I needed to log an hour of flying time today, and we were supposed to get together with our daughter and two grandsons. That got me thinking…
Teeny little passengers
POA 2013 Gastons Fly-In
Last weekend Lisa and I flew down to Lakeview, AR for the annual fly-in for a bunch of people from the Pilots of America web board. Naturally we had a stiff headwind both ways, so the trip was more flying than I had counted on. We had a good time, met some good people, and I gained some valuable experience and learned a few things. The trip down was uneventful if a bit slow due to the wind, but the real fun was the Gaston’s arrival. We made a high pass over the runway just for me to get my bearings and figure out how to deal with the terrain on the base and final approach legs. In the end it was a nice, soft, full-flap soft field landing, no drama. The trip back was more of a challenge — we took off in the rain, waited on weather at Mountain Home, had a very stiff crosswind when landing to refuel in Lawrence (but still eased it in nicely, if I do say so myself) and made it into Omaha as the ceiling was dropping. Another 9.4 hours in the log book!
Some of the highlights…
And some shots of the happy couple…
Grass can be fun
No, not THAT kind of grass, or even that kind. Yesterday I did my first flying from a grass runway. I took an instructor along since I hadn’t done it before. During primary flight training you get instruction in and have to demonstrate the “soft-field” takeoff and landing techniques, but it’s almost always on pavement. In fact, the flight schools I trained with specifically prohibited ever landing their rental planes on anything unpaved! Not so with the flying club.
We flew down to Auburn, NE where there is a 4000′ long turf runway in good condition. When we arrived we did a low pass — I skimmed along the left edge of the runway maybe 30-40 feet off the ground at most, while Ryan checked out the runway condition and grass length from the right side. It looked good, so I climbed out and turned back for the downwind leg. A full-flap approach, carry a little throttle through the flare for a soft touchdown with the nose wheel in the air, and we’re down. The field had not been mowed recently, so we got plenty of extra drag from thick grass and weeds. You turn a little wider, and there’s plenty of throttle needed about midway through the turn to keep your speed up so you don’t get stuck. It’s different, but not hard to do.
I turned and taxied back to the end of the runway and did a soft-field takeoff much differently than I have ever done before. On real grass, you need to really get the nose wheel up as soon as possible and lift off well under stall speed, then level off while you’re still in ground effect while you pick up speed. At 80 MPH I’d begin climbing and raise the flaps. We did a few touch & gos after that, then headed back to Millard. I’m glad I had Ryan along — it helped to have his advice trying to stay in ground effect, and a little post-landing coaching on the approach.
Roku: meh.
I spent some time playing around with a new Roku 3 over the past week or two. From a hardware standpoint, it’s a pretty cool little box. Wifi, HDMI, remote with accelerometers, all kinds of coolness. Unfortunately, its use as a streaming media player is limited at best, at least for what I wanted.
If all you need is a player for Netflix/Hulu Plus/Amazon and similar paid services, it’s fine. If you’re the type who loves video game blogs, old movies no one has ever heard of and similar stuff, I guess it would be grand. In general, though, the free content that’s available is worth exactly what it costs (if you don’t count the cost of the Roku), and I’m not looking for more places to send money every month.
My intent was to use it to play movies, recorded TV and live TV streamed from a MythTV backend. The success rate ranged from great to zero, depending on what I was trying to do. The Roku would have me transcoding every single video recording I have (no thanks, really). The Plex and MythTV frontends I found were pretty buggy. The “Brightscript” language used to build content channels is not something trivial to pick up, and I’m really not looking for a second career as a programmer. I finally decided that if I do build a whole-house TV/movie/music/DVR system, I’ll probably have to use little dedicated boxes running either XBMC or Mythtv, and talking to a dedicated MythTV backend.
Fortunately, Roku has a pretty good return policy. This one’s going back. It doesn’t seem to be a bad little box for what it does, it just doesn’t do what I need.
Thanks, Microsoft! (really!)
So today I looked at some new laptops. For various reasons I won’t go into, I really need to set up a new (well, another) Windows machine. Wine (the Linux program that lets you run Windows software) has made a lot of headway over the past few years, but some apps that I depend on just don’t act right. So, we stopped in at Best Buy to see what was up.
What’s up is Windows 8. For some reason, the stupidity in Redmond has reached a level where they can no longer distinguish the difference between a cell phone and a laptop or desktop computer. Hint, guys — what works great on Droid phone doesn’t make sense on a laptop. It’s cute, and I’m sure they’re selling a shitload of new laptops with Windows 8, but I’m baffled at how anyone could actually use one for anything productive.
So, really, guys — thanks. You saved me from wasting $750 or so on a new machine. Instead I’ll re-purpose a desktop I have here and load it with Win7, for which I think I may still have a spare OEM license. Or something. All I know is, Apple should be sending you guys flowers and candy. Windows 8 is enough to make even OSX look good.
Weirdness, and good timing
Yesterday morning, for reasons we haven’t been able to figure out, both my wifi router and what has to have been the most disappointing phone base unit ever created suddenly and simultaneously went to that big recycle bin in the sky. Our Internet connectivity went away as I was trying to send out a meeting invitation for work, and when I went down to reboot the router I saw the phone base was dark too. After ruling out any common power issues and verifying that the two wall warts were indeed working, I had to conclude that both boxes were dead. How very odd. The only common thing between them is that there was a direct Ethernet connection, but nothing else on the network took a hit. The Gigaset box had a phone line plugged into it, but that phone line passes through the A400 VOIP card in the server — neither of which were damaged.
Anyway. I happened to have a spare non-IP base for the phones, so I connected that and had phone service back an hour or so after the loss. The wifi router, though, was another matter. In a very strange twist of timing, my new E4200 Linksys was on the UPS delivery truck – all I had to do was wait for it.
I’m not completely thrilled with the E4200V2. Its performance seems to be excellent, and the signal strength reported by my cell phone and the Roku are substantially higher. I wish to hell it ran DD-WRT; I really missed some of that firmware’s troubleshooting and logging capability. I doubt I’ll return it, though. Swapping out the router is disruptive enough, and while DD-WRT is great, I was mostly using it to overcome some real deficiencies in the old hardware. It’s not a perfect solution, but the price was attractive and it will do.
What I learned from this is that I need better disaster plans, and need to test them more thoroughly. I had a backup of the router configuration — but it’s a binary file. Of course it’s completely useless on a different router, and I didn’t have all of the port forwarding and other rules written down anywhere. My Asterisk backup plan failed miserably, I have to fix that. I really need a seamless, fault tolerant VOIP setup with failover that actually works. I’ve got some work to do on that stuff to avoid the headaches the next time something unexpectedly goes TU.
It pays to shop around…
I need to upgrade the wifi router in the house. The old Linksys WRT54G has been working for years, but it just can’t handle HD video streams. So, I went shopping for a new Linksys E4200 V2, which is supposed to be the baddest, fastest one out there. Dual band, 900 MBPS and all that.
Best Buy has the E4500, but I don’t want that one — it requires a constant connection to Cisco. WTF? Newegg was the same, only the E4500. No thanks. So I looked on eBay and Amazon. It seems that they go for $125 and up new, and around $80 or so on up used. I’m not in the mood to screw with someone else’s used router, so I was looking only at new and factory-refurbed.
Then I find the Linksys on line store… factory refurb, 30 day warranty, $79.99 with free shipping. Sold. Anyone want a nice, current generation WRT54G already loaded with DD-WRT? I have one for sale cheap. 🙂
Too cool!
This morning Steve & Laura showed up — Steve made me this clock, which is way too cool. The only challenge will be deciding where to have it so people can see it. Thanks Steve!
A nice trip to dinner
Flew up to Norfolk tnis evening with Steve (my brother in law, just in case someone other than a family member ever reads this). The flight up was nice and smooth, and I managed a nice greaser of a landing. We taxied over and had dinner at Barnstormers. We flew back to Millard and fought the cold to get the plane tucked in for the night.
Good weather, good flying, good food and good company. Can’t ask for much better than that!
I suppose I should just admit it.
I’ve tried keeping it quiet for a while, but word is leaking out anyway. Before long even the neighbors will know. So, I’ll just admit it. Yes, it’s true. The ugly rumors, the whispering, the speculation – it’s all true.