Category: Revelation

Fun fact #143.4

Discovered while trying to debug my nav data loading scripts: The Hendersonville Airport (0A7) and the “W.N.C. Museum Airport” (8NC9) are only 0.03 nautical miles apart, but they’re separate airports. I’m not sure if they’re the closest two ever, but they’re certainly pretty damn close. As a matter of fact, I think this picture Hendersonville Airport from the AirNav.com web site listing for Hendersonville shows both runways, the paved one for Hendersonville and the turf one for the museum. I bet there is a story why they didn’t just build a taxiway between them and call it one airport.

This looks incredibly promising

Thanks to a post by Skud, I’ve discovered Freebase, which is, as Skud described it, “crack for information nerds”. It appears to be exactly what I was hoping to develop or find for my aviation navigation data project – a flexible structured information agregator, almost like a wiki with user definable fields.

You probably can’t see much of it, because right now it’s in alpha and by invitation only, but so far they’ve imported all of Wikipedia and added some links between then, and people have written some demo applications.

Like many AJAX applications, it has a tendency to get the dreaded “a script on this page is running slowly”, but otherwise it’s pretty nifty.

Movie tickets

Our project has a custom of handing out free movie ticket coupons every year as sort of a bonus. In the past, either one of the admins has handed them out, or just stuck them in an interoffice envelope. No ceremony or fuss.

This year, my boss Nancy comes over. She says that she’d had to go through my pimp for this (and I’m suddenly thinking “hey, is this my first raise in 5 years?”) and then congratulates me for a good year and hands me the movie tickets. Sure enough, as well as the usual cover letter from my boss’s boss, there is another one from the pimp agency. Knowing it went through them, I immediately counted the coupons to see if they took 35% of them. But no, it appears they’re all there. I guess there’s a first time for everything.