Airships over UConn?!!

Let's just pretend, first of all, that I haven't been on a 21-month hiaitus from my presence here and skip right to the present day. Yes, I like that idea a lot. It avoids a lot of awkward questions which may or may not be answered in the next few posts anyway.

What I need to share with you today is airships. You know, blimps, zeppelins, dirigibles, rubber cows, lighter-than-air... that sort of thing! In particular, I re-discovered an old photo in my collection of airship-related ephemera that just begs to see the light of day.



I've been holding onto this photo now since I was an upperclassman in high school exploring my options toward a college education. Having been an airship and lighter-than-air enthusuast most of my life, I was stunned, amazed, astounded, and utterly entranced to find this photo of a crudely designed and built airship on the back of the pamphlet I'd received from the University of Connecticut's School of Engineering! "Do you mean to tell me, Mr Dean of the School of Engineering, sir, that if I go to UConn, you'll let ME design, build, and fly my own crudely designed and built airship, too?!!" Oh, I couldn't wait to hear back from the admissions office, because as it turns out, UConn back in the day was considered by my folks to be the low-cost alternative to such schools as RIT and WPI.

In the end, UConn is exactly where I chose to go, but due to a conspiracy involving the School of Engineering's insistence on a new project being tried every year, and my own crappy grades forcing me to reconsider something a little more my speed (rocks), I was never to fly my own airship.

So why do I bring all this up? It's not like I am leaping out of my skin to tell you I flunked out of the School of Engineering (oops, there goes my internal monologue again), but what I really want to know is who are these guys who got to participate in what would've been my dream thesis?!! Do they read poorly written blogs? Do they check out shamelessly self-promoting flickr.com accounts? I sure hope so, because I'm really hoping somebody out there can tell me about that project! It was way cool!!