FlightAware offers some of the richest flight tracking information I’ve seen to date. Among other things, you can get up to 4 months worth of take off/landing times for free. Pretty useful if you’re wondering how often a flight will be late.

Now they have a new page that tells you what planes are in the sky right now by type. Here are the first 10:

FlightAware > Live Flight Tracker > Aircraft Type
Airborne Aircaft (by type)
Count Code Aircraft Type

300 B752 Boeing 757-200
281 B737 Boeing 737-700
263 CRJ2 Canadair Regional Jet CRJ-200
241 A320 Airbus A320
208 A319 Airbus A319
197 B733 Boeing 737-300
156 B738 Boeing 737-800
150 E145 Embraer ERJ-145
119 MD82 McDonnell Douglas MD-82
112 B763 Boeing 767-300

If you go to their site, you can click on those numbers and see who is operating those plans, where they are going, and more.

Pretty neat!

James Senior had this interesting post where he created a great MP3 to showcase the sounds that his copy of Vista makes:

Views on Vista : Windows Vista Sounds
So over the weekend I installed a nice shiney RTM build and the sounds have been upgraded from the ones in XP to the new creations by Robert Fripp. I’d thought I would share some of these with you and I’ve compiled them in this mp3 which you can download and listen to below.

The sounds I cover are the following:

* Critical Stop
* ReadyBoost drive inserted
* Windows UAC control prompt
* New e-mail notification
* Low Battery Alarm
* Exclamation
* Windows Start
* Exit Windows

Check it out - it’s definitely… uh… surprising.

People so often think of Microsoft of this soulless, monolithic borg cube of drones. But the reality is that it’s made up of people - with everyday people concerns.
Usually any article you see with Microsoft is strictly about technology or business, so it caught my attention when I saw this piece in the NY Times:

Liberal Republican Suburb Turns Furious With G.O.P. - New York Times
Bellevue has been growing more Democratic for several years, thanks to an influx of liberal voters and a professional class that is changing teams. This year, Bellevue may send its first Democrat to Congress. Darcy Burner, who even supporters admit is inexperienced, may unseat Representative Dave Reichert, a well-liked, longtime public servant, simply because constituents want Democratic control of the House of Representatives.

“I am a Republican and have traditionally voted that way,” Tony Schuler, an operations services manager at Microsoft with a Harvard M.B.A., said as he sat with his wife, Deanna, in their home above Lake Sammamish. But Mr. Schuler abhors what he sees as a new Republican habit of meddling in private affairs.

“The Schiavo case. Tapping people without a warrant. Whether or not people are gay,” he said. “Let people be free! It’s not government’s job to interfere with those things.”

In Bellevue, the professional is political. Rather than religion or culture, what unites the diverse population — a quarter of residents are foreign born — are the values of their workplaces: technological innovation, accuracy, efficiency.

And this year, one issue incenses them above all others: restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.

For those not familiar, Bellevue is the town right next to Redmond.

I wasn’t aware that stem cell research was such a big deal up there, and for all I know it could just be overblown in this article - but still it was interesting to read about Microsoft employees in an everyday sort of way, rather than just the usual tech/biz stuff.

I’m trying out FeedBurner. My apologies for any feed weirdness.

I happen to like multiple rows of tabs only in one context: web browsing. Everywhere else, it’s a no-no.

Here’s an add-in for FireFox 2.0 that lets you have multiple rows of tabs: Tab Mix Plus.

Is there something like this for IE 7 that I don’t know about?

Has anyone else noticed a massive increase in spam e-mail since the weekend?

I was trying to map an address tonight, when I noticed that Bird’s eye view is available for parts of Silicon Valley.

Here’s a neat picture of the Shoreline Amphitheatre:

I wonder what event this was.

One of the things I’ve always wanted, was a thin, light, laptop with a good keyboard and 8 hours of battery life.

The trend, however, seems to be to produce 12 pound laptops, with DVD+-*/ RW support, 512 megs of video RAM, 15.9 audio, retina scanner, RAID 5 storage, 2 2 cupholders.

Ok, ok - I exaggerated a little, but still, this picture of a Dell XPS M2010 comes to mind:

In other countries though, I know that thin and light laptops have been available for a while. At one point, I was interested in a Sharp laptop - seemed pretty neat. (Yes, Sharp does make laptops.) Check out this LG laptop:

Over the weekend, I read an interesting article that points to some of the reasons why these thin/light laptops don’t exist in our nation - here are the relevant snippets:

Tech Gadgets Banned in the USA - Yahoo! News
[snip]

Plus, according to a major player in this game, the U.S. tech market tends to take its cue from big business, not John Q. Public.

“In Japan, where a majority of the cutting-edge innovation occurs, they’re driven by consumer demand. In the U.S., we’re mainly driven by business needs. That’s why you see more of an emphasis on cheap laptops than on lightweight machines,” says Douglas Krone, chief executive of Dynamism.com, an online site that sells technology not found on the shelves of U.S. retail stores.

[snip]

Smaller, Faster, Better?

In addition to corporate strategies driven by the bottom line, there are cultural preferences to consider.

Japanese consumers do not flinch at spending the equivalent of $3,000 or more on a laptop as long as it has the most up-to-date technology and weighs less than 2 pounds, Krone says. Consumers in Japan, and many in Europe, will spend more to enjoy the fruits of innovation rather than use a laptop or gadget that is just “good enough” for their purposes.

American consumers, on the other hand, are more interested in lower prices than lighter weights, which makes top-of-the-line electronics a difficult sell in this country, Krone says.

Yuni Sucippo, vice president of I-Cube, another Web site offering products from beyond U.S. borders, agrees. “Americans, in general, tend to like big, powerful notebooks,” she says. “They want everything in there, as much storage as they can get, as fast as it can go, as big as possible. But they end up carrying around 10 pounds of computer.”

[snip]

Despite the possible sales to be gained from these niche customers, large retailers in the U.S. get their marching orders not only from consumers, but also from shareholders. That’s where the economics of mediocrity come into play.

High-end products command a high-end price. Most shoppers tend to make middle-of-the-road selections at middle-of-the-road prices. Catering to that mentality will produce the kind of returns stockholders demand. It’s an economic reality that further diminishes the chances certain top-of-the-line tech goodies will reach U.S. shores anytime soon.

It looks like the trifecta of consumer mentality (Hummer(R) laptops!), vendor market sizing (gotta sell to walmart!), and enterprise customer demands (ROI!) run against my preferences.

I hope the tide will change some day.