Twilight Missile Launch

A few months ago I noticed that my laptop's LCD backlight powered off if I leaned the screen most of the way back. The image was still visible in direct sunlight, there was just no power to light it up. At the start of September I bought an external hard drive, imaged my laptop, then sent the laptop off for repair. It was returned a week later. They'd restored the factory image to my hard drive. I might've preferred otherwise, but at least this takes care of the OS-decay problems I was having. For example, Windows Explorer wouldn't always load the desktop when I first logged in. I'd have to ctrl-alt-del, start the task manager, kill explorer.exe, start explorer.exe, and poof, the desktop would appear.

I've been using Dropbox to back up my taxi notes, and to store my keepass password file. The network-sync feature quickly moved these files across the network to (and from) the loaner-laptop I'd borrowed from my dad.

Yesterday I restored my photo directory from the external drive, and was reminded of one of the cooler things I've seen while out and about in the taxi.

Inside: photo gallery, and the back-story.


It was early-morning, just before sunrise. I was driving east to pick someone up. In my peripheral vision I saw the contrail of a missile launch, rising from the horizon. Then there was a second launch. This intersected with the first missile, and the contrails both silently exploded into a cloud.
It was very surreal.

The camera on my Droid 4 takes forever to load, so the pictures below are all from well-after the action had taken place.

The next day I noticed this story on the Arizona Republic's website: Unique contrail seen in Phoenix area from N.M. missile launch.

When I got to the address where the passengers were supposedly waiting, no one was there. Usually I am rather annoyed by no-shows and bad addresses, but in this case I was very appreciative. If not for their 'decoy' cab order I certainly wouldn't have been facing in the right direction to see the launch.

These pictures must be from September 12, 2012. Apparently this was before I started typing my notes, or those files were lost. I checked my real online backup service, and it doesn't have any 2012 notes either. I wonder where the notebook with that day's notes is stored. ("Oh yeah..." - my laptop's 2 year warranty expired 9-20-2014, so this day was before I even had this laptop to type notes with. The power inverter on my previous laptop had died, the used inverter from ebay didn't work, and the motorola lapdock didn't work like I'd hoped...)

Missile Defense