About Lee Devlin

I'm Lee Devlin from Greeley, Colorado.

Napoleon Dynamite

Posted on October 13, 2005 by Lee Devlin

I saw the movie Napoleon Dynamite a few months ago, and I’ve been hearing snippets of it and references to it ever since. It’s a wierd movie and the main character is extremely quirky, yet not as quirky as the rest of the characters, which makes him somewhat sympathetic. I’m pretty sure that it’s the only movie to spawn a legislative bill. While watching the movie, I realized that I have met a few people who were exactly like the main character. I’m talking about people with the same look, same hair, EXACTLY the same speech patterns, and, of course, the same attitude. The first time was when I was at Penn State. The went by the nickname ‘Milt’. Milt liked punk rock, especially the Clash, and thought that they would eventually be recognized as the greatest band in the history of the planet. I am not sure anything like that is likely to happen in my lifetime…at least I would hope not.

The second Napolean Dynamite-like character I met was a dude shortly after I started working in Greeley, CO. Again, same blonde ‘fro, same mumbly speech pattern, etc., it’s almost like these guys were the result of the same alien spore. I once drove down to Mardi Gras with him and a friend and we stayed at his sister’s place along with about 20 other people and a large number of dogs and cats sleeping on a wooden floor in several inches of dust. It was a weekend to remember… but not an event I’d care to repeat.

I’m not sure why I’m even posting about this, other than perhaps to have someone wander across it and let me know that they know that they also have Napoleon Dynamite character in their past and were thinking the same thing as me when they were watching that movie :-). I can’t help but imagine that the character was based on someone the writers knew personally.

And if you’ve seen the movie, then you may just want to learn to dance like Napoleon. It seems to be a popular goal for several hundred people registered on 43 things.

Update: Shortly after posting this entry, I got an email from a long lost friend from high school who directed me to this top 10 list from David Letterman read by Napoleon Dynamite himself. It’s a classic!

JetBlue Landing

Posted on October 2, 2005 by Lee Devlin

I was amazed at the amount of news coverage of the successful JetBlue landing that took place a few weeks ago that resulted in a landing of a disabled aircraft with minimal damage and no injuries.

Usually, the mainstream news only likes to cover air disasters, but they covered some very good news in this case. But I’ll bet you didn’t know the whole story, and that is that the pilot was assured that the nose gear was OK, and that he only had a sensor problem. He remained calm and didn’t make any rash decisions such as retracting the nose gear and chose to land at the nearest suitable airport.

The pilot really is a hero in my view, especially for avoiding the press and not showboating his performance, which was quite remarkable.

Rocky Mountain High

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Lee Devlin

Terri and I took a ride up to Rocky Mountain National Park on the motorcycles last weekend and were joined in the ride by our new friends Mike and Janet. The aspen trees were just starting to turn and the elk and big horn sheep were out in large numbers (but so were the people 😉

It was a little chilly, but still good mountain riding weather. Maybe we’ll have more this weekend too. I’ll keep riding into November, weather permitting.

I hear about cool things on the Internet all the time. Usually, I wait until I hear about it 3 times in succession because otherwise, I’d be spending all my time on the Internet checking things out. Over the past month, I’ve been using Google Earth, which is a downloadable free application that lets you ‘fly over’ anywhere you like on Earth. It’s a truly stunning program. I use it to check out places where I’ve been and places I’m about to visit, or would like to visit. For example, I’ll be going to Taiwan soon. I can just type in “Taipei, Taiwan” into Google Earth, and it flies me there like I’m in a rocket in just a few seconds. You get to see the countries you’re flying over, the curvature of the earth and get a real sense of distance. Then, when you arrive, you can ‘get your bearings’ and see what the city looks like from the air. You can click the scroll wheel of your mouse and get a 3D view of mountains, buildings, roads (with names), rivers, landmarks, etc. and it’s almost like being there. You can pan and zoom effortlessly. I highly recommend you download it and try it. It requires a high speed Internet connection, because the maps are stored on Google’s servers but it retreives them very quickly.

Last time I blogged about my friend JD’s cornmaze. Well, he’s been profiled in the Fort Collins Coloradoan and they wrote up a nice article about him and other corn mazes in the Northern Colorado region. Terri and I have never been in a corn maze. Maybe we’ll have to check one out this year.

More Cozies and Corn Mazes

Posted on September 18, 2005 by Lee Devlin

I am trying a bit of an experiment today. I’m typing this entry on a PocketPC and using a wireless connection to update my blog. I’d like to add a few photos and I will plan to do that later since we made a little progress on the Cozy yesterday and took a few pictures of it. I won’t try the extra credit experiment of adding photos from the PocketPC.

Don and I moved the canard out to the hangar to get it mounted on the fuselage. After the canard is mounted, we can start on Chapter 13, installing the nose on the fuselage, hopefully before it gets too cold outside to do layups. We’ve skipped around a bit and already have the main spar (Chapter 14) and Wings (Chapters 19 and 20) finished.

I also promised to put a link in the blog for my friend, JD’s cornmaze webpage so that it will get picked up by search engines. It’s the only corn maze in Fort Collins. It’s also quite convenient if you live in Loveland and Greeley. I blogged about it a few weeks ago, but since then, we took another flight over it and JD captured more than 40 photos along with some video segments and combined them all into a nice little 3 minute web video which I’ve uploaded to my website for your viewing pleasure. It will give you a little bit of a feeling of what it’s like to fly in a LongEZ over the front range near Fort Collins.