Scott sheds, Bill talks explosions, gunfire and airplanes, Steve head fakes, flash floods, tornadoes, weddings and other disasters, Scott discovers Tetris, Starship launch is nearing… all this and so much less on this week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage, made possible by the generosity, wisdom and excellent taste shown by YOU.
32 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 04/04/23”
While it is fun to see the flaps and spoilers working, my favorite part of landing is hearing and feeling the thrust reversers. Of course TOGAs are the best! And I love the take-off roll; it’s the only time in the flight when you can see your speed. Zoom zoom!
Many years ago, my civilian employer assembled 10 of us employees and 5 instructors at the Regional Office for a 2-week training course. The last day, they took 20 POLAROID class “pictures.” An instructor finally said, “I’ve been smiling so long, my teeth are dry.” I said,. “That’s OK. Just put them back in the glass.” LOL
Cillian is pronounced Kill-ee-an. No soft C in Gaelic. That’s what the S is for.. That goes for Boston teams too.
Interesting you mentioned Limon. Our family drove through there the day after a tornado wiped out the trailer park there just south of the highway.
In the KC area there is a distinction between ‘tornado watch’ and ‘tornado warning’. Watch translates to the weather is disposed to developing severe weather including tornados while ‘warning’ refers to an actual event. There are ‘tornado watchers’ who track the tornado providing up to the minute/second details, the location, direction, severity and which towns or cities are in the direct path of the tornado.
Bill. Creative Computers in Santa Monica
Don’t knock my state…. LOL
A friend of mine was riding his bike two blocks from the Murray building in OKC when it was blown up, It knocked it off his bike
Deflagration .vs. Detonation, prior is Subsonic .vs. latter supersonic pressure wave. Note energy (pressure felt) is a function of velocity SQAURED!
Scott, I believe that trimmer (Edit: with) a grab-it bag was called a FlowBee. Not sure on the spelling. It was a hair cutter you attached to your vacuum hose. It must have been a Ronco product. 😂
Those are a great idea with a horrid execution. The trimmer is built like a rotary lawnmower! It pulls the hair loose as much as cuts it!
I have seen, however, pro barbers who have suction hoses attached to quality clippers. I believe you can <edit>buy an adapter kit to attach a vacuum to a good quality hair clipper.
Just don’t use a FlowBee. Ever. Seriously… Just don’t.
Takes me back to my first computer a Heathkit H8 computer with 32 K of RAM and programs including Basic were on cassette tape I also got the video terminal no graphics just letters and numbers. I have played that StarTrek game Bill.
Me too on the Star Trek game. I got so addicted to it that I would sneak into the company’s office after hours and play it when we got our first computer. I was the assistant manager and had a key. My dad was the boss so I wasn’t really taking any risk but I couldn’t wait for the office to close every day so I could go fight Klingons, on a ASCII screen with no graphics.
It was just plain magic at the time, wasn’t it guys?
Sure was. The computer I was playing it on was top of the line for that day and age and with software cost a serious chunk of cash.
It really, really irritated my dad that the best use I could find for it was to run Star Trek in ASCII.
Did one of the RA from last week not post on the site? I see Backstage and then two other episodes; Nashville and Make It Stop.
Oh, and Scott if you are reading, this episode of Backstage is available on YT, I just checked to see if the missing RA was there.
Last week’s Backstage is as well.
6 year old me sitting in an airplane for the first time watching the wing change shape prior to take off and then in the air directly led to 20 year old me sitting in a class room learning how to optimize the shape of an airfoil and understanding Bernoulli’s equation to wanting to build the habitat shown below and having lunch in a NASA cafeteria on Jan 28, 1986 and deciding that day I needed to rethink my career path.
But it all started on a flight from LGA to Orlando and me staring bug-eyed at the wings moving.
28 Jan 1986 was a terrible day for me. I was in the US Navy, working the flight line at a Naval Station in Nevada. We were between ops evolutions, and I kept sneaking into the air terminal (for Caps flights) to watch the shuttle launch on the TV they had in the waiting room.
I knew what time the launch was supposed to take place, but I was late. I didn’t worry about it, I was going to be just as happy to see the bird fly.
I got into the terminal, and there’s a big fireball on the screen and nobody’s saying anything. I asked the Airman “What the Hell happened?!”
“They blew it up…”
I said “They can’t Range-Safety it, that’s a manned flight!”
Work pretty much stopped for a while, until my AOC came in a rousted us all out to catch airplanes.
Since you love Tetris, politics, and history, you should check out “Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris” — it’s brilliant!
Artemis II: “To boldly go in distant circles far above where other men have gone before, a half-century earlier.”
We’re detonating Atomic weapons for movie special effects? Wow. If only that was the ultimate fate of the remaining doomsday bombs. I hope this doesn’t result in people getting comfortable with them.
I get your point, don’t see how anyone could get ‘comfortable’ with thermonuclear weapons and … There are people who are comfortable with a geriatric, senile nincompoop having his finger on the trigger to those weapons so … No bet.
Flowbee on the way for Scott LOL!!!
I was in a house near the governor’s mansion in Buckhead in the 70’s when a tornado came through. I think it was a category 2. The sky was dark green and it sounded just like a big train coming, just like everybody says everywhere.
Also have a house on the panhandle of Florida right on the water and have sat through a category 1-2 hurricane and regretted it. You think “What could happen? People ride these out all the time.” Then you’re sitting there calling yourself a dumb bunny as the bullet proof windows are getting pummeled.
So much on this one….. All of which make me realize I’m old. (67).
In college I played a Star Trek game on the mainframe that printed out the moves on paper. Got good at it. Still have the printout. Its pretty fragile though.
First computer I got for my personal use: TRS 80 model 3. 16K. Yes, K. (Radio Shack)When available, I upgraded to 32K. Programs were stored on tape. No disk. When available, I got the hard drive. First in the city. When I walked into my nearby Radio Shack, the employees treated me like I was the most important person in the world. It was like in kept them business by myself. This was before PCs . No such term.it was mini or micro computer. Personal Computer was IBM trademarked later. But PC was not. Programmed my own game on it.
Got a Commodore 128. Not Commodore 64. Too puny for me.
When I upgrade my PCs (only when I must) I get one step down from most powerful. Reason: often $100 or more cheaper. And the most powerful became “meh” within a month or so anyway.
(sarcasm on) You young whippersnappers have no idea what it was like. Putting in actual hard DOS commands.To put an additional hard drive in, one had to be the “slave” and one the “master” and you have to move the correct jumpers around. And some disks refused to be the slave. No internet. No YouTube instruction videos. Only BBSs that may give you info. Why, once I had to put a dual boot on my disk so I could run two different Windows on one machine so I could run programs that could not run on both. Wimps. Back in my day… Blah, blah, blah. Yammer, yammer, yammer. Grump, grump grump. (Sarcasm off)
Can’t keep up like I did then. And not as much need. Married with 4 dogs. Don’t have time. Single then.
Like it so much better now.
You’re bringing back such memories for me! I got a Vic 20 one year for Christmas and decided then I was going to get a Computer Science degree. I hooked it up to my little B&W TV and bought a cassette drive to save my BASIC programs.
My first job after graduation was writing embedded 8086 assembly for a solid state recorder. I think it could save 10 seconds of images before dumping it off to a backup tape drive.
Tetris was my goto game on UNIX. I became so addicted to it that I had to stop cold turkey. I haven’t played it in 35 years.
Now I’m addicted to Solitaire!
If you do a live stream, make sure it’s on Rumble. I chatted with “chrisrumble” today on Bongino’s live stream. He’s throwing money at streamers by crashing the stream. I asked him to hook you guys up with a private channel for this show, but I think he’d left the stream by then.
I’ve been in 3 floods in my life. 1972,2006?, and 2011-12. The first and the last were the worst.
Being from Pa, I never said wutter…lol. My first flight sim was on a Ti-99, and it was on cassette. No scenery at all, just the data and gauges..lol.
Not quite Steve. Besides the fact that bullets aren’t made of lead anymore…the bullet still remains, it just drops. I couldn’t explain it as well as the MythBusters could.
I’m taking a bit of a risk coming here to watch this. I imagine you’ve been read in, but Avast antivirus falsely identified this website as being infected with a phishing virus. They said they corrected it, but it failed. So I had to add the site as an exception.
I’m pretty sure I ticked off the Clinton’s…tagging ole Bill in this…lol…
(Now on with the show!)
Looks like they finally fixed it this morning. Hopefully.