If you’ve ever wanted to see personal jet transportation, here’s your chance. SwissAir pilot Yves Rossy has crafted a light weight composite wing and attached two small jet engines to it. Rossy becomes the fuselage after, get this, jumping out of an airplane with the rig on. You really have to see it to believe it – and it looks phenomenally dangerous, and might I say, way fun.

He’s got up to 4 minutes of power and then folds the wings up and parachutes back to earth. The vehicle/man combo has achieved speeds up to 100 knots.

Believe it or not, there are now one thousand and one posts on Musings from the Coast. I first started blogging while at Sun in 2004 for an internal audience only. My first attempt was spotty and I didn’t really find a voice gave it up after a few months. I started again in 2005 and that’s what has morphed into MftC. Here are a few other interesting numbers:

• 103,703 spam comments
• 3,200 page views per day on average
• 1,800 unique visitors per day on average
• 820 legitimate comments
• 106 RSS subscribers per day on average
• 80 total tags
• 13 content categories

The first post on this blog had to do with a startup in China, Saybot, that taught English language using computer software, a microphone, speech recognition, and speakers. Rereading it now, I can see the bias toward the internal stakeholder community (my former team at Sun) and also the bias toward innovation and interesting ideas (at least interesting to me.)

Now, what do the readers of this rag like? That’s an entirely different list, here are the Top 10 posts all time you’ve seemed to enjoy:

1. Want to get $3,500?
2. A Mighty Wind
3. MORONS
4. Sexy Pole Vault
5. Geek Chic
6. Hellenologophobia
7. Global Warming: The Proof is in the Knickers
8. College Football Rethink
9. Prison Population Growth
10. Children with Checkbooks

Well, the first thousand posts have been fun, thank you for taking the time to visit and read them over time. Hopefully, the next thousand will not only be fun to read, but also fun to comment upon and participate. Happy reading and enjoy the weekend!

This is the third, and final entry about Farecast on Musings from the Coast. For those who don’t know, Farecast is a travel service that allegedly has a model that predicts airfare cost and advises travelers based on that when to purchase a ticket. Sounds great, right? It doesn’t work.

A good idea poorly implemented is apparently still worth something, perhaps $115M. Which is what Microsoft ponied up to bring Farecast into the family. Now Microsoft is a smart company and they must have done due diligence before the deal, but they didn’t talk to dissatisfied former customers like me. I could have saved them a bundle by showing them empirically with Farecast’s own data that taking the opposite advice of given would lead to the best price for travelers.

Well, now that Farecast has gotten their payday, I want mine. Using Farecast cost me $500 over two trips, when do I get my money? The Farecast team that wrote and promoted this piece of bovine feces has had a liquidity event. Where’s mine? And what about all the other schlubs who tried this flawed model and lost money?

Good luck Microsoft, you’re going to need it.

“I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”
-Tom Buffenbarger, Youngstown, Ohio

My how the world turns. What would Thomas Jefferson make of an African-American being positioned as the elitist poster-child by a former first lady while battling for the nomination to run for President?

Hillary, with her estimated net worth of $35M is likely to be, shall we say, a little more out of touch with the working class family than Obama with his estimated net worth of $1.3M (though I did notice a snippet that Obama’s 2007 income quadrupled to $4M.) Let’s stipulate that neither candidate is worrying about where their next mortgage payment is going to come from or how they’ll pay for the next tank of gas (I just paid $4.09/gallon for regular unleaded this morning.)

In any case, getting back to Mr. Buffenbarger’s assertion, is there a correlation between hybrid owners, birkenstock buyers, latte sippers, and/or trust fund babies?

Blogger Ethan over at UrbanSpoon.com has posted a brilliant article on the possible correlations and his findings are a bit surprising. Rather than let the cat out of the bag here, suffice to say there is a weak correlation between one of the attributes mentioned and support for Obama. It’s worth a visit to the original article to have the full context as it’s very well articulated and documented. And beyond that, it’s a little funny too. Hope you enjoy it!

And the notion that Obama is a poet, not a fighter. Well Ethan doesn’t take that one on. But I’ll weigh in here and say that better is always different and after decades of “fighters” – perhaps a step outside the box would be good for the nation, and perhaps even, the world. One of the world leaders I’ve always admired is Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic and a world-class writer before he assumed the office. He wasn’t perfect, but he did catalyze huge change and manage to lead his country along a path into the 21st century pretty effectively…There is a precedent for different being much, much better.

It’s gone back to its primary home at the Renewable Energy Journal. There was just too much overhead posting in both places. So, if that’s what you were here to read, go there instead. I may post a digest of articles here on a periodic basis, but the Renewable Energy Journal is the place to go for your clean energy fix.

• Canadian Geothermal Potential – Just what heat is up there anyway?
• Euro Utility Renewable Map – Want to know how much renewable energy is active in Europe and how much it cost? This is the spot to find out.
• Switchgrass Gas – Forget ethanol, what about cheap gasoline made from switchgrass?