Barnboy’s ParkZone F-27 “B” Stryker Guide

Although the F-27B Stryker is a charge-and-fly park flyer, a few extra steps—and, of course, a little extra equipment—before trying to toss your bird into the air will go a long way toward making sure you have the best experience possible.

Recommended equipment at a glance:

• The Stryker and all its hardware in the box

• One or two spare ParkZone 8-cell Stryker batteries

• A hobby-quality battery charger, capable of charging two batteries at once. If you have the cash, get one that can charge Lithium Polymer batteries, too (more on this below)

• A spare propeller or two. Or even three.

• A digital multimeter

• Foam-safe CA glue, 3M “Super 77” spray glue, or five-minute epoxy and some clear packing tape for fixing the inevitable “oops”. I usually bring all of these 🙂

1. The Pilot

The Stryker is not a beginner’s plane! It is both fast and unforgiving. You should have at least 5-10 hours of flying time either on a simulator or behind the stick of a trainer-style aircraft before flying the Stryker. If you’ve already bought a Stryker, and are a newbie, go buy another plane that’s actually a trainer… or plan on buying several Strykers (or spending lots of glue and shop time) to replace the ones you wreck trying to learn using this plane.

HobbyZone doesn’t cover crash damage, and once you begin putting the plane together, they are your warranty source, not your local hobby shop. Inspect the parts carefully to make sure they are not broken before assembling.

2. Balancing the plane

• Ensure your control surfaces are perfectly level with the top of the wing. Laying a ruler on top of the wing and elevon can give you a good idea whether you need to raise or lower the elevon using the clevis.

• With your lightest battery installed, ensure the center of gravity is at, or slightly ahead of, the two circles in the middle of the handgrip on the bottom of the plane. Nose-heavy planes fly poorly; tail-heavy planes fly once. I just balance on my fingertips.

• Ensure your plane is balanced laterally, too. Place a finger on the tip of the nose, and one finger under the prop. If the Stryker does not remain perfectly level, add a little weight to the "light" wing, starting near the fuselage and adjusting toward the wingtip until perfect. I use a penny with some strapping tape for this job.

3. The Motor

A "water break-in" of your motor will extend the expected service lifetime, flight time, and power of the stock 480 motor. You should perform this procedure once, before you fly the plane. If you have flown even one time on the motor, this procedure is worthless: the high RPMS, shavings from the brushes, and arcing from powerful amperage has already permanently scarred your motor if used without a break-in.

The idea behind a “water break-in” is to remove the burrs usually found in brushed motors. This prevents arcs and gouges, usually exacerbated by heat, inside the motor. Using one “C” or “D” alkaline cell allows us to do this gently, at low RPMS.

You will need:

• A standard "C" or "D" battery

• A wide-mouthed cup of distilled water

• Some electrical tape

• A screwdriver

• 3-in-1 or sewing machine oil

Remove your Stryker motor. I’ve found it’s easiest to just unscrew the mount, leaving the 480 motor in it (it’s glued in there, so is tough to remove). Unplug the leads from the receiver. Immerse the motor, shaft first, into the cup of water up to near the electrical leads. Do not immerse the leads or resistors in the water! Tape the opposite motor leads to the positive and negative terminals of the battery (I find that wrapping the entire battery, top to bottom, in electrical tape helps keep the contacts attached). The motor should begin running at low speed. Let the motor run this way for at least fifteen minutes; running it for longer than an hour, like until the battery is exhausted, may damage the motor (I blew up one motor running it for an entire D battery: bad idea!). Some people like to reverse the leads on the positive and negative terminals to run the motor backwards to further remove particles.

Afterwards, see all the gray chunks floating in the distilled water? That would have been in your motor, gunking up your bushings, shaft, and brushes, while causing electrical arcs. Once you’ve completed the break-in, add just ONE DROP of sewing machine or 3-in-1 oil to the forward and rear bushing (where the shaft attaches to the motor). Do not use more than one drop on each bushing, as if oil gets inside the motor, it may ruin it (or require another water break-in, this time with a little detergent added). You should re-oil these bushings every thirty to fifty flights.

4. The Battery

The ParkZone chargers often under-charge battery packs. You cannot charge an 8-cell or 9-cell HobbyZone battery pack with it. You should buy a hobby-quality charger. I use the "Great Planes Triton DC Computerized Peak Charger". It’s the difference between long, strong runtimes from even your standard packs, and short, underpowered flights where you can barely keep your bird in the air.

You should also invest in a multimeter. They are cheap—around $20-$30—and will help you monitor the health of your battery packs.

If you’re looking to get longer, more powerful run times, the newer “B”-series Strykers can use Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery packs with just a jumper change! The ParkZone charger, however, cannot charge LiPos, so the aforementioned hobby-quality charger is a prerequisite. Be sure to use the LiPo prop, included with your “B”-series Stryker, with LiPo batteries to avoid invalidating your warranty. A 3-cell (“3S”) 2100mAh narrow-profile LiPo will double or triple your flight time, with much better power and speed.

Important note: if you leave your standard ParkZone charger plugged into your car lighter socket, and remove the key from the ignition, these batteries provide enough power to keep the twelve-volt system in your automobile energized. And that will usually drain your plane’s battery down to nothing very quickly.

5. The First Launch

• Check your trim tabs to make sure they are centered. You may want to add some “up” trim (slide the elevator trim slider towards you) on launch.

• Do the range check and motor check as indicated in your manual.

• Then, run really fast, throw really hard, and throw into the wind, with the nose level or very slightly pointing up.

Following these tips—and the balance tips above—will generally prevent the instant “nose-in” experienced by many first-time Stryker flyers. It won’t prevent you from crashing if you don’t know what you’re doing, though 🙂 The usual problem with nose-in hand launches are due to these factors:

• The “stock” Stryker’s stall speed is too high for a gentle hand-toss. It needs to be flying fairly quickly at a shallow angle of attack for the prop to bite into the wind. In other words, you can’t possibly throw it harder than it can handle.

• Although they are a strong, well-balanced combination, the high-RPM motor and small-diameter propeller take several seconds to build up speed. In other words, a solid running start really helps.

• If thrown at too high an angle of attack (nose pointing up), the prop can’t build up airspeed and power quickly enough to prevent a stall. Attempting to add aileron during a stall will sometimes cause the plane to roll in the opposite direction! In other words, a high-arc toss will probably send your plane plunging into the ground. In sports terms, think “Bullet” or “Fast Ball”, not “Hail Mary”.

• If there’s any wind at your back when tossing the Stryker, that’s subtracted from its air speed. Even if you have to radically—and maybe temporarily—reposition your flight line, throw it into the wind, always. It’s free airspeed.

It’s helpful to have an experienced flyer evaluate your plane before you fly, and possibly fly it on its maiden voyage. It doesn’t mean your trainer won’t crash your bird—my buddy who flew mine landed it pretty hard—but it raises your chances of making sure your bird stays in one piece. Their insight and tips on your plane’s handling will help, too.

6. The First Landing

If properly balanced, the Stryker will coast into a landing with a moderately nose-high attitude. Land into the wind, keep your wings level, and don’t flare until the last possible moment. If you’re planning on landing on rougher stuff, like the dry lake bed I usually fly from, put some strapping tape on the bottom of the upright fins to absorb the brunt of the scrape.

Don’t stop your motor until the plane is just a few feet from the ground. If done right, the plane will flare and just “pancacke” onto the tarmac (see the ParkZone Stryker video for an example of a perfect landing). If done wrong, you’ll swing nose-high, then plunge into the ground nose-first requiring a repair with that handy glue and strapping tape 🙂

7. Hopping it Up

Many people are fans of improving the Stryker’s performance. I’m not going to go into all the fancy stuff like carbon-fiber wing reinforcements, brushless motors, and those kind of big, non-stock upgrades. That’s the domain of the hobby at large, and your best bet for additional information is to check out the “F-27 Way Past The Limits” threads on the forums at http://www.rcuniverse.com/, in the “Park Flyers” forum. If you want to create a bullet with wings, or an extreme aerobatic flyer with rudders, that’s your best spot for more information.

The most straightforward upgrade is the purchase of Lithium Polymer batteries, mentioned above. These batteries will generally push a “stock” Stryker to about 50 miles per hour, using the HobbyZone-supplied “LiPo Prop” in the F-27B kit. With that speed comes higher roll rates, climb rates, and dive rates. People have found that larger diameter or higher pitch propellers can provide more speed or thrust (not necessarily the same thing!), but the “stock” LiPo prop provides a good balance of speed, power, and motor/battery/electronic speed controller longevity. Deviations from stock equipment may lead to premature ESC (Electronic Speed Controller), motor, or battery failure.

But hey, it’s your plane! It’s your science project. Once you’ve wrecked and fixed your plane once, anyway, your warranty is gone, so what will it hurt, other than maybe your wallet? The Stryker is one of the most easily repairable RTF airframes in existence; the motors and electronics are fairly cheap. Why not have fun with it?

Stop the Vomit, or “keeping your plane in one piece in the air”

Many people report problems with the battery ejecting from the Stryker during inverted flight, particularly during inverted pull-outs. If you slightly widen the battery compartment and epoxy velcro straps into it, you can largely prevent the ejections.

Another problem frequently reported is the battery tearing the electronics apart during ejections due to a crash. If you snip off the “Tamiya Small” plastic connectors on the battery and ESC as provided by HobbyZone, and replace them with “Deans Connectors”, battery ejections are less likely to destroy your electronics.

If you glue a brightly-colored ribbon to your battery, you will improve its visibility in an ejection (a high-speed ejection will often bury your battery in the topsoil!), and make it easier to pull out of the Stryker upon completion of a “normal” flight.

The plastic parts on top of the Stryker frequently part company with the fuselage during high-speed or inverted flight. Epoxying the parts down, however, adds considerable weight and prevents maintenance access to the inside parts. If you plan on a lot of inverted or high-speed work—or, particularly, high-speed inverted work—you should reinforce these with some strapping tape, velcro, or other non-permanent method of holding them onto the plane. The factory-provided pins and battery latch are, unfortunately, a bit of a joke in inverted flight. If the battery is securely fastened using velcro, as mentioned above, the hold-down material for the canopy pieces need not be fastened down extremely tightly.

Control Throws

Be cautious increasing the throw of your elevons. You have a low-rate/high-rate switch on your transmitter: use it! Low rates are useful to prevent stall-inducing hard turns on takeoff and landing, while high rates are great for carving up the sky. Even at the outermost hole of the elevon’s control horn, high rates provide plenty of throw for many sport flyers. If you need faster rates, move the clevis down one position on the control horn at a time until you are comfortable with the low/high-rate behavior.

The “F-27B”, versus the earlier “F-27”, is programmed for much higher roll rates. Be aware of this if upgrading electronics from the original to the “B” version.

Electronics Failure and Upgrades

The addition of Lithium Polymer batteries, combined with high-speed dives and speed or high-rate-induced crashes, will often break, or “strip”, your servos. Crashes will open up the cold solder joints on your electronic speed controller/receiver unit. You may overheat your ESC. Regardless, at some point, the electronic gear in your Stryker will probably fail, resulting in a crash, more repairs, and replacement parts.

Unfortunately, you can only use ParkZone-branded electronics to replace the stock ones, unless you want to change ALL your electronics: transmitter, receiver, servos, and electronic speed controller. Many people consider this option the most attractive, as it opens up more avenues for future upgrades: brushless motors, additional channels for rudders, airbrakes, lost plane locators, etc. The possibilities are limitless.

Regardless, if you drive your Stryker hard, and a lot, you will probably reach a point where you begin considering replacing the stock ParkZone gear with higher-grade stuff. This guide can’t cover all the possibilities, except to say that, if you just replace your ParkZone electronics with more ParkZone electronics, you’ll probably end up on a never-ending nickel-and-dime treadmill of ordering replacement parts at your local hobby shop 🙂 It may be wise to fly conservatively on the stock ParkZone gear, with an eye towards saving for higher-performance gear in the future.

Or just thrash the heck out of it, planning for your next plane 🙂 Once again: your plane, your science project.

If you plan to upgrade to standard electronics, be sure to go for “micro”-sized parts. Your Stryker is weight-sensitive, and although the high speeds you can reach using brushless motors may allow for more weight, this also means faster belly-scraper landings.

Good luck. You’ve chosen a fun airframe that lets you do a lot with it. Enjoy yourself, and stock up on your foam-safe glues!

Feedback always welcome,

Matthew “Barnboy” Barnson

matthew@barnson.org

A large part of my job is working the “help desk” for UNIX users.

I have to get something off my chest. Please note that this is addressed in the second person, as if I’m speaking to the nincompoops involved. No offense intended to barnson.org readers.

Sometimes, dear user, the problem isn’t the machine. It isn’t your environment. It isn’t the configuration settings, or even the hardware. It’s that YOU ARE TOO FLAMING STUPID TO LIVE. Yes, you read that correctly. You are both stupid AND ignorant. You think you can waltz into an environment which is new to you and have everything YOUR WAY. Guess what? YOUR WAY IS STUPID, YOU EGG-SUCKING NIMRODIC BOOB! Get with the program! Get some training on the operating system you are trying to manipulate, rather than ASSUMING IT’S GOING TO WORK LIKE FRICKING MICROSOFT WINDOWS!

Where did you get your technical UNIX training? Wal-Mart? How tough is it to get it through your thick skull into your pureed brain that this AIN’T YOUR MOMMA’S OPERATING SYSTEM. It’s UNIX! It’s big, powerful, and MADE TO DO A JOB MICROSOFT WINDOWS CAN’T DO. It’s like going from driving your momma’s Hyundai to getting behind the wheel of a big rig with a 13 METRIC TONS OF CARGO. IF YOU DRIVE IT WITHOUT TRAINING, YOU’RE GONNA BREAK SOMETHING AND PROBABLY HURT YOURSELF.

Do the world, and the company, a favor. Stop your job-hopping, half-thought-out training regimen. Sit down with a real UNIX operating system for a couple of weeks, and FIGURE OUT YOUR OWN DANG PROBLEMS. I’m not here to wipe your butt. I’m not here to fix your .profile. I’m here for when the FIT HITS THE SHAN and the MACHINE BREAKS. I’m like the mechanic for your big rig. I’M NOT THE DRIVER, MR. USER, YOU ARE. You’re supposed to be the engineer, the college-degreed master of your domain! Why the heck are you asking this COLLEGE DROPOUT TO DO YOUR JOB FOR YOU?

Get some training. Get over yourself. You’re one tiny employee in an enterprise of thousands of people. Your issue isn’t “Severity-1, Critical”. That’s RESERVED FOR STUFF THAT, WHEN IT BREAKS, HURTS LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE. Try a severity of “minor”, or “normal”, instead. That’s how big your problem REALLY is, you ostensibly Hephaestian, ham-handed, interloping, warthog-faced buffoon.

That said, I recognize your problem is important. I will address it as soon as I finish wiping the butts and noses of the fifty people in line ahead of you, who think their problems are equally colossal. Pray you get a fresh hankie instead of a used one, and that I use it in an order pleasing to you. Thank you.

— Matthew P. Barnson Engineer, UNIX Operations SomeBigCorp, USA

I just met the father and son team of Lance and … umm, I think his name was Joe … from 3dBiplanes.com while flying out in Grantsville’s Mistway Field (also called Grantsville #2). I was there to gently putt around with my gentle, stable J-3 cub and fast, unstable F-27B Stryker. Once I saw these guys in action, I did more watching and talking than flying!

They are about hot-dogging as much in real-life as they are in the videos on their web site (Check out the hot flying on that link! The videos are big, high-quality, and fun to watch — like the planes.). They custom-build plane kits for about $200-$300 out of 4″ “pink” foam and sell them online. They don’t have many more of the planes in stock, unfortunately. I was really impressed with the handling characteristics of the birds. Harriers were entered and exited quickly, and they dragged the tail on the ground several times. The plane flies equally well inverted and right-side-up, and can hover forever. Waterfalls begun a scant 50 feet over the ground were completed with room to spare.

Wow. Not only for the flying skills of these two pilots, but also for the planes they designed. “3D Flying” is all about flying low, flying slow, and doing aerobatics while at or near stall speed in the plane (unlike the usual aerobatics seen at airshows, which are generally high-speed “pattern flying”).

The plane excelled. I drooled, but alas, the kit is nearly $300 for the larger aircraft. Then, of course, once you have the plane, you have to put in a big motor, a big 16oz fuel tank, and buy some hefty servos to power the large control areas.

But man, once it’s kitted out, it sings. I’m partial to biplanes anyway, and these flew like biplanes should: stable, predictable, and yet able to roll and perform any aerobatics you could throw at it with minimal fuss.

I think they could be converted to electric with little trouble. To swing the large props necessary, it would probably have to have a really large outrunner, or a geared inrunner, and I hesitate to think how expensive the LiPo battery packs would be. But it’s a nice plane, pretty, and flies great. Harrier landings are simply something else with these things. Landing at stall speed in a partial hover, with only a big prop on the front, and a 10-foot touch-and-go. Who’d have thought?

Blown away.

— Matt B.

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of [the hurricane] looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less — mainly Black — were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city’s poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean’s daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the “large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods” who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

The date: September 24, 2004

The web site: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6292

Those in power have repeatedly said, and would have us believe, that most of those trapped in dire circumstances in New Orleans — up to 4/5 of them — are in their condition as a direct result of their unfortunate decision to remain in the city in the face of a Category 5 hurricane.

Their decision to remain, with no vehicle, no money, and no busses left in the city?

Spin and humbug.

Like many of my friends, I switched from Internet Explorere to Mozilla Firefox in hopes of avoiding the mess of pop-ups, un-closeable windows, and other associated crap with that web browser.

All it took was one experience, really, in 1998. I had been looking for some drivers for hardware. I was really digging hard. I came across a site that I thought had what I was looking for, and clicked the link.

Pop-up after pop-up for hard-core pornography popped up on my screen.

My boss chose exactly that moment to show up at my desk. She was not impressed with my explanation, nor my inability to close the windows when I tried.

I knew I had to find a way to stop the insanity, and began using early versions of “Mozilla”. Eventually, that segued into Firefox, and here I am.

After living several years in popup-free bliss, I’ve recently found that sites had begun being able to pop ads up on me again. It was really annoying! Finally, a few nights ago, I decided to research how they were doing it. It turned out, they were embedding the pop-up commands in Macromedia Shockwave Flash animations.

A lot of ads use Flash. It gives you nifty animations, small file sizes, and tends to disable the right-click functionality a lot of users use with various “ad-blocking” software. The thing I’ve always hated about these is how much CPU time they use up. I use a laptop, and when I come across a site with really Flash-heavy advertisements on it, I can hear my fan come on to try to put up with the heat generated by rendering these ads over… and over…. and over again.

Pop-ups were the last straw. I found the PERFECT extension for Firefox. It makes one simple change: Flash animations load, but do not automatically play. You have to click them to play them. Well, if they can’t play, they can’t issue the command to your browser to pop-up a window on you. They can’t start spouting gibberish at you when doing research on the web at your place of work. They can’t suck up CPU time playing the same boring, yet eye-catching advertisement over and over.

Download it here: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/.

Remember that, to install it, you may have to tell Firefox to allow this site to install software. When you go to the installation page and click the download link, a little bar will appear at the top of your browser window, indicating that Firefox stopped a program from installing. Click the bar, and follow the instructions to allow “flashblock.mozdev.org” to install software.

Now when I go to one of those Flash-animation-heavy web sites, I don’t worry about popups anymore. I don’t worry about Firefox sucking up 100% CPU and wearing out the fan on my CPU. And I don’t worry that my computer will suddenly start talking to me because advertisers thought it would be cute to have a talking ad. There’s just a little “play” button on every Flash ad, and I can still play my favorite Flash shows.

Overall, good times. Flashblock: it’s good for you.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: And we heard him exclaim As he started to roam: “I’m a hologram, kids, please don’t try this at home!'” — Bob Violence

How do you prepare for a disaster?

For a long time, Christy and I have been in the habit of keeping a modest amount of “food storage” in our basement. It’s enough to last us about three months, with supplemental water and some fresh food (eggs, milk, etc.) We have a pair of fifty-gallon water barrels, with fresh water inside (and a once-every-six-months chlorine tablet regimen) in the backyard. We’ve actually lived off our food storage several times when I’ve been unemployed, and it’s been a lifesaver for the budget during those stressful times.

Yet as we’ve watched events in the American South unfold, as Lake New Orleans grows and swallows the city whole, I wonder:

How the heck do you prepare for a disaster like that???

I have no flippin’ idea. Except maybe turn into one of those whack extremists out in the boonies, living off meat you hunt yourself or something. If your food storage is seven feet under a river of sewage, it’s not much use to anybody. If your water barrels blew away in a hurricane, they’re not going to keep you from going thirsty.

For several years after the Northridge Earthquake in 1991, the epicenter of which was a scant two miles from the garage I was living in at the time, I kept a bag packed with my important belongings right next to the front door. Guess that habit has stuck with me; thanks to the efforts of my spouse, we have one last contingency: a briefcase full of important papers, parked in the front closet near the front door. It’s the thing we’ll grab right after grabbing our kids on the way out the door. It contains account numbers, passports, IDs, and other information we’d need to make a new life and settle insurance claims. That’s definitely a last-ditch resort, but (for instance) if our house burned down around us, we’d be able to grab it and get out of the home. With any luck.

What preparations have you made for disaster?

And a last question about Katrina: At what point do you just write off an entire city as a loss, and give to the ocean what she wants to claim? Or do you rebuild and keep your tenuous peace with the ocean through a series of dikes and dunes like one “>famous country?

Just a thought for the moment.

Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have… the course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

–Thomas Jefferson

You know how, growing up, there are all these little stories you hear about or read about that stick with you? One of those, for me, was the “eye of the needle” story, based upon this passage from the Bible:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” — Matthew 19:24

The explanation, which I heard in Sunday School several times, went something like this: Jerusalem would shut their gates at nightfall, and the only door through which people could pass after dark was very small, referred to as “the eye of the needle”. If one wished to take a camel through it, one would first have to strip the camel of all baggage, and have it kneel and crawl through the person-sized hole. Thus, to “go through the eye of the needle” meant to metaphorically strip oneself of all worldly belongings and enter into God’s presence on your knees.

Poetic, no? Unfortunately, though very nifty from a “teaching a religious principle” perspective, it’s a complete fabrication. I received this little blurb from my acquaintance Ken Clark about this topic:

When we were in Jerusalem a few years ago we asked several different tour guides (Christian and Jewish–LDS and non-LDS) about the door in the gate named “Eye of a Needle;” and they were unanimous in declaring that the eye of the needle is not named after a door in the city wall. I hated to hear that because I used to use the “camel on the knees” interpretation all the time and thought it was cool. After I took a little Hebrew at a synagogue I learned that religious hyperbole (exaggeration) was common with the Semitic people. Rabbis used it because it made a point so plain that listeners couldn’t misinterpret his meaning. For instance, when Jesus said to first remove the beam from your own eye, before looking for the mote in your brother’s eye, it was intended to be a gross exaggeration; much like the camel through the eye of a needle.

I thought he was wrong, at first. So I looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a page on biblicalhebrew.org, among others, about this very topic. So now a useful little piece of sermon material — right up there with the “how to boil a frog” urban legend, and the fastest growing church legend — has now joined many peers in the “well-intentioned falsehood” pile in my brain.

Small things, tiny things really, seem to make so much of a difference in life. I mourn the little losses sometimes. I mean, it’s better to be informed than remain ignorant.

I think.

But still, sometimes I miss being ignorant. You can’t un-learn what you’ve learned just because you want to. You can’t believe something true which you know to be false, just because someone you respect told you it was true.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: God is the tangential point between zero and infinity. — Alfred Jarry

In case you haven’t heard, Hurricane Katrina made landfall today at 7:15 AM Eastern time. New Orleans — all 1.3 million people — has been ordered to be evacuated.

Apparently, only a little less than 1 million made it out in time, leaving about 300,000 hunkered down in various places in the parish.

Good luck, Louisiana and Mississippi. You’re gonna need it.

Thanks to Jen Gagne’s post for pointing this out: Are you a nerd, geek, or dork?

Me? Well, here I am…

Outcast Genius 65 % Nerd, 73% Geek, 69% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in all three, earning you the title of: Outcast Genius. Outcast geniuses usually are bright enough to understand what society wants of them, and they just don’t care! They are highly intelligent and passionate about the things they know are *truly* important in the world. Typically, this does not include sports, cars or make-up, but it can on occassion (and if it does then they know more than all of their friends combined in that subject). Outcast geniuses can be very lonely, due to their being outcast from most normal groups and too smart for the room among many other types of dorks and geeks, but they can also be the types to eventually rule the world, ala Bill Gates, the prototypical Outcast Genius. Congratulations!

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 71% on nerdiness You scored higher than 94% on geekosity You scored higher than 98% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid