Happy Thanksgiving and wish for fun holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving to my family, local friends, and travel friends!
Each trip we take, our experiences open new doors! With the challenges of today (economy, war, jobs/no jobs, apartment rent increases in a negative economy, etc) facing us, I am grateful to have and share these memories with everyone.

Travel friends are different than any other type of friend. You meet these people just one time. These new friends which we share ONE moment of our lives and will remember forever! We may never meet our travel friends again, we will always have that one common experience between us. Sometimes we do meet them again.

Enjoy these images from Italia! Peace!
Happy Thanksgiving! The FunTourGuru

Italian Cars

Dear Detroit car makers,

Please pay attention to this message. Economical cars are not really new and a great source for drivers now. Please contact me for ideas for your 2009 biz plans .... ways to save money, engineer new products and help the environment.

Best Regards,

The Fun Tour Guru

Italian cars in Florence, Italia

Maybe we should take note of these with our latest gas crisis in USA. It really is not new to drive vehicles like these.

Current Events this Week October 2008

Jean Jennings Bartik
Events at the Computer History Museum

This is an event of interest about a significant person from Missouri and who attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (my Alma Mater) which I will be attending this week. I hope to see local people there!

ABSTRACT OF TALK (copied directly from the Computer History Museum link and belongs to the Computer History Museum).

Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Jean Jennings Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). During her college years, WWII broke out, and in 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the government's call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the new guns developed for the war effort. A new employee of the Army's Ballistics Research Labs, she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories (differential calculus equations) by hand - her title: “Computer.”

Later in 1945, the Army circulated a call for computers for a new job with a secret machine. Bartik jumped at the chance and was hired as one of the original six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-electronic, programmable computer. She joined Frances “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence in this unknown journey.

With ENIAC's 40 panels still under construction, and its 18,000 vacuum tube technology uncertain, the engineers had no time for programming manuals or classes. Bartik and the other women taught themselves ENIAC's operation from its logical and electrical block diagrams, and then figured out how to program it. They created their own flow charts, programming sheets, wrote the program and placed it on the ENIAC using a challenging physical interface, which had hundreds of wires and 3,000 switches. It was an unforgettable, wonderful experience.

On February 15, 1946, the Army revealed the existence of ENIAC to the public. In a special ceremony, the Army introduced ENIAC and its hardware inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The presentation featured its trajectory ballistics program, operating at a speed thousands of time faster than any prior calculations. The ENIAC women's program worked perfectly - and conveyed the immense calculating power of ENIAC and its ability to tackle the millennium problems that had previously taken a man 100 years to do. It calculated the trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to trace it. But, it took ENIAC only 20 seconds to calculate it - faster than a speeding bullet! Indeed!

The Army never introduced the ENIAC women.

No one gave them any credit or discussed their critical part in the event that day. Their faces, but not their names, became part of the beautiful press pictures of the ENIAC. For forty years, their roles and their pioneering work were forgotten and their story lost to history. The ENIAC Women's story was discovered by Kathy Kleiman in 1985. Bartik will discuss what it means to be overlooked, despite unique and pioneering work, and what it means to be discovered again.

Out and about in Silicon Valley ~ The Fun Tour Guru

Explore the day at this fascinating Computer History Museum

Ongoing events at the Computer History Museum

Consumer alert - Alitalia Airlines

Please confirm with your travel agent if you have a ticket issued to travel on Alitalia Airlines

Alitalia (Italy's national airline)European media are reporting this afternoon that Alitalia -- the Italian national airline that has struggled financially for years -- now faces an effective deadline of Monday, Sept. 22, to come up with additional financing to stay afloat. However, the prospects appear grim, as yesterday the last group of Italian investors interested in the carrier withdrew their bid in the face of withering opposition from Alitalia's unions.

Thank you ~

Airline Industry Deregulation

I want to share this article from USA Today, by Bill McGee. Let me know any thoughts?

With industry in crisis, experts question deregulation
Thirty years after the landmark Airline Deregulation Act went into effect, lawmakers and industry experts are no longer unanimous that deregulation was a boon for U.S. fliers. Bankruptcies, higher prices and widespread service cuts have helped spark talk of re-regulating the airline industry. "Three decades of deregulation have demonstrated that airlines have special characteristics incompatible with a completely unregulated environment," says Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines. "To put things bluntly, experience has established that market forces alone cannot and will not produce a satisfactory airline industry, which clearly needs some help to solve its pricing, cost, and operating problems." USA TODAY (9/2)