Modern Vespa

Interesting recollections. Was Berlin the city of your birth? City has had a rather tumultuous history in the last century. Wartime accounts of life there are harrowing. Despite being nearly leveled, its made an amazing comeback.

A good part of my ancestry is from near Stettin (now Poland), and it's like my home to Chicago in distance. Of course it was a long trip in the early 19th century, but it had to be THE big city.

We also have a Berlin, as well as a New Berlin within an hour of me, but they're little dots on the map by comparison.

Busted!

I could absolutely bore someone to tears about the merits of Pipers vs Cessnas and Lycoming engines vs Continentals. Most general aviation questions as well.

Riding two wheels solo through the Baja peninsula would take a considerable amount of time to get through.

Im sure all the other useless bits of knowledge I've occurred over the years could come into play at the slightest provocation! 😄

I graduated from USAF Navigation school at Mather AFB in 1979, went on to fly/navigate KC-135s using sextant/charts/compass/dead reckoning into the inertial and doppler system era. Then into the 'staff' for a long career... Nice to 'meet' you!

Compared to you "guys" I feel like I know nothing......

I could talk about 'The Princess Bride' for at least 20 minutes.

Does that count?

Yes. Prepare to die.

But, hopefully, you will only be mostly dead.

field first-aid - open pneumothorax
(AKA: sucking chest wound)

1. put Pt. on back & bare the area
2. cover & seal wound with any handy occlusive material (cig. pack wrapper, plastic wrap, foil, cloth, pad) taping all 4 sides
3. apply field dressing and wrap Pt.
4. elevate feet 6"
5. start IV
6. request "priority" evac

O.S.

Ditto on "The Blues Brothers".

Connected - there's a four-part documentary on Stax, the record label, streaming on Max. Excellent viewing!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19891206/

Is that sort of like "only a little pregnant?"

Not exactly.

Reference here:

Here are a few hypothetical titles of the talks I could give without much effort:

1. How to build your perfect workshop (subtitle: just throw more money at it)
2. Spanish Tortilla, hold the potatoes (subtitle: from the Heretical Cookbook)
3. Building a sorting system in Minecraft (subtitle: you don't have enough chests yet)
4. The best block in all of Minecraft (subtitle: it's the shulker box, stupid)
5. Running a website on a shoestring budget (subtitle: just throw more money at it)

And finally:

6. Setting the tone: creative behavior modification in online forums

Ah, I see (said the blind man).

From what we know about you, these would all have a supporting PowerPoint deck?

Sounds familiar! Mather '81, AC-130 Nav as a 2Lt, Lockheed Flight Test Nav, Korea remote(not by choice), Joint Duty at Bolling, back to AC-130s (as a Major), AFSOC staff, retirement. In the gunship we had Vietnam-era Doppler, LORAN, NDB, Compass, Radar, sextant, and a primitive inertial that drifted several miles per hour. These days, my phone has more processing power than that whole airplane, and GPS. But we managed, didn't we?

You and Nautiker are extreme badasses!! Hat off and bowing down to both of you. Using a sextant through the celestial navigation window/portal is truly impressive. Ridiculous how easy and how extremely accurate my Garmin Aera 660 is to use. The synthetic vision alone puts me within feet of where I'm actually at. You two earned every dollar! Carry on.

jess mentioned Minecraft, so I'm considering this on-topic

Skip if you're not a techie…

I worked at Salesforce for six years. The biggest impact I made was a Friday afternoon throwaway project that turned into a thing: integrating Salesforce with Minecraft.

Six minutes of madness:

The conference session I presented at Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual conference, explaining how I did it:

Flying. Gliders, single engines, aerobatics.... competitions... And how life was better "back then", lol.
I was instructor in my previous life, in my home country.

I could rattle on for more than 20 minutes about why Linux is awesome and then why it's rubbish. It's been a hobby of mine for almost 30 years. How to install it onto stuff the vendor abandoned.

I could also rattle on about Discworld by Terry Pratchet. I was given one of his books decades ago when I was recovering from an operation and haven't lost the love for the franchise yet 😀

Pass me the dried frog pills.

My latter career was pedicacted by just standing up and repeating anecdotes. Actually, I lie. But maybe most of it. I could drone on for hours.

I used to work for Sun Microsystems. Back when they were at loggerheads with Microsoft, around 2002, it was really difficult to get a corporate laptop with Windows installed. They issued me an IBM ThinkPad (IIRC) running "Sun Java Desktop System", a rebadged distribution of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. It was great to have a "proper" operating system on my laptop, but it was not the best user experience. Literally every time I applied an update that touched the kernel, something broke. Video playback, audio, networking... It was always a lottery as to what you'd have to dedicate hours to fixing.

Then, in 2007, after a Toshiba and a few years of vanilla SUSE, they gave me my first MacBook Pro, and I never looked back. A usable GUI desktop with a sane command line. Bliss!

Unicycling.
I could fill 20 mins answering the same questions I get almost every ride....
Is it difficult to learn?
Why would you even start?
Are you a clown?
Where's your other wheel"? (Men over 40 seemingly have to shout this as I ride by)
Can you pop a wheelie?
Don't you have any friends?
Why do you wear cycle gloves when you don't have handle bars?
Where do you hide your bell?
Can I have a go?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a9MnRF1HM3s

Something we share in common, then. I haven't ridden one for years, but I learned how to ride one at an alternative primary school, along with pretty much all the other students there.

I rode a unicycle during my last few years of high school.

At times I would take it to the beach to ride on the firm sand.

Or around the neighborhood, sometimes even miles outside of the neighborhood.

I ever rode it at college or much after, but did get it out twenty years ago, riding it on the street in front of our house.

That ended with a fall that told me not to try it again.

Bill

A thought proviking thread.

For some reason, I didn't even think of things like literature, music or art in this context before reading some of the answers. A true engineer soul then...

Then again, to me, trivia comes in from the left ear and immediately leaves through the right. Always loved logic, very little numbers.

With this in mind, I could easily give a talk about Charles Bukowski, the controversial writer.

Don't remember the names of his books, publication dates, tittles of the most well known poems etc. I do have most of his work in my bookshelf, all novels and most poems published before his death. Before, because, unofficially and as a personal opinion, I find some of the posthumous publications dodgy - a bit like chatgpt version of the original....could be the bottom drawer stuff, who knows.

His work draws an interesting picture of a genius what comes to using words and a questionable misfit what comes to anything else in life - 20 min would go easily with this.

I'm certain I could spend 20 minutes talking about different cuts of steak and grilling meats.

I worked my way through college doing display cooking behind a plexiglass screen. Grilling on my back deck is one of my favorite ways to spend time. I use my grill 3-4 times a week, even with snow falling.

Hell, I covered the deck a few years ago just so I could grill in the rain.

I could talk about the non-existence of Black Holes. I am an astronomical heretic as I follow the Frozen Star heresy.

Been studying this for decades and going over it in my head, but I don't know any astronomers to discuss it with.

Made me look that up. In many ways it makes more sense. And I've been reading about quantum chromodynamics and superstring theory since high school. This falls right in line.

People have adopted the idea of black holes as fact, when it is still - in fact - simply a theory. Like a lot of other things. I'm a big fan of Hawking, but at the end of the day he was a theorist.

This is not a statement refuting credible science ... it's just there is a lot of theoretical science out there that makes me shake my head. I read a story this weekend about "experts" predicting the possibility of our galaxy colliding with its nearest neighbor sometime in the next fifty billion years or so, give or take. But also it might not.

I don't think anyone is checking their work. But I'm sure they are being funded.

But I do like alternate theories.

Interesting theory, if true Einsteins Theory of Relativity would be totally screwed

Coddy, it is totally based on Einstein's theory. EVERY gravitational collapse calculation, from Oppenheimer and Schneider (1938) onwards, has shown that gravitational time dilation slows the collapse and brings it to a halt just before it becomes a Black Hole.
Don't want to go into more detail here. It's not really a discussion for this forum, and would go way off topic.

Well, to be fair, if Einstein IS actually right, then Newton and the idea of gravity is screwed.

Ok fair do's, You clearly have far greater knowledge on this subject than I. It's just that I read that if Frozen Stars exist, they would require a significant revision of Einstein's general theory of relativity, moving our understanding of gravity and spacetime into uncharted territory.

I could easily talk for 20 minutes about User Interfaces (UI) and product usability.
In software. Why menus should be in the upper left corner and X to close windows should be in the upper right corner.
In hardware. Why fan speed control (AC) in car should be rotating buttons, not menus in the infotainment system. Why On/Off buttons should be at the front of the equipment. Why older people, who grew up answering phones by lifting the headset have trouble with mobile phones.
Then I could spend few minutes in website UI design. Why many websites like Vespa com do not display price where it's easily seen.

I'm a big fan of designers like Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive and Don Norman. Although sometimes they, especially Jonathan, have gone too far in simplifying things.

Fishing, I've attended my company's annual Fishing Day today and now I'm fully qualified to talk about fishing. Oh and maybe Canadian Geese for 2 minutes.

Start with the fact that they are actually called "Canada geese".

(Though, I suppose that any goose who legally resides in Canada could be called Canadian.)

Hence the 2 minutes rather than 20.

The first minute covers the question and possible answers on "why have the bastards shat absolutely everywhere on and around my fishing peg?

I could talk about Canadian Gooses for ten seconds. Canadian Gooses crap like big dogs. Thank you.

Can you make bacon from them?

I kid you not, Mrs. Jess sent me this photo today, taken as she was boarding a cruise ship in Vancouver BC.