Hans Cathcart’s Homepage

Today, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. The ceremony was held in front of thousands of people who had flooded into DC to witness the event. This CNN link shows an interactive satellite picture of the crowds on the National Mall. As Obama was being sworn in the White House web site transitioned to the 44th President at whitehouse.gov — ask me some time how that was accomplished, it’s an interesting story. At the same time millions of people were watching the event Online, with web sites from CNN to CSPAN to FoxNews webcasting the event, many using the delivery services of my employer.

Well, I’m at least a good half year away from going on my Flight Instructor check-ride, but now that I’m volunteering at the Air & Space Museum I’m getting my first taste of what it’s like to teach someone how to fly an airplane. Last Friday, I was checked-out in the Cessna 150 interactive exhibit at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. For most of the day I was helping control the crowd waiting to get into the one airplane that visitors can actually get into at the museum, where I was mostly showing little kids what the different control surfaces on an airplane do.

Towards the end of the day as we were closing up the exhibit I helped our last visitor, a young girl who was maybe twelve or thirteen get into the Cessna. Since her Mom didn’t want to sit in the plane I let the aspiring pilot sit in the right seat as I climbed in and sat in the left. I showed her what all the controls do and simulated a short little flight from takeoff to landing. I let her fly the airplane and let her pretend to use the radio to make position reports. I’m not quite sure how inspiring it was for her, but it really reaffirmed my desire to be an instructor. Here I was giving a wide-eyed aviation enthusiast her first “flight” lesson, what an incredible privilege. Hopefully some day she’ll realize her dream, earn her wings and fly a fighter jet, a commercial airliner, or maybe even be one of the first astronauts to land on Mars. Hehe, her first “instructor” has high hopes for her.

Being back in the Bay Area is fun, because I’m getting to see all my friends and family.  Of course, I’m also doing a ‘bit’ of flying.  Today, Fiid and I went with my instructor Bill Hightower on my mountain checkout flight to Lake Tahoe.  What a fantastic flight.  Fiid took a bunch of pictures and I did the flying.  The Spot track is reversed, so number 1 is the last track point.  We flew IFR from San Carlos (KSQL) to Lake Tahoe and flew the GPS approach into South Lake Tahoe (KTVL) airport.  Then we flew to Alpine Co. (M45) and then back to the Bay Area VFR.  I’m now all set to fly the Cessna 182 to Vegas. Yeah!

This evening I created an advertisement, well… I got suckered into personalizing an ad and sending it to one of my friends. Meetup.com created this cute animation, and then gives you the opportunity to personalize the message to send to your friends.  Pure genius!  The pull-downs are so seductive that it doesn’t feel so much like an ad, but rather a way to poke fun at someone who you know would get the joke.  So, I sent one message.  Yes, only one.  I’m sure everyone else is spamming the planet.

The amazing thing about this site is that it does exactly what Marshall McLuhan envisioned back in 1960.  Shown here in a TED talk by Peter Hirshberg, McLuhan comments: “If the audience can actually become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it’s happy.” (skip to 14:30)  To describe McLuhan as a visionary is a massive understatement.  I suspect that if he had time-travelled to today and seen Facebook and MySpace he would not have been surprised.  The rest of Hirshberg’s talk is also really quite interesting.

Let it be said that 2008 will be the last year that I don’t got to AirVenture in Oshkosh.  For the uninitiated, it’s the Mecca of Aviation every year.  Now that I’m an EAA member, with an instrument rating I really have no excuse not to go any more.  This year they announced the Icon, the SPOT Messenger was apparently a big hit (I just ordered one to document my flights), and an all-electric airplane flew.  Two of my friends (Lisa and Adam) were there, and apparently Esther Dyson was there.  I did not know she was into aviation.

Today I made my first contribution edit to this page on Wikipedia.  I was actually able to add some relevant content, information about the FAA’s decision to extend the expiration dates on first and third class medical certificates for pilots under 40.  Quite amazingly, looking at the history of the page I discovered an old friend of mine who, it turns out, is a flight instructor.  Small world.

I’ve now been ‘online’ in one way or the other for nearly 20 years, starting the first time I connected to a bulletin board system in Dec. of 1988. I’ve played, chatted, searched, published, expressed options, made friends, argued, campaigned for office, experimented, learned, even entered the truly bizarre world of online dating. What’s it all leading to? Well, if you recall the battle-cry of the Borg on STTNG you’ll already know ‘you will be assimilated.’ We Fell Fine is just about the only proof you’ll ever need. As far as interesting Internet experiments go it’s not completely lame. And I want you to want me is slightly surreal. Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar are sickly creative.

This week could be one for the Space history books…

Atlantis (STS-122) is scheduled to land on Wednesday. There are four possible landing opportunities, two at Kennedy (preferred) and two at Edwards AFB. As you may know NASA likes to avoid landing the Shuttle at Edwards because then they have to load up the orbiter onto the specially-equipped Boeing 747 and haul it back to Kennedy, which looks cool, but delays the next scheduled mission for that Shuttle. Now, typically if the weather at both these locations is unfavorable due to storms or high-winds then NASA will delay the landing and try again the next day. They have enough oxygen and fuel to make it to early Friday if necessary. But, here’s the catch…

Last week President Bush authorized the DoD to attempt to destroy a doomed super-secret spy satellite, designated USA 193, that is expected to tumble uncontrolled from orbit within the next few weeks. The U.S. Navy will try to destroy the satellite prior to its reentry by slamming a ship-fired SM-3 into it.

from Sky and Telescope:
“Apparently, DoD computer models have shown that, if left alone, more than half of USA 193’s roughly 5,000-pound mass would survive the atmospheric plunge and reach the ground. In particular, there’s a 20-inch diameter tank containing about a half ton of the highly toxic propellant hydrazine. So the decision was made to break up the satellite if possible.”

The DoD has determined that Thursday is the first possible day to start letting the Navy begin ‘target-practice’ and let SM-3 ‘meet’ USA 193. And this brings up the interesting question of, do you really want to be launching a kinetic warhead into space to break-up a spy satellite into thousands of little bits the same day 7 relatively un-armed Astronauts are attempting to guide a rather fragile glider back to Earth. Now, admittedly the Earth’s atmosphere and Space are pretty big, but if something were to happen it would look rather… what’s the word… stupid.

NASA is remaining surprisingly mum about the conflict, but I bet NASA really, really, really wants to get out-of-the-way and land Atlantis on Wednesday. And that brings up the interesting possibility of the fifth landing opportunity on Wednesday. That’s right, the fifth. If the weather at both Kennedy and Edwards is unfavorable, then Atlantis can also land at White Sands, NM. The last and only time the Shuttle has landed at White Sands was in 1982 when Columbia (STS-3) landed there during an R&D flight. But as it stands White Sands is now prepping for a possible landing.

Admittedly, this landing of Atlantis is not going to be as exciting as Jerry Bruckheimer could make it, and it will not end in Bruce Willis sacrificing himself to blow up an asteroid, but bringing in a Space Shuttle for a combat landing just before you start shooting at an out-of-control toxic spy satellite is about as exciting as it gets.

Working at a technology company that doesn’t make products like Apple or web services like Monster, but instead helps those companies have faster-performing web sites is sometimes a little hard to explain. Plus most people don’t really care how the Internet really works. But, every so often something happens on the Internet that catches the media’s attention, and when we’re quick Akamai’s marketing team puts some pretty cool info online for everyone to see. Here is a time-lapse depiction of the Middle-east Internet outage that started a couple weeks ago. The thing to realize about this animation is that all the lines are Internet BGP routes that are being advertised as good to use for Internet traffic. However, the latency on those links is so bad as to make using Web applications through those links practically impossible. Yes you heard me right, the Internet does not magically fix itself in real-time.

Today was the Virginia Presidential Primary of 2008. It was a rather historic day, and the first time I’ve really cared much about voting in a primary. Of the two remaining democratic candidates, not one was a white man, opening up the interesting possibility of a woman or African American man becoming President of the United States. The weather today was absolutely frightful with black ice forming everywhere. That kept the Maryland polls open a few hours longer, but by the end of the night Barack Obama had managed to over-take Hillary Clinton in the delegate count by winning decisively in Virginia, DC and Maryland. At this point it’s looking like neither one will win enough delegates to be the definitive candidate for the democratic party.