… but not on camera.

This is part of the Toronto visit series.

So I inadvertently took a picture of the running propeller on my side of the plane, and it came out weird. And I mean, really weird (1):

The propeller does not look like this. It has like six blades spaced out evenly and all of them straight. So of course this is due to aliasing of the damned camera. But wait now, I just said not too long ago that this is photography, so indeed, I only took this and
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… in air travel.

This is part of the Toronto visit series.

I sit in this small airport in the middle of Downtown Toronto, wondering why airports can’t all be like this. YTZ (Billy Bishop) is small, with a single terminal (if it can be called that). There is just one commercial airline, also a small company. And its planes are small, four-seat-across propeller aircrafts that I’ve sworn not to take again after one particularly unpleasant ride years ago, but am taking anyway. More on that later.
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I’m going to attempt to classify chords from first principles, forgetting about the restrictions imposed by existing terminology. Chords are essentially a partial harmonic series. Therefore, they can be indicated as a series of ascending integers indicating ratios of frequencies of elements in the chord, such as 1:2 (octave), 2:3 (fifth), 4:5:6 (major triad), and so on. This is for pure tone combinations. Real instruments contain overtones in each note, so the total effect is more complicated (or collapsed, depending on the view). We will just deal with pure tones for now.
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NBC hosts flash versions of all of its TV series on its site. The interface is generally good but there are some quirks about when ads must be viewed. The ads are forcibly inserted between chapters of an episode. Whenever the chapter boundary is crossed in the forward direction, the overlay ad is played and the underlying video is paused. (As an aside, this kludgy architecture actually makes me believe it is possible to disable the ads…) So for example, if you’ve already watched to certain chapter, then backtrack, then return to it, the boundary is crossed again in the forward direction and the ad must play again. This shouldn’t happen. Also, suppose you want to start playing a late chapter. The ad immediately before that chapter plays, but if the video was freshly loaded, the ad at the beginning of the video is also forcibly played before a chapter can even be selected. This also seems like incorrect behavior.

But I understand… playing ads too many times in error is of no concern to NBC, of course.

So what’s on NBC’s site? Most shows have only the latest episodes on a time delay (to not preempt live broadcast and DVD sales, I suppose), but a few have all past episodes available. One of these I’ve been watching is Friday Night Lights. Actually never saw any ads for this, but all of Season 1 was surprisingly good. Unfortunately, Season 2 was crap and total BS. Sadly, there is only so much good material for writers to crank out.

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