Thursday, May 10, 2012

High Hopes : An Exercise In Experimentation


Remember that silly old ram, the one who thought he could punch a hole in a dam? If you recall, nobody could make that ram scram, he kept buttin that dam. Life forever teaches us that we need to experiment and when we fail we need to try again and, in the words of Samuel Beckett, "fail better". 

Take, for example, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the American aviation pioneer and inventor. He not only experimented with early manned aircraft but also designed a unique launch pad for them. Somewhat confusingly the aircraft was called the Aerodrome whilst the aerodrome was little more than a houseboat with a roof on it. If you look at the picture now you will probably laugh, but it should remind us that in the run-up to a successful product there are likely to be a multitude of rediculously failures.


"What is the old fool going on about this time?", I can hear you asking. All this is by way of explanation that this is simply a test post to see if I can put a blogpost together on my iPad. If it turns out upside down, inside out or attempting to imitate a drunken pigeon sat on the top of a houseboat, it will be back to the drawing board. I still have a few weeks before I go on holiday and need to perfect the technique. In the meantime think of this as simply my attempts to punch a hole in that dam.

My photograph shows nothing more than the view out of the bedroom window this morning. Yet again it is dull and wet. The rain has been coming down for weeks now. Who on earth, in their right mind, would want to punch a hole in a dam?

15 comments:

  1. Not bad. I have just checked this out on my desktop and I think I may be on to a winner. Now all I need to do is to work out where to put the baggage carousels.

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  2. Hello Alan:
    Ah, you are light years ahead of us where technology is concerned. But we love the idea of the floating bungalow with a landing pad on its roof. Not so way out, and when you consider helicopter landing pads on buildings, well ahead of its time.

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  3. I think it's amazing that you are trying out so much in the techy world, if one bothers to try we gain so much more....imagine what we'd be doing now if we hadn't bothered to just sample Blogger right?!

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  4. Love the "houseboat." It looks like something out of that awful movie "Waterworld" with Kevin Costner. Langley Research Center (I typed researchy and almost left it). Even your test posts are intriguing.

    It's a nice view from your window. I hope you get to see some sunlight out there soon.

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  5. And thus the aircraft carrier is born?

    Congratulations on mastering the technique of blogging on the road! Does this mean we won't get those long Alan-less gaps when you and the GLW go voyaging? Hooray!

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  6. Can't get used to my iPad - you can't do some pretty important things on it, like deleting a DropBox file.

    The boy seems to be able to make more use of it than me!

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  7. Yes, I helped to download a few applications on staff's ipads and I spent a lot of time getting the screen rerighted to the correct position. I like them and I don't like them but on a trip away from home they would be wonderful.

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  8. Looks OK to me. Are you going to start drawing on it too? I know someone fairly local who makes a lot of money out of his iPad drawings...

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  9. Time to move to Winnipeg Manitoba. Temperature 29. Nothing wrong with rain though. It's just water. Nothing wrong with blogging on the iPad. The problem is finding the baggage with the iPad in it when you land. Where IS that Carousel ??

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  10. I’ve never put a post together on an iPad, but on trips away I do comment on other people’s and publish comments on mine. Just one warning though; pinch and zoom before doing this because those pesky edit, delete, view buttons are too close together. Last week whilst hoping to show my visitors a blogpost in which they featured, I pressed ‘delete' instead of ‘view’ and lost the post! What followed was a steep learning curve before it was restored, and I discovered something new in the process, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience.

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  11. I tried to post some answers to a quiz up side down on blogger. It wouldn't let me!!

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  12. Seems to have worked just fine! :)

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  13. Doesn't look OK to me anymore....the pictures have been replaced by big black 'no entry' signs....

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  14. Jenny : Thanks for drawing my attention to that. I discovered two images in a folder I normally reserve for blog images and thought to myself "how did they get there?" and deleted them. I now realise that the mobile app I was using had placed them there to support the post. Clever app. Silly me.

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    Replies
    1. We press 'delete' at our peril! Though I do find I tend to have the same photos all over the place, copies in every folder imaginable!

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