Friday, February 10, 2006

The Educational Value of Disasters

It horrifies Brett, but I actually really enjoy watching the Air Crash Investigation shows on the Discovery Channel. Despite what I suspect he thinks, I don’t have a death wish; I actually find them reassuring. If you haven’t seen one of the programmes, they reconstruct a given ‘incident’ and the investigation which follows to find out what happened; perhaps not as thrilling as an episode of CSI, but fascinating nonetheless. Seeing how aircraft and pilots fail, it continually brings home how well engineered modern airliners are and how resourceful pilots can be when it all goes wrong. And in even the worst air crashes, there are usually some survivors (and those that don’t at least have the benefit of dying quickly!)

Nope, I find the show both reassuring and entertaining.

I mention this because watching Air Crash Investigations was pretty much what yesterday evening consisted of. Work had been long and hard and I didn’t fancy the trek up to Islington to Gay Gordons, so I went home instead while Brett went for drinks with one of his former colleagues who has just started work in the City.

Today we are driving north to the parents’ for the weekend. I have a couple of old mini-firewalls from work to take along. I am hoping that I’ll be able to set up a VPN tunnel between their computer and my own so that when the regular calls for support come in, I’ll have much more access to their which will certainly make things go more smoothly. We shall see.

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