I worked in bookstores to help put myself through college, and would quickly become known as the person to send customers to who were asking for those weirdo books on sed and awk or lex and yacc. Even as recently as 2002-2005, though, some bookstores and computer shops still had excellent selections on some pretty obscure topics. Some of the guys who worked at the college back in the early 90s, though, and who had been there since the 50s and 60s -- analog radio and broadcast engineers -- man, those guys were walking encyclopedias. It was great to hear their stories of how the college radio station was first set up, in 1960, and how things were back then. I always felt as if I had missed a really important time in our nation's history.

When email first started becoming a "thing," we used to send emails using a manually edited from field. The real sending info could still be found, but most people back then did not know to look for it. Great fun. Oh and outdials. Good times, good times.

Maryland is testing today and flying this weekend -- it's entirely possible that they may win the prize tomorrow. AeroVelo made some attempts over the past couple weeks, and came very close, but damage to the aircraft has evidently put them out of commission for at least another couple weeks or so -- no chance of them winning it for a while. Hope that helps! Latest news here.

The contest rules state that the height requirement has to be reached only momentarily (albeit by the part of the aircraft closest to the ground). So they can cruise at 4 ft, 5 ft, and then really pump it for a one- or two-second flight up to 10 ft, and then come back down. Which even that is proving far easier said than done -- a third requirement is that some reference origin point on the aircraft must stay within a 10 square meter box, for the entirety of the time requirement. Both the Canada and Maryland teams have suffered some pretty spectacular crashes, trying to meet all three of those requirements. Luckily nobody has been hurt. Yet! The rules don't say anything about a safe or controlled landing!

Well, the craft suffered another malfunction, this time in flight. It appeared that nothing touched the ground or hit anything, it just broke in mid-flight. Nobody was hurt, and it appears that a new record for height was reached, as the last flight unofficially broke nine feet. More info on the team's twitter feed.

Today they unofficially broke nine feet. There was an NAA observer there who will certify the altitude, but even he said it was about 9.3 feet. And if 3 meters is about 9.8 feet, they were really close. Unfortunately, something broke and the vehicle crashed, well short of the required 60 seconds.

It was indeed repaired, and they are preparing to try again for altitude, even now. That is what did them in Thursday, so fingers crossed!

They use the center of the aircraft -- the pilot's position -- as the origin or reference. As long as the reference does not drift beyond the 10 sq meter box, they are good.

Not yet -- the rules of the contest are pretty specific, but basically they have achieved the duration and stability requirements, and have almost gotten the altitude requirements -- but never on the same flight. They are hoping to win the prize today. Interestingly enough, another competing team in Canada is flying this very weekend.

The aircraft was damaged Thursday evening after another attempt at altitude. The team has repaired the craft though and resumed testing just a few minutes ago. The flights are taking place at the Prince George's Sports and Learning Complex, 8001 Sheriff Road, Landover, MD 20785, if you want to see their latest attempts!

You have evidently not read nearly enough of what the "blogosphere" (MAN I hate that word) had to say on the subject. Otherwise you would not refer to much of the analysis as "woefully uninformed." And to sum up the entire analysis as a "brief obsession with kerning" is just silly.

Likewise your notion that the best the bloggers could offer was "cheerleading" from "friends of friends." The credentials of just one analyst:

"I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is "I was working with laser printers before they had lasers", which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Document Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography."

Perhaps that does not compare with CBS' typewriter repairman (ha), but when this person says "the probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft's Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero," then he says it with quite a fair degree of credibility. Go read http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/newcomer/index.htm and tell me with a straight face that it can be summed up as a "woefully uninformed discussion."

Inconsistencies with Killian's writing style are one indication that the memos are fake, to be sure; but they are most certainly NOT the only ones! All of the discussion regarding proportional spacing, line spacing, superscripting, the almost exact matching of Word's default settings with the memos, and yes, even inconsistencies in the writing style, were all discussed on the blogs, in sometimes excruciating detail, several days before the WaPo horned in and tried to take the credit. To pass it all off as nothing more than getting lucky is itself "woefully uninformed."