Sunday, October 4, 2020

My Dog Ate my Article

 This week due to my real life job, which requires shifts, I had one spare day to do my article. I spent six hours on in it, then when it was ready I went to copy and paste it into an email to send to my long suffering proof reader.
I selected the entire text, but I used the short cut keys (Ctrl+A). I then went to press Ctrl+C. 
At this point one of my dogs decided she needed head rubs, charged into my room and headbutted my hand. Exactly at the point I was pressing the copy short cut. The impact knocked my hand off the Ctrl button. 
So here's this weeks article:

'c'

The guilty party after we'd been out on a walk a few years ago, and she'd run through some grass fields.

I obviously tried the undo command, but that failed to work, so I tried to retrieve an auto-saved copy, which also failed. As it was just after 1900, I had no time to re-start, and no more days in the week to get an article done.

The article was the story of Blimp K-74, a US Navy anti-submarine blimp that entered combat against U-134, and caused enough damage that eventually resulted in its destruction. This was a historic event because it seems to have been the only time the US Navy Blimps entered combat. There is a very long, but detailed, paper on the subject, which can be found here. It covers all the background material and the like, so it maybe too long for you (136 pages). If you want me to write it up as an article let me know, or if that's sufficient for you that's fine.

While reading the above paper, if you do that is, there's a couple of good images I think improve the piece. 
A K-class blimp gondola. You can see the general layout and the location of the all important machine gun. It also gives a sense of scale.

U-134 under air attack a couple of weeks prior to the encounter with the K-74

Anyway, we'll be back next week, assuming some other unforeseen disaster doesn't befall my writing.