Jeff’s Most Excellent Blog

The older kids and I drove down to Shelton, WA yesterday to visit the Port of Shelton Autumn Festival at Sanderson Field.  It was pretty cool, like a mix between an airshow and a county fair.  The EAA was giving free plane rides to kids through their Young Eagles program, and there were some nice planes on display.  Will definitely consider going again next year.  Best of all, my truck averaged 23.9 mpg over the roughly 200 mile round trip.  Certainly can’t complain about that (oh, and diesel fuel is $0.16/gal cheaper down there, so I filled up while I was there - when you can carry 35 gals, that’s enough for “free” snacks for the kids for the ride home).

Apple is ruining their reputation with the crap they’ve been passing off as “software” for the iPhone lately.  2.0.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2 were all variations on the general theme of “Suckage”.  But 2.1.0 is different.  It completely bricked my phone.  It managed to wipe out the old phone firmware successfully, but now it fails with “Unknown Error” and dies whenever I try to update it to the new firmware.  I can’t even seem to get it to install the old crappy 2.0.2 code.  Suddenly, those eight-hour-plus backups don’t seem quite as bad as I thought they were.  After all, I can always just install new songs and music while I sleep, right?  As long as nobody calls me during those eight hours…

If you live in the Seattle area, you’ve got two neat open-houses coming up next weekend (September 20th) to visit.  Of course, unless you’re going to visit both in your plane, you’re probably limited to one or the other.

• CubCrafters Fall Open House & Fly In
• Troutdale Aircraft’s Cirrus Open House

Personally, I see it as a no-contest comparison.  I’m going to Yakima to see the fine folks at CubCrafters.  But to each his own.

Did you know that once you’ve taken 999 pictures with your iPhone, the numbers roll back over to 0?  And start wiping out your oldest photos?  There’s really no excuse for this idiocy.

First day of school!  And for Abby, first day of school ever.

I got stuck on call for the holiday yesterday.  There’s not enough time between pages to do anything useful (ie, go work on the yard), but there’s too much time to just sit in front of the computer and do nothing.  So I started digging around the junk in my office and built a computer-controlled robotic camera in between fixing broken Google infrastructure (oh how I love the shrill shriek of a pager on a quiet sunny afternoon).  I used:

• Junky old tripod I don’t trust with a “real” camera
• An old Logitech webcam I used to use for videoconferencing
• Two ancient Futaba FP-S148 servos from an R/C glider I built in 1991
• A Pololu serial servo controller
• A USB -> Serial cable
• A bunch of double-sided sticky tape
• A Mountain Dew can cut in half
• A small piece of Radio Shack perf board
• A 7805 voltage regulator
• Two 10uf electrolyic caps
• Asst. wire
• Plastic zip ties
• streamer webcam software
• rsync
• GCC
• Emacs

First, I soldered up a little 5vdc regulated power supply on the perf board using the 7805 and the two caps (just like this).  Doesn’t get any simpler than that.  It won’t supply a ton of current, but it’s enough to power the pololu board and two servos.  Next, I wired up the power, the two servos, and the serial cable and made sure I could control everything from the computer.  It took a little fiddling, as some of the Pololu documentation is poorly phrased, but I managed to get the computer controlling the servos without too much trouble.  I then set both servos to the middle of their range and unplugged them.

I taped the first servo to the top of the tripod.  This servo is for azimuth.  I then took the second servo, laid it on it’s side, and taped it onto the control arm of the first servo.  This servo controls elevation.  Then I tried to attach the camera to the elevation servo.  No luck.  No matter what I tried, it kept falling off.  It was just too heavy for the double-sided tape.  I finally hit upon the idea of cutting a soda can in half, mounting it to the elevation servo (by poking holes in the side of the can and using wire-wrap wire through the servo arm holes), then bolting the camera inside the soda can (using a 1/4-inch short bolt).  It took some adjusting, but it worked.

Next, I fired up my trusty editor (emacs, of course) and whipped out a little C program that would take three values (azimuth, elevation, and speed), and output the appropriate commands to the servo controller.  It’s ugly, but it works.  You can steal my code from here if you promise not to complain about the quality - it’s quick and dirty and ugly.

Next, I played with moving the camera around to point at various things in my office (and out my window).  I recorded the azimuth and elevation of six different “interesting” things, then wrote a shell script to move to each of these positions, take a picture, then rsync the picture to my web server, all every fifteen minutes.  So now you can go here and see what’s going on in my home office.  Here’s an example of what it sees:

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Not bad for three hours worth of work.

Guess who turned three today?  Hard to believe.

We tried an experiment for our summer vacation this year.  We rented a trailer.  We just got back from a week-long road trip down the Oregon coast.  Pretty place.  We visited the Tillamook Cheese factory, saw Cannon Beach, saw the Tillamook Air Museum, visited one of the better used bookstores I’ve been to in years (Robert’s Book Shop), and just generally hung out and did nothing.  It was a fantastic trip.  The place where we rented the trailer gave me a bit of a bad vibe (a bit “used-car-ish”), but they were nice enough.  All in all, it was a pretty neat experience.  For what it’s worth, we discovered why none of the trailer parks have decent pictures of their facilities on their web pages.  And in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.  A trailer park looks like (wait for it) a trailer park!  Not much you can do to pretty that up.  Now I see why they only have pictures of the things to see and do near the trailer park.  Ah well.  You live and you learn.  The ol’ Duramax diesel got about 14mpg pulling the 26′ trailer all up and down the coast (as opposed to about 18.5mpg in normal daily driving).  I can live with that.

I dug around a bit and found the web sites of two of the resellers of the Just Aircraft Highlander.  Both sites are considerably nicer than the factory site, and contain a lot more photos and information.  Here is BLB Flight’s page, and here is Cornell Aero Works’ page.  Both are nice, particularly BLB’s.  They’ve even got some used planes for sale.

Julia and I made a weekend trip down to Portland to visit Powell’s, the world’s greatest book store.  With the demise of the Tattered Cover in Denver, there aren’t very many book stores left in the country worth visiting a city to see (ok, so the Tattered Cover actually does still exist, just not in a form that’s worth visiting any more).  Anyway, I found a copy of Sparky Imeson’s Mountain Flying Bible that’s long out of print, as well as some other nifty items.  Julia got a stack twice as big as mine (plus a pile for the kids).  The best part was that as we drove back up I-5 heading home, we got to watch the Thunderbirds doing a show ahead of us.  At one point, one of them got back behind us and headed straight up the highway at low altitude and lit up his afterburner just before he went overhead.  Sounded like the fury of God ripping the sky in half.  Good stuff.

It’s Bastille Day in France.  Now I know that the rest of the world (or at least those of us in the US) think of France as largely irrelevant, somewhat annoying, and full of themselves.  But it wasn’t always so.  France has a history I like to compare with Cadillac.  Today, Cadillac is a car for old people.  Grandpa has a Cadillac.  Grandma has a Cadillac.  Drug lords and pimps have Cadillacs.  Your local mortuary probably has a Cadillac limo.  But regular people don’t.  The average American wouldn’t be caught dead in one.  It’s strange to us today, but Cadillac was once the symbol of wealth and success.  Cadillac was the gold standard, to which everything was compared.  Their quality was unquestioned.  In the US, Cadillac once filled the spot now occupied by Mercedes.

Likewise, as hard as it is to believe today, France was once a world power.  The world power, in fact.  And French was the language of the world.  Even harder to believe, in the early days of this country, they were even our friends (well, not exactly, it was more “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of thing, but still).

Take a few minutes and read up on the Storming of the Bastille.  Again, I realize that in the context of the modern world, it’s hard to believe there’s anything we can learn from the French, but the history of the French Revolution has a lot to teach us.  There are huge parallels that can be drawn between revolutionary France and the America of today.  America is becoming more deeply divided.  The Left and the Right are growing ever more militant and intolerant, and attempting to force the country off in their own direction, the other 50% be damned.  The quality of our elected “leadership” on all sides is at historic lows.

Jerry Pournelle had this to say recently:

“Democrats seem to be drifting toward the concept of prosecution of former office holders by criminalizing policy differences. That’s a certain formula for civil war; perhaps not immediate, but inevitable.  The absolute minimum requirement for democratic government is that the loser be willing to lose the election: that losing an election is not the loss of everything that matters. As soon as that assurance is gone, playing by the rules makes no sense at all.”

Now combine all this with the potential for economic collapse we’re seeing every day around us, and you’ve got the makings of the French Revolution all over again.  I’m just sayin’…

Charles Schumer is a contemptable human being for a lot of reasons.  Pilots hate him because he’s irrationally anti-General Aviation.  Gun owners hate him because he’s even more irrationally anti-gun and anti-2nd Amendment.  But now he’s outdone himself.  An entire new demographic now has reason to hate him:

July 8 (Bloomberg) — IndyMac Bancorp Inc., the U.S. mortgage company that stopped most of its lending as losses mounted and capital deteriorated, blamed Senator Charles Schumer for “elevated levels of deposit withdrawals.”

Schumer’s comments last month about the lender’s reliance on deposits purchased from third parties are causing customers to pull their money and making it harder to raise funds, the company said in a regulatory filing today. Schumer responded calling IndyMac a “junior version” of Countrywide Financial Corp. and said bad lending practices date back several years.

IndyMac, based in Pasadena, California, said yesterday that it’s firing half its employees and is working with regulators on a new business plan after failing to raise capital. The demise of IndyMac, the second-largest independent U.S. mortgage lender last year behind Countrywide, would be the biggest since the bankruptcy of American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. in August.

“They’re in the unfortunate position of being a specialty mortgage entity at a time when mortgage assets are out of favor,” said Christopher Wolfe, an analyst at Fitch Ratings in New York, in an interview. Fitch reduced IndyMac’s debt four levels today to CC from B-. “Our rating suggests there’s a high degree of doubt that they can” survive, Wolfe said.

IndyMac fell 27 cents to 44 cents at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, reducing its market value to $44 million from more than $3.4 billion in mid-2006.

Schumer Letters

Schumer, the New York Democrat, sent letters last month to home-lending regulators including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., warning of a potential collapse. Those comments led to additional restrictions on the bank’s borrowings and caused its so-called operating liquidity to dwindle to about $1.7 billion, the company said in the filing today.

IndyMac spokesman Evan Wagner declined to comment beyond the company’s statements.

The lender lost almost $900 million in the nine months ended in March and its second-quarter loss will exceed the $184 million reported in the prior period, IndyMac said.

Because it doesn’t have enough capital to meet the “well capitalized” threshold set by regulators, IndyMac said it can’t fund its lending with deposits acquired through independent brokers. IndyMac’s request for a waiver from the FDIC to allow for brokered deposits hasn’t been approved, the company said.

“We don’t expect to be able to raise capital until there is more stability and less uncertainty in the housing and mortgage markets,” IndyMac Chief Executive Officer Michael Perry said in a statement yesterday.

Alt-A Loans

At the bank branch adjacent to its headquarters, spread across a coffee table were blue brochures entitled, “Your Insured Deposits: FDIC’s Guide to Deposit Insurance Coverage.” There were no lines forming at the branch today.

IndyMac specialized in so-called Alt-A mortgages that usually didn’t require borrowers to provide documentation on their incomes. The lender said it is working with regulators on a new business plan while it curbs lending and will slash its 7,200-strong workforce by 53 percent.

“IndyMac was one of the banks that was using relatively weak underwriting standards on the basis that housing prices would continue to rise in value,” said Jason Arnold, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco, in an interview yesterday. “With prices coming down, that became the bottom card in the house of cards built by these lenders.”

The company’s key asset is its Southern California retail bank network with 33 branches and $18 billion in deposits, mostly insured by the FDIC, Arnold said. IndyMac’s inability to find a buyer or attract capital, even amid pressure from regulators, reflects continued concern over the declining value of its loans, he said.

IndyMac agreed to sell most of its retail mortgage branches to Prospect Mortgage. The deal gives the Northbrook, Illinois based-company more than 60 branch offices with 750 employees, Prospect said today in an e-mailed statement.

To contact the reporter on this story: David Mildenberg in Charlotte at dmildenberg@bloomberg.net; Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 8, 2008 16:49 EDT

Go, Chucky!

So as I threatened, I went back to the airshow today to fly the Highlander.  Yes, I got up at 4:45am just to fly an airplane.  And it was worth it.  It’s everything I hoped it would be.  The plane can be flown from take-off to landing with two fingers.  It climbs out hands-off.  It cruises hands-off.  It doesn’t even require re-trimming when putting out the first notch of flaps.  It’s an amazing little plane.  The visibility down and to the sides is fantastic, with glass that goes almost all the way to the floor.  You can almost see straight down.  Many thanks to Darrin for his 6:00am demo flight.  Even more so than before, I think I’ve found my plane.  Yes, I’m waiting for the Zenith CH-750 announcement at Oshkosh, but this thing would be hard to beat.

As always, this airshow turned out to be more about the people than the planes.  I talked with various people for hours this morning before I turned around and headed home.  Airplane people have to be about the nicest people around.  As an added bonus, I scored a copy of Chickenhawk for $3.50 from the cool guy at Barbarossa Books.  I first read it when I was about 12 years old, and have been unable to find a copy since.

Julia and I both took the day off of work yesterday to attend the Arlington Airshow and Fly-In.  It’s the third largest in the United States (after Oshkosh and Lakeland).  Aircraft attendance seemed down a bit this year from years past, maybe due to the frightening cost of 100LL.  We like to go on Friday to avoid the mobs of people there on the weekends.  One of the prettiest planes there was the 1946 Globe Swift in the picture above.  I can’t even imagine the amount of elbow grease that went into that shine.  Gorgeous.  They don’t make planes like this any more.

After years of trying, I finally managed to sit in a Zenith CH-701.  I fit (for certain values of “fit”).  It was a pretty tight squeeze, and the plane I sat in had the seat lowered just a bit, but it’s flyable.  There was also an awfully nice 701 for sale in the parking area.  I never did find the owner, but I talked to someone who had, and said it had a mid-time engine.  At $39k, it was quite the deal.  The color (dull grey) wasn’t my favorite, but paint is relatively cheap.  I was surprised as all heck to run into a guy with a Savannah VG over in the parking area.  The Savannah is an Italian rip-off of the 701 with some interesting modifications (which some claim are great, and some claim are bad).  Well, and some claim it’s not a rip-off at all, but only people with a vested interest in having it perceived that way.  The tail is slightly different from the 701, as is the skylight, the struts, the doors, and the flap actuators.  It’s also got vortex generators on the leading edge of the wing, rather than slats.  But it’s otherwise the exact same airplane.  Interestingly enough, I saw Chris Heinz over by the 701 booth.  Wonder if he saw the Savannah?  Oh, and the Zenith guy told me that they CH-750 was going to be officially announced at Oshkosh.  He either didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell any more details than that.  Looking forward to that.

Oddly enough, it turns out the most interesting plane I saw at the show was the Just Aircraft Highlander.  I’ve seen them in Trade-a-Plane once or twice, and I’ve even run across their web page, but I never had any idea what a nice plane they build.  They don’t really advertise, and they have one of the worst web pages I’ve ever seen.  Which is too bad, because they sell quite a remarkable little plane, both in kit form, and completed.  The local rep was at the show from Moses Lake, and is a great guy.  Got to sit in the plane for a while and talk.  The important details that caught my attention were:

• 700 lbs useful load - That’s two actual normal humans (as opposed to the mythical 175lb “FAA people”, full fuel, and 150lbs left over for cargo/luggage).  If that doesn’t sound amazing to you, you haven’t looked around at the competition.
• 34 cubic feet of cargo space - The plane I fly now has about four cubic feet (and is limited to 55 lbs).
• 150 ft take-off roll with one person (300 ft with two).
• TAIL DRAGGER!!!  Woohoo!!!
• Comes from the factory with 800×6 tires, can wear tundra tires.
• A stick - Not a yoke, a real stick like God intended airplanes to have.
• Toe brakes - Not this freakish handbrake thing like on a lot of the new planes.
• 27 mph stall speed.
• Enormous leg room - I’m 6′4″, and I actually slid the seat FORWARD one notch from the back-most position.
• Float attachments - Hey, I live in Western Washington - someday I want amphibs.
• Rotax 912ULS - Not everybody considers this a plus, but service and parts are starting to get pretty easy to find, and there’s no denying it’s a powerful, quiet, reliable little motor with great fuel consumption numbers (3.5gph in economy cruise, 5gph in normal cruise).
• Made in the USA!
• $75,000 - $80,000 with a pretty nice panel.

Just Aircraft needs to get the word out.  It’s a really really neat airplane at an exceptional price, but they’re killing themselves with their awful web page.  They leave out most of the information, the photos are tiny and hard to see, and there are errors in the information that they do include (you can’t tell me stall speed clean is 27 mph and still speed with 40 degrees of flaps is also 27 mph).  Guys, hire a local high school student for a couple of days to re-do your site.  Offer one up to the various airplane publications to fly and write an article on.  You’ve got a fantastic product, but unless somebody sees it in person, they’ll never know it even exists.

I’m seriously considering going back to the airshow tomorrow for a demo flight.  I may have finally found my plane.

The kids (well, the two older kids) camped out in the front yard last night.  Good times.

Took the kids flying this afternoon.  Let them choose where they wanted to go (within reason).  Morgan chose to see our house and her friend Allison’s house from the air, then fly around a little.  Joshua chose to see our house and his friend Rhett’s house, then fly around over Lake Stevens.  I let them both fly a little, and they had a great time.  Now Abby wants to go.

The CH-701 in the picture above was parked in front of my FBO when we go there.  I love 701s, so I had to have a picture.  I’ve seen this one at a couple of airshows (the lizard makes it easy to remember), as well as pictures of it on the Internet.  I suspect he’s here for the upcoming airshow.

Had some friends over for fireworks in the yard, grilled out on the deck, then went to the big fireworks show over on the north end of Lake Union.  We watched from the road just north of Kenmore Air Harbor.  Tried to take fireworks pictures with my iPhone.  This is the only one that was even slightly ok.  Ah well, didn’t feel like dragging the big camera over to the lake with me.

I work in our Seattle office one day a week to keep in touch with my team.  Seattle (ie, the Rat Colony) gives me the heebie-jeebies.  Here’s a great example of why.  This guy not only believes this, he believes it enough to go buy thirty individual little stick-on mailbox letters at Home Depot and painstakingly attach them to the trunk of his beater Honda to advertise his belief to the world:

Personally, I find it hard to believe that our Federal government is competent enough to pull off something like this, even if they wanted to.

Somebody wanted to see a picture of our one-eyed corgi.  Here he is, ten feet tall and bulletproof (in his own mind, at least).

It’s not all that often that I agree with anything on far-Left websites, but this piece is dead-on accurate.  Unfortunately.

The United States Supreme Court has finally ruled on District of Columbia et al. vs Heller.  As expected, we won.  Also as expected, it wasn’t a complete and total victory.  I took some time before work this morning to read the ruling. I’m no lawyer, but I took some interesting things away from it.  One, the Left is going to have to finally stop yammering on about how the 2nd Amendment only applies to militias.  It takes some remarkable mental gymnastics to get that meaning out of the text, but they’re pretty adept at torturing the meaning of words to the point of absurdity (obviously, it depends on what the meaning of “is” is, right?).  Second, this isn’t the sweeping restoration of gun rights across the board for the country that was hoped for in the best-case scenario.  It does not do away with licensing and registration of handguns, it merely requires that a handgun license be granted.  Again, I’m not a lawyer, but to my novice reading, it looks like it will also do away with the mandatory trigger lock absurdities.  Unless I’m misreading it, the ruling doesn’t completely do away with individual states continuing to infringe your rights in many ways, but at least it blunts their attacks.

In spite of it’s shortcomings, the ruling is an enormous victory for the citizens of Washington DC, New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.  These people have been denied their rights for far too long.  While this ruling doesn’t set all of the wrongs right, I do think it will provide a firm foundation for future court cases to restore things to their rightful state.  I don’t think Sarah Brady is a bad person, but I hope this ruling helps her understand how out of step she and her group are with America.  I don’t really expect her to just walk away and persue something positive with her life, but maybe this will encourage her to be less negative.

As an additional point to ponder, consider that the justices voted 5-4 on this case.  In other words, we as a country were one vote away from a ruling that would have been used for decades to come in further stripping us of our rights as citizens of this country.  This is additional proof of how critical making the right choice for Supreme Court appointments is.  I’m not a Bush fan, but appointing Roberts probably stands out as one of his most significant accomplishments.

Remember this in the upcoming election.  I, like most Conservatives, can’t get very excited about John McCain.  In many ways, the Left is going to win this election no matter which way it goes (there is no winner when the candidates are the most liberal Republican in the Senate vs. the most liberal Democrat in the Senate).  I find myself in the unenviable position of the Left in this country.  They relentlessly beat down everything Bush does as “bad” and “wrong”, and take great joy in pointing out every mistake, every weakness, and gloating over every mis-step.  But when you look beyond that, they have no answers, they offer only criticism.  They would be easier to take if they offered a useful solution along with pointing out the faults, but they never do.  And America lets them get away with it.  It’s a hundred times easier to tear down than to build up.  So now we’re faced with the likely election of a candidate who is offering “change” under the false pretences of “hope”.  He offers no answers, only criticism of what is, a promises that the future will be different.  So I’m in the position now that the Left has held for so long.  Obama is so obviously not the right answer, but I don’t really have a vastly superior answer to offer in his place.  McCain is just “more of the same”.  More Bush.  Great.  So once again, it’s a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils.  But I’m going to vote for McCain, in spite of most of what he stands for, because Obama is so much worse.  I don’t have a “McCain ‘08″ bumper sticker on my truck.  Instead, I have a “NObama ‘08” sticker.  I’m not happy about the Republican nominee, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to be in the position of negativity that the Left has occupied for so long.  But it is what it is.

Where’s Ronald Reagan when we need him most?

Julia and I decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and the new license and fly to Orcas Island (KORS) for date night.  Downtown (such as it is) East Sound is a short walk from the airport, and we ate out on the deck of a pizza place called Portofino Pizzeria that looked out over the water.  A long way to go for pizza (well, calzones, actually), but that wasn’t the point…

I passed.  I’m now officially (per the FAA) a pilot.  Somebody I was talking to at an airshow about a year ago made the point that anyone who has soloed an aircraft can legitimately call themselves a pilot, but now I’m one by the legal definition, rather than just the technical one.  I can’t honestly say that I aced my test, but I did reasonably well, and the inspector signed me off.  I didn’t scare him, which I guess is the big thing.  Now I’m itching for my first $100 hamburger…

Yesterday was my final flying lesson.  Well, that’s not really true.  My final lesson before I take the test for my first license.  There are plenty more endorsements and upgrades I’m planning on doing in the years to come, but this is a good start.  We had a ton of paperwork to do today along with a bunch of ground work and a stack of paperwork about the same size as that required to buy a house.  My instructor and I decided it would be much nicer to do it somewhere else, so we flew up to Orcas Island (KORS) and sat in a nice restaurant to do all the boring stuff.  We then did a ton of review on the way back to Arlington, including him pulling the power on me twice.  Both times over the water.  Both times, he had me down to within about 500 feet of the dirt before he let me put the power back in.  The good news was that we would have walked away from both landings, though one of them probably would have bent the plane a little (I came in just a bit high, and almost certainly would have overrun into the big grass field beyond the pavement, but that’s preferable to going swimming or putting us into the trees - as somebody on the pilots mailing list at work said, “The second the engine quits, the insurance company owns the airplane; don’t do anything heroic and get hurt trying to save them money”).

The real excitement of the day was my first take-off of the day from Arlington.  We took off to the South on runway 16 while listening to a Diamond DA-20 in the pattern heading for a landing on 16.  No problem, that’s normal.  Except that he didn’t have the vaguest idea what he was doing.  He was doing a right-hand pattern onto 34, not a left hand-pattern onto 16.  What that translates to is that he was on the wrong side of the airport landing directly at us.  He must have turned final about the time I rotated off the ground.  Neither my instructor nor I saw him until we were about 200 feet up, and he was over the threshold on short final about 100 feet lower.  I saw him, but my instructor didn’t, and my instructor was more than a little shocked when I almost stood the Sportstar up on it’s right wing and headed West as fast as that little Rotax would pull us.  He seemed pretty pleased with the way I handled it (ie, do what needs to be done right now rather than asking him for advice first - I had just looked at the airspeed seconds before seeing him, so I knew we had speed to spare to do a radical turn like that - I was pleased my hands did exactly the right thing without me having to think it through first).

Going head-to-head with somebody in a plane will take a few years off your life.  I hope the DA-20 pilot was a student, he was on the wrong side of the airport, flying the wrong pattern, and came in 180 degrees off from where he said he was, landing with about a 5 knot tailwind (and using the entire 5332 feet of pavement before he managed to get it stopped).  Bet he had to change his pants when he stopped shaking.  Bet he learns to read his charts, airport directory, and compass before he goes up again.  Oops.

Anyway, my oral and practical (flying) test is tomorrow.  This should be fun.  Or not.

We all went over to the peninsula today to visit the Turner Joy.  Great fun was had by all.  It’s amazing to wander around a ship of this size.  It’s enormous (well, not by Navy standards, but by normal standards).  It’s amazing how austere it is.  The captain’s sea quarters are smaller than my bathroom.  Even his larger cabin is surprsingly small and simple.  The enlisted guys lived in row upon row of bunks crammed into every possible corner of the ship (including some really undesirable ones).

There’s some really interesting history that goes along with this ship.  Go check out the wikipedia article.

We just got back from visiting the Flying Heritage Collection at Paine Field in Everett, WA.  Last time I visited, they were in a warehouse at Arlington Municipal Airport in Arlington, WA.  They’ve now moved into their new facility, and they’re now officially a museum (rather than a private collection that could be seen by appointment).  It’s a beautiful place.  Over the summer, they’re going to fly two of their planes every other Saturday.  Today, they flew their P-51D and the P-47D - two of the three best American fighters of WWII (along with the Hellcat).  Can’t wait to see the Fiesler Storch, the Hellcat, and the Spitfire fly.  It’s amazingly cool that Paul Allen keeps these planes in flying condition, and regularly shares the experience with the public.  As usual, though, the best part were the people I met; the Executive Director of the Museum, their head of Media Relations, a former British Air Force member (who had some great stories of England during wartime and the things he saw at his base), an American pilot shot down and captured in Germany, and a host of other interesting people.  Great Fathers Day experience (one day early).

There were a couple of Cessna 172s in the pattern with the warbirds at different times.  No doubt that was exciting for the 172 pilots.  At least it’s probably not as intimidating as what I saw last weekend at KAWO.  A nice lady was up doing her first solo in a 152.  She did three take-offs and three landings.  Two out of those three trips around the patch, she was in the pattern with a little British Alpha Jet.  Nothing like spicing up your first solo with a fire-breathing jet trainer/fighter racing around behind you.  Adding to the fun, her instructor didn’t let her use the runway with the wind, he had her use the much larger and longer runway that gave her a nice stiff crosswind.  Might as well make that first solo memorable.

The rest of the pictures will be posted here as soon as they finish uploading…

Ouch.  Took this a few days ago (gas is now $4.33 and diesel is $4.95 as of last night).  It’s now $173.25 to fill up the tank (35 gallons) in my truck.  Wow.  I need one of those fake hybrid stickers to put on the back.  Maybe I’d get better mileage.  Even if not, it would be worth it to see the looks of confusion on the faces of all the hippies here in Land of the Moonbats.

Today is my three year anniversary at Google.  Woot!

I took my FAA written pilot’s exam today and passed.  Woot!  Now I just have to do my review and take my flying test.  Hopefully within the next week.

We visited the Outback Christmas Tree and Kangaroo Farm in Arlington, WA today.  A lot more fun than it sounds like.  They’ve got emus, ostriches, several different kinds of kangaroos, wallabees, llamas, a pig, and other assorted beasts.  And it’s a petting zoo, for the most part, so great for the kids.  Cheap wholesome entertainment.

We went to Costco again today, and they’ve got plenty of rice.  Looks like it was just a “run on the bank” after all, no doubt spurred on by all of the food shortage articles in the media.  They are, however, still limiting purchases:

I visited Costco in Woodinville, WA Saturday morning, right at opening.  I had my doubts about the reality of the shortages that are showing up all over the news, and needed to shop, anyway, so I thought I’d check it out for myself.  They had eight big warehouse guys escorting two pallets of rice out to the showroom floor just about the time I arrived.  Six of the eight then stayed with the rice, handing it out to customers as needed.  I don’t know if they were expecting trouble or what, but it was distinctly odd.  Both pallets were completely sold out by the time I left the store about 45 minutes later.

I talked with two of the warehouse guys independent of each other, playing dumb and asking what was going on.  Both said they were receiving normal shipments, just as they always had, but that customers were spooked and buying a lot more than normal.  Both told me they expected their next rice shipment on Tuesday.  One of them also told me (then showed me) that they were completely out of “general purpose”
flour, and only had some sort of specialized flour (bread-making?  I forget) in stock.  Both swore up and down (and I have no reason to think they were being less than honest) that there were no shortages, just a
run on things that they blamed on the media.  There was enough cooking oil to fill a swimming pool, no shortages there.

This, of course, proves nothing as far as the cause of the shortages, but whatever the reason, they are actually real.  I was surprised.  I figured it was the “black helicopter” crowd over-reacting.

The National Sporting Goods Association has reported on 2006 sporting goods sales by category.  Bet this didn’t make your local news report.  Anybody who tells you that shooting is not important to Americans, or is only done by backwards backwoods yahoos is grossly misinformed:

1. exercise, $5.22 billion;
2. hunting and firearms, $3.71 billion;
3. golf, $3.66 billion;
4. athletic goods team sales, $2.62 billion;
5. fishing tackle, $2.22 billion;
6. camping, $1.53 billion;
7. optics, $1.01 billion;
8. snow skiing, $615.0 million;
9. billiards / indoor games, $570.9 million; and
10. tennis, $419.8 million.

Somebody go tell the Brady Bunch that as usual, they’re clueless.  It really doesn’t seem possible that they don’t know how what they’re doing.  They’re distorting the truth and spreading their propaganda through FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).  They love to prey on the uninformed, primarily through trying to manipulate people with feelings, rather than logic or facts.  The facts on what they’re doing show them to be wrong every single time on pretty much every single claim they make.  As a result, they stick with inventing phrases like the “gun show loophole”, which sounds like something that really needs fixing (after all, loopholes are a bad thing, right?), except that the so-called loophole isn’t.  Gun dealers are required to do a federal background check on gun purchasers, whereas private sellers (ie, me selling one of my guns to my next-door neighbor) are not (except for one or two states).  That’s it.  Really.  This is the “loophole” they love to go on and on about.  See the section in the wikipedia Gun Show entry for more information.  If the public were better-informed, the Brady Bunch would be looking for real jobs.

Yay, after years of extreme suckage, the WSDOT has finally put up a nice new webcam at KAWO!  It’s good to have METARS, but even better to be able to pull up an image before I drive 45 minutes to the airport.

I live way out in the woods northeast of Seattle.  I commute down into Kirkland, a suburb across the lake east of Seattle, four days a week.  One day a week, though, I drive to our office in the Rat Colony of Seattle.  The drivers in Seattle are aggressive and rude, but no more so than any other big city.  Where Seattle really stands out is with the other users who share the road, the pedestrians and particularly the bicyclists.

In regular life, you come up to an intersection, look at the pedestrians who want to cross the road, and try to decide what they’re going to do.  If possible, you make eye contact.  That usually works out pretty well.  Everybody involved usually does what’s reasonable.

Not so when driving in Seattle.  In Seattle, the pedestrians have attitude.  As far as they’re concerned, they go first.  Period.  They have priority in every situation.  Period.  It’s very disconcerting when people step off the curb in front of you, literally without even looking at you.  It’s even more disconcerting when they do look at you, straight in the eye, then step off in front of you anyway.

As scary as all of this is, it’s nothing compared to the bicyclists.  They bicyclists in Seattle all act as though they are some kind of invincible deities, to whom traffic laws and physics do not apply.  Their ownership of the roads is unquestionable (at least by them).  I’ve stomped on the brakes many times when a cyclist aggressively cuts me off and butts into my lane.  They will ride ride up the center of a lane, holding up a dozen cars, each of whom has to pull into the oncoming traffic lane to get around the idiot, only to have the cyclist pass all of the cars up at a stop light, get out in front again, then all the cars have to do the same thing all over again.  It takes a special kind of genius to ride a bike in the city.

The icing, though, is the four-way-stop a block from my office building.  Three times in the last three months, I’ve pulled up to the stop sign with a cyclist coming at me from the opposite side, come to a full stop, then made a left through the intersection, and had the oncoming cyclist ride straight through the stop sign, completely ignoring it.  Two of the three have actually had the gall to yell at me.  My theory is that they breathe too many exhaust fumes riding around with all the cars.  It’s just not rational.  When 200 lb. vehicles mix aggressively with 3500 lb vehicles, it’s inevitable that there will be incidents.  And when there are, the physics of who will prevail is pretty cut and dried.  I have a friend who mixed it up with a car on his bicycle just over six months ago, and is still not back at work full time.

The most irritating thing about cyclists is that they shriek and whine about the law saying they are protected as automobiles, and have every right to the road, equal to that of cars.  But then, when the law isn’t convenient, they ride right through stop lights and stop signs, or take detours on the sidewalks, as though the law did not apply to them.  They like it both ways.  As Douglas Adams said, they seem to be in a moral high ground that only cyclists inhabit.  Even in the rare case where the car is in the wrong and the cyclist is in the right, I don’t understand the mindset of a rider aggressively cutting a car off.  Sure, your heirs might sue the driver and win, but what consolation is that to you while you’re burning in hell?

KVI produced a great commercial for these guys.  Click here to listen.  And laugh.

While I was in Denver last week, I bought a new set of photographic lights at Camera Trader.  They had been used for one day by a guy who couldn’t figure out how to use them, then returned.  They were marked down about $200 off the normal price, so I just couldn’t pass them up.  Got them all fired up at home today, and here’s one of the results.  This is the insides of a Small Wonder Labs DSW-40 40 meter QRP CW transceiver that I built a few years ago (click on the picture for the full resolution version).

The following forty items are the things you must believe in order to think gun control is a good thing.  Good luck.

1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, and Chicago cops
need guns.

2. Washington DC’s low murder rate of 80.6 per 100,000 is due to
strict gun control, and Arlington, VA’s high murder rate of 1.6 per
100,000 is due to the lack of gun control.

3. Statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control but
statistics showing increasing murder rates after gun control are “just
statistics.”

4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into
effect in 1994, are responsible for the decrease in violent crime
rates, which have been declining since 1991.

5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a
shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear
of such a lunatic is paranoid.

6. The more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.

7. An intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if
shot with a .357 Magnum will get angry and kill you.

8. A woman raped and strangled is morally superior to a woman with a
smoking gun and a dead rapist at her feet.

9. When confronted by violent criminals, you should “put up no defense
— give them what they want, or run” (Handgun Control Inc. Chairman
Pete Shields, Guns Don’t Die - People Do, 1981, p. 125).

10. The New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice
about guns; just like Guns and Ammo has some excellent treatises on
heart surgery.

11. One should consult an automotive engineer for safer seatbelts, a
civil engineer for a better bridge, a surgeon for spinal paralysis, a
computer programmer for Y2K problems, and Sarah Brady [or Sheena
Duncan, Adele Kirsten, Peter Storey, etc.] for firearms expertise.

12. The 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1791, refers to the National Guard,
which was created by an act of Congress in 1903.

13. The National Guard, funded by the federal government, occupying
property leased to the federal government, using weapons owned by the
federal government, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a
state militia.

14. These phrases,” right of the people peaceably to assemble,” “right
of the people to be secure in their homes,” “enumeration’s herein of
certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by
the people,” and “The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the
states respectively, and to the people,” all refer to individuals, but
“the right of the people to keep and bear arms” refers to the state.

15. We don’t need guns against an oppressive government, because the
Constitution has internal safeguards, but we should ban and seize all
guns, thereby violating the 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendments to that
Constitution.

16. Rifles and handguns aren’t necessary to national defense, which is
why the army has millions of them.

17. Private citizens shouldn’t have handguns, because they serve no
military purpose, and private citizens shouldn’t have “assault
rifles,” because they are military weapons.

18. The ready availability of guns today, with waiting periods,
background checks, fingerprinting, government forms, et cetera, is
responsible for recent school shootings,compared to the lack of school
shootings in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, which resulted from the
availability of guns at hardware stores, surplus stores, gas stations,
variety stores, mail order, et cetera.

19. The NRA’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign about kids
handling guns is propaganda, and the anti-gun lobby’s attempt to run a
“don’t touch” campaign is responsible social activity.

20. Guns are so complex that special training is necessary to use them
properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.

21. A handgun, with up to 4 controls, is far too complex for the
typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile that only
has 20.

22. Women are just as intelligent and capable as men but a woman with
a gun is “an accident waiting to happen” and gun makers’
advertisements aimed at women are “preying on their fears.”

23. Ordinary people in the presence of guns turn into slaughtering
butchers but revert to normal when the weapon is removed.

24. Guns cause violence, which is why there are so many mass killings
at gun shows.

25. A majority of the population supports gun control, just like a
majority of the population supported owning slaves.

26. A self-loading small arm can legitimately be considered to be a
“weapon of mass destruction” or an “assault weapon.”

27. Most people can’t be trusted, so we should have laws against guns,
which most people will abide by because they can be trusted.

28. The right of online pornographers to exist cannot be questioned
because it is constitutionally protected by the Bill of Rights, but
the use of handguns for self defense is not really protected by the
Bill of Rights.

29. Free speech entitles one to own newspapers, transmitters,
computers, and typewriters, but self-defense only justifies bare
hands.

30. The ACLU is good because it uncompromisingly defends certain parts
of the Constitution, and the NRA is bad, because it defends other
parts of the Constitution.

31. Charlton Heston as president of the NRA is a shill who should be
ignored, but Michael Douglas as a representative of Handgun Control,
Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the
UN arms control summit.

32. Police operate with backup within groups, which is why they need
larger capacity pistol magazines than do “civilians” who must face
criminals alone and therefore need less ammunition.

33. We should ban “Saturday Night Specials” and other inexpensive guns
because it’s not fair that poor people have access to guns too.

34. Police officers, who qualify with their duty weapons once or twice
a year, have some special Jedi-like mastery over handguns that private
citizens can never hope to obtain.

35. Private citizens don’t need a gun for self-protection because the
police are there to protect them even though the Supreme Court says
the police are not responsible for their protection.

36. Citizens don’t need to carry a gun for personal protection but
police chiefs, who are desk-bound administrators who work in a
building filled with cops, need a gun.

37. “Assault weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers
of people, which is why the police need them but “civilians” do not.

38. When Microsoft pressures its distributors to give Microsoft
preferential promotion, that’s bad; but when the Federal government
pressures cities to buy guns only from Smith & Wesson, that’s good.

39. Trigger locks do not interfere with the ability to use a gun for
defensive purposes, which is why you see police officers with one on
their duty weapon.

40. When Handgun Control, Inc., says they want to “keep guns out of
the wrong hands,” they don’t mean you. Really.

I didn’t write this, it seems to go around unattributed in e-mail from time to time.  The most recent source I found attributes the list to an essay by Michael Z. Williamson.

I keep forgetting to post this.  I finally put a webcam back up a couple of months back.  It usually points at my back yard, though I move it every once in a while for amusement, and sometimes I turn it off completely.  When it’s on, it updates every five minutes.  See what Jeff’s back yard in rural Snohomish County, Washington looks like!  Whee!  From time to time, you may catch a coyote, deer, or rabbits on the screen.  Or even more likely, one of the kids, dogs, or goats.  Or rain.  As my old pastor once told us, it only rains twice a year in Washington; once for six months, then again for three months.

While I’m on the subject of webcams, this is the closest webcam to my house that I know of, located at Harvey Field (S43), about three or four miles north of here.  Anyway, click here for back yard webcam goodness.

My buddy Tim (from way back in high school) and his brother have a fun new blog called Ask Us and SHUT UP.  In typical Tim form, the language is not for the kiddies, but it’s funny as heck.  Go have a look (but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

 Ok, this one wasn’t really a lesson.  Due to our trip to New Mexico and our upcoming trip to Denver, I was going to have to go five or six weeks without flying.  Julia talked me into going just for the fun of it, even though the only lesson I have left is a review (before my test).  It was actually pretty fun.  I cleared it with my instructor, then flew down to my house and circled around a few times while the kids ran outside and waved at me.  Did a little bit of sight-seeing around the area, then went back and landed.  Looking forward to finishing up my license so I can go do this any time I want to!  Got a quick picture of my house from the air with the camera on my phone.

We all went to New Mexico for the weekend for a family wedding.  Got to spend about three or four hours in Alamogordo where I grew up.  Mom still lives in the same house we moved into in about 1977.  Didn’t get to see any friends while I was in town, but I got to take the kids out wandering in the desert where I used to play as a kid.  We found rabbits and lizards, but no snakes or horned toads.  Forgot just how pretty the blue New Mexico skies and sunsets are.  Also forgot about the annoying wind at certain times of the year.  Got to eat fantastic Mexican food at La Posta in Las Cruces while I was there, too.  You can find good food called Mexican Food in Washington, but it isn’t actually Mexican.  It’s sort of an American/Mexican/Tex-Mex blend.  It’s tasty (well, some of it is), but it’s about as authentic as Taco Bell.  Also got to see a bunch of family I haven’t seen in many years.  My cousin Craig has the coolest job ever.  Karla has like seventeen kids now (last time I saw her, she had one).  And Commie Kelly has a brand-new baby.

I’m not sure there’s any rational person alive who thinks gun buy-backs do the least bit to reduce the number of “bad” guns on the street.  It seems to basically be a trade-in program payed for by the taxpayer.  How much you want to bet that half the buy-back money goes to buy new guns?  I’ve always wondered if I could set up a booth outside the police station and get first dibs on the guns going in for the buy-back program.  I suspect most of the guns people bring in are crap (I’ve got a couple I’d love to unload for a $250 buy-back - it’s more than I could legitimately sell them for), but there are bound to be some gems among the rot that I’d pay more than $250 for.  I suspect the cops wouldn’t find my little enterprise amusing, however.  Part of becoming a cop seems to be having your sense of humor surgically removed.

I attended a seminar by the AOPA Air Safety Foundation last night at the Museum of Flight on the Top Five Mistakes Pilots Make (that get them killed).  The presenter was a guy named Pat Shaub.  Very worthwhile couple of hours.  Pat was a great presenter, and gave me quite a bit to think about.  The most important thing I walked away from the siminar with was a decision to get a little bit of actual IFR time with my instructor, even though I don’t technically need that training for my Sport Pilot license.  With the almost permanent cloud cover nine months out of the year here in the Pacific Northwest, the danger of getting caught on top with no way down except through the clouds is very real.  While I’ve pretty much mastered instrument flying on X-Plane, I do realize that flying in actual instrument conditions (where your inner ear is saying something different than what your eyes are seeing) isn’t the same as sitting in front of a computer screen playing a game.  At the same time, though, I think the simulator has been valuable in learning to scan the instruments quickly and well, as well as learning about the lag between moving the stick and the reaction of the aircraft and the instruments.  Guess we’ll see when the time comes.

So what is it about teaching that attracts so many flakes? Both I and my kids have had some wonderful teachers over the years. My high school calculus teacher, Mr. Dooley, will forever stand out in my mind as an exceptional teacher. As will my high school German teacher, and my high school Physics teacher. All of them were passionate about their work, taking joy in the understanding of their students, and going far above and beyond what was required of them to inspire their students to learn. I also had a junior high teacher who came back from lunch each day so drunk he could barely remain vertical, and a high school chemistry teacher who was there because it was a place where she could dominate people who were “less” than her and were unable to fight back (though we certainly found creative ways to do so over time). A lot of them were there because it’s a job where they got two months of vacation every year. While some of the most dedicated and passionate people I have ever known have been teachers, pretty much all of the biggest flakes I’ve ever met have been, as well. Think about it. Think of the flakiest, most useless, most hippie 60s throwback people you’ve ever met, and I’ll bet you 90% of those people were teachers. Why is that?

Any profession has a spectrum of quality. Those who are there because they love it, and those who are there because they kind of just ended up there and it pays the bills. I went to New Mexico State University and was in the College of Engineering (EE, specifically). It was widely accepted that if you couldn’t hack engineering, you changed majors to business. If you couldn’t hack it in business, you switched to education.

My two older kids both have exceptionally good teachers this year. It hasn’t always been so, but they’ve been pretty lucky so far. Why am I ranting about teachers this morning? Because I ran across this. Go ahead, read it. It’ll shock you. These people are tasked with shaping the minds and thoughts of our children. Their futures. And when shaping children, you’re shaping the leaders of tomorrow, and therefore shaping all of our futures. Worst of all, it’s happening right here in Washington. I’m not sure if I should be sad or scared. But I certainly feel for thse children being subject to the twisting of their little minds by these people. They’re having the seeds of socialism planted firmly in their heads from the earliest age possible, and being taught that this is right, and other ideas are wrong. They’re not being taught that these are two competing (but possibly valid) ways of solving problems. They’re being taught that one is right and one is wrong. I can understand this approach if you send your kids to a religion-oriented school, but if there is one lesson we can take from the history of the world, it’s that Socialism, in all it’s forms, fails. Every single time. You can’t tax yourselves into prosperity. The world is not fair. There will always be “haves” and “have nots”, and no amount of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is going to change that. This is wonderfully illustrated by Kurt Vonnegut in his story Harrison Bergeron. Also in the Bible by Jesus, in John 12:8, “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

While we’re fortunate not to have the teachers mentioned in the article above in the public school system, there are certainly plenty of them there. The best defense we have as parents against this type of thing is a school voucher system. Let parents send kids to the school that is most closely aligned with their own beliefs. Teacher of all beliefs will be valued (likely even these in the article), and those with no teaching ability will find themselves out of work. Capitalism isn’t 100% flawless, but it’s the best system ever devised by man for finding separating the wheat from the chaff. Let market forces determine the value of teachers and schools. It’s harsh if you’re one of the teacher not up to the task of teaching, but then again, it’s probably not much of a surprise to them. As the Left is so fond of saying, “it’s for the children”.

I did my short solo cross-country today. Technically, I only had to visit one other airport, but it had to be at least 25nm away from where I started, so given the airspace mess of Western Washington, it ended up easier to visit two other airport again to get the required 25 mile leg. I went KAWO KBVS S43 KAWO.

It was fun going back to Harvey again after not landing there for eight months or so. Man, that runway is narrow. Had about a five knot crosswind, and ended up much closer to the left edge than I had intended. I got a little slow on short final into Harvey and had to blip the throttle up just a tad to give myself a better margin over the fence. No real danger, it just annoyed me because I’m usually very very meticulous about my speed on final.

Beautiful day, though, not a cloud in the sky. Today was my last normal lesson. I’ve now completed everything necessary to take my flight test and my oral test. I have a three-hour review with my instructor, then it’s time to face the examiner. Hmm, I should study…

On a very sad note, while I was flying yesterday, another plane took off from Arlington and crashed after losing power. Turns out the people at my FBO knew the two women on board.  The King5 satellite news truck was hanging out in the parking lot next to my FBO at the airport all afternoon. They were apparently looking for people to interview, and probably getting some background shots of planes taking off and landing.

Today was my long solo cross-country. Went out to Orcas Island again. Wow, was it amazing. Lots of clouds. I’ve been waiting six weeks for a break in the weather, and today was finally close enough to call it good. Just like last time, I went KAWO KBVS KORS KAWO. I was pretty pressed for time (had to get the plane back by 1pm for the next student), so I didn’t get to hang around Orcas like I had hoped.

I just can’t get over how cold these little Rotax 912-powered beasties run. Here’s a picture of the panel (yeah, I know you can’t read the guages):

Per the OAT (outside air temperature guage), it’s in the low 30s outside:

Now have a look at the cylinder temperature and the oil temperature:

Now keep in mind that this is after something over an hour of hard working. I didn’t just fire the thing up. Also, the oil pressure sure runs low. It’s in the green, but only by a hair:

I need to ask my instructor about this. Or better yet, the mechanic. My FBO has a really cool mechanic who is willing to let me hang around, hand him tools, and ask questions while he works. I’ve already learned a lot from him just by listening while he works.

It’s one thing to read in the news that they’re gone, it’s quite another to see their facility at KAWO (Arlington, WA) sitting forlorn and empty.  Even if the ownership was somewhat…  um… “ethically challenged”, it’s a shame to see them gone.  Today was the first day I have flown at Arlington without the dozens of little Robinson R-22s buzzing around everywhere I look.  Sad.

Long story, but due to some scheduling conflicts, Abby got to come to the office with me for about two hours this morning.  She loved the free food.

The other day, I was writing about feeling alienated in my own workplace. Well, I ran across this story today in Wired. Seems I was right. The following is the amount of money donated by my cow-orkers to the presidential campaigns of the current candidates:

Hillary Clinton: $46,610
Barack Obama: $97,771
Ron Paul: $41,342
John McCain: $1,550
Mike Huckabee: $400
Mitt Romney: $0
Nice, huh? Told ya.

The web is awesome, but some companies still have a long way to go to make buying their products online a pleasant experience.  My irritation started with shopping for truck canopies a couple of years ago.  Yep, there were dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of models available.  You could get every possible detail you’d ever want about every single aspect of their design, construction, and use, except one little thing.  The price.  Try as I might, no matter how deeply I dug, I couldn’t even find the MSRP, much less an actual price.  From any manufacturer.  Not even one.  I gave up shopping for a canopy online, and in the years since, the situation might have changed, but it still hasn’t for many companies.

Tri-M Systems, for example, makes some wicked cool PC-104 and embedded system hardware.  But there’s not a price to be found on their site.  You can “Request a quote” all day long, but that makes the process of coming up with a price-conscious hardware solution so painful that it’s much easier to just go elsewhere.  I thought I could solve this by requesting a printed catalog.  I ordered one from the web site, and a few weeks later (and several times per year since), I got catalogs in the mail chock full of wonderfully cool gadgets that would solve all sorts of interesting problems, all completely without prices.

Back in the early 90s, I was considering using QNX for an internal project at work.  FreeBSD would work, but QNX looked like a better fit, given the limited hardware.  I e-mailed QNX for product info, and when I received the pricing, I suddenly understood why they kept it so secret.  It was on the order of $10,000 for a full-blown development suite with licenses, etc. for QNX.  For a system that was about 90% equivalent to the completely free FreeBSD distro.  In that case, I think it was simple embarrassment that led them to their secrecy.  They wanted a chance for the salesperson to convince you that you couldn’t live without the product before they sprung the price on you.

Being a radio nut as well as someone who likes to go remote places, I enjoy portable HF radio operations.  By far the two neatest radios in this category are the Q-Mac HF90 and the Vertex VX-1210.   Q-Mac is happy to give you a price via e-mail (which I’ve done), but they offer about ten different variations on their setups, plus numerous accessories, and you can’t simply ask for a price list to compare all of the options and accessories to decide how you’d like to spend your money.  Vertex Standard is even worse.  They’ve divided up their dealers into regions, and only dealers in your region are allowed to give you a price and sell you anything.  And all dealers are not the same.  Some are much more responsive than others, and many don’t even seem to have a web presence.  You can’t simply go to the dealer with the best price (or the most helpful, or with the most information), you have to use the dealer in your region, regardless of helpfulness or quality.

Why?  Ok, in the pre-web days when you sent out printed catalogs once a year and prices fluctuated a lot, I could see at least a little point in having to call for a price.  The dealer who sent out his catalogs two weeks later than the other guys might advertise a price 10% lower (due to, let’s say, fluctuations in the Yen vs. the Dollar), but on the web, prices can be updated instantly.  90% of the pricing information I’ve gathered on the HF90 and the VX-1210 is anecdotal.  People buy them, then post what they bought and what they paid to various ham mailing lists.  I’m considering creating about ten fake hotmail accounts, then mailing Q-Mac for prices on all the various options (one variation per fake e-mail account), then posting the info as a public service.  I don’t know about the public at large, but on the ham radio mailing lists, this pricing BS causes endless irritation.  Maybe the federal government decides what features it wants, then buys what fits that need regardless of the price, but normal people don’t work that way.  Everything is a trade-off.  Sure, you want the best, but most of us can’t afford it.  We have to weigh the various choices and come up with a compromise that meets enough of our needs to get the job done, but stay within our budgets.  These companies actively work to limit the amount of information available to make wise decisions.  It pisses me of.

A really smart buddy of mine just wrote a spiffy Matrix Inversion Calculator.  Just in case you need any matrixes inverted for an upcoming social event or something.

We’ve had a lousy winter up until now.  Cold, cloudy, and rainy, but no real snow.  We finally got some, and we’re supposed to have a bunch more on the way this evening.  Schools were closed and everything.  Woo woo.

We went to the Boat Show. My boss bought us tickets (he rocks). Yeah, I know, the picture above is a plane, not a boat. But it’s a float plane, and I took it from the deck of a boat on Lake Union. We also went to the indoor part of the boat show, and parked just down the row from this spiffy vehicle:

Fred Thompson, the only conservative running for President in 2008, has withdrawn his candidacy today.  It’s a sad day, as the remaining choices on the Republican side aren’t all that great (though at least they’re better than the liberal side).  Now vying for the Republican nomination, we have a pro-war Liberal (Giuliani), the anti-war (and slightly nutcase) sort-of-Conservative (Ron Paul), the unelectable social Conservative (Mike Huckabee), the schizophrenic sometimes Liberal sometimes Conservative (John McCain), and last, but not least, the Conservative-except-for-immigration-open-borders-and-guns (Mitt Romney).  Yay.  Once again, it’s come down to choosing the lesser evil.  Only it’s not even clear which one of these clowns is the lesser evil.  Can we have Ronald Reagan back, please?  I’m scared to think he might have been the last Conservative president this country ever has.

My wife bought me a 56-foot Rohn HBX tower for my birthday.  Woot!  Antenna time!  This is going to be a real project…

 Ever had fifteen tons of gravel delivered to your house?  That’s approximately one metric buttload of rocks.  Guess it’s time to work on the potholes in the dirt road…

Seven weeks after the accident, we finally got our Tahoe back.  I was impressed with the quality of the work.  At the time of the accident, were weren’t even sure if they would total it or not, and now it’s back to looking like brand new.

Ok, now that was fun. Flew KAWO to KBVS to KORS and back to KAWO. It was absolutely gorgeous. Flew over Whidbey Island NAS as a US Navy DC-9 was taking off beneath us.

Lesson 16 was mostly review. It’s been a while since I’ve flown (November and December are busy months), and I needed to brush up on some things.

Lesson 17 was fun. We did short-field take-offs and landings, plus some more review. That little Sportstar will really get up and go in a hurry, even with two on board. Tomorrow is my dual cross-country. Much fun.

We finally got a Cabelas in Washington.  They hung a Supercub inside, except it’s not a Supercub, it’s a Cub with tundra tires trying to pass as a Supercub.  No flaps, no skylight, and exposed cylinder heads, so definitely not a PA-18.  They did, however, put the pilot in the front seat, which you can do in a Supercub, but not a Cub.  If they’d move the pilot to the back seat, it would be a pretty cool display.  They had some fun toys inside.  These are two of my favorites, the gas-powered blender and the electric-powered beer cooler:

 

The best part of all was that I got 23.8 miles per gallon driving down there (a new personal record).  Not bad for 6.6 Liters of turbocharged V-8.

Got an MRI today for my wrist/hand, which was a new and interesting experience.  A month after the car accident in Canada, it still hurts almost constantly.  It was easy enough, but wow, what a loud machine.  The technician gave me headphones and a list of CDs and asked me what music I wanted to listen to.  I told her that I’d prefer not to have any music, and she replied that I should because the machine was very very loud.  I asked her how listening to music cranked up loud enough to drown out the machine was any better for my ears than just listening to the machine itself, and she got this weird look on her face like this had never occurred to her before.  Drowning out one noise with another doesn’t make things any quieter.  At any rate, I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to look at the pictures of the inside of my hand when we were done.

 

That’s a picture of one of the major intersections in Woodinville under three feet of water.  Made an unholy mess of traffic, and several roads (including at least two highways) washed away.  A quick (less than 60 minutes) trip to get the kids at school ended up taking over eight hours.  Fortunately, a friend picked the kids up at school so they weren’t stuck there all night.  Abby and I finally gave up on getting home and stopped for dinner.

 

We took a week off for a family vacation in Ucluelet, BC. Stayed at the Black Rock Beach House. Wow, what a pretty place. BC is an
interesting cross between Washington and Alaska (which makes a certain amount of sense since it sits directly between the two). It’s as
pretty as Alaska, but with a somewhat higher population density.

We did a bit of hiking and a lot of hanging out. The beach was about fifty feet from the back door of the house, so the kids spent a lot of
time down at the water.

 

The highlight of the trip was undoubtedly the last day. We were driving down to the south end of Ucluelet to hike around at the
lighthouse. I had just headed up a pretty good hill that climbed up and to the left, when a car came over the top of the hill from the
other direction about double the speed limit. There was ice on my side of the hill, so the driver immediately slammed on the brakes,
locked up all four tires, and slid into our lane and hit us head-on. We (and the Mounties) figure we were doing about 20mph and she was
doing about 40mph. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s the same thing as hitting a parked car while travelling 60mph.
Fortunately, we were in a Tahoe, and she was in a Hyundai. I’ll leave it to you to guess who won that battle of mass. Final score was two
sprained wrists (me and my older daughter) and some back and neck pain (my wife). The other two kids had no injuries. We felt pretty lucky about the whole thing. Oh, and of course the other driver was from California. No surprises there.

Thanks to the wonderful hospitality and kindness of the volunteer firefighters, the volunteer paramedics, the staff at the Tofino
Hospital, the manager of the local car rental place, and the people who rented the house to us, we finally ended up all patched up and in
a rental big enough to get five of us plus a week worth of luggage back home to Washington. Can’t say enough nice things about the
people who helped us. Can’t say enough bad things about California drivers.

I got an iPhone. Cool! Work bought it for me. Day one impressions are that it’s wicked slick. More later.

Julia and I went down to Palm Springs for a few days away from work and the kids. It was a trip she earned with her company, so they best part was that someone else paid the hotel and airfare. We stayed at one of the thousands of very nice golf-oriented resorts. This would have been a good thing, except neither of us have any interest in golf. Fortunately, we were only a few miles from much more
interesting things, so we did a lot of walking and rented a car for some exploring.

There are a ton of things to see in the area. We’re not much for shopping, but we walked down to the main shopping area of town one
afternoon just to see what there was to see. Lots of really fancy expensive places that sell things that we neither want nor need, but
we stopped at a few neat stores. One of them specialized in paintings of cats and mice playing. I’m not much into art, but it was kind of
neat. There’s a great little map shop right on the main road with more maps, charts, and map-related books than I’ve seen in a long
time. We also stopped at what seemed to be the only gun store in town, and had an interesting conversation with the owner about what
all the irritating new laws are doing to the industry in California. Many companies, like Barratt, have simply chosen to refuse to do
business with the State of California in any capacity, including law enforcement. I think that’s a fantastic idea.

We stopped at the local British car dealership, just to see what they had. Not that we were buying, but hey, we were on vacation, why not? Julia found her favorite car, a Bentley Continental. Oooh, pretty. I found my favorite, as well. An Aston Martin Vanquish S. The only one I’ve ever seen in the country. It was already sold ($225k), so no chance of driving home in it.

We also visited the Living Desert Zoo and the Joshua Tree National Park. Much fun.

The most fun (for me, at least) was the Palm Springs Air Museum. It was the day before Veterans Day, and the place was packed to the roof with vets. There were a bunch of them volunteering, and if you were interested, one of them would hang out with you for the duration of your visit, and tell you anything you wanted to know about every plane in the place. I ended up with a WWII Navy pilot who had flown Douglas dive-bombers against the Japanese. He knew every detail about every single plane in the Navy half of the museum, and had flown most of them himself at least once. I spent a couple of hours listening to his stories. These guys were amazing people. It would be hard to pick a favorite, but getting to watch them run their Catalina PBY (the “Aluminum Falcon”) up to full power was pretty impressive. Climbing through the B-17 from tip to tail was an experience I won’t soon forget. Neat place, worth a visit.

I read stuff like this all the time, for the same reason I subscribe to lots of Leftist and anti-gun mailing lists - know your enemy.  A common theme from the Left (particularly the extreme Left) is that the evil Neocons have brainwashed America, and the only reasons Americans could possibly support Issue X (in this case, war with Iran) is that they’ve been duped by the duplicitous and evil Right.  The more you read, the more you realize that this group of people genuinely believes that no normal or “enlightened” person could possibly have any type of conservative views without having been tricked into them.  I’ve had some conversations with some of these people (actually, the company I work for is stocked to the roof with them), and it’s both a fascinating and disturbing experience.  They have an enormous shared mythology of politics in America, complete with their own vocabulary.  Listening to a group of them talk is very much like listening to my eleven-year-old and his friends discussing the amazingly intricate details (all of which they have meticulously and carefully memorized) of Pokemon.  The make-believe world has literally come alive for them, and they discuss the characters on their playing cards as though they lived and breathed.  One kids will discuss what Picachu might do in this or that situation, and the other kids will jump in and argue until they all agree on what might happen if Pokemon X battles Pokemon Y.  It’s much the same with the Lefties.  One of them will answer a random question with “Haliburton”, and they’ll all nod sagely.  The disconnect from reality is shockingly similar, but somehow much less disturbing in the eleven-year-olds.  Am I immune to this?  Above it?  No, but unlike so many of these people, I do try to see both sides.  I watch both Fox and CNN.  I read both pro- and anti-gun literature.  I read the Drudge Report and the Daily Kos.  I listen to conservative and liberal talk radio (though that’s one place the Left has totally failed to invade, despite repeated attempts and suitcases full of money).  I even read the Seattle Times every once in a while (so I can read yesterday’s news with a wildly liberal slant).  I do try to get balanced news, and base my decisions on that.  Besides Fox News, though, it’s hard to get a non-liberal slant on television.  The Left owns the media, lock stock and barrel.

I used to wonder how it was that we, as Americans, could all grow up in the same country and come to such vastly differing views on things.  After all, we’re all exposed to the same newspapers, magazines, and television.  But I’ve got a theory.  When I was a kid, there was some truth in that.  There was the local newspaper, plus ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS.  That was it.  These days, I have something like 200 channels on my satellite dish, three local newspapers, plus the web.  People today have the option of tailoring their news sources to fit their beliefs, further reinforcing their beliefs, in a vicious cycle.  Couple that with the fact that Conservatives and Christians are deserting the core cities in droves; leaving for the suburbs and beyond, and you further reinforce the problem of never running into an opposing viewpoint that might make you think.  All of your news sources, plus everyone you know does nothing but solidify your viewpoints, because everyone you know and everything you read is self-selected to tell you what you already know.  As a Christian Conservative who lives in a very rural area, yet works in an urban one (almost all of my co-workers live in the city of Seattle, and an astonishing percentage of them are foreigners to boot), I’m an alien in my own workplace.  It gets to you after a while.  You start to lose faith in people.  If I don’t leave Washington every once in a while, I almost start to believe that people really are like this everywhere, and that we’re doomed as a nation.  But the occasional trip away from the influence of the big city helps restore my hope.  After spending about four years here without really traveling anywhere (except the Bay Area, which is even worse), I made a trip to Kansas City to see my in-laws.  What a profound shock.  I had forgotten people could be nice.  I had forgotten how, as a kid, everyone on the road used to wave hello as they drove by.  I had forgotten what it was like to be wished a “good morning” by a complete stranger, for no reason at all.

The sad part is that it’s only getting worse.  The cities are heading down hill at an ever-accelerating rate.  The Left is moving in and the Right is moving out.  Media is becoming more and more specialized, so people hear less and less of what they don’t want to hear.  It’s becoming more and more an Us vs. Them mindset every year, with no end in sight.  Look at the last few elections, there are still people running around whining about how Bush didn’t really win.  Can you imagine what this election will look like?  Americans are more divided than we’ve ever been in history.  No matter who wins, at least 50% of the country is going to be shocked, scared, and amazed that we could do something so idiotic.  And I don’t know about the people on the Left, but speaking as a member of the Right, there isn’t anybody running (who has a chance in hell of winning) who strikes me as being even the least bit conservative.  Rudy might be conservative my New York standards, but not anybody else’s.  Same with Romney.  As much as I admire Rudy’s leadership abilities, he’s anti-gun, pro-gay rights, pro-abortion, and ran his city as a safe haven for illegal aliens.  Romney isn’t much better, except he’s not pro-gay-rights or pro-abortion.  McCain blows with the wind.  Sure, he’s done some conservative things, but they’re balanced out with just as many liberal things.  I agree with a lot of what Ron Paul says, but not enough, and not on a few very key issues.  Fred is the only one I have any faith in, but he’s not doing so hot in the polls.  “Republican” no longer means “Conservative”.  “Republican” now means George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rudy Giuliani.  I actually laughed out loud the other day when I heard Rudy referred to as “ultra Right-Wing”.  How times have changed.  Most of the Conservatives I know (not Republicans, but Conservatives) consider Bush, Rudy, and Arnold to be slightly to moderately Liberal.  No wonder the two sides can’t even communicate any more.

God help us all, no matter who becomes president.

I got my LORAN receiver in the mail today.  I’ve been wanting to play with LORAN for years, but had never had the opportunity.  It’s a bit “old school”, but still in widespread use, and has some advantages over GPS, even today.  I was poking around E-Bay about two weeks ago, and thought I’d look to see how much a receiver cost.  Found one with nine minutes left in the auction, and bid $1.25 on it.  Hey, it’s “as-is”, but for $1.25, why not?  So today it arrived in a completely crushed cardboard box marked “Fragile”.  Everyone in the post office laughed when the mail guy handed it over.  I figured for $1.25, I wasn’t going to worry about sending it back if it was damaged.  Besides, it’s an aircraft receiver, so probably pretty tough.  I’ve got it out and disassembled on my desk right now.  It shows obvious signs of previous repairs, but overall is in pretty good shape.  As soon as I work out which pins on the 25-pin connector are power and ground, I’ll fire the thing up and see if it works.  If nothing else, the antenna that came with it is probably worth something.

I’ve been playing with ham radio the past two weeks, as well.  I’ve got two Yaesu radios with ARTS, and I’ve been leaving one turned on at home while I go to work, and bringing the other with me in the truck.  ARTS is a proprietary Yaesu protocol (well, I think it’s proprietary) where two ARTS radios send each other an “I’m still here” code every sixty seconds or so, and tell you whether or not they’ve heard the other radio in the last sixty seconds.  The theory is that if you turn this on while hiking or something, you’ll always know if the other person is reachable, even if you haven’t talked in a while.  Anyway, the radios are only 5 watts each, so I wasn’t expecting great range, but I wanted to see how far it would work.  Both radios are equipped with nothing more than crappy rubber duckie antennas, nothing special.  I live in a heavily-wooded and hilly area, so I wasn’t expecting a lot.  I started out on 2 meters, and drove to work with the radios on that was for about a while.  Oddly enough, the point at which I lost the signal varied dramatically from day to day.  Some days, I could get three miles.  Other days, seven.  I changed antennas on the home radio every few days to see what helped/hurt, and discovered that the MFJ dual-band “long/thin” whips worked by far the best (I think it’s a model 1715, but I’d have to check to be sure).  Anyway, I wasn’t too disappointed at the five miles or so the radios worked through houses, woods, small hills, etc.  When I lived in Colorado, I used to be able to work a repeater 110 miles south of me on 5 watts with a handheld.  Of course, it was over 10,000 feet higher than me, so that helped.  Five miles “real world” isn’t bad.  Just for fun, I thought I’d try the same thing on 70cm.  Figured it wouldn’t work as well, but why not find out for sure?  Amazingly enough, my range went up to a consistent 15 miles.  Just like that.  Same radios, same antennas, but two to three times the range.  My current theory is that it’s some sort of interference that’s much stronger on 2m than 70cm, but I haven’t taken the time to try to test/prove that theory yet.  I plan to take the HT up with me in the plane one of these days to see what kind of range I can get from 2500 feet higher, but I haven’t done that yet, either.  Actually, I did take the radio with me last week on my flight, but forgot to turn it on.  Flying keeps you really really busy, and distractions are bad, anyway.  One of these days…

Today was short/soft-field take-offs and landings, but after some discussion with my instructor, we decided to swap this lesson and the next. It was basically a repeat of Lesson 14 (ground-reference maneuvers) with some power-on and power-off stalls thrown in for good measure. I did really poorly on my ground-reference maneuvers. I gues sit was just one of those “off” days, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get them right. The wind was very strong and variable, and it had been a long day (plus a two-hour drive to the airport), and it just didn’t work for me. It was fun, though; it’s always fun, even when it doesn’t go well. There was a huge storm off to the south of me, and my instructor gave me a quick refresher on what to do if I suddenly found myself inside of a cloud or unable to return to the airport due to weather. He also reminded me of the Whidbey Island frequency - they’ve got radar and can always lend a hand if you get lost or into trouble.  I’m not too worried about getting lost.  I’ve got two GPS receivers on-board, plus two charts, plus it’s pretty hard to get lost following a coastline, but it never hurts to have a backup plan.  The only really exciting part of the flight was that it got dark much much faster than I expected it to.  Whether that was because the sun went behind the fast-moving storm or because that’s just how quickly it usually happens, I’m not quite sure yet, but by the time I noticed how quickly the light was fading, I got was starting to get a bit concerned.  I was still within the letter of the law when I landed, but that being said, I’m going to be a lot more careful in the future when flying at dusk.  The good news is that I made a beautiful landing, one I was really proud of.

KML file is here.

Somebody gassed up the plane after his flight today, and left one of the gas caps down at the pump.  It then got locked inside the office when the owner went home for the evening.  A buddy of mine here at work suggested duct tape, but somehow I don’t think that would look good on the NTSB crash report.  Ah well, it’s raining, anyway, and the canopy on the Sportstar leaks pretty bad around the back.  Everything in the cargo area behind the seats ends up wet.  Soggy charts are no fun.

The first solo was fun, but more than a little intimidating.  The second solo was just plain fun.  Off I went to practice S-Turns and Turns Around a Point all by myself.  Left the pattern alone for the first time.  Had to watch out for Whidbey’s airspace all by myself.  I expect they don’t appreciate it if you stray inside, and our practice area is just on the East side of it.  While I don’t have complete freedom to do whatever I like at this point, I do have some discretion, and it’s kind of fun to decide exactly where and how I’m going to try something.  On my way up to the practice area, I flew over a house with a great big fire in the back yard.  It was then that I realized that I could make that my first spot for turns around a point, for no reason better than “I feel like it”.

I felt like I did pretty well.  I felt pretty confident in my abilities, at least within the boundaries I’d been given, and only made one real mistake.  Did about five touch-and-goes to tie it all up.  On my first, I failed to give it quite enough right rudder, and headed for the grass off to the left.  I had very few choices (no possible way to stop, too fast to turn), so I gritted my teeth and stuck with it and popped it off just before the grass.  Kept it low in ground effect for a bit more speed, then corrected my heading and climbed out normally.  I learned from that experience.  I was lucky not to clip a light, and the feeling of heading off in an unintended direction was one I’d just as soon not repeat.  I think I’m going to have “More Right Rudder” tatooed on the back of my right hand (where I can see it on the throttle as I take off and land).  Of course, with my luck, I’ll end up owning a pusher, and have to learn left rudder, instead.

Next up is short field/soft field take-offs and landings.  Which is sort of what I just did, except before today, I’d only every done it in X-Plane and my radio-controlled plane.  Fortunately, the technique is the same.

KML file is here.

Flew today for the first time in two weeks.  Up until now, I’ve been flying two or three times a week.  I’ve always followed the checklists religiously, but pretty much had them memorized.  I certainly saw the value, but never really realized how valuable they were.  Until today.  After two weeks of no flying, I walked into the hanger, looked at the plane, and realized I would be scared to death to try flying without my checklists.  Sure, it’s easy to remember something you do every two or three days, but if you only fly once or twice a month, wow, you forget amazing amounts of important stuff.

It was windy like crazy today.  The surface winds were pretty reasonable, maybe five knots or so.  But up at 3000 feet, the wind was blowing a good honest 30 knots.  It was a nice wind, though, with few gusts.  Made for some interesting flying.  We tried flying directly into the wind as slow as possible, and managed to get the plane down to 15 knots of ground speed on the GPS.  Was hoping for zero, but not quite enough wind for that.  The flight was mostly a review of everything I’ve learned to sign me off for more solo flight.  I felt like I did reasonably well, though had a brush up on a few things.  By the time we landed, the wind had picked up considerably down at ground level, though I was extremely lucky in that it was coming almost directly down the main runway.  We did several landings, but my second was the most flawless landing I’ve ever done.  I just looked over at my instructor and said “Wow!”.  If only I could replicate that one every time…

My next lesson will be another solo.  The weather is getting worse, and it’s starting to get dark pretty early, so weekday (after work) flying is probably going to get less common.  We flew in the rain today (and discovered that the Sportstar leaks like crazy), but managed to stay clear of the clouds.  That’s going to get harder as the weeks go on.

KML file of the flight is here.

Looks like another spammer has targeted one of my domains.  There’s apparently zillions of e-mails being sent out with return addresses set to non-existent users at gritch.org.  While neither me nor any of my machines have anything to do with the sending of any of this mail, it still affects me.  First, every single bounced e-mail message comes back to my mail server, even though it wasn’t sent by me in the first place, since the return address is set to one that I own.  The load on my mail server is currently 11.75 (somewhere around 0.05 is normal).  This amounts to a couple of thousand messages per hour that I have to sift through and delete.  There’s probably smoke coming out of the back of my mail router.  Second, idiots who don’t know how to read their mail headers love to write the most hateful messages you’ve ever read to me, trying to blame me for the spam that someone else sent.  I don’t take them personally, since these people really don’t know any better, but it’s truly amazing how nasty and hateful people get about spam.  I’d personally support some sort of a bounty system where you get so many dollars for each spammer scalp you turn in.

Flying lessons have been on hold for a week or two.  I had to make an emergency trip down to Long Beach for a few days over the weekend, and had to cancel a couple of lessons.  Oddly enough, I rather liked the Long Beach airport.  I hate airlines and commercial air travel, but KLGB is a neat little airport.  They’ve managed to preserve a bit of a “small town” feel, and some of the airport buildings looks like they date back to the 20s or 30s.  One of the guys at work used to keep his plane there, and had good things to say about the place.

This week, I’m on-call at work, which makes scheduling lessons a bit tough (not enough time either before or after my on-call shift to get to Arlington, fly, and get back home).  I hate to take this long of a break in lessons, but it looks like I have little choice.

 

I finally soloed. Went up with my instructor for six trips around the patch first. He was happy with four trips, but I asked him to do two more, just to make sure I was feeling 100%. Then I went up and did three alone. Wow, what a cool thing! It’s an interesting feeling when you push the throttle up to full power and realize that 1) whether you live or die in the next ten minutes is entirely up to you, and 2) there is no turning back. My first landing was all anyone could ever ask for. I managed to get everything right. The second landing was not as pretty. I was landing on 29 (the wind was 290@12), but some of the traffic was still on 34 (it’s a lot longer). Had to dodge around a 172, but he was nice about it. It horked up all my sense of timing, and I floated it much longer than I would have liked. Third time around, I was following a Bonanza who wanted to take the scenic route around the pattern. To stay far enough behind him, I had to extend my downwind way the heck out, then bring it in. The third landing was as good as the first, though.

 

KML file is here.

My wife and kids were all there to watch, and we went out for pizza to celebrate afterwards. A day I won’t forget.

In theory, today was my last lesson before solo. I flew with a different instructor today, as mine is taking the week off. It’s fun to fly with someone different, as they have a different perspective, different techniques, and new tips and tricks to show you. Today was supposed to be all review, but I actually learned at least as much as I do in a normal lesson, due to the ideas and suggestions of my different instructor. It’s fun to get better at something. My S-turns were horrendous and my turns around a point were passable, but not pretty. Today, I learned to do both fairly well. I flubbed a few things, like forgetting the pre-taxi checklist entirely, but remembered before I actually got all the way out onto the taxiway. I also didn’t exactly shine at the “oops, your engine just died” exercise. The cool thing was, after talking about what I did wrong, my instructor flew the plane back to where we started, then showed me what he would have done different. My way would have worked, but in this case it had more to do with luck than my superb piloting skills. His way was much better, and I’m going to incorporate what he taught me into my way of thinking about emergency landings. Did three landings, all of them passable. Got pretty squirrely after landing on one of them, I was back to chasing the plane back and forth across the runway. I’m sure the old-timers hanging around got a good chuckle.

KML file of the trip is here (or it will be as soon as I finish downloading/converting it).

The joy of a great lesson was pretty much squashed a couple of hours later. Franzi, our 13-year-old German Shepherd, died a little before 4:15pm this afternoon. We knew it was just a matter of days before she went, but that didn’t make it any easier when it finally happened. We were with her when she went, though. It’s been a rough afternoon here today, but at least she’s no longer in pain. Our two-year-old doesn’t understand where “Danzi” went, and the other dogs are wandering around kind of lost. So are we.

The news was posted here today.  Let the celebrations begin!

 

First day of 4th/5th grade for the older two. Much fun.

I just drove up to KPAE and filled out all the paperwork and got my student pilot license.  Woot!  Now I can legally solo as soon as my instructor and I agree it’s time.

Julia and I got up about 2am this morning to see the eclipse.  We didn’t watch the whole thing, but I got a few cool pictures.  Took these from my bedroom balcony with a Nikon D1x, ISO 640, 750mm, f8, 1/800.

Yesterday was Abby’s second birthday.  She got more neat toys than we know what to do with.  Her friend CJ came over to help her celebrate and eat cake.

Interesting.  This just showed up on Craigslist.  Looks like my flight school is for sale.

Last night’s lesson was great fun. It was mostly review for my upcoming solo. We reviewed stalls and slow flight (again - I’m getting the idea that this is particularly important stuff given how much we practice it), and did a bunch of landings. We also visited KBVI and did some landings there; my first trip to another airport. I’m also doing more and more radio work, last night was my first experience asking for flight following and dealing with all that that entails. I screwed up my initial request, but the guy at Whidbey was patient and we worked it out.

The SportStar has nifty little sliding vents in the canopy on either side to allow cool air in while flying. They’re maybe three inches by five inches, and are a nice touch. I learned an important lesson last night, though. If you allow your chart to get too close to the 100+ mph slipstream going past that little window, it’ll suck the whole dang thing out the little hole before you even have time to blink. I managed to hold onto the important piece (ie, the piece showing the airspace we were in), but the southern half of the Puget Sound area is now a shredded mess. Time to buy a new chart…

I have one more lesson before what should be my solo. Cool!

The (incomplete) KML file for this lesson is here.

If you scroll back in time through my blog to Summer 2006, you’ll see that I had a bad experience with the Zenith guys at the 2006 Arlington EAA Air Show.  You’ll also notice that yesterday, the president of Can-Zac Aviation (the company who had the booth, and quite possibly the guy I talked to) added a comment.  Stuff happens, and I’m very happy to say that my initial impression of you guys seems to have been way off.  So now instead of being annoyed at Mark, I’m annoyed at the clod who showed such blatant disrespect during the Canadian Anthem.  Mark, I’m looking forward to meeting you (again) next summer.

Last night’s lesson was fun.  I’m finally starting to feel in command enough of the plane (well, except for landings) that I can do quite a few tasks without having to think them through first.  I’m finally able to (mostly) hold altitude, heading, and airspeed without so much conscious effort.  Using the right amount of rudder in turns is now automatic enough that I don’t realize I’m actually doing it.  And I can now talk on the radio without pre-rehearsing everything I’m going to say before I say it.  I just realize it’s time to say I’m on base, and my mouth goes on autopilot and says the right things into the mic while I continue to concentrate on flying the plane.

My power-off stalls are still just a bit messy.  I have all the pieces (nose down, level the wings, power to full, flaps in stages), I just don’t have them smooth and slick yet.  I think that will come with a bit more practice, just like my s-turns.  I finally did a landing last night good enough that if I can replicate it and build on it, will finally get me to solo.  Tomorrow’s lesson is going to consist almost entirely of touch-and-goes, so I’ll get my opportunity to try.  With luck, I’m within two lessons of soloing.  Guess it’s time to finish the paperwork/process of getting the official student license, or I’m gonna be stuck waiting when the time comes.

KML file of this flight is here.

We headed out yesterday to cover one of the last two lessons remaining (well, plus whatever I might need work on) before my solo.  About five minutes into the flight, I noticed that the elevator trim would not trim down, only up.  It did the same thing on Saturday once or twice, but my instructor and I both figured I was just hitting the wrong button or something.  Nope.  It was dead for sure this time, it wouldn’t work from either control stick.  Cycling the breaker and the main power did nothing to help.  It was exactly a dangerous condition, but it did require constant forward pressure on the stick.  My instructor was concerned that one of us might bump it all the way down (it still worked up, just not down) and make the plane very difficult to control, so he suggested we call it a day.  Disappointing, but that’s what he’s there for - to keep me alive to fly another day.  We headed home.  Upon landing, the trim miraculously started working again.  After mulling it over, my instructor decided to set it to neutral and leave it alone, then spend an hour doing touch-and-goes.  This worked out well.  I can take off without too many problems (still having a little bit of trouble transitioning my right foot to a nosedragger), but my landings could use some real work.

We did somewhere around eight touch-and-goes, and by the time we were done, I was feeling pretty good about landing.  Each time around, my instructor did less and less, and by the end, I was doing 100% of everything.  About half-way through, he decided it was time I started doing the radio on top of flying the plane.  That threw an interesting twist into things.  I’m not afraid of radios, I got my ham radio license in 1979, so I’m no stranger to the mic.  At the same time, though, it did add yet another thing to think about while managing stick, rudder, flaps, throttle, airspeed, altitude, bank angle, and keeping an eye on the swarms of helicopters.  At one point, I reported I was turning downwind while turning crosswind.  Another time, I let a “Dang it!” slip out over the radio before I let go of the button (I’m sure many people have said far worse).  I also discovered that my turns got sloppier while I was talking.

At any rate, my instructor had finally lost his look of abject terror during my landings by the seventh or eighth landing, and in what I took to be a nice vote of confidence, spent one landing turned entirely around in his seat watching the Cessna in the pattern behind us who was intent on taking a piece of our tail out with his prop.  I feel better about landings now.  What I suck enormously at, though, is the roll-out afterwards.  Not only can I not keep the stupid plane on the centerline after touchdown, I can barely keep the damned thing out of the grass.  I spend all my time chasing it, and always feel two steps behind.  I asked my instructor about it afterwards, and he suggested perhaps some deliberate high-speed taxis all the way to the end of the runway after touchdown to learn to use the pedals a bit more gently and get on top of things.  Hope that works, there’s no way I’m gonna feel safe doing a solo if this keeps up.  Gotta get this under control.

The KML file for this flight is here.  I’m flying again Tuesday and Thursday (assuming the bad weather clears up and the trim problem is fixed).  Much fun.  It occurred to me that one possible solution to the trim tab problem would have been to simply pull the trim breaker for the balance of the flight.  Would have eliminated the possibility of it moving and getting worse.  I’ll have to ask my instructor about that tomorrow.  No idea if that’s considered kosher or not, but it seems like a reasonable solution.

First of all, I saw a couple of seriously cool planes at KAWO today. Didn’t have my camera with me in the plane, so I only got pictures of the AlphaJet. I messed up and only brought my 17-35mm lens (meant to bring my 28-70mm) so the picture is pretty grainy (it’s cropped from a much larger original). I also saw a MiG-21 and what I think was an old Yak.

If Thursday was a day for joyriding, today was a day of work. We stayed up for 2.2 hours straight, and basically reviewed every single thing I’ve ever learned since I began. While it was certainly fun, by the time I was done, I was hot, sweaty, tired, and just a tad airsick. It was a hot afternoon, and the air was bumpy as hell. I feel like I did pretty well on some things, and other pitifully bad. While most things are easier in the SportStar, some things (like s-turns and turns around a point) I did much better in the Champ. Guess it’ll all come with practice. My landings in the SportStar were atrocious. I didn’t bend anything, but no doubt anyone who was watching was wincing at each touchdown. My instructor promised me a whole session of take-offs and landings over and over and over in the near future. He’s also got some exercises he’s gonna run me through to work on my crosswind “keeping the plane aligned with the runway” skills. I’m looking forward to that, I feel that’s by far my weakest area. If push comes to shove, I can get the plane on the ground without damage (which is nice to know at some level), but it sure ain’t pretty.

If the weather doesn’t turn completely nasty tomorrow (which it’s forecast to), I’ll get to work on some of my weak points.

I managed to retrieve a small amount of GPS data from Lesson 5, it’s here (the battery died shortly after take-off). I didn’t bring my GPS on Lesson 6, but I did bring it today for Lesson 7. That file is here.

Assuming weather isn’t a problem, at the end of tomorrow’s lesson, I will have accumulated as many hours in four days as I managed in seven weeks at my last school.  It feels good to be back on track.  No idea when I’ll solo, but at least now I’m not worried that it won’t be until Christmas 2010.

Finally back to flying again! Today’s flight was half-way between an orientation and a lesson. New school, new airport, new instructor. I like all of them. I’ll admit I’m a bit disappointed that, despite trying a dozen different ways, I’m not going to learn in a taildragger. At the same time, the Evektor Sporstar is a seriously neat fun little airplane. My instructor likened it to a Miata - small, quick, fun, and not quite as powerful as it’s bigger brothers, but a real joy to fly. It was a cool cloudy evening with air as smooth as glass, and mostly we just spent time getting familiar with the plane and it’s systems. As you can see from the photo below, the panel is about two orders of magnitude more complex than the old Champ. The Champ had gauges for airspeed, altitude, RPM, a compass, temperature, and oil pressure. Plus a float gauge for fuel quantity. That’s it. You carry a hand-held radio with you, and try to balance it in your lap while you fly. This thing has a lot more goodies to learn and keep track of:

Now I just have to learn how to land a nosedragger. Feels very very different.

Here’s a nice news article from AFP where the report doesn’t have the vaguest idea about what he’s reporting on:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)

Ok, quick, what’s wrong with this picture?  Judging by shape and relative size of the rounds compared with the lady’s fingers, plus the fact that they’re presumably US Military rounds, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet they’re 5.56mm, the standard US round as used in the M-16.  One catch, though.  THEY’RE UN-FIRED.

Is it just more completely incompetent reporting, or a even more spectacularly incompetent attempt to make US forces look bad?  You be the judge.

So I signed up with a new flying school because my old one keeps canceling my lessons (three this week alone).  On the way home from church this morning, the new school called to cancel my lesson for this afternoon.  Well, ok, I still have five lessons scheduled at the old school over the next two weeks that I haven’t canceled yet, pending checking out the new place.  Assuming they continue at their current 70% cancellation rate, I can still get one or two lessons in out of those five.  Less than five minutes ago, the old school called and said somebody damaged the Champ yesterday (prop strike), and they’re going to have to tear down the engine to inspect for damage, and it’s going to be a minimum of two weeks before it’s ready to fly again.  So now that’s not an option, either.  I’m running low on options before the kids start school in three weeks, when my schedule goes to hell.  If I’d known earlier on that things were this flaky, I probably would have started with these guys, instead.  It didn’t look like the best option at the time, but in retrospect, I think it would have been a much better choice.

My flying lesson was canceled this morning. Just like my lesson last night. And my lesson on Tuesday. I think somebody is trying to tell me something. Out of seventeen lessons I’ve scheduled in the last six weeks, twelve have been canceled (two due to weather, the rest mostly due to plane maintenance). Instead of flying two to three times per week, I’ve averaged a bit less than once per week. With the added bonus of having my instructor quit the school last week, I think it’s time to look around for other options. I have one more lesson scheduled this week, on Friday afternoon. Before I buy any more blocks of time, I think I need to see if there’s another school around that might meet my flying needs.

Update:

I’ve signed up for a class on Sunday afternoon at Out of the Blue Aviation in Arlington, WA.  They seem to have a lot more instructors and a lot more availability in their calendar (especially on the weekends).  It won’t be long before weather and darkness become issues, but if I can get a few hours a week for the next couple of weeks, at least I can solo before the kids start back to school.  If I like the school, the availability, and the instructors (and there’s no reason I shouldn’t based on what I’ve seen and heard), I’ll probably switch schools as soon as my pre-purchased time runs out at my current school.  I’m just annoyed that this school is 26 miles further away from my house.  Oh well.

Assume for a moment that the threat of terrorists using liquid explosives on a plane is real. I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the threat is real. It would make a certain amount of sense from a security perspective, then, however annoying it might be, for the TSA to limit the amount of “liquid” (very loosely defined by the TSA as to include toothpaste) that is carried onto a plane, and insist that you pack it separately in a clear plastic bag so they can examine it as you go through the security check-point. I’ve forgotten to do this twice, and both times they noticed on the X-ray machine, and asked me to pull it out. So clearly, the stuff looks suspicious on the screen.

Ok. Good. Explosives on a plane are bad, checking for them is good. But there are some problems with this. The TSA currently limits you to something like three ounce containers of liquids. This is presumably because it takes more than three ounces of commonly-available liquid explosives to be a threat (I’m speculating here, bear with me). Ok. But they don’t limit how many three ounce containers you can bring with you. Sure, twelve of them might get them wondering, but not three. Especially if each container was different. Say, one of “shampoo”, one of “conditioner”, and one of “toothpaste”. Get on the plane, pour them all together into a larger container (which you brought on with you as a “flower vase”), and you’ve got nine ounces. Combine that with Achmed and Mohammed’s stash, who are also on your flight, and now you’re up to twenty-seven ounces. If three ounces is the cut-off for being small enough to be “safe”, nine times that amount should be enough to be dangerous.

But wait, it gets better.

I flew to California two days ago for work, and really didn’t feel like playing the little TSA security game. I was wearing cargo pants, so what was my solution? I put my little clear plastic baggie of shampoo and toothpaste in my pocket instead of my carry-on bag, then walked right through the metal detector. Why not? Metal detectors detect metal, not shampoo.

But wait, it gets better.

This made me think a bit once I sat down on the plane. Metal detectors also don’t detect ceramics (like ceramic knives), plastics (like plastic knives), semtex, dynamite, or C-4. Basically, they prevent you from bringing a metal knife or a gun onto a plane (well, 59% of the time, at least). Basically, anything I can stick in the pockets of my cargo pants that’s small enough to not be obviously huge and is not made of metal can be carried right onto the plane. Sure, you’d still need a detonator for your bomb, but come on, cut the wires short and stick it inside a ball-point pen and toss it in the little tray with your car keys, watch, and pocket change as you walk through the metal detector. You’ve got all the batteries you need in your Walkman. It’s not like you need a timer or anything if you’re planning on going down with the plane. Am I missing something here? It’s one thing to chuckle about the silly little show the TSA puts on when you go to the airport and have to play along with their little game, but this is ridiculous.

I wish this had occurred to me in time to enter a story in Bruce Schneier’s Movie Plot Contest. The idea of the contest was to come up with a plausible enough movie-plot to get the TSA to ban something fun like underwear, eyeglasses, or pants on airplanes.

I think that either the terrorists have no imagination whatsoever (not likely), or that they simply haven’t bothered to try again since 9/11 (much more likely). Whatever it is that has prevented a second attack certainly wasn’t airport security. Security is good, but security theater is just plain stupid.

Flew down to San Jose, CA on Sunday for the week. Flights are getting scarce, so I ended up here on Sunday afternoon, rather than Sunday evening (the flight I more often take). Since I had a rental car and time to kill, I figured I might as well see something interesting. The Bay Area has no shortage of interesting things to see, so I decided to take a road trip. I headed south down to Salinas to pay a visit to Light Sport Airplanes West. Of course, being Sunday, they were closed, but it was still an interesting drive down here.

Would have been fun to stop by when they were open, but given their business hours (9-5 M-F) and the heinous commute down to Salinas from Mountain View during the week, that’s not gonna happen this trip.

From Salinas, I headed over to the coast. Finally got to see the Laguna Seca Raceway for the first time, then stopped in Monterey for a couple of hours. Monterey is awfully pretty, especially on Sunday with a big rainstorm moving in from the west. Traffic was awful, but the trip was worthwhile. I just can’t quite get used to the motorcycles splitting lanes. Scares the crap out of me every time one whizzes by.

Drove one of our company electric cars across campus earlier this afternoon. They’re spooky. They’re not much quieter than any other modern car while moving, but they go absolutely silent when stopped. It takes some getting used to. Our cars are governed at 25mph, so they weren’t exactly speedy, but it was interesting. And probably safer than the electric scooter I usually ride.

Another crosswind day. Yay. If this keeps up, I’m not going to be able to land without one, I’ll only know how to do it with one.

Today we worked on ground reference maneuvers. Turns around a point, s-turns across a road, etc. Plus some crosswind take-offs and landings. Got another 1.2 hours and three more landings.

The batteries in my GPS went dead shortly after take-off, so no KML file this time. I’ll see what I can download some time tomorrow, but probably not much. Gotta go get ready for important stuff, taking the kids to see the new Simpsons movie tonight. I know I’m gonna regret this tomorrow…

Had lesson four last night. It’s finally all starting to click. I’m finally starting to get the knack of getting the plane to do what I want when I want. It was another crosswind day, like Lesson 2, but this one went much better. Did three landings, the last one almost 100% on my own. Crosswind landings in a taildragger are not exactly fun, but they went much better today than they did last time.  We also did “your engine just died, where are we going to land?” kinds of fun.  At any rate, another 1.0 hours and three landings for the log book.

My instructor is leaving the school on Friday, so I’ll be getting a new one. I haven’t met him yet, but trying to schedule my upcoming lessons with him has been a nightmare. His schedule is booked almost 100% solid for several months out, so I’m having to do a lot of lessons in the middle of the day during the middle of the week. Plays hell with the work schedule since I live next to the airport, but work an hour away (well, 30 to 90 minutes away, depending on the time of day).

The school just bought a new plane. It’s gorgeous! It’s an Evektor Sportstar Plus. The thing only has nine hours on it, and it comes with all the goodies, like a Garmin 496. It’s a nosedragger, but still has a stick (not a yoke). Looking forward to trying it out at some point. It’s not yet available to rent or train in, as they’re still doing all the paperwork on it (insurance, probably).

I’ve got another lesson tonight, then not again until the week after next. Have to spend next week down at the Mother Ship in California.

The KML file of this flight is available here.

 

We finally took the camping trip we’ve been looking forward to all summer.  Went up to Skykomish for the weekend.  Absolutely gorgeous.  The kids played in the water for something like eight hours on Saturday.  The trailer blew a tire up near Jack Pass on Sunday afternoon, so we called off the exploration a bit early (changed the tire, but didn’t want to be 20 miles down a dirt road if/when the next one went since at that point we were without a spare).

Lesson 3 was supposed to be last night, and Lesson 4 this morning. But like 80% of my scheduled flights so far, something went wrong and last night was cancelled. At least it was the weather and not the plane. We had rain, wind, and clouds about 300 feet. Visibility was maybe two miles. Not good flying weather. I was hoping it would clear by 6pm so we could at least do a bit of pattern work, but it was not to be.

This morning dawned cool, clear, and sunny, without a trace of wind. It was a beautiful morning to fly. Today we worked on power-on and power-off stalls as well as slow flight. The old Champ has a tendency to wander even in normal flight, but puttering around down at 40 knots or so, she’s all over the sky. Takes busy feet to keep her going in the right direction. Stalls are gentle and predictable, though, and take a remarkable amount of back pressure on the stick. Recovery is remarkably fast. Lots of fun. Did a normal landing (first time from the North, coming in over the river, trees, and power lines), then did a go-’round. Simple enough in concept, but a bit messy on the first try. The sudden blast of power pulls the nose up in a hurry, plus way off to the side, I was all over the place before I got back on the runway centerline. Also did my first “almost-by-myself” pattern and landing. Eric (instructor) told me to have a go at it and he’d only pipe up if/when I put us in danger. I actually felt really good about the whole thing. Wasn’t quite perfect, I flared one or two feet high and dropped it in just a bit harder than planned tail-wheel-first, but for my first try with minimal help, I was really pleased.

KML file for Google Earth for this flight is here.

That makes two more landings and another 1.2 hours in the ol’ logbook.

Remos G3

The airshow was great. Julia and I took Friday off and spent the whole day there. Then I went again on Saturday with Dad and Joshua. Looked at a lot of planes, sat in a few, bought some goodies and a couple of subscriptions (airshows are the best place to subscribe to new airplane publications). Ran into some people I knew, and generally just hung out, got rained on, and sunburned. Saw some beautiful planes, including a few of my favorites (a P-51D, a DeHaviland Beaver on floats, a bunch of SuperCubs, several Cessna 195s, and a gorgeous old blue and silver Cessna 170 polished like a mirror).

The guys at Light Sport Airplanes West brought in a bunch of LSAs, and were really cool about taking the time to show and explain everything about them, and even let you sit in them for a bit to get a feel for the cabin and control placement. Their sales guy John spent a bunch of time with us, and we really appreciated him showing us each of the planes they brought. Julia and I really like the Remos G3. It’s got outstanding visibility, a decent space for bags, available glass panel, and a really reasonable price (well, reasonable as airplanes go, at least). It’s also got a ballistic parachute available as an option (which Julia really liked). The low-wing planes were a bit sexier, but I tend to like high wings better.

Plain and simple, lesson 2 sucked. We had a decent crosswind, and nothing went right for me. I even managed to bounce the damned plane ten feet in the air on my second landing (and that I can’t even blame on the crosswind). The only thing I did right was that I finally got the hang of making turns without gaining/losing more than 25-50′ of altitude. I’ve read for years how crosswind landings in a taildragger are hard. Not just hard, but the type of hard that an engineer would call “non-trivial“. That being said, until I actually tried it today, I never really understood just how hard it really is. Particularly on your second lesson. It’s a critical skill to learn, but I would have just as soon delayed crosswind landings until I got the hang of non-crosswind landings. Anyway, I’ve now got another 1.1 hours and three more landings under my belt. It’s all good, but some of it is more painfully earned than others.

The KML file (for Google Earth) is here.

Well, today’s flying lesson was cancelled due to weather.  My CFI just called, and the winds are picking up at the airport.  I checked the METARS, and it looks like about a 10 knot crosswind.  That’s a bit much for a new student in a traildragger (no argument from me on that one).  My flying record isn’t great so far:

• June 23rd:  Lesson cancelled due to a fuel leak
• June 27th:  First lesson
• June 30th:  Lesson cancelled due to broken tailwheel
• July 1-8:  CFI on vacation
• July 11:  Lesson cancelled due to fuel problem
• July 12 (morning):  Lesson cancelled due to scheduling conflict with plane
• July 12 (afternoon):  Lesson cancelled due to high wind

That’s one lesson out of five tries.  With a start date of June 23rd, I should have been done with about 25% of my hours by now.  Instead, I’m about 5% done.  Very frustrating.

Julia and I both took the day off tomorrow to attend the big airshow in Arlington; that’s something cool to look forward to.

They just squeaked by getting my server back up in less than 48 hours. I’m currently in the process of moving everything back over. It takes a while to restore 20+ gig of data, set up the mail server, web server, all my mailing lists and aliases, etc. If you’re reading this and seeing only one entry previous to this one, you’re still reading on the temporary box. Once DNS propagate everywhere, things will go back to normal. I’m still extremely irritated with 1and1, but for the moment I’m moving back since the hostgator server is so limited (ie, no ssh/shell access, for example).

Flying lesson cancelled for tonight. The old Champ is down again with fuel problems. The offered to put me in one of their 152s for the same price (which was generous of them), but my instructor said with my height and weight, plus the completely different flying characteristics of the 152, I’d be better off waiting a day and sticking with the Champ. Oh well.

Well, looks like I’m having server problems. I’ve leased a machine somewhere on the East Coast of the US from 1&1 Internet for the past three years or so, and it’s always been pretty solid and reliable. Two days ago, it started crashing. I was lucky enough to catch a kernel panic on one of the crashes, so I called their tech support to either get the machine repaired or have them replace it. Some time since the last time I called support, they farmed the whole thing offshore. The nightmare began. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but here’s a summary of the high points:

• 1&1 doesn’t do their own first-line tech support, they farm it out to the Philippines.
• Their tech support people have moderate to poor English skills.
• Their tech support people have no computer or networking skills. Zero. They have a list of questions they ask along with the answer they read to you if your question matches. Or even if it doesn’t. God help you if you have a question that’s not on their list.
• Their tech support people have a single phone number they can call to talk to the real engineers in the US. This number is busy almost 100% of the time. When they transfer you to this number and it’s busy, you get yet another tech support person in the Philippines who you have to tell the whole story to all over again and talk them into transferring you.
• Beyond opening tickets, there’s very little 1&1 tech support can do for you.

Anyway, my machine has now been down almost 48 hours, and all I can get from them is sporadic e-mail updates telling me that my machine has a problem. To bridge the gap, I’ve rented space on a virtual server from HostGator so at least my mail won’t go into a black hole (well, once DNS propagates, at least). HostGator doesn’t have the greatest reputation, but they’re only $10/month and so long as I have a place for my mail to go, I’ll get me by. Not sure if I’m going to go back to 1&1 or switch. There are plenty of companies that offer Linux servers, I just hate to pay the $150 or so “setup fee” most of them charge. Normally, I don’t care how bad the tech support is, as long as I have root on the machine and a console server, I can deal with everything on my own. But when the hardware breaks, I need remote hands to fix it. Can’t do that from the other side of the country. I hate to stick with 1&1, but the pragmatist in me says to just suck it up and ignore their incompetent first-line support people because their price is reasonable and I rarely have to deal with them. We’ll see.

I’m hoping they’ll either fix my machine or give me a new one some time in the next day or so. Their tech support guys here in the US actually seem quite good (on the rare occasions you can actually reach them). I disagree with their assessment that my machine was hacked, I think it’s bad RAM, but that’s beside the point. I can live with a disagreement with a competent person. I’m just not sure if I can live with their outsourced ninnies.

On an unrelated note, I’ve got a flying lesson this afternoon. After a several different problems with the plane plus my instructor’s vacation, it’s been two weeks since the last lesson. It’s hard to be mad at them about missing all the lessons due to the broken plane, because they’re just about the nicest people around. And after all, I’m the one who chose to learn in a 61-year-old plane.

At long last, I got to fly my first lesson. Most of the lesson involved getting familiar with the plane and it’s systems (both inside and out) and some gentle, general flying around the area. After quite a few flights in various Cessnas over the years (mostly 172s), the old Champ was quite different. Ergonomics has come a long way in sixty years. The very few instruments the Champ does have are spread in a single line across the width of the panel. Engine RPM and airspeed are at opposite ends, making it a bit tough to quickly glance down and see what’s going on. There’s also no rate of climb indicator, so you have to watch the altimeter for a few seconds to see if it’s moving, which direction, and how fast. All things that no doubt I’ll adapt to, but different than I’ve seen before. The compass is also very dark and hard to read in a hurry. It’s probably good that the Champ is slow and nothing ever happens fast.

We did three take-offs and landings. The first one, I mostly just watched and kept my hands lightly on the controls to feel what was going on. The second one, I flew down to the runway, then my instructor actually landed. The third one, I flew the whole thing, and my instructor just watched, then saved me after landing from ground-looping the damned thing. Take-offs were similar. He flew the first one, I flew a bit of the second, and I flew the whole thing on the third. Once you get past the rudder dance of the taildragger, it’s surprisingly easy to take off.  The tail will tell you when it’s ready to lift, then the whole plane lets you know when it’s ready to take off.  Very different from a nosedragger where you have to watch the airspeed and lift off when the numbers are right.

I did a lot of reading prior to flying.  Stick and Rudder is a classic, and has a nice section of flying taildraggers.  I also bought The Compleat Taildragger during my last trip to Alaska.  Both were chock full of useful advice.

I recorded my flight on my handheld GPS and converted the waypoints to a KML file so they could be loaded into Google Earth.  You can get the file here.

My wife bought me a nifty new Icom IC-A24 Nav/Com radio for Father’s Day.  I love it.  I got the chance to play with the built-in VOR functionality driving my buddy down to SEATAC yesterday for his flight back to Denver.  It’s a really nice piece of gear.  Reception in my truck, though, is unbelievably bad.  Even with the squelch turned to it’s highest setting, I get constant noise.  This is probably due to the linux box under the back seat, two GPS receivers, two ham radios, an XM receiver that re-transmits in the FM band, the ethernet switch, and the AC inverter.  Not a huge surprise there, but annoying.  My idea was to stick a mag-mount antenna on the roof of the pickup and plug it into the BNC connector on the radio.  My theory is that if all the RF hash is coming from inside the truck maybe an antenna outside might make things better.

I started poking around on the INTARWEB and found that mag-mount aviation-band antennas are a bit hard to come by, and unusually expensive, at least compared to ham antennas.  I rooted around in the garage and found an old dual-band (2m/70cm) antenna that had the main antenna shaft held in by a little hex screw.  Seemed easy enough to re-work.  A bit of quick math said that the middle of the voice/nav band (108 to 136 mhz) was 122mhz.  A bit more math said that this equated to an antenna 23 inches long.  I rooted around a bit more in the garage and found an old marine band VHF antenna I got for free years earlier.  Some quick work with a Dremel tool, and I had a 25 inch section of stainless steel whip (I cut it long on purpose).  I stuck it in the mag mount, tightened it down, and fired up the antenna analyzer.  4:1 SWR.  Yucky.  No problem, though, I cut it long on purpose.  About three iterations of “remove, cut, insert, test” later, and I was down to 1.2:1 at 122mhz, about 1.8:1 at the band edges.  As the rubber ducky that came with the radio is anywhere from 2:1 to 3:1 across the band, I decided to call it good before I slice off too much.

Price:

• $20 mag-mount ham antenna bought ten years ago
• stainless steel whip from a free marine VHF antenna
• sliced finger from razor-sharp stainless-steel edge
•  burned finger from touching red-hot steel after grinding sharp edge off
• about half an hour

A bit of pain, but very little cash.

On the down side, all it did is make the noise even worse.  Guess it’s time to start seeing what I can shield.  It’s a diesel truck, so at least I don’t have to deal with ignition.  Guess I’ll start turning stuff off one device at a time until I find the worst offenders.

Well, flying lesson postponed. Turns out the old Champ has a fuel leak. Even better, it’s leaking into the cockpit. They had to tear quite a bit apart to get to the tank, then send it out to be welded, then put it back together. Looks like things got postponed for another few days. Next chance is Wednesday evening. It’s disappointing, but not as bad as a lap full of 100LL gasoline…

After a year of waiting (due to a host of reasons), I finally signed up officially for flying lessons. Went to Snohomish Flying Services at Harvey Field and filled out a stack of paperwork, gave them my passport, wrote them a check, and got a pretty hefty stack of books. I’ve been gathering goodies for the past couple of months, and have managed to find all sorts of useful pilot things (like a really nice David Clark H20-10 headset) on craigslist. My first lesson is next Saturday. I’m training in a 1946 Aeronca Champ. In a perfect world, it would have been a Piper J-3 Cub, but hey, it’s close. I know I’m doing things the hard way, but I really wanted to learn in a taildragger with a stick. First lesson is next Saturday. Woot!

If you have kids, you owe it to yourself to check out “The Dangerous Book for Boys“. My dad bought it for my kids, and they can’t seem to put it down. They fight over whose turn it is to read it. It’s brand-new, and already the edges of the pages are dirty and smudged with thumbprints from taking the book outdoors to use as a reference for making a homemade bow and arrows. Here’s a neat blurb I found about the book:

“America does a much better job educating girls than boys. But now, out of nowhere, comes a book that may hold the secret to male learning… ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’ is all about Swiss Army knives, compasses, tying knots and starting fires with a magnifying glass. It includes adventure stories with male heroes, vivid descriptions of battles and a history of artillery. Readers learn how to make their own magnets, periscopes and bows and arrows. It gives rules and tactics for poker and marbles—and secret moves for coin tricks. In a radical departure from modern schoolroom readings, the book has almost nothing to say about feelings, relationships or how boys can learn to cry. It valorizes risk, adventure and manliness. … The National Parent Teacher Association recommends a cooperative alternative to the fiercely competitive ‘tug of war’ called ‘tug of peace.’ By contrast, ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’ has detailed instructions on how to hunt, kill, skin and cook a rabbit. … ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’ will send bias and sensitivity committees into turmoil—but its very success may eventually put them out of business.” —Christina Hoff Sommers

For myself, I bought “The Reagan Diaries“. It’s an utterly and completely fascinating look into eight years of the life of one of the most important historical figures of the late 20th Century.  The Clintonistas and the rest of the “character doesn’t count” crowd would do well to spend a few hours with Mr. Reagan’s book. Ronaldus Magnus was already my favorite president, but as I continue to read, my opinion only goes up. He was a man of immense strength, character, and resolve. After buying the book, the very first thing you should read is his entry for Monday, March 30th, 1981. If that doesn’t convince you that Reagan stood head and shoulders above anyone else you’ve ever known, nothing will.

If you’re a typical American, you probably have Netflix.  Netflix is cool, and they’ve got a lot of neat movies.  The down side is that they’re kind of like shopping at a mall bookstore - they’ve got all the mainstream “Top 40″ stuff, but not much beyond that.  A friend of mine told me that a friend of his had gotten sick of the corporate 9-to-5, and started a company that fills part of the void, Huntflix.  Huntflix carries a fantastic variety of hunting, shooting, and self-defense videos.  The kind of stuff you’ll never find on Netflix.  Check it out.

I don’t normally do anything remotely related to book reviews, but I just finished a book so amazingly good, I just have to comment on it. I’ve always loved “end of the world” books (particularly post-apocalyptic fiction), but this book stands head and shoulders above even the time-tested classics, such as Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach”. It is the single most powerful, most depressing, and darkest thing I have ever read. I literally had trouble putting it down long enough to sleep and go to work. They’ve got a nice summary and comments over at Amazon.com if you want more info.

I knew I owned a lot of this kind of book, but didn’t realize quite how much of it until taking a quick look through my bookshelves. Some of these books are remarkably good, some remarkably bad, but all sort of on the same “end of the world” theme.

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• The Postman, David Brin
• The Stand, Stephen King
• Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank
• Earth Abides, George R. Steward
• On the Beach, Nevil Shute
• Orion Shall Rise, Poul Anderson
• Battlefield Earth, L. Ron Hubbard
• Ill Wind, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason
• When the Almond Tree Blossoms, David Aikman
• Black Sun, Robert Leininger
• Aftermath, Charles Sheffield
• Lucifer’s Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• Footfall, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• The Rift, Walter J. Williams
• Wrath of God, Robert Gleason
• Resurrection Day, Bendan DuBois
• Paris 2005, Carlo Zezza
• Cold Sea Rising, Richard Moran
• Shiva Descending, Gregory Benford and William Rotsler
• Timescape, Gregory Benford
• War Day, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
• Prayers for the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno
• The White Mountains, John Christopher
• Down to a Sunless Sea, David Graham
• Cell, Stephen King
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• Left Behind, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
• Aftermath, Gregory Benford
• The Steel, the MIst, and the Blazing Sun, Christopher Anvil
• The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
• Logan’s Run, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
• Aftermath, Gregory Benford
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick
• A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• A Boy and His Dog, Harlan Ellison
• I am Legend, Richard Matheson
• Fail Safe, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler

Julia and I went to Anchorage for a few days. It was gorgeous. Drove down to Seward to see the Sea Life Center. Spent a lot of time poking around the Aviation Heritage Museum, Lake Hood, and the other little airports scattered all over. Took a couple hundred pictures of airplanes and added them to my Alaska page. During the trip, I also set a new personal record for the furthest North I’ve ever been. Much fun!

We spent the kids’ Mid-Winter Break in Victoria, BC. We had the greatest hotel room ever, right above the seaplane ramp on Victoria Harbor. Got hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Beavers and Otters coming and going on floats. I was amazed at how quiet the Otter turbine conversions are. I still think Victoria is one of the prettiest cities I’ve seen.

If you haven’t seen the movie Happy Feet at the theater, make sure you know what you’re getting before you run out and buy it on DVD for your kids.  In spite of the advertising, Happy Feet is really not a happy fun movie for kids.  Rather, it’s a “message movie” for adults.  Among the messages your kids will be learning when they see this movie are:

• Flouting religion, tradition, and the accepted norms of society make you a hero.
• Behind the mystique, our religious leaders are frauds, and they know it, but they can be turned around to the “progressive” way of seeing things.
• Leaders with religious beliefs endanger society and the future of everyone in it.
• The real problem with this world is the presence of humans.
• The U.N. is a wonderful body that can solve the world’s problems, if just given a chance.

I finally got around to setting up a gpsd server web page.  Thanks to Chris Kuethe for the PHP code.

We (the whole family) drove across the lake last night to see the One Six Right screening in a theater. Normally, it’s only available on DVD. Brian Terwilliger, the director and producer, was there to do the intro to the movie, then answer questions afterward. What a beautiful movie. Three of my all-time favorite airplanes, the DC-3, the P-51, and the Piper Cub, were all well-represented. The in-flight sequences above the California desert were almost beautiful enough to make you cry. The music of the main theme is as great a song as anything John Williams has ever done. Check the web page for a screening near you, and don’t miss it.

Another thing I wish I’d written. Got it from a friend today, no idea where it originated, but I love it:

The Honorable Paul S. Sarbanes
309 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

Dear Senator Sarbanes:
As a native Marylander and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you.

My reasons for wishing to change my status from U.S. citizen to illegal alien stem from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill’s provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, what I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years.

I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out.
Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year, so I’m excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of the last five years taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively?
This would yield an excellent return for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005 and I estimated a gross savings approximating $72,000. After the fine this would yield me a net savings of $70,000.

In addition, I would reap the other benefits of being an illegal alien such as free health care, avoidance of paying Social Security taxes, buying automobile insurance, serving on jury panels, etc. If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal (retroactively if possible) and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you for your assistance.
Your Loyal Constituent

I’ve done quite a bit more traveling than usual lately, and I’m finding it harder and harder to take the whole thing seriously. I’ve always thought all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the little security show they perform for you getting on airplanes was all a bit silly, but taking a cruise to Alaska a month or two ago showed me that they’ve got the airlines beat hands-down (not that the airlines are slouches in this area, see below). The cruise ship had an X-ray machine at the door that everyone was required to pass their things through to get back on the ship after each stop. Well, unless you were carrying too much, pushing a stroller, or looked particularly irritated about the whole thing, in which case, they’d often just wave you around. Well, that is assuming they even chose to even do the security show at that particular stop. It all seemed pretty arbitrary. Not pissing off the customers was, at least in the case of security, secondary to any security that might have otherwise been provided by untrained cruise employees staring at X-ray screens.

The cruise line and the TSA saved the best for last, though. As usual, when re-entering the USA, it was mandatory to fill out one of the little customs declaration forms so they can tax you appropriately. The form was distributed the night before our arrival back home, along with instructions on how to pack, containing dire warnings about packing liquids in your carried baggage. All liquids (which, incidentally, includes non-liquids, such as toothpaste) were to be packed in your main luggage which had to be placed outside your stateroom door the night before. Now let me get this right. The supposed point of not carrying liquids onto airplanes is so that Abdul and Achim can’t pack their Gatorade bottles with explosives and blow up the plane. Ok, I’m with you so far. But we’re not on a plane, we’re on a boat. And we’re not getting on the boat, we’re getting off the boat. Assuming I could even sink a boat the size of a cruise liner with a pound of C4 (which I’m betting could be done, if you could find just the right place to put it), I’ve already got it on the boat by the time this “security measure” could be used. One can only assume that the idea is to prevent you from bringing your “soda” into the country with you. Incidentally, it also made brushing your teeth the next morning a bit of a challenge.
But it doesn’t stop there. Oh no. It gets better. The next morning, you get up, brush your teeth with water, and hang out until your deck is called. You grab all your stuff, count the kids to make sure you’ve got the ones you like, and head down the gangplank, with your customs declaration and passport in-hand. The whole time, you’re watching for the line. Everything about travel involves waiting in line, right? Even getting back into your own country without your toothpaste. But there’s no line. You walk and walk and walk, still waiting for the TSA guy’s demand for your papers, but it never comes. You grab your luggage that you placed outside the door the night before, and on into the terminal you go. Inside the terminal, a nice cruise employee takes your customs form as you walk past, and you’re out the door onto the streets of downtown Seattle. Wow, I feel safer already. Good thing I didn’t have that toothpaste with me, or that could have gotten messy.

But wait a minute, there’s still a problem… Let’s assume for a moment that the TSA actually did something beyond impede travel. Say, for example, that they checked passports as you came into the country. You have to go through customs (when they bother) with all of your luggage, including the ones containing the dreaded toothpaste you put outside your door the night before. Am I to believe that the country is safer with the deadly toothpaste tube in my suitcase rather than my backpack as I show my passport to the customs guy? I guess it’s a moot point when you just let anyone in who walks off the boat without checking. You can see why these people are so hard to take seriously.

Airlines and airports are not immune from stupidity, though. My wife and I flew to Mexico last week. There are a hundred things about flying that make it distasteful that little can be done about. Like getting to share your seat with an immensely fat person who takes up their entire seat plus half of yours. Or sitting next to the guy who hasn’t taken a bath since indoor plumbing became popular. Or sitting next to the person who can’t seem to stop talking, even after you’ve faked your own death. In addition to all of these unavoidable joys of travel, the airline gives you bonus reasons to avoid airplanes. Say, for example, the 50lb per bag weight limit. Ok, I’m good with that, I understand that every pound costs money, people have to lift these things up and down to get them on and off of the airplane, and without limits, there would be people traveling with their bowling ball collections. But there needs to be just a modicum of intelligence applied to the process. For example, lets say two people, me and my wife, hypothetically, decide to pack all of our things into one suitcase to make things easier for everyone. And let’s say, hypothetically, that said suitcase comes to 54lbs (not that I weighed it at home, like I must be expected to). So we go to the airport, and the assclown behind the counter says, “You’re over 50lbs, I have to charge you $25.”

“Yes,” I reply, with what seems like a perfectly logical statement to me, “but we’ve shared one bag, so we’re well under the 100lbs we’re entitled to.” Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? We’re 46lbs under our limit. But it’s not to be…

“The limit is 50lbs per bag, you’re going to have to pay an extra $25,” says the assclown.

I think about this for a minute. It’s probably useless to argue with this guy, but what the hell, it amuses me. “Why is that?”, I ask.

“Weight and balance of the aircraft,” he says.

Ah, ok. Now I understand. On an aircraft with a gross take-off weight probably exceeding 3/4 of a million pounds, the extra four pounds of weight is magically negated by the extra $25 in revenue gathered by Alaska Airlines. They apparently have some sort of a kick-back deal with God. Good thing we didn’t pack two separate 50lbs bags and bring them. Imagine what THAT would have done to the weight and balance of the aircraft.

Ah, but wait, there’s more. Airlines and phone companies may be astonishingly incompetent, but for the pinnacle of incompetence, government intervention is required. And the best peek most people get at the ways of government are at the airport. So when you fly, there’s a series of steps you go through (leaving out the ones not relevant to this example):

1. You buy your ticket. Maybe on the phone, maybe over the internet, or maybe even using one of those 20th century “travel agent” people.
2. You arrive at the airport, and present your confirmation number and/or name, and the agent prints out a spiffy piece of paper which is your boarding pass, but only after carefully checking your driver’s license and/or passport. It’s got your name, flight number, gate number, and all sorts of officious-looking markings all over it. It’s printed on multi-colored paper, and overall looks like it would be non-trivial for a bad guy to forge. “Have a good flight, Mr. Francis”.
3. You take this piece of paper to the security check-point, where a TSA goon carefully compares the name on your official-looking boarding pass with your driver’s license.
4. You take off your shoes, place your jacket, dignity, and civil rights on the conveyor belt, along with every other item your brought in a separate bins, and run the gauntlet of the metal detector and anal probe.
5. Gather your belongings from the seven bins, get dressed again, and proceed to your gate.
6. Hand your boarding pass to the gate agent, who scans the bar code with her nifty laser scanner, and says, “Welcome to flight 42, Mr. Francis”.
7. Get on the plane.

There are usually some extra steps involved, such as waiting 45 minutes while somebody holds up the line ahead of you while trying to put his moose antlers in the overhead bin, but those are the important details. Seems pretty secure, right? After all, your official ID was checked twice, and compared with the other information you provided (your confirmation number, in the first case, and the boarding pass you were issued in the second case). If you apply no thought to it, and take it at face value, it seems pretty good. You’re only allowing people who have been positively identified (and checked against terror watch lists) into the gate area. Sure, maybe a bad guy could forge an ID or get false papers, but the agent’s computer should red-flag a lot of those people, supposedly. It all makes for a pretty good show. Except that there’s another way to get a boarding pass. Here’s the other way:

1. You buy your ticket on-line.
2. The day before your flight, you go to your airline’s web page, in this case, alaskaair.com, type in your confirmation number, choose your favorite seat, and up pops your boarding pass on your screen. Click ‘print’, and it spews out on your printer. For fun, you right-click on the page, and save the HTML file to your hard drive.
3. You take this piece of paper to the security check-point, where a TSA goon carefully compares the name on your official-looking boarding pass with your driver’s license.
4. You take off your shoes, place your jacket, dignity, and civil rights on the conveyor belt, along with every other item your brought in a separate bins, and run the gauntlet of the metal detector and anal probe.
5. Gather your belongings from the seven bins, get dressed again, and proceed to your gate.
6. Hand your boarding pass to the gate agent, who scans the bar code with her nifty laser scanner, and says, “Welcome to flight 42, Mr. Francis”.
7. Get on the plane.

See any differences here? Well, for one, your ID was only checked against your name once, rather than twice. And it was checked by someone usually in a huge hurry, who has to make snap judgements on the validity of a huge variety of ID (fifty different states’ worth of drivers licenses, as a starter). This person never puts your name in a computer, though. Never checks a manifest to see if you’re actually on the flight listed on the piece of paper spewed from your home printer. I’d be willing to bet they never even check the date or flight number to see if it’s today. They simply compare your face to your ID photo, and the name on the ID to the name on the boarding pass. And they’re not even all that picky about your name. I go by my middle name, but my license lists only my first name, so the name on my boarding pass often doesn’t match the name on my ID. It’s never been a problem. But hey, it’s only a small security hole, right? I mean, it still keeps the riff-raff out of the gate area, right?

Well, no. You see, last time I printed a boarding pass, I saved the HTML file on my hard drive. Why? No good reason, I just felt like it. But now, if I ever want to go wander around the gate areas at the airport, I can. No problems at all. All I do is load up the saved HTML file into my favorite text editor (even MS Word), and change the name to whatever ID I have handy. I also change the date to today, and re-save the file. Then I click on it to load it back into my web browser, and print it again. Presto! I now have a valid boarding pass in whatever name I choose. It won’t get me on a plane, because I’m not on the passenger manifest, and presumably there’s some sort of info encoded in the bar code that identifies me, but they don’t check any of that just to get past security. They only check that when you get on the airplane. So I now have unrestricted access to the gates. Even better, I have unrestricted access to the gate area with no record whatsoever (beyond the recorded security cameras) that I was even there. I can come and go at will. Unless some really clever person notices that I come to the airport, go to the gate area, never get on a flight, then leave, I can do whatever I wish. It’s not like they pick on loiterers at the airport. Is this valuable to a bad guy? Well, I’d have to guess yes. How? Well, I’m coming to that.

Ok, so now I’m in the secured area of the airport. Maybe I’m a bad guy. I’ve just showed you how a fourth-grader can falsify a boarding pass to get there. Hell, maybe I even use my real name, even though it’s on every terror list that exists. After all, no record is made at the single spot I have to show my ID. Why not use my real ID, and reduce the chances that some TSA flunky detects my fake ID? It’s not like they have a watch list in their heads. Now it’s time to get on the plane. “Aha! Here’s where it falls apart!” is what you’re thinking. But wait. There’s no check anywhere along the way to make sure that the boarding pass I used to get past security is the same one I use to get on the airplane. Maybe I used my real name, Kareem Abdullah Mohammed Terrorist to get through security. Why not? My ID matches my homemade boarding pass, and neither is checked against anything. Now I’m at the gate. Now I present my real boarding pass, the one I bought on the Internet two weeks ago using the stolen credit card and printed on my home printer this morning. It’s totally legit in every way, other than being in the name of “Bob Smith”, the guy whose card I stole. But wait, I don’t have a driver’s license in the name of Bob Smith. Well, so what? The gate agent never asks for ID. Why should she? It was already checked at least once, and maybe twice before you got this far.

“Have a nice flight, Mr. Smith.”

Update:  27.Oct.06

Turns out I wasn’t the first person to think of this.  Or even the second.  Or even the third.  See here.

I just realized when I got to the office this morning that I’m on-call again this week, for the sixth week out of the last eight.  I swore on my life when I quit my on-call job years ago that I’d never carry a pager again for work as long as I lived for any reason.  Now I remember why.  So forgive me if I’m grumpy this week.

So somebody tell me what I’m missing here. The Pope made a speech that quoted a statement by the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus in (approximately) the year 1391, in which ol’ Manuel noted that Islam had mostly been spread through violence. Well, ok, that’s History 101. So was Christianity at one time, but that’s not the point. Muslims worldwide, outraged at the Pope’s quoting of a 14th Century text, reacted with… ok, three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Ding ding ding, Violence! Yes, you guessed it. The Muslims, always on the lookout for something to be offended by so they have an excuse to go blow themselves up, reacted by (among other things) shooting at and/or burning five Christian churches in the West Bank. Three of them were apparently not even Catholic. Apparently irony is not high on the list of things taught in Jihad School. As an added bonus, they’re now threatening war with the West because the Pope dared to quote some history. Is it just me, or are these guys just looking for an excuse to go murder some more people? This certainly isn’t the product of rational human thought.

I’ll give the Pope points, though. He didn’t take the cowards way out and whimper, whine, and say he’s sorry for what he said. Instead, he said he’s sorry that the Muslims were offended. Which is what he should have said, as he was offering neither an opinion nor a judgement on Islam, he was simply quoting history.

I was listening to Fox News in my truck on Saturday afternoon (thanks, XM radio!) when they announced that it had snowed in Loveland, CO the previous night.  Well, ok, snow in Colorado in September is actually fairly common (I used to live there), but in Loveland?  Of all the places it might snow, Loveland doesn’t seem very likely.  Then later in the story, they showed footage of the snow on Loveland Pass, CO.  Ah, Loveland Pass, that makes more sense.  Loveland Pass, CO is about 100 miles southwest and over a mile higher in elevation than Loveland, CO, something that any atlas or map page on the Internet could tell you in about two seconds.  I dearly love Fox, as they’re by far the least biased and most accurate cable news source, but they screwed the pooch on this one.  Once again, it’s a minor mistake that makes you wonder about what other major mistakes are making it into our news.  Don’t news agencies have the obligation to do at least the smallest amount of research on a story before spreading it?

We’re painting the house in preparation for new carpet. This wall, we’re painting red. Not just red, but a special color I’ve named “Holy Crap” Red, ’cause that’s what you say every time you walk into the room and see it. Actually, it’s not even so much that you see it. You walk into the room and it visually attacks you. A million years from now when humanity is long gone and alien archaeologists from another solar system visit Earth and start digging, they’ll find this wall in my house and shriek “@^#**% $+@!!!”, which are of course the alien words for “Holy crap!”. I thought it would be fun to leave the “Redrum” on the wall, but my wife insisted on painting over it. I can only hope that ten years after I sell my house, the letters start showing through again.

We just returned from Alaska, this time we took the kids. Pictures linked here.  Warning:  contains excessive numbers of airplane pictures.  I think AK has more airplanes than cars.

I really get mad about poor reporting, whether on television, radio, or newspaper. The picture above (along with the caption) appeared in my local paper (the Everett Herald) on July 31st, along with a long story about Verizon bringing fiber directly to homes. Now I understand that reporters are not experts on every story they cover. They’re people who (supposedly) get as much information as possible about something, validate it to the degree possible, then tell the rest of us about it. From reading the story and looking at the pictures, the reporter was right there with the Verizon installation guy while he worked. If a reporter gets something wrong as simple as the difference between copper and glass, it casts huge shadows of doubt over everything the reporter says, and even the publication in which he says it. If he can’t get something this trivial right, how can you be sure he has correctly reported the more complicated parts of the story? It’s no wonder blogging is destroying the mainstream media. People who actually understand subjects are now reporting on them, and it doesn’t matter how well-trained a reporter is as a journalist, an expert with a decent command of the written word trumps a word-artist with no understanding of the subject every time.

My wife and drove down and spent the weekend Portland, OR. There’s a lot to do in Portland. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is super cool. We don’t have a single ham radio store in the state of Washington, but Portland has a Ham Radio Outlet. By far the coolest thing in Portland, though, is Powell’s City of Books. It takes up a full square city block, and is three stories tall. One of the world’s great bookstores, without a doubt. Two blocks down the street is Powell’s Technical Books, which is twice the size of your typical neighborhood strip mall Barnes and Nobel, but filled with nothing but technical books, without all the foofoo crap. Paradise. My wife and I loaded up, and got some good stuff for the kids, too. I brought home:

• Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic Cartography - I’m a GPS geek, this is a must-have.
  
• Airplane Ownership - Ever try to get a handle on the cost of airplane ownership by searching the web? Can’t do it. Every single bit of info you find basically says, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it”. This book puts actual examples in front of you to look at. While everyone’s cost will vary, it at least gives you an idea what’s reasonable.
  
• Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying - The classic flying book, written in 1944. We had it at the public library when I was a kid, time to own my own copy.
  
• Asterisk: The Future of Telephony - I’m running Asterisk at home as my personal PBX, but there are some things I haven’t figured out yet. Thought having the book might help.
  
• Kit Airplane Construction - Do I want to build my own airplane? Yes. But ask me again after I’ve read this, my answer may be different.
  
• Flight of Passage: A Memoir - Two kids (age 15 and 17) buy a Piper Cub in 1966 in New Jersey, rebuild it, and fly it to Los Angeles. Then write a book about it. How cool is that?
  
• True North: Exploring the Great Wilderness by Bush Plane - Adventure and exploration in a float plane. Neat.
  
• Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol.1: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture - An ancient classic, picked it up for free in the bargain bin, so why not?
  
• Computer Networks - Another ancient classic, but a newer addition than my copy at home.
  
• Introducing the UNIX System - Older than dirt. Another free one from the bargain bin.
  
• Exploring Java - I hate Java. But sometimes I have to deal with it.
  
• Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 - One rev out of date, but you can’t beat the (zero) price.
  
• Microsoft Secrets: How the World’s Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People - MS is evil, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

These are all in addition to last week’s (local finds):

• Flying the Alaska Wild: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Alaska Bush Pilot - Almost done with this one, as cool as it sounds.
  
• FAR/AIM 2006: Federal Aviation Regulations/Aeronautical Information Manual for 2006 - Dry as dirt. A thousand pages of Federal Aviation Law. But important stuff.

It wasn’t all fun. First, it was hot. 104 degrees. I know hot, I lived most of my life in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado. But this was 104 and high humidity. That’s not fun, especially in a part of the country where a common joke is “you know you live in Seattle if you know more people who own boats than people who have air conditioning”. I know exactly one person who has A/C (at least that I’m aware of). I know dozens of people with boats. Guess it’s not just a joke. Traffic between Seattle and Portland is also not fun. 190 miles of two to five lane parking lot. I also forgot how completely full of freaks downtown Portland is. I can understand why the legions of Portland homeless have an odor. But in this modern age, why is it that the hippies can’t take the occasional bath? Lots of protests. Hippies protesting war, protesting fur, protesting whatever. What a waste. There are so many positive things these people could be doing with their lives.
Anyway, all in all, a very fun trip, in spite of the traffic and the weirdos.

The family and I attended the Northwest EAA Fly-In today in Arlington, WA. This is one of the biggest EAA airshows/events in the country, and was a blast. We spent pretty much the whole day there, and saw less than a third of the exhibits. The array of planes was amazing, I saw a number of planes I’ve only read about.I was particularly looking forward to to finding the Zenith booth, as I’ve been interested in building a Zenith Aircraft CH 701 STOL kit plane for quite a while. I’ve been subscribed to the Zenith mailing list for some time, and almost a year ago, I posted a question asking whether or not I would fit in a 701. I was concerned, as I’m 6′ 4″ tall, and there is a structural element that runs across the cockpit above the pilot’s head that looks like it might be in the way of my head. There was quite a bit of interesting discussion on the list, but ultimately, it turned out there was nobody with a 701 as tall as I am, and the question was ultimately left unanswered. I’ve been waiting for the EAA show, as I know that Zenith usually has an exhibit, and I was looking forward to seeing a plane in person, and sitting in one to see how it “fits”. I poked around until I found the Zenith exhibit, and sure enough, they had a beautiful 701 parked in front. You would think that my problems were solved. They weren’t. I talked to a guy in the booth, explained my issue, and asked if I could sit in the 701 for a moment. Well, no, he said, the plane on display actually belongs to somebody, and he wasn’t around. Ok, I understood that, if I’d spent a couple thousand hours building something, I’m not sure I’d leave it wide open to sit in, either. I asked if the owner would be back later, so perhaps I could ask him in person. The Zenith guy said there was no way the owner would let me sit in his plane, and was getting a bit hostile. I tried to ask him a few more questions, and he was very dismissive, and hinted that he had other things he needed to be doing, rather than talking to a customer. Well, hint taken. If that’s the attitude of a kit plane manufacturer, it’s not a kit I’d like to build. Kit plane building generally requires at least a bit of interaction with the factory, and that’s not the kind of interaction I’d look forward to.On the other hand, most of the other exhibitors were very friendly, and many would let you “try on” the planes for size (again, something critical when you’re as tall as I am, and literally cannot see out the side windows of a Cessna 152/172 without considerable contortions). I’ve always wanted a Piper Supercub, and the Dakota Aircraft guys were there with their kits. They had a beautiful yellow example parked in front of their booth, as well as a bare, uncovered airframe. I also got to sit in a Bear Hawk, which is a really really slick bush plane. I also got to see an Aviat Husky up close, as well as a really nice Maule (pictured at the top of this entry).

Last, but not least, I bought a really cool DVD from Spencer Aircraft called “Big Rocks and Long Props“. I thought it a bit overpriced at $30, but the guy managed to talk me into it. Turns out to be worth every penny. It’s 45 minutes of some of the coolest bush flying footage you’ll ever see. The pilots fly their two Supercubs in and out of places you have to see to believe. I’d give these guys a better than even chance of being able to land and take off again from the roof of my house.

My buddy John has invited me to fly out to Oshkosh with him on the 23rd. Tempting. Oshkosh is (in my opinion) the coolest airshow in the world.

I finally upgraded the webserver I lease in NYC from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 4. While I’m at it, I decided to switch from pLog to Wordpress for blogging. Obviously, the content has all disappeared, I’ll get everything migrated over the weekend.

I did Field Day again this year with the crowd from WetNet. Much fun was had by all. They run a pretty laid-back event (ie, when the food comes off the grill, the radios are idle). I tend to prefer that to the insanity of some of the highly-competitive events I’ve been to. I don’t get much chance to play radio any more, so I was really looking forward to the chance to hang out with some “radio types”. I finally got to meet Curt, WE7U. Smart guy. We’re both UNIX guys, and we both built our first computer out of 1802 processors (the only silicon-on-sapphire CPU ever made - the same one they used in the Voyager spacecraft) back in the late ’70s. Was fun to talk about the crazy things we used to try to do with 256 bytes of RAM. As usual, the guys set up the rhombic out in the field. It’s just over 500ft long. Hell of an antenna for HF. My property at home is over 600ft lengthwise, hmm…

I visited Snohomish Flying Services at Harvey Field this morning. Looks like they’ve got a nice program. I’ve got to schedule a flight with them, meet the instructors, etc, then make a decision on them vs. Regal Air. I’m leaning towards Harvey Field, due to it’s proximity to home, but only if they’ve got a good program. Gotta get going on this. Too much to do, not enough time to do it all…

Woke up today to a great Father’s Day. My son bought me a really nifty Dremel tool set. Great for things like helping him work on his Pinewood Derby Car (hmm…). My daughters got me a really nice jacket that I’d been thinking about buying. My wife got me flying lessons. She even went ahead and scheduled the first lesson for earlier today. I did my first lesson in a Cessna 172 at Regal Air over at Paine Field near Everett. Had a great time. Did power-on stalls, power-off stalls, 180- and 360-degree turns-without-losing altitude (I’m sure there’s a better name for these), and worked on building various habits, like when to use carb heat. Put my first 1.1 hours in my log book.

I really liked the guys at Paine Field. I have a friend who flies there, as do several of the guys at work. Before I commit to starting “hard-core”, I’m going to check out Snohomish Flying Service at Harvey Field, as Paine Field is about a 40 minute drive from my house, and Harvey Field is less than five. Pretty exciting Father’s Day.

I wish I could attribute this properly, all I know is that it was a letter to the editor somewhere in the US:

Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration. Certain people are angry that the U.S. might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely. Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.

Let’s say I break into your house. Let’s say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave. But I say, “I’ve made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors; I’ve done all the things you don’t like to do. I’m hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).”

According to the protesters, not only must you let me stay, you must add me to your family’s insurance plan and provide other benefits to me and to my family (my husband will do your yard work because he too is hard-working and honest, except for that breaking in part).

If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my right to be there. It’s only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I’m just trying to better myself. I’m hard-working and honest … Um, except for the … Well, you know.

And what a deal it is for me!! I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of selfishness, prejudice and being anti-housebreaker.

Did I miss anything? Does this sound reasonable to you? If it does, grab a sign and go picket something. If this sounds insane to you, call your senators and enlighten them because they are stumbling in the darkness right now and really need your help. (Unfortunately the Senators won’t listen to the people and tried to “fix” things in their own convoluted way.)

“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!”

Monday is Memorial Day in the US. In honor of this day, two quotations:

“Beyond those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row on row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom… Under one such marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small-town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, ‘My Pledge,’ he had written these words: ‘America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone’.”

Ronald Reagan

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

John Stuart Mill

My wife and I went to see United 93 over the weekend. I’d rate it as one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen, along with Saving Private Ryan (especially the first fifteen minutes) , The Passion of the Christ, and Schindler’s List. The movie is not political, is not needlessly melodramatic, and it doesn’t whitewash anything. It’s approaches everything with a quiet, reverent feel to it. There’s no “message” behind things. It’s simply a careful re-creation of what happened on September 11, 2001. There are heroes, villains, heroics, and incompetence. A surprising number of people in the movie are not actors, but are the real people who took part in what happened that day. If you’re one of those people who see everything as relative, and feel that anything is ok, so long as you look at it from the right perspective, go see this movie. If you’re one of those people who think maybe the terrorists have a valid point, go see this movie. If this does not prove to you once and for all that there is truly good and evil in the world, nothing will. If radical Islamic fundamentalism does not scare you now, it will after you see what these men did to their fellow humans. It is deeply disturbing to watch four men commit mass murder while ranting “scripture” and praising Allah. May they burn in Hell for all enternity.

Ok, I’ll admit it, this goes in the “you’ve gotta be kidding me” category, but bear with me here. I’ve been playing with VoIP for quite a while. I’ve got both a FWD and a Broadvoice account, plus an Asterisk PBX and several SIP phones and “SIP-to-real-phone-adapters”, and last but not least, soft clients for Linux, OS/X, and XP. I keep thinking the nifty new little WiFi SIP phones that look just like little cell phones seem awfully cool. The reviews of these phones, however, are uniformly bad. Audio quality apparently ranges from “Bad” to “Abysmal”, depending on which review you read. This made no sense to me, as there is no reason SIP should not work just fine over WiFi. Granted, there’s a few extra milliseconds of latency in a WiFi connection vs. a hardwired connection, but even with a really cheap junky access point, it’s typically considerably less than 1% of the totaly latency from Point A to Point B. A properly set-up access point (assuming you don’t have 18 zillion neighbors interfering with it) should have essentially zero packet-loss. I’m lucky enough to live out in the country, so I can’t even see another access point from my house without my 24db dish antenna. I decided to test my theory that the issue was not WiFi itself. I set up two identical SIP phones, one on a 10meg switched ethernet port, and the other the gadget above. I then made a series of calls to both other SIP phones and to “real” POTS phone numbers and compared the quality of the two. Results? No difference. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The WiFi version works every bit as well as the wired version. This leads me to believe that either the people doing reviews have really poor home networks that suffer from quite a bit of interference, or that the nifty new cell-phone-looking WiFi phones suffer from some sort of packet-loss or signal-strength issues.

In case you’re curious, the setup above consists of a Grandstream SIP phone, a Netgear hub, a Linksys/Cisco WiFi box (designed for use with an Xbox), a 100 Watt DC to AC inverter, and a 17aH 12V battery. Totally, utterly, completely impractical for actual use, but fun as an experiment in networking.

I picked up a fun toy at a local gun show a couple months back (btw, I miss the gun shows in Denver, the shows here in the Seattle area are tiny and the group who runs them is a bit overcontrolling, but that’s another subject entirely). Anyway, I picked up an old Civil Defense radiation survey meter. A bit of research on the ‘Net reveals it to be of approximately 1962 vintage. When I bought it, I thought I was buying a Geiger Counter. Alas, a survey meter is not the same thing. It does measure radiation, but it uses an ionization chamber rather than a Geiger/Mueller tube, and is something like three orders of magnitude less sensitive. In other words, if you can actually get the meter to move, you’re probably in mortal danger. I’m not upset, I paid almost nothing for it, and along with it, I got a really nifty FEMA book from 1985 on constructing fallout shelters, monitoring radiation, treating radiation sickness, and other happy things. I also got six little clip-on pocket dosimeters and a calibrator for them (yes, only five are shown in my photo). I calibrated and reset one of the dosimeters and clipped it in my laptop backpack about three months ago, and have been carrying around ever since, including three airplane trips to California (thought I might get some interesting questions from the TSA flunkies as to why I’m carrying around a radiation monitor, but they took no notice - guess I’m not really surprised). The meter still reads dead-on zero. Guess that’s a good thing.

One of these days, I ‘d still like a real Geiger counter, even better one of the nifty ones that have serial/USB output and can be monitored with a PC. Thought it might be fun to mount one in my pickup and monitor it for a couple of months. While I realize the Seattle area isn’t exactly a radiation hot-spot, there are bound to be areas (industrial areas, maybe?) with higher radiation levels than others. It would be fun to plot levels on a map.

So I was doing a bit of light reading last night (US Gov’t Publication NTIA Report 99-360, High-frequency Radio Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) Application Handbook), which, among other things, describes MIL-STD-188-141A ALE. ALE in it’s simplest form, is a modem that operates over HF radio and determines the quality of a radio link from Point A to Point B, and is capable of scanning a number of frequencies to determine which offers the highest likelihood of successful communications between two stations. It’s also capable of talking to multiple stations, passing short messages, selective calling, and some other nifty things. Hams are playing with ALE now, though ALE-capable HF radios are very rare in the surplus market, and prices are astronomical for new commerical units.

At any rate, it’s an interesting document that desribes ALE in actual use and the document gives a lot of detail on the more obscure aspects of ALE operation. I was reading happily along until I got to “Annex 6 - HF E-MAIL” which describes how the US Navy does e-mail both between the various ships in a Battle Force Group and also between that group and shore stations. Among other things, this e-mail system carries the mail between Navy personel at sea and their friends and family back home. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the standard e-mail client for use aboard ship for this purpose is Eudora. Well, ok, not a bad choice, if I had to do e-mail on a Windows machine, that would be my second choice (after Thunderbird, which wasn’t even available when this document was written). Guess I was just a bit surprised that the US Gov’t made such a wise (and cost-saving) choice rather than develop something kludgy and custom.

Deeper in the document lies an even bigger surprise. On page 230 of Annex 6, there’s an illustration of the ISO 7-layer stack we all learn in “Networking 101″ with Layer 2, the Data Link Layer, labelled as “AX.25″. WTF? AX.25? AX.25 is a ham radio packet radio networking protocol, based heavily on X.25. An odd thing to find in a document about Military radio networking, kind of made me wonder where the authors stole the illustration from. Three layers higher in the stack was an even bigger surprise. Layer 5, the Session Layer, is labelled JNOS. OMGWTFBBQ? JNOS? It couldn’t be. JNOS is a derivation of Phil Karn (KA9Q)’s software originally written to run on MS-DOS that provided a multi-tasking environment that gave the user an IP stack, mail server, mail client, telnet client, and a host of other very UNIX-like functionality almost twenty years ago on a dead-stock PC. It was a landmark in DOS software, and in my opinion was one of the most impressive things ever written to run on DOS. It was primarily used by ham radio guys to do IP networking over AX.25 on VHF radio links. It also served as Linux’s very first IP stack, before the linux kernel actually contained it’s own IP stack (yes, a user-mode IP stack - shudder).

A bit more reading, and sure enough, the specific hardware and software used to implement the system is spelled out, and other than the modems and crypto units, the US Navy uses a standard packet radio setup just like thousands of ham radio operators across the world. Huh. Wow. How… thrifty. Imagine the US Gov’t using something tried-and-true off the shelf instead of spending umpteen gazillion dollars to have something custom (and probably inferior) written just for them. Strange days, indeed.

I needed some switches and lights a couple of years back to control a car-PC that I primarily used for wardriving. I wanted to be able to turn certain functions on and off and get visual feedback on the status of things. I bought a WTDIO-M Digital I/O Module from Weeder Technologies with the hope that it would do the trick. I installed the board in an aluminum enclosure, and added switches, LEDs, a buzzer, and a voltage regulator. The WTDIO-M board has a number of nifty features, among them the ability to “stack” multiple units, 14 programmable I/O pins, and the ability to use plain ol’ ASCII to talk to it. At the time, the only software I could find on the ‘Net to talk to this board was the Windows software which was supplied with the board (which looks really slick, but I don’t do Windows) and a perl module from the Mr. House project. The Mr. House stuff was a little too application-specific to fill my needs, so I ended up writing my own horrible kludge in perl. It was ugly, but it (mostly) worked. And so it stayed for a couple of years.

A couple of months ago, I pulled my box out of the closet while searching for something else, and decided to put it back to work with my current truck-PC. I couldn’t deal with the awful perl code I had used previously, so I whipped something up in C. The current code is threaded, and is much more flexible and robust. One thread talks to the I/O board via the serial port, and another thread talks to user processes via a TCP socket. Switches can be read and LEDs set by reading and writing (in ASCII) to the TCP socket. While the code is pretty specific to the hardware I built around it (four switches, eight LEDs, and a buzzer), it should serve as a robust base for someone to build something more general out of. The C source is here, and a very simple sample client in perl is here. There’s a small amount of documentation at the top of the C code, enough to get started. Compile with:

cc -o weed weed.c -lpthread

I use gpsd on my truck PC to gather GPS data for both real-time processing and for later analysis. About a month ago, I bought a nifty LCD display for the truck from CrystalFontz, figuring I’d use it to show system status, GPS information, etc. on the screen in a way that was safe to look at while I drive. Turns out that the only lcdproc client for gpsd that I can find on the web is a steaming dog turd of a perl script over at Freshmeat. In an attempt to give the world a better alternative, I whipped up my own client called gpsdlcdd in C, and posted it here. You can also grab the patch for gpsd that builds gpsdlcdd right along with the rest of gpsd (which saves figuring out a bunch of nasty gcc parameters). The patch is simple enough to do by hand if by chance the gpsd Makefile.am changes enough that the patch won’t apply. You should just be able to apply the patch, re-run autogen.sh, configure, and make. I’ve been using it for about two days now, and it seems to work rather well, considering that lcdproc is under considerable development, and has new bugs added and removed daily. My LCD screen also came with a bunch of little one-wire temperature sensors that plug into the back of it, and can be used to measure the temperature of whatever you attach them to. One of the projects on my long list of things to do is to get those attached to interesting things and monitored.

My wife says I look like the Unibomber in my hoodie. I said, “No, I’m ‘The Uniblogger’”. Ok, well, anyway, back to work now…

Fun times. It’s been raining for two months. Not normal Seattle rain, this is record-setting rain. It’s failed to rain about three days in the last sixty or so. My back yard is so soggy that when I tried to drive out there to pick up a load of stuff the other day, my pickup sank right through the pretty green grass and eight inches into the muck. Even with 4-wheel-drive and a limited-slip differential, I wasn’t going anywhere. I went and got one of my 4×4 tractors and hooked it up to the receiver hitch on the pickup, had my son drive the truck, and just barely managed to yank it out of the mud. Actually, it was kind of fun. Joshua was very proud to have helped Daddy.

As an added bonus to the rain, today we have wind. It started about midnight, and hasn’t stopped since. I’ve got 100-foot-plus cedars in the back yard, and they’re flapping in the wind like little saplings. Two years ago, one went down in a similar storm. It took months to cut it all up. The power went off at 5:05am this morning, and has been going off and on since. I went out to the shop and loaded my generator in my front-end loader, brought it up to the house, and wired it up. We’ve been running on generator power off and on since. We were told yesterday that if the power went out, it could be out for days, due to the expected severity of the storm. So far, the DSL link is still up, so I’m assuming the local Verizon switching office is running on generator, as well. If that goes down, I’ll fail over to the EDVO/EDGE wireless. It’s slow, but it works. I wouldn’t care so much about Internet access during a storm, except that I’m lucky enough to be on-call this week.

Time to go bring a big load of firewood up to the house.  Fortunately, we have a huge old woodstove in the kitchen that’ll darned near heat the entire downstairs.  Ah well, it beats working.

Yesterday was my birthday, and among the presents I received was tickets from my wife for my son and I to visit the Flying Heritage Collection at the Arlington Airport in Arlington, WA. We have two world-class aircraft museums in the Seattle Area, the Museum of Flight and the brand-new Future of Flight museum attached to the Boeing factory tour. What many people don’t know is that there is a third place that’s worth visiting if you’re an airplane nut, that in fact is far more interesting than the two more well-known museums. The Flying Heritage Collection isn’t a museum, it’s the personal airplane collection of Paul Allen (yeah, that Paul Allen). He collects rare and valuable vintage aircraft and has them restored to flawless perfection. Even better, the goal is not just to create something pretty to look at, the ultimate goal is that every plane be able to fly (even at the risk of damage, as evidenced by a prop strike when recently flying the collection’s Polikarpov I-16 Type 24)

As amazing as the aircraft are, by far the best part of our tour was our guide, Art Unruh. Art is 83 years old, a former B-17 crewmember with 50 missions over Europe, and a genuine American hero (he earned a silver star with oak leaf cluster). My son and I showed up at our appointment (tours are by appointment only) at 2:00pm, and we spent the next two hours listening to Art tell stories about the planes in the collection, and the people who flew them. I thought two hours was far more time than necessary to look at fifteen airplanes, but in fact, I could have spent eight hours listening to Art’s stories without tiring. I figured we’d spend an hour doing the tour, then an hour taking pictures. My pictures, in fact, were all hastily snapped in the last ten minutes we were there.

It would be difficult to say what my favorite exhibit was. I’m a sucker for P-51s, and P-51Ds in particular. The collection has the most perfectly restored P-51D I’ve ever seen. The German Storch observations plane is flawless, and displays the amazing engineering and craftsmanship of the German engineers who designed and built her fifty years ago. The B-17 tail gun assembly (part of the Collection’s B-17 restoration) is one of the most beautiful examples of metalwork you’ll ever see. It’s polished to a mirror finish you have to see to believe.

If you’ve got a few hours to kill, make an appointment with the Collection and make the drive to Arlington. You’ll never forget it.

Ham radio has been one of my favorite hobbies since I was nine years old, when my dad and I originally got our licenses together. The hobby is very diverse, encompassing such cool things as moonbounce, satellite communications, IP networking over radio (twenty years before WiFi), disaster relief communcations, and a hundred other things. One of the very cool things I enjoy doing with radio is being able to use e-mail from anywhere on the face of the Earth. I have a very spiffy HF data modem from SCS Communications which, when combined with a suitable HF radio and the Airmail software package and the Winlink2000 network, combine to give you a very powerful system for worldwide data communications. I’ve used it from home, camping, road trips, you name it.

I applaud the Winlink/Airmail effort, and think they’ve done an outstanding job getting their network up and running. The ARRL is considering adopting Winlink as the “official” communications system for use in disaster relief and emergency communications. While I understand part of this motiviation (ie, Winlink is up and running, and works), I wish they’d hold off a bit on making the decision. Winlink is a wonderful prototype for working out the myriad of issues involved in this type of system. However, rather than continuing the prototype into perpetuity and continually tweaking it, I feel it’s time to take the lessons learned from Winlink and integrate those ideas into much more decentralized and robust system. My nits with it in particular are:

• While there are many “connection points” located all over the globe, the logical architecture of the system is very centralized. The entire worldwide network relies on one single MS Windows machine here in the US being up and running. To anyone with a background in doing any kind of fault-tolerant Telecom infrastructure design, this screams “disaster waiting to happen” at the top of it’s lungs. Granted, they just recently brought up a backup system, but it’s still an architecture that relies on one of two Windows boxes being running, else hundreds (thousands?) of users who rely on it (many of whom are on boats quite literally in the middle of the ocean) are suddenly without communications. As part of the goal of HF radio e-mail is communication during disasters, a centralized structure seems to run counter to that mission.
• The Winlink servers run Windows. I completely fail to understand the rationale of having the servers run on Windows machines. Once again, going back to the Telecom world, where “5-9s” reliability (99.999% uptime) is pretty much mandated for all equipment (which translates to approximately five minutes of unscheduled downtime per calendar year), use of Windows is pretty much verboten. I have worked for or consulted for about six major carriers, and all of them had engineering policies forbidding use of Windows in critical infrastructure. Suns were pretty much the norm, though Suns are now being replaced in large numbers by Linux running on server-class PCs.
• Both the client and the server run on proprietary software (in this case, by proprietary, I mean “source code is not available”) that run only on Windows. This is annoying on several levels, one of which is that client software that runs only on Windows addresses only 80% of the potential desktops (and the 80% figure is actually probably not accurate in the ham radio community, which tends to have much more sophisticated users who tend towards Linux and even Mac OS/X). The Airmail client is actually a remarkably nifty piece of code, which manages to replicate a large number of typical Unix services all running in one Windows binary. The client is much more than a mail client, it can also function as an SMTP MTA (like sendmail) to accept mail from other networked mail clients, can act as a POP3 server, can talk to a GPS receiver to provide location information, and can act as a gateway from HF to VHF/UHF packet radio. Linux will actually do 99% of what the Airmail client will do straight out-of-the box, but lacks the one small piece of code to encode/decode email to/from the format used by Winlink, and the piece that actually talks to the SCS modem. It wouldn’t take much to be able to replicate Winlink with pretty much any Linux box, once those two little pieces are complete.
• Winlink uses a proprietary modem. Well, ok, in all fairness, this is being addressed. Hams are a notoriously tightwad group of people (myself included). SCS modems are not cheap. I love my PTC-II, but I’m impressed by some of the new software modems that use the sound card. They completely get rid of the need for a physical external modem, all that’s needed is a simple (and cheap) interface between the computer and the HF radio that handles audio level conversion and transmit/receive switching.

I’ve been giving the architecture issue a great deal of thought, and I think I’d design a system much more similar to UUCP back in the heyday of USENET. A design based on UUCP would have the following advantages:

• Supports transport of both mail and arbitrary binary files transparently.
• Supports transfer of data over both dial-up modems and IP (ie, the Internet) out-of-the-box.
• Well-documented, standardized protocols that have been in use for 30 years and have a very large base of users already familiar with setup and use.
• Supported by pretty nearly every OS (even Windows - with free add-on software).
• Existing transport mechanisms could be trivially extended to support SCS modems, particularly given that new versions of the SCS firmware even support the Hayes AT command set.
• A fairly simple “modem emulator” framework could easily be built that presents the UUCP core with an emulated Hayes AT-compatible interface, but uses a software/soundcard modem on the back end. As new HF data modes are developed (both for HF and VHF/UHF), they could easily be “dropped in”.
• UUCP is completely decentralized.  E-mail gateways to/from the Internet could exists at any or every point where there is a radio node.
• UUCP already supports lat/lon (we used to call it the “ICBM Address”) for use in propagation prediction.
• UUCP can be made to be extremely tolerant of network topology changes, whether caused by stations coming and going, propagation conditions changing, Internet outages, or any other reason.

As a stop-gap measure, I decided to see if I could get Airmail to run under Wine on my Linux box. I was getting mighty tired of having drag around both my Linux laptop, plus a crufty old Windows laptop for the sole purpose of accessing HF e-mail. First, I installed wine on my kubuntu box:

sudo apt-get install wine

I then copied over Airmail to that machine (I back up all of my Windows and OS/X boxes to my main Linux box at home using rsync, so it was just a matter of copying the Airmail folder from the big box to my laptop). I put it in my home dir as /home/jfrancis/airmail

When I ran it the first time, I got a bunch of error messages about a missing library called vcl50.bpl. I had not the vaguest idea what this file was, but a bit of googling led me to David Taylor’s website where I could download the right library. I re-ran Airmail3.exe under wine, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t come up and run. I’ll admit, I was amazed. I tried to do a telnet connect, and sure enough, it uploaded and downloaded mail from the Winlink server flawlessly. Next, I figured I’d try actually doing a mail transfer via radio. I had a lot less confidence in this working. I did a bit more googling and found out how to map a virtual wine com port to a real serial port. It required creating a .winerc file and adding the following line:

com1=/dev/ttyS0,9600

Holy radio, Batman, it worked! I was blown away. It’s profoundly disturbing to see a Windows application running on your LInux desktop. I’m now completely MS-free. I did a bit more testing, and after I disabled my local MTA in /etc/init.d/ (which shouldn’t have been running on my laptop, anyway), I could even run the SMTP server and POP3 servers in Airmail. I can now use mutt, Thunderbird, or whatever mail client I choose to do HF e-mail. As a final step, I decided to try to get the propagation prediction engine that’s integrated into Airmail working. I downloaded it and ran wine on the install file. It generated a few spurious errors (it was unable to install any of the icon files), it completed. I fired up Airmail yet again, hit F8, and there was my propagation chart. So there you go, it’s possible to use Winlink and Airmail without being stuck with Windows. Color me impressed. Wine rocks.

I run an ancient version of Asterisk@Home as my home PBX, and have it hooked up to Free World Dialup (500275)and Broadvoice for POTS service. I have a couple of Grandstream BudgeTone 101 SIP phones, but wanted more phones hooked up to the system without spending $60 per phone (plus ethernet wiring). The other day, I ran across this link on Hack A Day, about how to hack a Linksys PAP2 Vonage box to work with generic SIP. It involves TFTPing the Sipura firmware to the PAP2, changing a few setting, TFTPing the linksys firmware back onto it, then blowing away the Vonage config. At one point, there was a rebate you could get that would cover the entire price of the device.  They seem to have wised up, and now require you to actually sign up for the Vonage service and keep it for two months before you can get the rebate.  Ah well.  I can now add SIP extensions for (on average) $25 each, and just run normal phone lines through the walls. I can also do things like plug in generic cordless phones, wireless headsets, etc., all of which are much cheaper for “real” phone lines than SIP connections.

I’ve turned out to be quite the lazy blogger. Over the last year+, I’ve managed to average not much more than a post per month. Unimpressive. So, here are some short updates. This morning, I downloaded and built Daniel Seagraves’ TI Lisp Machine emulator called Meroko that everyone is talking about. I e-mailed Daniel for a copy of the disk images, and he graciously shared them with me. I haven’t pulled them off the mail server yet, as my wife is currently working and has the misfortune to have to use Windows and MS Outlook over a VPN connection. Painful on a good day. The disk images Daniel sent me are over 50meg, so they’ll have to wait until this evening.

I’ve now had my Mac for several months, and it has become by far my favorite machine. I’m still occasionally annoyed by what still strike me as gratuitous differences, but I’ve become fond of the extra meta keys. I used to carry my Linux laptop everywhere. Now I carry the Mac. They’re bloody expensive, so I’m still not sure I would have bought it if I’d had to spend my own money, but it would be hard to live without it now that I’m used to it. Emacs under carbon is really pretty, and sbcl works great. I know I should try MCL, but things have been busy, and it’s not really something I can justify spending time on at work (not that work is any less busy).

I’d been wanting to learn Python for a couple of years now, but never had the time. I finally did it; Google paid me to do it, so it was hard to complain. While I still “think” better in CL, Python is quickly becoming my second favorite language. It lets you solve problems in a very Lisp-like way (for example, it has the equivalent of a REPL), and has a vast array of nifty free libraries that save you from constantly re-inventing the wheel. My first project (needed a problem to solve to learn on) was to port a bunch of my GPS data processing stuff from CL. Haven’t written anything substantial yet, but there are a ton of problems at work that need solutions, and Python looks like a good tool for it.

Abby is six weeks old today. She’s slept for seven hours straight twice in the last week. We can only hope that trend continues. She’s starting to smile every once in a while. Fun stuff. The other kids are getting used to having a little sister. The cat still wants nothing to do with her. The dogs seem to think she smells interesting.

Last, but not least, the last bruise has finally faded from my left ankle (several of my toes turned almost black, as well as half of my foot). About ten days after the baby was born, I tripped over my senile arthritic dog on the stairs coming down from the bedroom. My ankle made a sound that had to be heard to be believed. I would have bet anything that it was broken. Almost passed out from the pain. After half an hour or so, it hurt a bit less, so I decided I could go to the class I was attending that day. By the end of class that afternoon it had swelled up like I had a tennis ball hidden under my sock. Off to the emergency room I went (about twelve hours later than I should have). I still wear a brace on it, as it’s still a bit wobbly and painful, but at least I’m off the crutches.

So now we’re caught up. Wish somebody was covering the Grand Challenge live on TV. Hope the Discovery Channel or History Channel does a special at some point.

A co-worker (thanks, Mark!) passed along this little gem from MSDN Magazine this morning:

“For the past few years, it has become fashionable to embrace a dynamic language such as Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. While I’ll admit to having a short but pleasurable tryst with Ruby, I believe I have found true love in the dialect of Lisp called Scheme. — Don Box”

Read the rest of his post here.

The organizer of SeaFunc (a group of Seattle functional programmers formerly known as SeaLUG - Seattle Lisp Users Group) has put out the following message for all interested:

SeaFunc is Seattle. SeaFunc is functional. Functional language. Functional PRO-gramming. We shall attempt to adjust your software, as there is something wrong. You’re in a C funk. Get out of your C funk. Stumble on down to the best Belgian booze around.

The Mothership lands at 8 pm on Tuesday, every 3 weeks at one of the venues listed below. Check the mailing list archives to find out which one. Better yet, subscribe!

For the uninitiated: “Functional Programming” (FP) treats computation as the symbolic substitution of functions. Solving problems by making changes to program state is often avoided. Common Lisp, Scheme, Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell, and Clean are examples of FP languages.

The merits of the FP approach are highly debateable. Much more clear, is that people who debate these issues are interesting (to other such people :-) ) and provide useful networking contacts. SeaFunc aims to be the premiere group in the Seattle region for advanced programming language paradgims. If you think there must be more to life than C++, Java, and C#, please join us!

“Make my func the SeaFunc, I wants to get funked up.” - Parliament http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/SeaFunc

Stumbling Monk
1635 E Olive Way
Seattle, WA 98102 - 5612
(206) 860-0916

Notes: the Monk is in Capitol Hill, at the corner of Olive and Belmont. The B&O Restaurant is a better known landmark and is kitty-corner to it.  The non-descript storefront says “Typing” on the awning. The Monk has a fantastic rotating menu of high-octane Belgian beers at reasonable prices! No food, but you can bring in or order in. We are evolving a tradition of taking turns bringing our own food; for instance, brie and crackers.

Ruby Restaurant
4241 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105 - 5806
(206) 675-1770

Ruby’s is in the U. District on “The Ave,” near 43rd St. Good, non-pricey food, and normal beer.

I haven’t personally made it to a meeting in quite some time. It’s over an hour’s drive each way from my home, but it’s a pretty good group of guys.

Abigail Joanne Francis was born at 5:59 PDT this morning!

I’ve finished my first month owning (well, being responsible for, at least) a Mac.  It’s been a mixed month, more positive than negative.  I installed the darwin ports system straight off, and have grown rather fond of it.  It happily built SBCL for me (once I figured out how to update it).  I didn’t like how it built emacs, so I pulled the source off the CVS tree and built it myself.  I rather like emacs under Carbon.  It’s pretty.  My biggest annoyance has been with the Mac infatuation with “not invented here”.  Never mind that control ctrl-t opens a new tab in Firefox in Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, every other OS you can name.  The Apple motto is, “we don’t do that here”.  They seem to take pride in gratuitous differences.  While I can understand that the Mac culture has branched from the rest of the world and has grown rather proud of the cute little flower key on their keyboard, would it have really been that hard to also support the control ctrl key?    I also get really annoyed that alt-tab doesn’t let you swap to different windows the way you’d expect (like Windows and KDE do it).  Rather, it switches you between applications.  If you’ve got four terminal windows and Safari open, you can only switch between Safari and the group of terminal windows.  alt-tab also ignores all of the applications that you’ve shrunk down to the little bar at the bottom, so you have to resort to the mouse to pull them back into play.  Granted, there may very well be keyboard shortcuts, but they’re not the obvious ones.  Time to RTFM.

On a tenuously related note, I’m down at the Googleplex in the Bay Area again this week, and was lucky enough to have lunch today with Peter Norvig as well as two other Lisp heavies.  Seems rude to recount our conversation, but I will say that he’s as cool as you’d hope he would be.

On an even more tenuously related note, I visited the Computer History Museum, just down the street from the office here.  I had been there once before, back when they were located in Boston.  They have far more goodies than I could possibly list, but the things that impressed me were a Cray I, a Connection Machine, and the PDP-1 from MIT (the actual machine described in the book Hackers).  Of course, they had an old Symbolics machine as well.  The museum is free, and worth the visit if you’re ever in the area.

Two quick items: 1. My first posting from the new G4, and 2. Just bought a copy of Practical Common Lisp at the Border’s Books just down the street from my hotel in Sunnyvale. The technical selection in most book stores has gotten to the point where if you’re not looking for “C# for Dummies” or “Get Your MCSE in 21 Days Even if You Have an IQ of 42″, you might as well not bother. This Border’s provided a nice counterpoint to that. They had copies of the Xlib set of books, Applied Cryptography, all of Stevens’ books, Valahalia’s UNIX internals book, and of course PCL. Books I haven’t seen for sale retail in years (well, ok, I see Stevens’ books still every once in a while). Amazon.com hasn’t completely ruined chain book stores. Silicon Valley still has one good one. I also thought it was cool that the local Fry’s has an Apple I in a glass case.

So I’ve been at Google for a week and a half now. I’m spending this week and next in Mountain View, CA (at the Mother Ship) before heading back up to the Great Northwest to get on with things. Haven’t written for several weeks, as I wanted a chance to read the much-rumored Google blogging policy before I got myself into trouble. I got explicit permission to annouce that I’d accepted the job, but figured I shouldn’t push things beyond that before reading up on the rules. It’s no fun to score the coolest job ever, then get booted out the first week. While I obviously cannot even make vague references to what goes on behind the walls, I will say that when you hire a bunch of the smartest people in the world, set them free to create, and have the budget to provide for their every need, you get some astonishingly cool things as a result. I’m enjoying the Google cafeteria immensely, and will probably go home at the end of next week with the “Google 15″ (equivalent to the “Freshman 15″ I earned when I was 18, only much harder to lose almost 20 years later). I need to make time to visit the Computer History Museum while I’m here, as it’s only a mile or two from the Google campus (and on my way back to the hotel). I walked upstairs to Peter Norvig’s office earlier today. I wasn’t sure if I’d have the nerve to bother him when I got there or not, but I was spared the decision by the fact that he wasn’t in his office. You can’t be a Lisp geek and not at least try. I bought my copy of PAIP well over ten years ago, and I still consider it the best book on programming I’ve ever read.

I get my new laptop tomorrow morning; it’ll be the first Mac I’ve ever owned (well, ok, not “owned”, but mine to use). I stopped at both Fry’s and MicroCenter on the way back to the hotel tonight, and was very disappointed at the lack of retail software they carried for the Mac. I suppose tomorrow night’s project will be building/installing emacs, slime and some as-yet-to-be-determined Mac flavor of Lisp.

In other news, we lost one of our goats (Jake) to a coyote a few weeks back. I was even outdoors with them at the time, though I was out at the other end of the property working in my shop. The coyotes are hungry this year. I’ve taken a shot at two of them in the weeks since, but missed both times. I have no excuse for missing, both times I chose to use a .223 with a scope on it - a scope I haven’t sighted in since I lived in Colorado 2+ years ago. I either need to take a trip to the woods and sight the thing in, or next time grab something with good ol’ fashioned iron sights. Elwood was having fits without Jake around to keep him company, so we ended up with two more goats to keep him company, plus a Tibetan Mastiff named “Indy” (personally, I was pushing for either “Bigfoot” or “Chewbacca” as names, but got voted down - ah well, “Indy” is cool, as Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie) to watch over them when we aren’t around. Tibetan Mastiffs aren’t the same mastiffs you’re thinking of. Chances are, you’ve never even seen one. They’re exceptionally rare in the US, but are really neat (and very pretty) dogs. They are very calm, very gentle, and very protective of kids and goats, but capable of fighting off pretty much anything on legs. In Tibet, a single mastiff was historically used to guard and protect an entire village. Our one-eyed Corgi can’t even impress our cat, and our German Shepherd is as deaf as a post (and has pretty bad arthritis), so it was time for another dog. The breeder we got our mastiff from had one mastiff who fought off a cougar, and another who fought off three coyotes at the same time. We feel the goats (and everything else we own) are probably about as well-protected as they can possibly be. The next coytoe who wanders into our yard won’t even know what hit him.

It’s official, so I’m finally allowed to talk about it. I accepted an offer yesterday afternoon to work for Google in their new Kirkland (Seattle) office. That combined with the Yankees stomping the Mariners 6-0 in last night’s game made yesterday a pretty darned good day.

DARPA came on Tuesday to see my friend Ted’s Grand Challenge truck. Link to TV report here and a newspaper article here. I wish I had more free time to participate in the project, as it is, I’m just contributing little bits and pieces. Mostly I’m sharing my painfully acquired knowledge of installation and use of GPS receivers and computers in vehicles. Cars are pretty hostile places to run a PC and getting them to work reliably for long periods without vibrating apart or frying (from heat or power surges) is a bit of a black art.

Being the map junkie that I am, I was very pleased to note that google now has a UK version of their US mapping page. Unfortunately, it’s lacking the cool overhead satellite imagery that the US version has, but it’s still a great excuse to dig up and re-read my copy of The Kingdom by the Sea.

We made the list! My friend Ted put together a Grand Challenge Team in a remarkably short time and for surprisingly little money. The entry is an old Jeep Cherokee (pictured above). I’m not a major part of the team, but I’m contributing in the area of GPS navigation and a bit here and there on the electronics/computer interfacing side. More info on the Allied Forces web site.