Dale's blog. Why would you care?
I’m going to start moving my old web pages under the WordPress blog. Over to the right side you’ll see a list of “Pages”, which is where the content will show up. It’s going to take a while, but I really do need to move some of the old stuff over. Of course if I find out I can still use the copy of Frontpage I’ve got installed down on the PC in the basement, I may change my mind and just link to those instead.
In other words, this is all extremely experimental at this point.
There are a couple of reasons why I’m migrating off of GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting service.
For one thing, I’m really not all that happy with GD to begin with. While they haven’t done anything lately that has massively pissed me off, they have done so before. Like when they claimed they had backups of my web hosting account stuff. Well, they did, sort of. When I needed it, they wanted to charge me $149 and it would take them two weeks to restore the data. ‘Scuse me? They should be able to rebuild an entire data center in two weeks. Come on. Then there was the time I contacted their tech support (and I do use that term loosely). My virtual dedicated server (their term for a VM) was sputtering and dying, logging thousands of “NIC_NL waiting binding to NETLINK_ISCSI socket” errors. Turns out their host machine was having problems which apparently went undetected for weeks. It seems they didn’t even know it until I emailed their tech support. Then they gave me some bullshit song and dance about “This process is most likely used for an internal purposes and unfortunately due to security reasons we are unable to go more in depth on this process.“ I suspect that means, “We don’t know what it was, so we rebooted the host and it went away”. I don’t know. I suspect they don’t either. It really bothers me, though, that they apparently have no monitoring in place to tell them when things start going south. I just wonder how many people on the same host wiped and re-imaged their VMs trying to fix the problem.Â
Then there is the cost. I have found what appears to be a very good hosting provider that charges 1/3 less per month, and their add-on services like extra bandwidth and disk space – should I ever need them — are FAR less expensive. They also don’t treat their customers like complete imbeciles, and their web site is not a constant barrage of upsell that makes it hard to get to the stuff you’re paying for.  Anyway, I’m switching over to Linode. The prepaid domain registrations and stuff will stay with GD for now, but I have zero allegiance to them – so if someone else has a better deal for domain registration when mine start to expire, I’ll yank that business from them as well.
Last night Lisa and I had dinner at Okinawa Sushi, in the “L Street Marketplace” shopping area north of L between 120th & 132nd. We have a sushi place a lot closer to home, but — well, they’re snooty and the service isn’t that great, and we don’t go there if we don’t have to. So, being in the mood for sushi, we tried the new place.
I wold say we were both pleasantly surprised. The interior is fairly generic but clean, with granite table tops in the booths. There is a certain Asian flavor to the restaurant, but of course there’s only so much you can do in what is pretty much a strip mall. No matter, we are in suburbia after all. We ordered a couple of the daily special drinks, a Cruzan rum and coconut ting that was quite good and a very reasonable $4 each. We also ordered some edamame, which was quite good and there was enough for both of us.
The biggest challenge, honestly, was deciding what to order! The menu was excellent and included sushi rolls, dinners, a few Chinese staples like General Tso’s Chicken and such. There are also raw fish dishes and a number of “chef’s choice” combinations of sushi and raw fish. I ordered the Sweetheart Roll and the Jazz Roll, and Lisa had the Crunchy and one I don’t remember the name of. All were excellent, with Lisa especially fond of the Sweetheart Roll. I’d say the food was as good as any sushi restaurant we’ve been to.
Service was friendly even if at just a little more relaxed pace than we would have liked. Still, I wouldn’t say it was slow enough to be a problem. The bill for two drinks, an appetizer and four sushi rolls was under $60 including tax. In the end, it was good enough that we plan to be back — probably more than once. There are still a lot of items on teh menu we want to try!
Man… I get this question from time to time, and it’s tough to restrain myself from going off on a minor rant. Sometimes I don’t succeed. So, I’m going to spell it out here, and never speak of it again. I hope.
I have a number of problems with Facebook and other so-called “social networking” sites — Twitter, Myspace, and whatever new thing Google is throwing into the mix this week. Some of these issues extend to so-called “cloud” services like Picasa, Google Docs and the hundreds of similar “Give us your stuff, we’ll take care of it for you” businesses. Most of the issues I have revolve around three major points:
So, no, I’m not on Facebook. And I’m OK with that.
Lisa and I had dinner at Lazlo’s the other night after seeing a movie. The short rundown: We’ll probably be back.
The restaurant is located just a bit north of Center on 192nd Ave., a little out of the way for most people but not “out in the boonies”. They have three different dining areas that I saw. There’s a regular dining room, divided up by chest-high walls into smaller areas. The bar area is open seating, with a mix of high and low tables as we ll as booths along one wall. There is also an outdoor patio, where we would have sat if it had been a few degrees warmer. I didn’t have my jacket, Lisa did.
The food was pretty good. Lisa had a salmon salad on assorted greens, with a really good avocado dressing. I had their Reuben, which while not in my top 3 or 4 of all time was pretty good. Both of us ended up having leftovers for lunch the next day. We also had some beer cheese soup — pretty good. I like the gouda ale soup at Upstream better, but we just quit going there because we got utterly lousy service the last 2-3 times. The soup was rich and creamy, and they brought out some beer bread which was also pretty good.
We each had a Bermuda Triangle, which is an odd mix of a dark beer, some dark rum and root beer. Lisa liked it… I didn’t. Service was not the best, but we were in the bar and there was apparently no assigned wait staff. I think if we’d been in either of the other areas we would have had a little more prompt service. It wasn’t horrible, just a little slower than I would have expected considering the light crowd.
Lazlo’s is at 2425 S 192nd Ave, open Sunday – Thursday 11 AM – 10 PM and Friday & Saturday 11 – 11. They do takeout too.
I’ve been using the M3 CNC machine quite effectively to produce machined cabinets for one of my ham radio kits. In a couple of hours the other day I was able to greatly improve the machine control programs for producing three of the parts, making the machining process faster and less hassle. I’ve even posted a couple of Youtube videos of the machine doing its thing.
I’ve got two new kits that will have optional, custom modified cabinets. For these I am hoping to do a little more complicated work. In addition to various round, square and/or rectangular holes in end panels, I’m going to try some engraving to label the connector locations and maybe put a logo on them. That will take a little more development work, including making a jig to hold the parts in a rigid, repeatable location.
The machine has been a real life saver in modifying some existing cabinets. The manual process using a file was very time consuming, very difficult, and produced imperfect results. Using the CNC mill gives me perfect results in about half the time of doing it manually… and I can be doing other things while the job runs, coming back only to swap out parts when the program is finished. I may eventually be investing in a new Gecko G540 driver, which should make the machine smoother, quieter and much faster. For now, though, the cheap ($65 or so, including shipping) Chinese driver board is doing the job.
I’m reading Brave New World… somehow I managed to make it all the way through junior high and high school without having to read it. Ditto for Animal Farm, although I believe I did read 1984. It’s somewhat dated, but so far fairly interesting. Always entertaining to read something that tries to predict the future state of the world, from 40 or more years back. In the case of Brave New World, for example, there is virtually no mention of computers or personal communications devices (phones, etc) which would be an enormous part of any future world. Of course Huxley would have had no way of foreseeing this in ’32.
One of these days I’ll finish reading John Adams, I think I made if about 2/3 of the way through.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working steadily on ground school for my pilot license. The first observation I have is… there is a LOT of stuff to learn and remember! I have heard of 3-day and 1-week ground schools. I cannot understand how someone could learn everything needed, with adequate retention, from a short school such as that. It’s not like this is a license exam for Amateur Radio, where you can have all of your books and reference materials on hand while operating. You’ve got to remember all of the information needed for flying while in the air, making immediate decisions. I’m sure I could “exam cram” and pass the knowledge test in a few days, but I’d prefer to take long enough to learn the material in a way that I’ll be able to retain it well past the exam.
Some of the stuff I knew from my childhood, when I learned a lot about how airplanes fly, how airfoils work, etc. A lot of the information is what I think of as “learnable”. Things like pressure altitude, density altitude, radio procedures, etc are just new skills and science that needs to be learned. Some of it, though, will just require rote memorization. VFR minimums, for example, have no real “rules” that can be learned and applied – there’s just a chart of rules that needs to be memorized in order to pass the exam. That, for me, is the tough part. It’s made a little easier for me by taking my time. I can study the VFR minimums chart, then as I look outside I can quiz myself on whether it’s VFR conditions or not, why or why not, and so on.
I know this isn’t the fastest way to do it, but I’m not paying instructor time yet and I’d rather know it than just remember it long enough to pass the knowledge test.
Well, back in March I made a couple of posts detailing the installation of the dual band mobile ham radio in my new pickup. As some time has passed, I thought I should follow up on those posts with the latest news.
The mounting products I used turned out to be a complete bust. The Command foam mounting tape gave up about the first day the truck was parked outside with the temperature over 65 or 70. The kind-of-Velcro-like stuff I used for the speaker will hold on for an hour or two before that drops onto the floor. I have not yet decided what my next step will be. I may have to fabricate a U-mount for the speaker and drill a couple of small holes in the driver side kick panel to mount that. For the control head, I’m debating still. Someone makes a really slick no-holes F150 dash mount, but I don’t think it’s worth anywhere near the $40 they want for it ($50 after shipping). Right now things are “just barely” hanging on, but I’ll need to fix them soon before the speaker cable gets twisted to death.
It was getting on toward lunch time, and the weather was perfect for flying other than a pretty stiff breeze. My boss and friend, an experienced pilot, grabbed me and said, “Hey, this place is driving me nuts. Let’s go rent a plane and go fly.” How could I resist?
My friend (I’ll call him Joe) has flown a lot. His colorful history includes time as a commercial pilot doing courier runs, ferrying various aircraft of questionable history and condition, instrument rating, multi-engine, high performance, and even some stick time in a P51 Mustang. He’s had his share of close calls and rough landings in airplanes that probably shouldn’t have been flown at all. To say that his flying skills are above average would probably be a dramatic understatement.
So, off we went to the local airport, where we rented the only plane they had available at the time — a well worn early 1960s vintage Cessna 172 that has seen a lot of use as a trainer. I wasn’t that impressed with the general condition of the plane, but it checked out OK on preflight. Being a non-pilot and really knowing nearly nothing about the instruments and equipment, I scanned the instrument panel looking for clues. OK, there’s a COM (VHF communication) radio, there’s a NAV (navigation) receiver, backup COM and NAV… “Hey, Joe, what’s that one?”, I asked. “Oh… GPS. We won’t need it today”, he replied. “OK, how about that one?” “No idea. Looks like they use this as an instrument trainer, but we won’t need any of that stuff today, we’ll just tool around a little while.”
Startup and the first few yards of taxi were uneventful. As we turned onto the taxiway, Joe said, “Huh. That’s weird. Look at that — the yoke just flopped to the left”. He centered the yoke, let it go, and it again flopped to the left. After some discussion, we decide it was probably just the left quartering crosswind catching the aileron and flipping it down. No big deal. Run-up was also uneventful, except now the yoke wanted to flop to the right. Well, we had turned almost 180 degrees, so maybe that was just crosswind too.
Joe got us out lined up on the runway, and we took off. About five seconds later I heard in my headset, “We missed something on preflight. The rudder is pinned or something, I have no controls.” I looked over saw that Joe with a very worried look, holding full left rudder and full left aileron, and we were still beginning a lazy roll to the right — at 50′ AGL and right toward a hangar. Joe fought the controls as I desperately looked for a stuck flap, hung aileron, something that would explain the problem… not that there would be anything we could do to correct it until after impact. Nothing was visibly wrong, though, so there was no real explanation as to why we seemed about to barrel roll a 172 into a hangar.
Joe took the time to thumb the PTT and announce that we had a problem and would be returning immediately. I was looking for a soft place to hit… and there was no immediate candidate. I thought of the tanks of aviation gas just above my head and developed an instant dislike of high wing aircraft. I decided that, since my life insurance was current and my family would be OK financially, I could just hope for a hard impact to get it over quickly. I expected Joe to do a 180 and land downwind, but he managed to wrestle the balky aircraft into a wide left turn and make the downwind leg — where he immediately had to apply full right rudder and aileron. Things were not looking promising in the slightest. Clawing for altitude, the plane was dangerously uncooperative and neither of us honestly expected to walk away from the flight. We turned onto the base leg and saw the Beech Bonanza on the run-up pad, and given the difficulty of controlling the 172 Joe told me to get ready for a very rough grass landing to the left of the paved runway. He did manage to get it on the pavement, though, and in one piece. We got it onto the taxiway — I didn’t know about Joe, but I was shaking a little. Maybe more than a little.
After some examination on the parking pad, we discovered that the mystery box on the instrument panel was an autopilot (how Joe failed to recognize that will always be a mystery to me, I think it was a run of the mill Bendix/King KAP-140). It was set for a heading of 240 degrees, as I recall, and the active runway that day was 12. The confusing part was — I had, at Joe’s direction, turned that box OFF before we took off. So we did what any reasonable engineering types would do. We pulled the breaker, verified that it wouldn’t turn on again, and took off again without incident. I later heard that Joe spoke (frankly and enthusiastically, I am told) with the FBO and found that the plane had just been returned from having some avionics work done. Whether that autopilot was malfunctioning then or not, I’ll probably never know. I do know it was trying its damnedest to make a turn to heading 240.
So that’s the adventure story. And for several years it was for me just that – an adventure story, and an illustration of Joe’s flying ability. I suspect that if the same thing happened to me, or many other pilots, it would have resulted in a crashed airplane and potentially worse. But lately I have re-evaluated the experience to look for lessons to be learned.
It’s still a great story — but I look at it completely differently now. As happens more often than not, what started as an adventure is best told as a cautionary tale.