Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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VLJs --- 20 years after all the hype

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20 years ago the world was abuzz with the VLJ (very light jet) movement. I got to park next to this one the other day in South Carolina. Here is an article from Wired magazine from 14 years ago indicating the demise (or morph) of the hyped VLJ. (Wired article from 2009). The plane in the picture is the Cirrus Vision jet. It probably won the contest in actually (mostly) delivering on the promise of a VLJ. The actual cost of the plane here (about 3 million USD) is way outside what the ridiculously low projected pricing of 20 years ago. But, the plane is cool for sure and is very relateable to the Cirrus piston aircraft. The cruise speed of the vison jet is 345 mph. The Honda jet cruises at 424 mph and the Phenom jet at 466 mph. The speed of the vision jet is incredible compared to my Cessna 172 at 140 mph, but the Vision jet speed is pretty much with the turboprops. (King Air 360 mph and the PC-12 at 311 mph).

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