He had a parachute, and even used it on his previous attempt after shooting out too many baloons.

"...Anybody flies in a lawn chair with helium balloons deserves SPOT..."


Well said...

As an interesting aside, I just saw a commercial for the ACR Microfix on the Discovery Channel.

"...find out where he fell out of the lawn chair..."

The last one of these lawn chair idiots that I heard about was actually smart enough to wear a parachute. Don't know if this particular idiot did or not. But if he did, he had to bail, and landed in a boonies, SPOT would/should have been able to pinpoint him so that a rescue chopper (which would hopefully bill him bigtime) could find him. But since it went belly up, he could have been in for a long hike out...

I work in the web development industry, and I know about server load issues. Basically, you can see an exponential increase in traffic even from a moderate level of media and blogger coverage. One of my clients is a major financial services firm and we have had a few experiences where a national commercial ran and just melted the servers down. Building highly scalable systems is highly challenging.
That's why I'd never trust anything via the Internet for life safety. Anything public is highly susceptible to spike loading by accident - or in the case of a DDOS attack, by malice.
The FINDMESPOT servers could be deliberately targeted for such an attack, and there's not much that can be done. The same can not be said for networks that are not public.

New meaning to armchair adventurer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7491841.stm

The 'slashdot effect' is its own phenomenon. As soon as a story is posted (its like Digg.com but for geeks - www.slashdot.org), and if the story is associated to a web site thats on poor equipment... in a matter of seconds its down.

I haven't followed this much but I do recall that the weight budget for his "lawn chair" was over 300 lbs ... that's quite a lawn chair..

The biggest question in my mind is the sheer number of balloons. I think I read he was going to get 4 lb of lift from each balloon and had a total flight weight of 600 lbs, or 150 balloons. How are those tethered such that none are ruptured by another's tether rubbing against it?

When he shoots a balloon, shooting upwards would hit many balloons stacked vertically, also resulting in many tethers rubbing against balloons as the remaining balloons adjusted. Shooting to the side might not be practical either for that reason and for balance reasons.

In any case it sounds safer than the Swiss guy who strapped on a jet engine and flew over the Alps outside of the intervals when the lawn chair is too low for parachute bail-out.

It's possible the deal with the slashdot problem, *if* you're willing to spend vast sums of money. I doubt SPOT has the budget for it, so they need to separate their business, marketing, and operations networks and internet presences, and be prepared to handle operations via FAX or phone in case of a DoS attack to reassure customers. That said, this was probably one of those cases where the cleaning lady went to unplug the vacuum cleaner and yanked out an Ethernet switch power cord instead...

This is the catch 22 of the dev industry.

If the server stays up for the big event, then, you can wonder if they are being as careful about quality when they aren't on TV. Maybe they use resources for that one guy that they wouldn't ordinarily use, making the big demo a fraud.

On the other hand, if the server fails on the big event, that doesn't necessarily mean it would fail for you on an average day when you didn't have an unusually large number of people trying to track you.

Certainly, its egg on the face, but I feel their pain.

I hope they work it out... its all good experience, if they can hang on until the next iteration...

This is John Dark with SPOT.

I saw this thread about Couch Balloons, and thought readers might be interested in some of the facts. We have posted a note about Couch Balloons over on our new Blog.

http://findmespot.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/spot-successfully-tracks-kent-couch-at-couchballoonscom/

It also includes a document that lets developers know how to integrate SPOT into their site, which seems to have been a sticky point for our friends at couch balloons. We have a separate workaround if a site will get more than 500 views in 15 minutes, but users need to contact us so we can work directly with the developer.