I’m here. I was here yesterday as well. Just not online.

Alas. My adventure to install a new hard drive in my laptop turned into a more harrowing experience than I had hoped for.

Take one hard drive bracket and a stripped screw in that bracket and a hard drive that is not seated correctly and no way to remove the screw that is stripped, and well — the afflicted machine is now in the hands of an Apple certified worker bee.

And I’m working on a desktop machine from an external hard drive.

Hey at least I backed up my laptop before beginning this rather sad mess. So everything is just a bit inconvenient — and not nearly as fast. And this dorky Microsoft keyboard bugs the bejesus out of me. But….. I’ll manage.

In the sake of full disclosure, that was not all I was doing yesterday.

What if I told you I was reading former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s book, “The Age of Turbulence?”

(Economic turbulence mind you, not the kind in the sky.)

If that confession doesn’t make me a geek, I don’t know what does.

Airlines? Airplanes? Enough of my technological and economic ramblings.

A couple of comments to get this week rolling to a somewhat late start.

One — on the Southwest Airlines PR debacle involving short skirts, tight tops and publicity-seeking passengers. In response to more than a couple of you — no, I did not like the hokey press release the airline issued last week. I thought Gary Kelly sounded foolish. I thought the press release was foolish. Yes, the airline could have used a touch of humor when it finally responded to the bruhaha, but it also needed to convey the impression that it was not making fun of its accuser.

Don’t think that happened.

I would have preferred to have heard Gary come out fairly seriously, apologize, and maybe make one humorous comment. That would have conveyed the message that the airline took the incident seriously, but would also have sent the message that it was keeping the entire mess in perspective.

Instead, the airline didn’t do itself any favors.

On the news front today, the Seattle Times is going with a story that details how a former senior aerospace engineer with Boeing is going public with concerns that the new 787 aircraft structure is unsafe.

In the sake of full disclosure, Vince Weldon was fired last year under what the paper calls “disputed” circumstances, but I think the article is worth a read. Weldon contends that in a crash that would be survivable in a metal aircraft, the new jet’s composite materials will be more prone to shatter and/or burn, which would then release toxic fumes.

He backs up his opinion with emails from other engineering colleagues at Boeing — as he claims the company is not doing enough to test the aircraft’s “crashworthiness.”

You can read the entire article here.

More to come. I’m off to see if I can update the software for this clunky keyboard.

Technorati Tags: airlines, Boeing, kyla Ebbert, Southwest Airlines