I’m proud to look up and see colleagues Julie Payette and Bob Thirsk in orbit on the International Space Station. I worked closely with both of them and have high regard for their abilities. Now that I’m working with the Ottawa Flying Club, I’m reminded of them and all the Canadian Astronauts daily since our pictures are on the walls. Before the Canadian Space Agency moved to St. Hubert south of Montreal, the Astronauts recieved their primary flight training at the Ottawa Flying Club under contract with CSA. It was great fun. Julie and I did our first cross country flights on the same day back in 1993, dodging snow squalls as we flew small Cessna 150’s between Ottawa and Kingston.
The Station is quite visible in the sky (when its clear). If you want to see it, check out the sightings page at the NASA web site (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/sightings/).
I had to turn the heat on in my car this morning. I needed to defog my windshield as the rain and humidity where causing the windshield to mist over. This is typical in late September, but not now. It is near the end of July, the height of summer.
Have you also noticed that the summer is colder and wetter than usual? For a flying operation like the Ottawa Flying Club, the weather has a big impact. Apart from the benefits of Instrument training in actual IFR conditions, very few of our students can get practice time when there are low clouds and nasty weather. So far this summer, our hours flown are significantly below what we would historically expect.
There may be a reason beyond bad luck. I was passed this link to a Weather Channel Report by Chris St. Clair where he explains that the bad weather is based on a phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation. According to the report:
The North Atlantic Oscillation is a variance in the location of a large area of strong and stable high pressure. For the past many weeks it has developed over Greenland and the Labrador Sea.
The emergence of the North Atlantic Oscillation has lead to a block in the usual, steady west to east migration of unsettled low pressure across our continent.
Simply, the cool rainy weather is stopped once it gets to the Great Lakes Basin because it cannot get past the big, stable high pressure over the western Atlantic. Not until the high pressure, that has manifested itself further east, relaxes will there be a change in the pattern.
Certainly this morning, a quick check of the surface analysis chart shows a ridge of high pressure running from Newfoundland up to Baffin Island. Keep your eye on it and hope it goes away soon.
This is my first post as the CEO of the Ottawa Flying Club. It is a honor to be given the responsibility for such a venerable organization. The club has been active since 1928 and has a long history of promoting aviation in Canada. In the last few years, a strong partnership has formed with Algonquin College where OFC provides professional flight training to students at the Algonquin Aviation Management program. While this is beneficial for the club in terms of increased activity and revenue, it is also creating new challenges for a club that is now a multi-million dollar business. Properly managing the growth in the next few years will be critical to ensure that the club continues to benefit from its new business activities. I look forward to these challenges and would appreciate any comments the club members may have regarding the way ahead.
A number of news articles and items of interest lead me to conclude that Google will be offering virtual desktops as a service in the near future. Consider the following:
- Google introduced the Chrome browser last year and is widely considered to be competing directly with Microsoft explorer
- Google is dropping the beta term on some of its software products - the term is preventing enterprise sales of their Apps and Docs products
- Google has announced its own operating system-intended to get the user to the net faster on boot-up
- The Google’s recent release of the open-source NeatX - an open source version of NoMachine’s NX Server that allows servers to host virtual desktops.
These elements could be the building blocks for the provision of virtual desktops. With this service, Google could offer virtual desktops in the same way they offer gmail.
Whether they pursue this will depend on their focus on organizing the worlds information. If they expand that concept, they could use the virtual desktops to become the world’s computer.
