I can't imagine there is anyone on my friends list who has an interest in airplanes who hasn't seen this, but just in case:



It's more interesting to watch for what's not there. He told ATC what was going on, but clearly only as his lowest priority once it was clear they couldn't help. There was plenty of time for checklists, and an attempt at a restart, all without the plane ever wandering in altitude or heading. It really is an absolutely textbook model of a professionally handled emergency.

The best part of living in Houston is the wonderful fall weather.

Now that I'm not spending my weekends feeling guilty about not flying, I've been taking windsurfing lessons from a guy down in Texas City. The first weekend, I mostly just managed to stand up on the biggest board he had, and sometimes managed to move in something vaguely like the direction I was heading.

Last weekend was much better - we went to a smaller lake (instead of the bay), and I managed to figure out turning around by the end of the lesson. I made it back and forth across the lake 3 times, including turning around at both sides, without falling off. This is a major improvment.

So I'm getting the hang of the basic muscle memory stuff, but I feel like I'm lagging behind on theory, so I ordered a book from Amazon this week. I'm hoping it'll give me a better understanding of the aerodynamics of the sail (which works just like a wing, except when it doesn't), and the board (which clearly has a "step", but I can only find it by accident) and the interactions of the sail and the board, which lets you turn (for now, I've just been trying various sail positions until either I stumble on the right one, or the instructor gives me hints).

And I'm hoping it'll give me a clearer path of what I should be learning. Clearly, standing up was important. Going in a straight line was important, and turning around was important, but I'm not sure what the next big step is. I'm sure he'll tell me next time I show up, but I always feel better with a more pre-determined path.

It's interesting. I'm having enough fun with it to go out and find a new usericon for my LJ, and certainly enough to keep taking lessons. At some point, though, I suspect I'm going to have to buy my own rig, and that's not going to work if I don't also get a car. I'd been thinking vaguely about a smart, but today I saw an adorable classic Beetle - orange with daisies on the side - and said, 'Wow, that would be the perfect car to strap a windsurfing board on top of!'. But I hate to get back into the whole car thing again, with all the expenses. There used to be places that rented lockers on the water for gear, but they mostly all blew down during Ike. So I'll see what's happening next summer - if I can rent a locker, in a place where I'm likely to find other windsurfers, I'll probably get a cheap used rig. If I can't, I'll have to decide if it's worth the expense of a car.

Tags: windsurfing

I have Google Wave invites. 7 left.

Leave me a comment if you want one!

Edit: Gone now, but I'm sure I'll get more. It says they won't go out "immediately", so I don't know how long before they show up. I'm also not sure how to go about finding my friends who are already there.

I need a Cupcake Car.

Please let me know if you're going to order one for me. I'd hate to end up with multiple cars all with the same type of frosting!

How to write first contact messages in a way that will actually get you a response

Women have been saying these things for years. Maybe the addition of pretty graphs will finally get guys to listen?

From The Kitchen today:

- Pour the cream into a saucepan. Do it gently heat. Grate the chocolate with the electric robot and put it in a bowl. Add the butter pieces.

- For the first stirrings of the cream, pour over the chocolate and butter and melt, stirring. If this n''est not hot enough, take a bath. Let the chocolate is melted.

Why do I not have an electric robot to grate my chocolate while I take a bath?

I really do try to not post a whole lot of political things here - I have a lot of people on various friend lists who have a variety of political views, and I try to keep from offending most of them most of the time.

But this is more philosophical then political, I'd say:

Of course they are screaming 'socialism'. They've been doing that since the 50s at least. They're not talking about economic redistribution of wealth - they never have been. They've been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had 'earned'.

The whole thing is brief, and worth reading here.

In other randomness, the hanger is empty, and I turned in the keys on Saturday. I still need to finish organizing all the stuff I dumped in the garage, but it was just too hot. Next weekend should be better.

Current Mood: sore

So the Tripacer sold this weekend.

She went to an amazing home - a grandfather who was buying her for his grandson to learn to fly in. They also took the Bobcat, and the kid has made more progress on it in the last two weeks then I did in the 5 years I had it.

Someone told Michael, when he bought the Tripacer 13 (!) years ago: "The day you buy your first airplane is the second happiest day of your life. The day you sell it will be the happiest". The Tripacer wasn't my first airplane, of course, but I had her far longer, and was probably more attached to her, then I was to the Starduster.

But selling her, in the end, wasn't as traumatic as I thought it would be. Honestly, I'm more relieved that the whole "airplane selling" process is over. It's been absolutely nutty - I've had so many people call to kick the tires, a few people actually showed up to kick the tires, a dozen first-time buyers who weren't really ready to buy anything, tons of incredibly low-ball offers via email, and more people then you can imagine who weren't interested as soon as they knew the paint wasn't perfect.

Then this guy showed up. He sent me email, with no pointless questions, just "can I see it this weekend?". He didn't want me to finance it, he didn't care that the paint wasn't perfect, he'd owned plenty of planes before, he chose a reasonable mechanic for the pre-buy, and he understood that a 53-year-old-plane could not be expected to look like it just rolled off the showroom floor. I couldn't have asked for a better plane-selling experience.

Will I miss her? Sure. But I know she's gone to a much better home, and I honestly need a break. Flying's been a chore for the last few years, and I need some time off. I don't know if I didn't want to fly because I resented the amount of money I was spending, or if it was because I'd outgrown the Tripacer years ago, or if I've just done enough and I want to move on. The plan is to take a year off, and re-examine flying next fall. If I'm deep into something else, that's cool. If I really miss flying, I'll join a club, or look around for a partnership, or just rent.

And it's so cool to see this kid excited about flying!

Next weekend, I finish cleaning out the hanger. Then it's time to hunt down the windsurfing instructor again!

Tags: flying, tripacer
Current Mood: crushed

...or "oh no - my CSA comes next weekend, and my freezer is already full" pie.

Take 2 refrigerated pie crusts, and roll them into an oblong shape, about 11x17. Put one of them in the bottom of a 13x9 baking pan.

Take 3 bags of random frozen fruit out of the freezer (about 6 cups or so). I had cherries, rasperries, and some mixed berries.

Put them in a bowl with 3/4 cups of sugar, half a cup of cornstarch, any spices that go with the fruit you happen to have, and a generous pinch of salt.

Mix, then dump into the pan. Take the other pie crust and put it on top, making an attempt to seal the edges. Brush with egg wash - bake at 375 for an hour or so.

Drizzle with a confectionary sugar glaze, if desired.

I've been thinking about what to do about backups lately. We have Time Machine running in the house, but I wanted something off-site. I have too much data to just throw on my server.

So I looked at the available online backup programs. I have a free subscription to the Norton one (imagine that!), but it's PC only and only 2GB. I looked at Mozy and Carbonite, but wasn't really impressed with either of them. I finally settled on BackBlaze. Solid encryption (and you hold the key), and configurable network usage. Downloading your files as zip archives, or individual files, is free - or for $199, they'll burn your entire backup onto a hard drive and mail it to you.

It took a long time to backup. I had about 100GB or so of stuff on the Mac, and it took nearly 3 weeks of nights to get it all backed up. But when I went looking to see how I could possibly have had 100GB of data, I realized there were a ton of pictures in my iPhoto library that I'd deleted from iPhoto but were still on my disk. I removed some of them, but there was no way to figure out what was and wasn't used. So, puzzled, I left the rest of them alone.

Today, I rode home from work in the rain. When I got home, I spent half an hour taking pictures of my wet bike and helmet. Before I downloaded them, I thought, "Hm. I wonder if I have a setting wrong in iPhoto that's keeping it from deleting the physical copies of removed pictures?". Wandering through the options didn't reveal anything, so I hit google.

"iphoto remove files from hard drive" told me, on the first hit, that maybe I should empty the iPhoto trash can.

iPhoto has a trash can of its own?

How many photos was I lugging around, backing up, and otherwise wasting space on?

2,358.

Now that I've emptied the trash, my iPhoto library is under 12Gb. Why didn't I do this before I spent a month uploading deleted pictures to the cloud?

I've got a friend who wants to sell some crafts online. I'm recommending Etsy, but she's thinking more of an ecommerce-type thing. I see a dozen packages that integrate with Paypal and friends - anyone ever used one? Can you recommend/not-recommed any of them?

This is really, really cool.

It's like an RSA key that doesn't require batteries and can't be given to an attacker over the phone: http://www.passwindow.com/

Summer's hit in full force here. We've already had a lot of 100+ days. It's too hot to be out, too hot to ride anywhere, too hot to go to the airport.

I did get a business trip to Portland a few weeks ago. I'd never been there, but it's now on my list of "places I'd be happy retiring". I haven't uploaded the pictures yet, but I managed to squeeze in a few hours at Mt. Hood State Park, and a trip with my friend John O to the Evergreen Aviation Museum to see the Spruce Goose. There's no way to express just how enormous that airplane is - you just have to stand under it to understand.

But I came home with bronchitis and two ear infections, so it wasn't all good. Despite a round of antibiotics, I'm still coughing. If it's anything like my previous round of bronchitis, I'm going to be coughing for another month.

We made it out to the airport for the 4th, where my mechanic fired up his L-39:

It sounds great - I expect it'll be flying before the end of the summer. We didn't stay long, since the humidity makes my cough even worse.

I know I put pictures up on FaceBook, but I don't think I mentioned it here: there are two new kittens terrorizing the household.

Meet Xena:

And Thera:

Those pictures are a month old, so they're a good bit bigger now. I have high hopes of teaching them to fetch.

The local library is closed for renovations this summer, so I'm short on books. I've been filling up my wish list on Paperback Swap. I finished Addition the other night, and I have two more on their way.

The local indoor range had a fire last weekend, so it's put a damper on my Tuesday nights of shooting. They're looking for a new location, but I suspect that anywhere they pick is going to be too far away for me to make it in time after work.

My WoW guild has been working our way through Naxx on weekend nights. We've got all 4 main quarters down, but still haven't downed the last two bosses.

Other then that, life's been quiet. I'm looking forward to being able to be outside again - in another 3 months.

Randomness of the day: Immigration control is DRM for a border, and people respond to it in exactly the same way.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Tags: via ljapp
Current Location: 45.317612, -122.751144

There are places where time doesn't exist.

An airport, waiting for a flight. There's only the time before your flight is called, and the time after. I can sit and read for 15 minutes or two hours, content in the knowledge that as long as it is Before, there's nothing else I should be doing.

To a lesser extent, there's the flight itself - it contains the takeoff, and the landing, and a gloriously empty space between them.

Those spaces can only be filled with self-indulgence. It's the one time I can bury myself entirely into a book, or just sit and daydream. For that period of time, I can do whatever I want without having a background thread running, worrying about what more-productive thing I should be doing. Because for that one slice of my life, there is nothing else I should be doing. I can simply be Still.

When I was younger, there were more of those times. Lazy Sunday mornings in bed with a newspaper, Saturday afternoons in a bookstore, the whole week after finals.

But aiports are the one constant place where I've always found that sense of timelessness. I always get off a plane with the feeling of relaxation that I imagine most women pay money for at a spa.

I've got to be the only person I know who often does enjoy the journey almost as much as the destination.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Tags: via ljapp
Current Location: 45.604706, -122.574188

Rule of thumb #937:

When an email arrives from a right-wing friend, with a long list of recipients, and the subject line "Lite hearted fun!" or similar, the contents will be racist, sexist, or both.

Current Mood: cranky

There's probably going to be a new PC in my future, sometime after Windows 7 comes out. I'm tempted by the Shuttle, but just for comparison, I wanted to see what the equivalent Dell would cost. And I found this:

A 56K modem? How...quaint.

I first saw this in college - on a real piece of paper - but then hadn't seen this in years. It popped up from fortune when I logged in this morning:

"No program is perfect,"
They said with a shrug.
"The customer's happy--
What's one little bug?"

But he was determined,
The others went home.
He dug out the flow chart
Deserted, alone.

Night passed into morning.
The room was cluttered
With core dumps, source listings.
"I'm close," he muttered.

Chain smoking, cold coffee,
Logic, deduction.
"I've got it!" he cried,
"Just change one instruction."

Then change two, then three more,
As year followed year.
And strangers would comment,
"Is that guy still here?"

He died at the console
Of hunger and thirst.
Next day he was buried
Face down, nine edge first.

And his wife through her tears
Accepted his fate.
Said "He's not really gone,
He's just working late."

-- The Perfect Programmer