Thursday, March 13, 2003
Gargantuan, Grandiose, Meglomaniacal |12:15 PM| My folks think I might be manic-depressive or some other convenient term for my personality. Since a large portion of my family is under the influence of one chemical or another (Be they legal or not) I have to be a bit slow to act on their advice. Advice, that is, about seeking treatment. But I'm already off track. I wanted to write down an idea I had while on the road.

While driving through New Mexico and Arizona, I was struck by how many enormous plots of land are available. The previous trip out, I had decided that at some point in the future I would build an enormous, scrap metal, windmill powered sculpture. At this point, I really should get my mechanical flowerpot up and running first.
Shoot, I keep getting off track. The only real limiting factor on how big you can construct a blimp is the size of the hanger in which you build and maintain it. If you had 2,000 acres of cheap land, you could build some pretty massive blimps.
Blimp Shipping. Mostly automated, but not unmanned. Unmanned aircraft are not allowed over a great deal of US airspace.
I had a couple of ideas that might make it more profitable than other blimp related ideas, like never needing them to land. Why have them land when you can just send up another balloon with a looped cable? The blimp would have a regular notched gear on the underside, and all the motors, cranes and other equipment would be on the ground. (The less equipment on the blimp, the less it weighs, and the less power it would need).
Solar panels on top for additional juice, ethanol based motors, a "pilot" who is there for legal reasons but is nothing more than a blimp sitter.

Of course, I should say that the genesis of this idea was to build enormous airships that would piss people off and lower property values. Like the enormous black sphere that would block the sun and just cackle until shot down by rednecks.
Or the end-of-the-world huge clown shaped blimp that would bounce off mountains and make farting noises loud enough to break windows.

Perhaps my sanity did not survive the trip.

FRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT. HONK HONK.

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We need one created for the years, and then the months. The months are the /////tricky ones, since they need their ID to increase more than the years, but since the functions keep referencing ///// the same name system, we have to be careful not to make the years close up when we click on a month. ///Set some Variables $YearMenuID = 1; /////What ID the preceding year link controls. Needs to be same for all the months under a given year. $MonthMenuID= 1; ////What ID the preceding month link controls. Needs to be the same for all the weeks under a given ////Month but not the same as any year, etc. $LastYearUsed = 0; $LastMonthUsed = 0; echo '

'; /////That should be the "Year" div. All the years should be in this one DIV. ///Start the main loop. foreach ($myDateArray as $key => $value) { ////Pulling the year/date. $month = ExtractMonth($value); $year = ExtractYear($value); $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; $PrettyMonth = $MyDateArray[$month]; ////Is this a new year? If ($year != $LastYearUsed) ///Then we need to put the year down. No DIV created quite yet. { ///First off, we need to close the preceding year's DIV. Twice if it ain't 2001 if ($year != 2001) { echo '

'; } echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML2_; ///That creates a DIV for the year (month based links) then the month (week based links). ////Then the first weekly link. ///That should have made a link to the weekly archive file. ///As well as creating the first month link, which is in its own DIV, } Else { ///Okay, it's not a new year. So, we need to check if it's a new month. If($month != $LastMonthUsed) { //So it's a new month. That means we need to put down a link for the month to control the div //that contains the weekly links. //First, though, we need to close up the previous month echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML3_; } Else /////////So it's not a new month, then we just need to put down the weekly link. { echo '

' . $myDateArray[$key] . '

'; } } $LastMonthUsed = $month; $LastYearUsed = $year; } ECHO '