Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’m almost ready for my talk at Ignite Seattle tonight. I am a bit nervous about how well it will go over. Unlike my disaster at the PDC ‘03 I’m prepared, but of course the format is very strict and so its not clear how effective I’m going to be getting across some information in 5 minutes of 20 slides each for an exact 15 seconds. Its a pretty rough format.

When I learned this stuff it was in a 3 day course. So the 3 days -> 5 minutes thing is an obvious limitation. Compared to the initial write-up of the topic and first draft of my slides I’m not going to spend as much time as I thought on some side topics like comparing aircraft and car engines and I had to cut my slides on magnetos / timing. I just realized as I went over the talk many times that trying to squeeze that extra stuff in there really was limiting my ability to get across the more central points. The whole thing is still a fire-hose of information.

I’m excited, it should be cool.

I’ll be giving a 5-min talk at Ignite Seattle next Thursday on the topic of airplane engines. I think they are trying to expand the talks beyond computer technology and there is a bunch of interesting things to talk about that should appeal to the “I want to know how everything actually works” crowd.

The funny thing about aircraft engines is they are based on similar technology as car engines, but in many ways they have been frozen in time by a number of factors. Many of the things that are automatic and high-tech in your car are still manual in an airplane because the manual approaches are more reliable, plus we tend to put a bit more effort into training about how the thing works than your typical car driver.

The other facinating thing is that despite the technology being basically the same for the past 60 years, pilots have recently rediscovered techniques that let us get 20% or more better fuel efficiency out of our engines. I’d actually been flying for 5 or so years before I took a course and finally learned about what’s actually going on in an internal combustion engine and how to get the most out of it.