it would be a good idea to secure it and keep things like network flooding from happening? To me that just seems like good business sense. I mean, I am trying to download a 211kb .zip file right now and I am getting 4k/s! This download should have been so quick that I didn’t even notice it. It is sad that nowadays you cannot get what you pay for.

I found another great photoblog today while doing some browsing. photojunkie.ca has some really great shots. Take a look, it’s definitely worth it.

Well, I love the fact that PHP has a built in function to handle CSV (comma seperated value) files. What I don’t like is the way that Windows handles quotations! When copying and pasting into any of the Office programs, Windows decides that you need Windows specific quotes, whether they be single or double. What does this mean? Well, when you try to output one of these quotes from the CSV you get a junk character thrown into your code!! This has got to be one of the most frustrating things I have ever run into and I can’t find an answer anywhere!

If you have any idea how to fix this, e-mail me at ssegraves [AT] alltel dot net.

I saw Shrek 2 last night and it surprised me. I figured it would be a lame sequel to the first one, wrong! It was hilarious! I would say it was 5x better than the original and it was definitely worth seeing. Antonio Banderas as the voice of “Puss in Boots” was perfect. This is one of the movies I will be buying on DVD, which is rare for me because I’m cheap… 😉