May The Force Be With You…

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…" I remember when I first saw those blue letters fade onto the screen when I was 4 years old. Star Wars amazed me when I was a little kid. I actually believed that the world existed and I used to fantasize about leaving earth in the Millennium Falcon and cruising around the galaxy going from system to system as a smuggler or bounty hunter. I still believe that the world exists, actually. I refuse to believe that it is all just a fantasy. It's just a matter of time before we discover a fourth Death Star and Earth sends it's young men to the Rebel base to defend our galaxy. I will be the first in line for that draft.

I have probably seen the original trilogy over 900 times. I used to watch the three movies, rewind all the tapes, and watch them again. The Star Wars universe absolutely fascinated me growing up, and it still fascinates me today. So knowing all this, wouldn't I be absolutely thrilled to find out that a rocket team out in California actually made a flying model of the X-Wing. It actually flies – well not literally as it is more of fancy rocket, but even still – it flies! It will even lock it's S-Foils in attack position in mid flight! How fucking cool is this?!

It is a 21-foot long model that has four solid liquid fuel rockets on it. They are the kind that burn red to resemble the engines of the X-Wing in the movies. It is mostly made out of wood with the exception of some solid aluminum rods to support the wing motion for when the wings open up. It is unmanned, which sucks, but I suppose in this case safety really does come first. They are planning to launch it on October 10^th and it will land with three man-rated parachutes. All I have to say is that they better fucking video tape it. Being that is made out of wood, it will probably explode into a ball of fire, and here is hoping. I would want to see a real life X-Wing explode in a great ball of fire. Then people could edit the movie and make it look like a TIE-Fighter shot it down. This is so cool and so right in so many ways.

The next step of course is for someone to make a real one and let me pilot it as I am not such a bad pilot myself. I would zip around the world, blasting stuff. It would be so much fun. Then all I would need is a Lightsaber, and my life would be complete.

Read the whole story here: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/star-wars/rocket+powered-21+foot-long-x+wing-model-actually-flies-305976.php. There are pictures of how it was built, and a full explanation of how it will work. These workers are strong with the force. Learn much from them we may and our lives fulfilled will be. May the force be with us all…

Too Long

    Wow, it has really been a long time since my last post. Things have been absolutely insane for me. It has honestly been too long since my last post. I have really been putting it off to get other things done. I will start to post more regularly and keep things updated.

    In recent news for me, my sister got married. I wasn't at the wedding, because of family issues, and I didn't really care to be there. She is a self-righteous bitch, so I didn't bother. Work is still going good. I am, however, going to take the police exams for Albany and Schenectady counties in NY. I am also going to take the NY State Trooper exam in January. I am looking to eventually become a computer forensics detective, but I gotta be on the street for a while before I can do that.

    In more exciting and technology related news, there are a couple of stories that I think any Linux and open source software supporter would like. The first one is actually old news, but it is new to me, as I never heard of it before. It is the One Laptop Per Child program. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XO-1_(laptop) . Basically it's a program that distributes $100 laptops to deprived countries so that children in these countries can learn how to use a computer, and can have access to the Internet for their education. It's a great program, and they are distributing these laptops with a stripped down version of Fedora Linux. Since 2005, there have already been over 10 Million children that have received one of these notebooks. That means that for the last two years, over 10 million people have had Linux as their first operating system.

    The second piece of news, which is new for everyone, is that the Linux Foundation has signed a deal with the Japanese government to help promote Linux to the Asian companies. This is another big thing since Japan is one of the economic super powers. Read the full story here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071002-linux-foundation-establishes-partnership-with-japanese-government.html.

    The world gets closer and closer to a Windows free society. Bad Vista!