Project Management

Several years ago I watched a series of PBS specials about the development of the Boeing 777 airliner. Some searches on the internet found the title to be 21st Century Jet: The Building of the 777. It isn’t available on Amazon, but can apparently still be purchased from the Boeing Store. The film makers had an amazing amount of access as they filmed meetings, talked to engineers, suppliers, etc. It was a perfect case study in project management.

Boeing’s goal was to develop a long-range plane to fill a niche just below the capacity of a 747. With a 5-hour series the documentary was able to go into detail about certain issues (for instance the difficulty in getting a 2-engine aircraft certified for trans-ocean flights or how they test turbine blades). It was fascinating to watch the pieces come together. One way to save money was to do virtual testing of the engine instead of using a flying test platform. The engineers thought they wouldn’t even need to do the real-life tests because their models were so good. But the decision was made to do the test on a full-scale prototype anyway and on the first flight the engine flamed out (they used a 747 so they still had 3 other engines). The engineers went back and found a flaw in their computer model.

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Ethanol

A great article by Robert Samuelson of Newsweek about President Bush’s plan to decrease gasoline consumption. While it is a great goal, the means is via huge government subsidies, when all that is really needed is requiring vehicles to get better mileage (rather than just passenger cars like the proposed scheme):

http://tinyurl.com/2w8tmj

I would propose that any vehicle (car, truck, SUV, whatever, no exceptions) that gets less than 25 miles per gallon should have a $3,000 tax assessed. Any car that gets over 45 miles per gallon should get a $3,000 tax credit. Those numbers would have to be adjusted to make sure that the two balance each other out, but that’s probably a decent start. It would cost the government nothing and instantly result in people buying cars with 80% better mileage.

My post in 2003 on Green Cars

DVD Kiosk

About a month ago I noticed a DVD rental kiosk at Kroger promising $1 per day rentals. I kept meaning to look at it more closely, but someone was either already at it, it was offline, or I was in a hurry to get out of the store. Yesterday I finally stopped by and rented a movie that I had kind of wanted to see but knew Susan would never want to watch (Talladega Nights: The Story of Ricky Bobby, C+, probably worth a dollar).

I guess the machine (about the size of a large coke machine) is filled with disks. They seem to have almost all of the releases from the last year, probably over a hundred movies, and with multiple copies there are probably 500 disks inside. There is a computer on the front with a touchscreen that lets you browse movies by genre and they seem fairly current with new releases. They take only credit cards and give you until midnight the next day before you are charged another dollar. After 14 days they charge you $35 plus tax to keep the movie.

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Palm TX Review

I’ve been meaning to write a review of the Palm TX on Amazon for a while. After writing a brief review of a replacement Palm stylus, I decided to write up the TX too. Here it is:

4 stars

Very Good

I have had my Palm TX now for about 3 months. I have had a Palm Vx, m515, and now this one, and its capabilities blow the others away. The screen is fantastic. I love the extra space and resolution, plus the landscape mode. Having wifi is a huge plus even though I don’t have a wireless network at home or work. With the better processor, this is also super fast. It sorts through 300 records in Smartlist in about a second.

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Sick iPod Well Again

A guy at work was having trouble with a 4G iPod that his son didn’t need anymore. He said he couldn’t sync it with his PC because it was formatted for his son’s Mac. I told him to bring it in and I would try to fix it. I didn’t have a problem syncing it (it was already formatted for Windows). I had an old program that was an iPod Updater that I tried to use to restore the iPod (wipe it out and completely reformat it, using the latest iPod software for that model), but that capability has now been built into iTunes. But iTunes wouldn’t download the update for the restore even after I uninstalled the obsolete Updater. I gave him his iPod back and said it should work fine even though I hadn’t restored it.

A few days later I was trying to make my first iTunes purchase since November and they wouldn’t download either. I played around with my firewall settings in McAfee (even turning it off completely), but decided the problem must be with iTunes timing out before a dial-up connection could bring a song over (about 10 minutes for a song). It didn’t help that iTunes was now trying to download three songs at a time instead of one like it used it to do. I tried some different settings in iTunes, but couldn’t fix the problem.

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