Banbridge Aeromodelling club

The first round of the NIAA Aerobatics took place on Sunday 26th April at the wonderful Ballymoney Model Flying Club. The morning started early for my dad and I, we set of at 7.30am along with David Nolan, as we drove up the M2 it started to brighten up and looked better further north. We picked up a lost Dutch man on the way so had ourselves a convey, breaker breaker rubber duck and all that, arriving on site at 9am. A good few people were there already and the marquee was up and our lunch was being prepared.

The rest of the story is on AerobaticsNI.

(Me, Lost? Naa. I knew where I was, just trying to convince the woman in the gps box that I wanted to go to the middle of a field, and that moaning about ‘there is no road in that area’ was not what I wanted to hear.) I would have won the battle, honestly.. But following the Poots-van was easier 😉

Just received an email that stated something like this:

URGENT PLEASE READ!!!!!!!

IF A PERSON CALLED SIMON ASHTON (SIMON25@HOTMAIL.CO.UK ) CONTACTS YOU THROUGH EMAIL DON’T OPEN THE MESSAGE. DELETE IT BECAUSE HE IS A HACKER!!

followed by a lot of other nonsense.

Folks, it’s a hoax, it’s been around for ages, and every so often someone falls for it and starts sending this to all his friends, thereby creating a problem far worse then the original. Usualy these messages are forwarded in such a way that the recipient will have acces to a couple of 100 KNOWN VALID email addresses.

THANKY YOU!!! If I were a hacker I could not be more pleased.

By copying/pasting/forwarding this list you give someone else (‘The Hacker’) access to a couple of 100 KNOWN good email addresses, and you’ve just created a problem 10 times worse then the original.

If you want to forward stuff like this to a list of people, ALWAYS use the BCC field, since that way, nobody will see the addressees.

Other than that. it’s an old one:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/simon_ashton.htm
http://www.merit.org.uk/news/shownews.asp?recordid=501
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/imvirus.html

.. and many many more references tot he same hoax can be found.

I just see I got a handful more of them…

It is my understanding that there are likely not enough people around this weekend to hold a gliding competition. Given that this weekend also coincides with the now famous Letterkenny Grant Capell Memorial Fly-in, it seems sensible to postpone it to a date when we have practised hill climbing a bit more.

Kees
(wearing Contest Directors hat)

Update: As it turned out, there was’nt a puff of wind on the hill, so we saved ourself the effort of climbing up to find out.