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Showing posts from May 29, 2011

LavaCon 2026 and the future.

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LavaCon is a conference now going on 25 years. Its always fun at conferences where folks collaborate on what the future holds. This year I drove to Charlotte NC from Duluth GA to attend. I used the Tesla in Full Self Drive. I went park-to-park without touching the wheel for over 200 miles. It's crazy. I don't think most people understand how well it works. Lots of nay-sayers still, but it really does work. Be on guard, but enjoy. I spent some of my time "driving" while conversing with Grok as part of my daydreaming. I was discussing with Grok an idea I have of building a West system (cold molded) old style barrel-back runabout maybe 20 feet long- all varnished Mahogony. Of course this boat would have an exotic 12-cylinder engine under a transparent engine hatch between the twin cockpits. We discussed the designs, available actual study plans and pre-lofted design documents for the hull. We also discussed the best engine (perhaps a BMW N73) coupled with a Velvet Dri...
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I have flown about 200,000 commercial miles in the last year. There is a pic below that shows what 200k miles of of boarding passes looks like. Now that the paper boarding passes are being replaced with electric ones on smart phones that image will get more rare. DJ and I did some exploring in Atlanta. There still is quite a bit to explore. One thing is for sure the people are nicer (less rude) in Atlanta than anywhere in NY. That grows on you. I have a few stories about that. That is the Olympic torch from a more local angle. We went to the Varsity, the local burger place. We went to Stone Mountain park for Memorial day and hiked the 5 mile Cherokee trail around and over part of the giant chunk of granite. It was an appropriate place for a Yankee to spend Memorial day. Stone mountain park is really a giant memorial of confederates. There is no secret about that and there are no memorials for other folks of the civil war. The sermon at church in the morning was about memorializing...