I’m dropping this account. I really haven’t been blogging in some years. I may say things here and there on Twitter. https://twitter.com/natiox
Author: nalter
1972: A Bad Year for Air Travel
1972 was not a good year for air travel. After D. B. Cooper hijacked a US flight and collected a ransom, there were about 15 copycat hijackings.
Google problems
Seems like we’ve had more problems with Google stuff recently.
We can cast to Google Home about 1 in 10 times.
There are many apps for messaging and many apps for tracking your TO-DO list. Which is the right one? Who can say?
Trying to use the Google Backup and Sync program on your Windows to back up your photos to Google Photos is a mystery. It wants to go to your tiny Google Drive, which is only 15 GB. How to get it to go to Google Photos without going through Google Drive? Can you determine that from these preferences?

No matter what combination you pick, you’ll be wrong.
Fun with Chrome Certificate Transparency errors
If you’re renewing an SSL certificate and there’s a checkbox to use certificate transparency, CHECK THAT BOX! Otherwise, the certificate will be fine in all browsers, but Chrome will give a panicking error about “this site being unsafe.” The issue is that there was no entry in the internet-wide certificate transparency logs and Chrome doesn’t trust it. You’ll have to reissue the certificate with that box checked.
street ball?
I just went to the basketball court at the park with my son, Sean. He’s now 6′ 7″ and 210 at 15. So he has 40 pounds on me. Anyway, just to give him some good practice I was having to do a lot of pushing and fouling. If I was on the Harlem Globetrotters, I’d be the guy with the mask, I guess. It didn’t matter, though. I could do very little to stop him from scoring!
Don’t look up!
I was talking to a coworker who’s a pilot and he was telling me about the instruments-only test that pilots can take where they prove that they can fly by instruments alone. They have to wear some odd IFR glasses that block their sight out of the windows so that they can only see their instruments.

Mexicish
I was watching an old Orson Welles movie from 1958 called Touch of Evil. It featured the famous Mexican actor, Charlton Heston.
That reminds me of a funny thing I see…towns where the official town name pronunciation is incorrect.
- Salida (pronounced Sahl-I-duh)
- Pueblo (pronounced Pee-EB-lo)
- Buena Vista County (pronounced BEW-nuh)
- Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid). Reminds me of Google Maps pronouncing Montaño (a road) without the tilde.
- Del Norte, Colorado (pronounced Del Nort)
Virtual Reality on the Cheap
I found a refurbished HP Windows Mixed Reality headset for $160. It’s the cheapest way to do virtual reality. It does 95% of what the fancy/expensive HTC Vive does. They keep the cost down by using cameras on the headset to sense the controller position instead of external sensors. We cleared out a bunch of space in the living room and I temporarily moved my computer into there. The more space you can clear, the better. But being tethered to the computer with a cable is a pain. You almost need to play barefoot so that you can feel the cable with your feet avoid getting tangled.
Other US political parties
You may have heard of the Whigs, but what about other political parties in the history of the US? To be fair, some of these were pretty out there and unpopular, but the names are interesting anyway. Surprisingly, there’s no Pity Party.
- Anti-Masonic Party
- Nullifier Party (programmers?)
- Anti-Nebraska Party
- American Party
- Anti-Monopoly Party (many hate that board game even today)
- People’s Party (tired of all these…uh…not people?)
- Looking Back Party
- New Party
Bahnk?
“Bank” does not have a long A sound as in “plane”? Are you kidding me? I pronounce it “baynk”. And yet, look at the dictionary and there’s no line over the a. It’s a short a as in “cat”. Either I’m mispronouncing the word or English is unreasonable. If English were a programming language, it would be JavaScript.