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.

The BBC is producing a fascinating series called “Britain from Above” that combines GPS tracking, data collection and sophisticated computer visualizations to give viewers a view of the UK that no one has ever seen.  It’s absolutely captivating to watch the planes entering and exiting British airspace, or seeing the nation’s telephone network come to life.  The Daily Mail wrote an article about the series that includes some images.

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.

You’re spending too much time on YouTube, aren’t you?  You’re at work, yes.  Ok, that’s probably alright.  If you haven’t been to TED, the site — cause getting into the actual event is like impossible, you’re missing out.  To start you off, watch Ze Frank’s presentation from 2004.  The Hans Rosling talk is a classic.  Jill Bolte talks about her brain.  And Johnny Lee plays with Wii.

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.

An interesting presentation at Stanford’s ACM on how facebook works behind the scenes with images. It talks about Akamai (my company) a bit and mentions how they are able to off-load 99.8% of their profile picture traffic. They also discuss their server-side Cachr project which is based on the memcached project.

CAPTCHA. You’ve all seen it on web sites where they want to read an image and then type the letters to ensure you’re a person and not a computer program. Well, a couple of guys at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University figured out how to make this annoying process into something that actually benefits humanity. Recaptcha.net helps digitize books from the Internet Archive.