oddhammer

I just returned from a nice vacation South of Cancun and had a little excitement on the return flight last night. About an hour into the direct flight from Cancun into Charlotte a man got into a fight with another passenger and was subdued after a short struggle. The plane was diverted to Miami where he was taken off of the plane along with a female passenger.

I saw it happen right in front of me, and on top of me actually, as the fighting at one point was happening in the empty seat next to me and I had to push the two off of me.

I've been on many, many flights for business since 9/11 and on each one I was careful to check out all the people around me and try to be alert.. this time was a bit different since I had my family with me coming back from a vacation.. I popped in my ear buds and started watching a movie on my iPod nano. The ear buds silenced everything around me so I didn't hear the two arguing. I was sitting in the first row behind the bulkhead (separating first class from coach) so I didn't have a good view of what was going on in the front of the plane. I just saw one guy in the last row of first class (on the opposite side of the plane from me) and the "attacker" suddenly start wrestling and within a few seconds they were on top of me and a few seconds later a third guy from first class pulled the "attacker" onto the floor. It wasn't clear to me (as they were wrestling beside me) who I should help.. I didn't see what precipitated the altercation. I just kept them off of me and my daughter and tried not to get in the middle of what looked like two old white guys pissed off at each other and they were in the floor before I had a chance to figure out what the heck was going on.

Other passengers told me that the man was seated further back in coach and had been drinking heavily and went into first class and argued with the woman who was also taken off the plane in Miami. So what appears to be a domestic dispute caused a bunch of people to miss connecting flights, etc. My kids saw and heard the whole thing and it was traumatic.. seeing a guy laying in the aisle at our feet getting handcuffed and yelling profanity is normally not what you expect to see when you get on a USAir flight.

Alcohol seems to be a real problem for folks flying to Charlotte this week.. as there was an incident on an American Airlines flight.

---- updated to add.. ---
it's finally been picked up by the media here and here and here

I'm looking for a "media repository" or "file repository".. some sort of a library or gallery app for a web server that will allow a team of people to look at images, SWF files, Doc files, FLVs, etc in a searchable "gallery" sort of format. Bonus for having the ability to comment on the files, the ability to put a thumbnail or screenshot with non-image or media files (i.e. a custom screenshot to represent the contents of a zip full of junk). Having user groups would be needed to allow only certain people to add files and comment, while other parts should be publicly accessible.

I'm thinking of something along the lines of what Coppermine does for images.. but for all file types.
I'm thinking of something with a better UI than PHP Navigator.

I bet there's something out there close to this (please comment if you know of one), but my real reason for posting is to kind of prod someone who has the time to start planning this in Flex. Now that we know Flash Player 10 is going to have some runtime filesystem access it's time to start thinking of raising the bar for these types of web based utilitarian apps. I've seen loads of demos of Flex apps that use sliders and filters to search through large data sets and this would be a good application for that.

ok, so this shot through the old radar way back (first of October?) and apparently a lot of people had the same reaction I did "..too... busy... will.. deal... with ... later.." because I rediscovered the Adobe AIR Marketplace today and saw that there were 27 apps listed in the Most Recent list. So I looked through those and thought some were cool and clicked on Highest Rated.. same 27 (but different order of course). So I clicked on ALL.. same 27.

I'm interested because I'm just finally getting into AIR and need some examples to show people and the AIR Marketplace has some but I'm finding there are more around. Submit them to the Adobe Marketplace if you've got them.

And if you have no clue what AIR is then go here and/or to the Adobe AIR Marketplace

I added the BlogRush widget thing onto my blog to see what the fuss is about. It looks like an interesting way to link to other related blogs and offer a different way to surf, etc.. they'll eventually put some ads in with the links, and it looks like people will be able to buy "credits" so their links will show up in the little widget, but it doesn't look like bloggers will be able to make $ off of it unless maybe there's a way to sell credits? hmm.. However, it might provide some increased traffic.

If you run a blog take a look at what they're building up here. They have a nice stats system on the backend that lets you see how much traffic you've generated, and how many times your links have shown up on other sites.

It's also based on a referral system, so if you get others to join then your links will show up more often on other sites.