Tomas Vykruta Data Daily

I'm a savvy business traveler. I spent 2 years working for Xbox, during which I would travel nearly 100,000 miles a year. On a monthly basis I'd be in Shanghai, Tokyo, Tapei, Soeul, London, Brisbane, and those were 2 day destinations. Today, I had to travel from New York to San Francisco on a routine business trip for Google. I decided to do a little experiment and track not only how long it actually takes to get from New York to San Franciso door-to-door, but where the time goes. I used 3 certified, scientific tools to write down exact times: An analog Diesel wrist watch A pen My hand My hand was not only a convenient place to write down times, it was also a reminder to keep writing down times.  The trip was simple: Take the NY Subway 1 stop to Penn Station. From there, the NJR direct to to Newark Airport. Direct flight w/ United to SFO. Rent car, drive to hotel in Palo Alto. End of trip. It's a 6.5 hour flight, so how long could the whole trip take? ...

1 coffee down. Early Friday morning I met who was to be my FAA Designated Pilot Examiner, Sherry Diamond at a small office in a flight school at KPAO (Palo Alto, CA) airport. It was the morning of my FAA checkride. If I pass this, I will walk out with a US pilot license usable virtually anywhere in the world. I didn't think I'd be nervous like the others, I'm not the nervous type, and I felt ready. But I was a bit nervous. The check ride involves a deep, 2 hour verbal exam, and a multi-hour flight exam where the examiner does fun things like suddenly shut off your engine - you must land the plane safely on a runway (with no engine) or you fail. It's a simulated engine failure landing. Sherry carefully examined my logbook . She looked puzzled. After a few minutes, she looked up and asked where the rest of my logbook is. I told her she's looking at it, and asked her what the problem was. She said the problem was it begins in December, and February has barely st...

Boom, you need to refile you income tax forms for IRS and the only copy you have is a PDF from h&r block or TurboTax.  The problem is, they are watermarked with giant 'DO NOT FILE, COPY ONLY' letters. Solution :  open up in any basic image editor (Gimp, photoshop).  Set contrast up to about 90%.  The watermark letters will magically disappear. Poof.  It causes some quality degradation in the rest of the text, so ideally you'll want to only change contrast in the area where the watermark exists.  Highlight with rectangle select tool. Quality is  good enough  to be readable by IRS agent.  Heck, drag that contrast all the way up to 100% and make them squint a bit.