Real live magic
Daughter flew home from Lanzarote on Friday.
Being the sad person that I am, I decided to track her progress. I knew the flight number and the airline so it was a simple enough task.
I sent her a text just before the allotted time, and sure enough she said she was in the airport in a wheelchair waiting to be shoved onto the plane. I fired up my Flight Radar and zoomed in on Lanzarote. There was her flight at the boarding gates. I entered a filter so only her plane was displayed.
After a while she started to move but stopped on the taxiway. I removed the filter and sure enough, there was a plane in front waiting to take off to Bremen. It took off but Daughter’s plane moved a few yards and stopped again. Ah yes – a flight arriving from Las Palmas. After that, things went as they should do. The flight took off uneventfully and I left my laptop on the table beside me so I could take an odd glance.
The only odd thing about the flight was that over the Bay of Biscay it began to change course in a somewhat erratic way, veering a few degrees either way. I fired up my weather map and sure enough the plane was travelling through the edge of some very windy weather.
I got a text from Daughter some time later asking if I could see her. I told her she had just crossed the coast of Ireland west of Tramore and was flying at 24,475 feet up.
Eventually she landed and some time later arrived at the Manor in an ambulance. Something for the neighbours to wonder about? Daughter was in a right mess, looking like The Terminator with her leg encased in a frame, but was delighted the journey was over.
Now the thing that struck me was the incredible power of the Interweb. Here was I, sitting on the side of a mountain in Wicklow yet I knew more about Daughter’s flight than she did. At all times I could read her exact position, her speed and her altitude which was more information than she had, and she was on the damned plane!
Home computing arrived on the scene when I was in my early thirties, so I knew well what life was like without a computer. Then the Interweb arrived and we stared in amazement at text that had been written by someone the other side of the planet. A few of the sites actually had pictures in them! Imagine that! Wow!
Nowadays the Interweb is everywhere and people just take it for granted. They don’t appreciate the wonders of it and just take for granted the millions of videos and billions of photographs, not to mention the information on any topic under the sun. I can’t take it for granted and still wonder at it every time I use it.
Forty years ago, who would have thought that one day I would be scribbling my brainfarts and that at least six or seven people could read them instantaneously around the world?
They would have said I was insane.
It fascinates me, that we have so much now at a button push. I remember when our office was purchasing new CRT’s and we could have them in golden rod or green, wowza no more white letters for me! Slippery slope from there I was addicted to my craving for the insanity available on the internet.
We were stuck with a standard green until we graduated to PCs with Windows 3. Wow! All dem coloury tings!
People nowadays though just don’t realise what an immense project the Interweb is. They have grown up with it and just don’t appreciate the vast strides it has taken over a mere few decades. I shudder to think what’s coming next!
I bought my first ever ‘computer’, a Commodore VIC20, around 1980; used it in part for playing games but perhaps more importantly, learning a programming language (BASIC); my greatest triumph with it was to produce a short cartoon production of my best mate playing with his todger! Thank goodness we didn’t have the interweb then otherwise it might have still been there for the world to see!
BASIC, though, eventually led to much more interesting stuff; C+, VBasic, HTML, JavaScript, Pascal and so on; it was only ever a hobby but even now, despite all the beer, I might be able to get my head around some code or write a short routine to make things work a little better if I need to.
A very similar path to myself. Bought a Spectrum 48K and learned BASIC. Then did COBOL and graduated to HTML, VBasic, Javascript, PHP and the rest. I can still bash out the odd blast of code if necessary though I have never attempted to portray anyone playing with his todger. My project for tomorrow?
You certainly can bash out some code; it was your fix for Google Earth problems in Linux that had being driving me crazy for months, that led to me to this blog!
Ah! My poor neglected alter-ego site. That fix is sort of redundant now they’ve removed all those photos.
And I only do coding to give two fingers to all those little twerps who think us old farts don’t even know how to switch on a computer.
I marvel at the speed of emails. Mind you I do miss the vibe of the old blue , condom thin, Airmail letters of yore. Who knows , maybe along with the blue passports we may all have to start using those blue airmail letters again.
Hah! Remember telegrams? The only way to get a message sent in a hurry? Then they were relegated to weddings until people started sending wedding greetings on fucking Twitter and Farcebook.
“Mind you I do miss the vibe of the old blue , condom thin, Airmail letters of yore”
There was something exciting about a letter, QSL card or small packet dropping on the mat with “Airmail” stamped on it.
“The only way to get a message sent in a hurry?”
I remember getting a C60 cassette from my friend in “OZ” just 36 hours after he posted it. Considering the flight time involved, that was pretty damned remarkable.
This all took place in the 1980’s, when I was a regular shortwave listener. In much the same way as with the post, hearing an unusual station was a real thrill. Now the vast majority of those stations are gone, and you just click a link to hear a “live” stream…
Further to my previous post; I live in SE Asia and had the dubious pleasure, via Flightradar, of being able to watch my 16-yr old son’s flight from Amsterdam to Hong Kong (his first time to fly long-haul or without his mother), be delayed and eventually re-routed to Taiwan so that he missed his connection to Manila where I was waiting to meet him. Cue his mother calling and going berserk with me because our little boy was vulnerable and all alone in Taiwan, and what in God’s name was I going to do about it?
The answer was sod all because the airline put him on the next flight to Manila and there was no way I could possibly get to Taiwan before that flight left. In any case, the airline put him up in a far better hotel than I could ever afford, fed him and even provided some beer money. The following morning I used Flightradar to watch his flight from Taiwan and then was then able to arrive at Manila airport at the appropriate time to meet him.
I suppose the next step is to provide a CarRadar site showing the position of every car? Followed by PeopleRadar – the ultimate tool for the State!
And then we’ll be able to play them back, to do our own analysis each time a “self driving” car kills someone…
The State is half-way there already – by combining the data from your contract mobile phone with their ANPR camera network, they can pretty much deduce your complete itinerary.
OK, it may be occasionally useful for live criminal investigations, but remember that data is permanent, your history of movements can be re-assembled at any time in the future. Then try denying that paternity claim . . . .