The end of an era

I'm finally putting to bed my old kaladorn accounts on Magma/Primus (old ISP). That means all my old sites hanging off of www.magma.ca\~kaladorn are going away. This means some old D&D stuff from the 2.x edition years and my Ad Astra, Per Aspera Traveller site. The latter, to be sure, will reappear somewhere else sometime in the future. I was happy enough with a lot of the look and content and thus it will live again.

It's interesting to contemplate the demise of an old ISP and all that entails. In my case, it meant:
- going out to buy a power cable for the PC that had the FTP and SMTP (e-mail) settings for that old ISP
- remembering my access passwords for that box
- updating the virus protection and updating from XP SP1 to SP3 (in process)
- bringing up my old e-mail client and remembering my username
- downloading about 1200 unseen (most likely spam) emails to empty out that email account
- remembering my ftp details (thank you, WS_FTP!) and then fetching down all of my old site contents and manually deleting every file and directory off the web server
- I have yet to do it, but I must make sure all memberships to mailing lists, credit cards, etc. do not depend on that old kaladorn dot magma.ca email address because it will die Thursday as well
- backing up that entire machine because I realize how much data it has on it (it was my key machine for 4 years)

So I've got two computers hammering away to try to accomplish all of these tasks. My lord, I'd forgotten how long SMTP downloads take - either that or they are all digests or have spam attachments...

Anyway, retiring that old account will save me ridiculous amounts of money every year (it wasn't cheap) and I can devote that to setting up a new web host for my stuff. Since I'm already using kaladorn.emwd.com for my SMF web forum (for gaming mostly, but also for recipes and other stuff), that might well be the provider I start using for webspace as well. I

'd like my own server out there on the interwebs, but I can't justify the costs for an entire server to myself despite the advantages in trying some new software development activities.

Anyway, it does feel like writing a closing chapter on a period of my life - just like closing out any old computer feels that way to a computer geek (because the computer contains so much of your life for so long). Que sera sera.

Story Conference from Raiders of the Lost Ark

Lawrence Kasdan, Stephen Spielberg, and George Lucas get together for a week to hash out story for the Raiders. Here is what emerged (notes). It shows some of the creative process and the nature of brainstorming for these events. And where the creators were in terms of head-space when thinking about the movie.

Story on ROTLA

Firefighters save St. Bernard from Icy Pond

This is a change - usually one things of the St. Bernard as the life-saver!

Saved the Dawg!

Bet he was happy to get dry and warm.

Two pilots belly land twin-engine plane in Winnipeg

Two female pilots, 25 and 26, have to belly land their plane carrying 10 passengers in Winnipeg due to a problem with landing gear deployment. Nice job, ladies!

Belly Landing Story

This one has picture:

Aviation Herald Report

It's good to see competence in pilots. The task is probably easier in a smaller plane, vs. Sullenberger's jet, but still a daunting one. Put her down without gear on a landing strip and hope to keep the fuselage in one piece. The fact that no one was more than a bit shaken up is a tribute to some great flying.

The DH-2 Beaver Bush Plane

An interesting article about the DH-2 Beaver Bush plane. Read all the pages of user comments - some from people who flew the planes in the articles, trained with them, and most from ex-Beaver or Otter pilots.


DH-2 Beaver

There's also a link on one of the pages to a whole site devoted to the Beaver.

The bush plane is something Canada did and did well. It has endured and continued to serve for a long, long time. It was a big part of opening up the Canadian frontiers, which at one point were most of Canada.

I also commend to you Wheels, Skis and Floats by Ted Burton and Robert Grant. If you want a view into the early days of Canadian Aviation and into the challenges and the amazing planes and men that helped tie Canada together, this is a wonderful book.