Heli-Q fun

Christmas 2005, picture Scooterboy and I on a big oval and a remote controlled plane, Scooterboy's present from me. Virgin takeoff... BBBBZZZZZZZZ.... 9 seconds of joy and CRASH, one busted-ass wing and no more plane joy.

Birthday 2008, Scooterboy and his new Heli-Q. Virgin takeoff... BBBBZZZZZZ... some seconds later, CRASH. Happy happy chopper joy, the Heli-Q bounced and is good to go again.

So, yea. Neither of us can quite get the jigger to do what it does in the promotional video below, but I'm confident after some nerdy-hours-of-fun, we'll be landing the thing on each other's heads in no time.

U.S. Romp Pics

I had a sensational time during my virgin foray into the U.S! Pity it was such a short trip. Oh well, just means that I will have to go back again to do justice to it 8) Larved NY, SF, Napa, Palo Alto, and Woodside, and all the wonderful people we came across. You guys rawk!

J.K. Rowling on the power of failure

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

" The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure....

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,...Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way....Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned...."

Courtesy of BoingBoing

Video and full text here.

There's no place like home

Gotta love good ol' Melbourne 8)

"Melbourne has retained its position as the best city in the world to call home...

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey ranked Melbourne, Vancouver and Vienna as the best cities for expatriates to live, with Perth fourth and Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney equal sixth."

Article here