Fly to Your Dreams

New Year, New Blog Posts!

2012-01-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! Granted if you’re reading this, it’s a post that’s probably been up for a few days, but that’s the way things go around here.

It’s been a busy couple of months. I’ve largely settled in to a new routine of job hunting and getting to know my kids again, which has included some interesting challenges of their own. Meanwhile I think I’ve mostly come to terms with leaving my last job. There are definitely some perks to no longer being associated with Huge Global Multimedia-MegaCorp, especially when I no longer have to facepalm at some new bit of media produced by one of our other divisions. There’s also been the pleasant realization that for the work I was doing at HGMMC, I should have been making significantly more money than what I actually was.

I’m also realizing that while it seems counter-intuitive, I’m actually less stressed out now than I was for the last six or eight months of working. Turns out that constant crunch really was starting to take a toll on my stress level. A couple of my bad habits that indicate stress have just sort of gone away, after resurfacing hard in the last couple of years.

This is starting to sound like one of those incredibly annoying articles about the “funemployed” that the LameStream media was publishing back with the Obama Recession started. Ick. Let me assure you that isn’t the case here. While I am definitely enjoying some unexpected benefits of leaving a somewhat toxic work environment, I am very much focused on finding my next gig. I love my kids, but I was never meant to be a stay-at-home dad. But in the meantime, it’s nice to be playing games, and catching up with my favorite shows again.

Until next time,

For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Back in the Pattern...

2011-11-21T23:38:00.000-08:00

Back again! It’s been another long absence, but I’m planning on being back for a while this time.

It’s hard to explain. I started this blog with the intent of giving voice to some of my general thoughts, and to chronicle my (planned) excursion into aviation. Unfortunately, the flight plan got interrupted by life and kids, and I found I didn’t want to blog for a while, because of what this place reminded me of. Then I came back for a bit, but three kids and 60 hour work weeks pretty much sapped any desire I had to blog, and what free time I had I found I much preferred to do stuff with my family, play video games, or just veg with the TV. In short, screw talking about the stuff I’m doing or thinking, I barely had time to do or think anything anyway.

So why am I back? The simplest answer is that I finally became a victim of the Obama economy, and after three years of 60 hour weeks, I have no idea what to do with myself. So in addition to looking for a new job (hopefully with slightly less brutal hours) I suddenly have free time to do all the things I’d thought about for the past few years but filed under “if I have time”.

Where does the blog go from here? I’m not sure. I’ll probably have a few political thoughts, and definitely some commentary on my job situation and search. I’m trying to catch up on a lot of the major video games that I haven’t played for the past few years while I’ve been busy making them, so I’ll probably have some quasi-reviews and reactions there. I finally have time to go shooting. Of course I now don’t have a money surplus to go shooting very often, but I have time.

I’ll probably use this to talk about some of my project ideas and progress while I’m on my “Involuntary vacation” as well. The biggest thing for me right now is not to waste this time. About eight years ago I had a three month span of being unemployed, during which I did absolutely nothing other than play video games and eat. It’s been one of my major regrets looking back that I didn’t make more constructive use of the time, and not a mistake I want to make again. How I avoid that trap, however, is a question I don’t entirely have an answer to.

“For those with wings, fly to your dreams.”

On Vacation: An FTYD Interlude at The Great Wolf Lodge

2010-03-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I like to take the FTYD family on a vacation. This year after getting most of our money back from the feds, and getting a decent (if overtaxed) bonus from AUGD we had a choice between two weeks of road tripping, sleeping in a tent and visiting the in-laws in the mid-west, or a long weekend at an air conditioned, in-door waterpark. After a brief debate we chose the waterpark.

I should note at this point that in spite of growing up in Southern California, I had never previously been to a waterpark. Plenty of theme parks, sure, but somehow the waterpark experience has always eluded me. Whether this is because my parents preferred to make our theme park visits in the less crowded (and cheaper) off season, or simply that we avoided them because the only time anyone really wants to go to a waterpark in California is when it's hot, so you spend more time in line working on your sunburn than actually being wet, I couldn't say. But suffice to say this promised to be as new and novel an event for me as it did for my wife and kids.

The waterpark in question is called The Great Wolf Lodge, and is part of a national chain. The Washington location is located roughly two hours drive (or three in traffic) south of Seattle. Conveniently next to nowhere it looms up beside the interstate and shares signage with another fine WannaFleeceASucker tribe's casino. (Shuttles every 15 minutes). Inside the lodge are a variety of shops, restaurants and amusements designed to carefully separate you from your money, usually through the middleman of your begging children and teens.

Fortunately, the FTYD children aren't old enough to see the appeal in interactive games requiring a wand (rented for $14.95 a game) with a personalized topper (bought for $29.95) or burn money in the arcade, decorate cookies ($3 per cookie) or any of the other diversions. They just wanted to get on the waterslides.

Off we went. Once I adapted to the overpowering scent of chlorine and the noise of rushing water, shouting people and bad pop music, and accepted that my glasses were going to be periodically difficult to see through, I rather enjoyed myself. A question though: at what point inthe last 13 years did the string bikini become normal swimmwear for the barely got their learner's permit crew? I think I would have remembered this from the beaches of my teens, and I don't. It's not like I was checking anyone out with FTYD JR in tow, but I was starting to wonder if John Stossil was going to be standing at the top of the ramp asking me to "have a seat right over there."

Oh well, it was a good day. FTYD JR. proved unexpectedly bold on the slides, and hopefully tomorrow we'll get The Girl on more than the tiny kiddy slide.

Off To the Range!

2010-03-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I picked up my first pistol from a local gun store. After passing the IQ test disguised as a background questionierre ("Are you a wanted felon?", "Are you an illegal alien?", "Have you been convicted of domestic violence?" Has anyone ever actually answered "yes" to any of these?) I was able to bring home a gun that hopefully will serve me well in eventual IDPA competition and as a carry piece.

Ruger SR9. 9mm, 4.25" barrel, 17 rounds per mag*

A week later I headed out to the range for the first time. Thanks to my gun gamer sibling, I had four Blackhawk double stack mag holders, and and four extra mags to put in them. Strapping 68 rounds to my right side, plus the loaded SR9 on my left immediately taught me one thing: I need a new belt. The black-leather Wal-mart belt that's reliably held up my pants for years just doesn't quite cut it with the extra weight. Saggy belt issue notwithstanding, I headed out to the range with a friend who hadn't been shooting for about 30 years.

I'm happy to say that the Ruger shoots well, and unsurprisingly, is a lot more accurate than I am. I'll have to work on that. But in the hour or so I was shooting, it happily digested the 100 rounds of cheap 115 grain practice ammo, and 50 rounds of 147 grain hollow-points with nary a hiccup.

Honestly though, the flawless performance of my new gun was a distant second in enjoyment to the smile on my friend's face when he put his first magazine of .22 into a target. I think I got a new shooting buddy, and on the drive home he was talking about buying a .22 of his own. He started off with a Ruger Mk.III, then switched to the more tactical looking Sig Sauer Mosquito, and shot holes in a variety of bad movie posters.

Now I just have to figure out what the best way to work on my accuracy is. I can keep 17 rounds on an 8 1/2 x 11" paper target at 10 yards, but only about half at 25 yards. Given the price of 9mm versus .22, I'm thinking that buying a used .22 and practicing until I can shoot a decent group at 25 yards, then transitioning back to the 9mm might be a good idea. Stay tuned.

*Except in California and Massachusetts. Sorry.

Gun Ed -- Treating Gun Education Like Sex Education

2010-03-03T01:59:00.000-08:00

The following was inspired by a comment to Bayou Renaissance Man's recent post about the failure of sex education in Britain.

March 1, 2010
Principal Carlos Vasquez of Compton's troubled Martin Luther King High School announced a radical new program today aimed at reducing the number of deaths due to violent gun crimes. Named "Safe Guns", the program acknowledges that almost one out of every two youths in the high school will at some point be affiliated with one of the gangs which claims Compton for their territory, and that most of the youths attending the school already have access to firearms provided by "Sumdood." The mandatory marksmanship class will replace health class two days a week.

The program has four stated goals:

Reduce accidental shootings of innocent bystanders by teaching students proper shooting techniques and marksmanship.
Eliminate self-inflicted gunshot wounds by providing each student with a holster appropriate to their gun of choice, and training/demonstrations on how to properly holster and carry their weapons.
Lower lethality of gang violence by encouraging students to explore alternatives to traditional center-of-mass shots and target arms, legs, hands and feet instead. This will also be accomplished by providing students with free hardball ammunition, which has been proven to cause less wounding and death than hollow-point or cop-killer bullets, and is less likely to wound a student by explosively failing in their firearm of choice.
Protect students from injuries caused by cheap black-market firearms by providing them with safe, reputable alternatives.

About Compton
Since the 1950s, Compton's murder and violent crime rate has risen steadily, although it had dropped several percentage points since 2002. However, citing an average murder and gun violence rate still several times higher than the national average, school officials feel that this radical plan was the best solution. "They're going to shoot each other anyway" said one school official off the record. "The best we can do is teach them to be more responsible about when, where, and what they shoot."

A Rational Voice on Gun Control Comes Out of Olympia

2010-01-13T01:59:00.000-08:00

I was utterly shocked to see this story show up on the local news sites today:

Chelan sheriff says gun laws can't stop killers.

The upshot being that in the wake of the murder of four police officers by a parolee (who had previously been pardoned for murder in another state), our governor and legislature, ever eager to give the appearance of action without actually having to do anything, appointed a commission to "See what Washington laws could be changed or strengthened to prevent this from happening again."

Somebody screwed up though, and appointed someone with some sense to the panel. The sad thing is that I'm sure there's a lot of politicians in Olympia who are going to be shocked at the idea that there's no way to make buying a stolen gun, shooting police officers, then stealing one of the officer's service pistols more illegal than it already is.

A Winner is Chosen

2010-01-03T15:03:00.000-08:00

I've been priveledged to have had the chance to take the past two weeks off from work. In addition to the opportunity to see the wife and kids that I am too often a stranger to, I also had the chance to see how much rust a sixteen year old water heater contains when it fails, and test the capabilities of a friend's Hoover Steam-Vac against rust in carpet.

I also went to the range. After water heater day, I needed it, and I had planned to use this break to figure out what kind of carry gun I wanted to buy. I'd already settled on 9mm for a caliber, partially on the recommendation of my more famous brother, partly because 9mm is cheaper than .45, and largely because I'm not a particularly good marksman, and I'd like to get good with small bullets before I try getting good with bigger calibers. With that in mind, here was my short list of possible purchase options:
1. Glock 19
2. Sig Sauer P250
3. Stoegar Cougar
4. Ruger SR-9
5. Springfield XD-9
6. Smith & Wesson M & P.

All were guns within my roughly $600 price range, had decent reps for reliability, and were available for rental at my local range. I took them out, shot each one in right- and left-handed modified Weaver stances and single handed from both sides. (I should note here that like my brother, I'm cross-dominant, meaning that my dominant eye is on the weak hand side. This means I'll probably be training to shoot primarily left-handed.) In the end, I successfully found a gun I really liked. The Glock was too uncomfortable, the Sig had too long a trigger, the Stoegar was just a little too weird, but the Ruger was just right.

An SR-9 for me it is then. In the silver/black two-tone, because I don't care to pay the $30 Tactical Surcharge for the black on black version. It's good timing too, because my CCW permit arrived in the mail precisely on schedule, making me legal. So soon, once my tax return comes in, or my bonus shows up, I can start spending money like a drunken democrat congessman: I'll need the gun, spare mags for IDPA, cleaning kit, holsters, lots of ammo to feed through, probably a small gun safe, ammo, and did I forget ammo?

It's going to be an interesting year.

Until next time,
For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Making Up My Mind, Part 02

2009-12-17T01:57:00.000-08:00

I was planning on making this a much more ordered and scholarly post in the vein of Part 1 in this series, but a post by Caleb over at Gun Nuts inspired me to take it in a different direction.

You see, fear, or at least the refusal to be ruled by it, figures into my own decision to carry. It's like this: for various reasons, I tend to work past midnight 3-4 times a week. Often this means my car is the last one in the parking lot, and while my building itself is quite secure, the parking lot is somewhat less so. Trespassers, car prowls, and break-ins are, if not entirely common, certainly an occasional occurrence and annoyance.

For these reasons, when I work late, I walk past a bunch of windows overlooking the parking lot and the path to my car, scanning carefully for anything or anyone irregular. Then I walk out the door knowing that if I missed something, or there was someone in a spot I couldn't see, then I'm pretty much screwed. I don't have the conditioning to run, or the skills to put up much of a fight. It'd be a Very Bad Night for me.

If I lived alone, that might be all right. It's one thing to run risks when you're the only one who might suffer major detriment, but it's quite another when your risks could have a dramatic effect on a wife and three little children. While my overall risks may still be fairly low, evaluated against my lack of latent defensive skills, and the possible consequences of failure, left me with two questions: How much gun can I afford, and what caliber should it be?

My security is my responsibility, and I'm going to make sure I have the tools to defend myself as best I can. The news carries too many people with sound-bytes of "I never thought this could happen in my neighborhood." I refuse to be one of them.

Shoot Him In The Gun!

2009-12-10T20:54:00.000-08:00

I'm a little surprised none of the gunbloggers I read seem to have covered this yet, but the most recent Mythbusters covered the popular "disarm the poor bad guy by shooting his gun" myth that's popular both in the movies and with anti-gun advocates who've gained their gun knowledge from movies.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of videos up on Discovery.com, but here's a summary and some of my own observations.

1. Even under lab conditions, you can't knock the gun out of someone's hands 100%. The first test they guys ran was to make a mechanical analogue with the same grip strength as a human hand, and try to shoot the gun out of it. Even with perfect alignment, they couldn't successfully shoot the gun out of the hand when it was pointed forward in firing position.

2. Lead Bullets + Steel Guns = Flying Fragments. The tests referenced above also revealed what happens when a lead bullet strikes a gun: the bullet fragments, providing fast-moving chunks of lead that go in multiple, unpredictable directions. Take a look at the start of this video. In the full episode, they show that a number of the bullet fragments hit the guy holding the gun, and had the gun been next to the head of a hostage, it's entirely possible some of the fragments could have hit the hostage too. Lead fragments and unarmored human tissue aren't a happy mix.

3. You can't predict the human element. To test variations in human reactions, they worked up a way to have the user hold a gun that fired in a different direction, simulating the shock of a bullet hit, and remote fired the gun when the holder wasn't expecting it. Here's a video explaining the design, and the physics that make it work. Jaime dropped the gun two out of three times. Adam never dropped it. Had Adam been an actual target, he could potentially have gotten his gun up and a center of mass shot off even after his gun was hit.

Admittedly, the show wasn't perfect. I would have liked to see the show take the experiments farther, testing different calibers and bouncing a few rounds of a Glock or another wonder-nine, but this did have some great visuals and proof.

What did the episode teach, really? For people who actually make the "well, the cops are trained marksmen, they should just shoot the bad guys in the arms, legs, or gun", this should provide some solid visual and scientific proof for why shooting someone's gun is a bad idea. People will still get hurt, and it's not reliable.

Making Up My Mind, Part 01

2009-12-09T01:42:00.000-08:00

A week ago, I broke from my normal work routine to take an early lunch break. I drove downtown to the non-descript building that houses our local police department, and emerged a half-hour later with a lighter wallet and slightly smudged fingertips. Assuming no major bureaucratic foul-ups, I should be receiving a piece of paper sometime in early January that gives me the legal ability to carry a concealed handgun.

"But why?" I've been asked a couple of times. It's a fair question. I live and work in a pretty safe neighborhood, the weekly crime blotter usually shows about as many DUI stops as violent crimes, and I've never been the victim of a violent crime. What made me, a married father of three who has never owned a gun decide that it's time to begin going about armed.

The answer is, admittedly, pretty complex, but I'm going to do my best to explain it here. Really, my reasons can be divided into two groups: general concepts, and personal realizations. I'll cover the general concepts now, and the personal stuff in another post.

In general terms, I've always been comfortable with guns. My father was a member of law enforcement, so I grew up around firearms, and shot them with my dad on a few occasions. In my adult life, I've been known to make an occasional trip to the local range and blast holes in paper targets for a relaxing afternoon. Oddly enough, in spite of being the oldest of my siblings, I'm the only one who has yet to actually own a gun.

A couple of years ago, though, I started reading a lot of "gunbloggers." These folks have a lot of other interests, backgrounds, and hobbies, but they also share general conviction about the benefits of an armed citizenry, the rights of people to be armed, and the fun of shooting. Bloggers such as Ambulance Driver, Caleb, Breda, Lawdog, The Atomic Nerds, and a host of others were instrumental in developing my world view to a point where I could intellectually accept the benefits of being an armed citizen.

These are what got me to accept the use of going about armed. But going from rational acceptance to personally embracing the armed citizen life would require some developments in my personal life as well.

We'll cover those in Part 02 of this series.

Coming back

2009-12-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

My last post of any significance was about sixteen months ago. For all intents and purposes, this has been a dead blog in the mean time, but here I am, starting again.

Why bother? Mostly because I feel like I have some things to say again, some stories I want to tell, and my muse has finally come back.

Why did I stop? That’s a much more complicated answer. I suppose a bit of the blame can go to a chaotic work schedule while we pushed our latest game out the door that left me a little burnt out, and bringing our third child into the world probably didn’t help either. But the truth is, this blog had become all about my flying journey, and that had come to an abrupt halt in September when I realized that the money was gone, and the funding source I’d hoped to have wasn’t going to happen. Blame the economy, blame the housing bubble, mostly blame me for stupidly optimistic planning, but the fact remains that I made two supervised solo flights, and one unsupervised solo flight of a few touch and goes, then walked away from the airfield.

It sounds silly, but it hurt too much to come back to this blog. I felt kind of sad every time I saw a Cessna or a Piper fly overhead in the clear blue sky this summer. Flying had been my dream for years, and I did not happily choose to postpone that dream once again. Getting back to a place where I could go to the airport again, or think about this blog, took a long time. Approximately sixteen months, apparently.

But I’m back. Like I said above, I feel like my voice is coming back, and I’ve got a few things to say. Some interesting things have been happening in my life, as Mrs. FTYD and I have tried to live more financially responsibly, FTYD Junior has passed four years old and turned into a pretty interesting kid, FTYD Daughter provides weekly lessons in understanding women and why men have trouble doing so, and FTYD Boy #2 is cute. And I’ve made the decision to join the ranks of the armed Americans. That last one there, is what’s probably going to be a big topic for the next few months at least, as I spend some time explaining how I came to make the decision to be an armed family, and explore the fun of figuring out what gun to buy when you’re a total newbie.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon.

For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Windows is Shutting Down. Please wait while updates install...

2009-12-02T02:01:00.000-08:00

I'm returning to blogging. There will be new content posted in the next couple of days.

Errata

2008-08-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

It’s been a slow few weeks on the blog. I’d like to say that the silence is due to me flying every day, studying for my written test, and that the only thing I’m waiting on is a date with an FAA examiner to approve my flying.

In reality, I haven’t flown since my last entry. Reasons for this range from Good (week-long road trip from Washington to Nebraska for a close friend’s wedding, playing Mr. Mom with The Girl for a few days while The Lovely and Gracious Wife (TLGW) and The Boy went to another friend’s wedding in Indiana), to Bad (forgot to move logbook from firesafe to flight bag after returning from vacation, found this out when asked to present said logbook to CFI to receive sign-off for a solo flight) to Ugly (wind, wind, and more wind. Who’da thunk that it’d be so difficult to get a tee time with less than a seven knot crosswind component in Seattle in August?!?)

Still, it’s been a fun month. For the Nebraska road trip we deviated from the Interstate onto a lot of two-lane highways, and a highlight of one night’s all-night drive through Nebraska was seeing the rotating green/white airport beacons as we came into each small town. Those beacons were often the first milestone that some civilization was coming up, and someday I’m looking forward to seeing a few of those little airports from the air (though perhaps not at night).

On the Indiana trip, The Boy got his first taste of real aviation with a pair of non-stop rides on an Airbus A319, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Even a week and a half later, he’s still talking about the ride on “Big Plane” (with arms outstretched as far as they’ll go) with Mama, followed by a choo-choo ride (with whistle noises).

And then there’s the weather. August is one of the sunniest months in the Puget Sound, and this year is no exception. What I’m also learning, though, is that August also seems to play host to a lot of unstable weather patterns, most of which blow in from the bay at about an 80 degree angle to the Boeing Field runways. I’m beginning to think there’s a Murphy’s Law corollary for August flying weather in Seattle, and it goes something like this:

1. On sunny days, the crosswind will be too strong to fly.

2. On days when the crosswinds are okay, the ceiling will be too low to fly.

3. On days when both the crosswinds and ceiling are okay, you will be too busy at work, need to spend time with the family, or forget your logbook. Barring all of these, no aircraft will be available.

C’est la vie, I suppose. Or as the great philosopher Calvin would say “When life gives you lemons, wing ‘em right back with some lemons of your own.”

Just like Beggar's Canyon Back Home

2008-07-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Saturday marked the successful completion of my second supervised solo. Due to circumstances beyond my control (namely the perpetual rehabilitation of the Bravo taxiways at Boeing Field, which this weekend meant that they closed the main runway) we made the very short hop over to Renton (RNT) to conduct the procedures.

I've never flown out of Renton, (home of Boeing's 737 assembly line) but it's an interesting field. One end of the single runway is backstopped by a great big barrier fence, while the other ends where the lake and seaplane base begin. We were operating towards the water, which at least solved the question of where I was going to go if I had an engine failure on takeoff.

I had fun though. Renton has some interesting aircraft operating out of there, and having success flying the pattern in an unfamiliar airport definitely boosted my confidence. The only squawk was that the mic on my headset started acting up again, requiring me to borrow my instructor's headset during the solo.

Oh well. During one circuit I had a brief bit of excitement when a flash of light at my altitude caught my eye absent of any warning from Renton tower or the TCAS system. I started to shade right, until I realized that I was attempting to avoid a mylar balloon.

Finally, my instructor was nice enough to use my little hand-held video camera to record some grainy video of my landings for posteriety. Here's one of my better ones from Saturday (visible short final starts at about the 00:53 mark).

A Milestone

2008-07-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

According to the statistics published by the AOPA, there are only about 600,000 pilots in the United States. This means that pilots make up about 0.2% of the population.

On Tuesday, I felt like I truly joined them as made my first solo flight.

As flights go, it wasn’t anything terribly special. Three touch and goes in the pattern with my instructor to make sure I was having a good day, with the third landing being a full stop. We taxied back to the flight school, my instructor got out, grabbed his hand-held radio and signed my logbook, then I fired up the DA-40 again.

This, of course, was the point when I found out that the fuel injector system in the DA-40 doesn’t like being shut down and hot-started within fifteen minutes. I’ve grown accustomed to an engine that reliably holds its RPMs as soon as it starts, but not this time. This time it started with a bunch of 50 RMP swings, which made me a bit nervous. But the roughness went away at flight RPMs with a slight leaning of the mixture, so I figured take it to the run-up area and if it was cleared up by then, I wouldn’t worry.

I calmly dialed in the ground control frequency, and pushed the transmit button. And was immediately rewarded with a squealing bit of feedback while I tried to talk to the controller. Time to switch to the handheld mic that I’ve never used before.

Honestly, after that, things seemed to go pretty easily. The Diamond climbed a bit faster with just me on board, and while my landings weren’t great, they weren’t bad either.

I made three touch and go’s, then brought her back to the flight school. In the same number of pieces I left with.

Boo-yah.

A vacation and a fresh start

2008-07-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

It’s been an interesting month since my last post. My flying was interrupted by a week and a half vacation to California, then resumed with a focus on passing my first stage check. In the parlance of the flight school I’m attending, this stage check is a flight where one of the school’s Master CFIs rides in the right seat, and observes your behavior as though you were flying solo. It’s his determination of whether you can safely get one of the school’s expensive aircraft off the ground and return it in the same number of pieces you left with that decides if you’re ready to solo.

I figured that I was pretty well prepared for my stage check. I hadn’t done much of any studying while on vacation, preferring to simply enjoy some time to unwind from the 60+ hour work weeks I’ve been doing for the past few months, but I had scheduled a refresher flight with my instructor for the day after we the family got back from our trip. The refresher flight went up on a nearly windless Saturday morning, and was probably one of the smoothest I’ve ever had. Stalls, slow flight, and steep turns were all within PTS standards, and one or two of my landings even felt pretty good. I was confident of a good performance the upcoming Tuesday.

Tuesday arrived, and as I drove to the airport, I could feel a bit of nervous energy kicking in. I was still excited though, and the butterflies were doing a pretty good job of flying in formation. I tossed up a couple of quick prayers, and soon enough, my questioner for the day started in on the ground school questions.

And then everything fell apart.

It’s been more than seven years since I graduated college, and at least that long since I’ve taken a difficult test that meant something important. I had totally forgotten that when I feel confident beforehand with limited preparations, I’m setting myself up for a world of hurt.

My recalled ground school knowledge wasn’t up to standards. I think it was close in most areas, but not enough to pass the actual FAA test. Still, the instructor didn’t fail me right there, so we headed out to preflight the airplane.

At least that part went well. I’m fairly sure he had pulled the circuit breaker when I wasn’t looking, but either way, I managed to catch and reset it when it came up on the checklist. The transponder was also not in its proper VFR configuration, but again, those were little things that I managed to catch before firing up the engine. It wasn’t until after the prop started spinning that I started getting rattled.

In hindsight, my first mistake wasn’t as bad as I thought. The winds were in the process of shifting, a new ATIS bulletin was about to go out, and the ground controller told me to taxi to the wrong runway and only caught his mistake after I’d finished my run-up checks. Of course, I thought I’d misheard (the instructor confirmed that it was the controller’s mistake, not mine afterwards) and spend the taxi back to the other end of the runway mentally kicking myself for being stupid, and telling myself to shake it off and focus.

Unfortunately, I was starting to get rattled, and it started to show when combined with my lack of recent practice. I blew through the final takeoff items checklist a little too fast, and forgot to note the takeoff time before we went roaring down the runway. In fact, I pretty much forgot the proper use of checklists, period, until we were in the practice area and I was working on my maneuvers.

It was a bumpy afternoon. None of my maneuvers would have met the PTS standards, but they, at least, were sufficiently close that the instructor felt comfortable saying I could practice those solo. Then it was time to head back, and my fun really got started.

The winds were still shifting, and the pattern was nice and busy. Boeing Tower was obviously dealing with a lot of aircraft, and I started on a long base leg entry; an approach I’ve never quite done before. Predictably, I came in too high, and ended up going around. On the bright side, the landing on the go around was one of the smoothest I’ve managed yet (and it ate up more runway than it should have. Ed.) After that we pulled up for another touch and go, only to have the tower flip the active runways and have me do a 180 in the downwind leg. In a move that shouldn’t have surprised anyone, the instructor then decided that it was the perfect time to have me simulate an engine out landing. Had it been an actual emergency, I could have made it (I would have used the big 9000’ runway) but on the 3150’ foot little airplane runway my engine miraculously fixed itself in time for me to go around. And have my flaps do a simulated failure.

I couldn’t do a flapless landing any better than I could an engine out. Perhaps sensing that I was just about at the end of my rope, nothing else had simulated failures on the next go around, and I was able to get the aircraft on the ground again (with a decidedly jarring point that I was very definitely on the ground).

After one final confused brain fart about where to park, I sort of fell out of the airplane and had a brief discussion with the instructor. The short was that my landing approaches weren’t good enough yet, but everything else was close enough that he’d leave my actual solo approval to my regular instructor.

That was the Tuesday of a week ago. In perspective, written down, the story doesn’t sound that bad, just a challenging day with a lot of good learning experiences, but it took a lot out of me at the time. There certainly hasn’t been anything recent that has left me as mentally and emotionally drained as that couple of hours.

But I’m pressing on. My next flight is Thursday, back with my regular instructor. With some better focus on using checklists and maps, and not relying so much on the fancy G1000 instruments, I should be soloing in a couple more weeks. I’m trying to keep in mind what a pilot friend of mine, a guy who used to be an Air Force instructor, told me about training:

“Training isn’t the fun part. It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to teach you to be safe when you’re ready to fly for fun.”

Wake-Jumping at 4,000 Feet: More flights

2008-05-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

The slow, drawn-out process of Spring is finally taking hold here, but the weather patterns involved have continued to make flight lessons a challenge. In the past couple of weeks, I've had two lessons canceled outright, and one that we ended prematurely after finding the ceilings too low at the practice area, and the air too turbulent at the airport for me to learn anything. There's a time and a place for learning crosswind landings, but my instructor isn't a big fan of the "throw you in the deep end and tell you to swim" approach. Considering he has to ride in the seat next to me, I don't blame him at all.

Still, Saturday managed to bring with it an unexpected heat wave, and some good flying weather. With my regular instructor on a vacation (not my fault, I swear) I went up with another instructor from the school, and committed aviation.

Actually, it was a flight with a lot of personal firsts for me: First time flying off the big runway at Boeing Field, first Vashon departure, first time my left-hand steep turns have approached adequate, and my first landing at a different airport. Oh, and my first time flying into an uncontrolled airport as well, plus my first attempt at a landing on a runway using PAPI lights rather than VASI.

I didn't do too badly, though it's still crystal clear that I need a lot more practice before my landings can be described with adjectives other than "jarring", "bumpy", or "tooth-rattling". With 8.9 hours in my logbook, that's to be expected.

I've got another flight scheduled for tomorrow, about which I'm guardedly optimistic of my chances for succesfully completing. The weather is back to its typical combination of rain and small sunbreaks, so we'll see.

Until next time,
For those with wings, Fly to your dreams.

Flight Lesson 4 – Takeoffs are optional, Landings are mandatory

2008-05-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

I fear I’ve taken a bit longer than I should for this update [and that’s a change how, exactly? Ed.] but the weather and my schedule haven’t exactly been cooperating again, thus I’ve had one flight in the past couple of weeks, plus a ground-school lesson.

Ground school was somewhat illuminating as we mostly focused on airspace regulations, and map reading. It was a good reality check session for me, on the order of realizing how much I don’t know. Odds are I’ll be resorting to flash cards to memorize the subtle distinctions between Class B, C, D, and E airspace rules. At least maps have legends you can use to (mostly) figure out what things mean.

The real fun, however, was on my flight lesson. I finally got some good weather, a cool, clear, crisp Saturday morning with nothing but the light haze from a thermal inversion layer making The Mountain (Mt. Rainer for the non-local) a little less than picture perfect. Either because the weather North at Everett was less stellar, or because I’m still taking too long to do my pre-flight checks, we scrubbed the original plan to fly to Paine Field in Everett and learn landings there, instead staying in the Boeing Field pattern for an hour.

No complaints here either way. Takeoffs, especially when I get to do them, are still a rush that I don’t think I’ll ever completely tire of. If pushing the throttle full forward and getting pushed back into your seat by acceleration as your airplane lunges for the sky ever starts failing to bring a grin to my face, it’s time to check my pulse, because I’m probably dead. Plus, in an hour of pattern work, I finally started to feel like I can keep up with the airplane during these maneuvers.

Nobody was going to mistake my landings for those of a pro though. By the end of the hour, I’m pretty sure my instructor wasn’t adding a lot of extra control input to get us on the ground safely, but every single one of them was definitely of the “Hard Thud” variety. Still, it was definitely fun, especially as I started to get the reference points and important directions.

Weather.com and the Magic 8-Ball both agree that tomorrow should be a good flying day, so hopefully I’ll get Lesson #5 in. Saturday should be interesting as well, since I’m planning on taking The Boy with me to start getting him familiar with the airport and real airplanes. No flying (obviously) we’re just going for the point where jet noises don’t freak him out.

For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Flight Lessons 2 and 3

2008-04-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Flight training report this week. I missed doing an update for my second lesson, wherein the most significant thing was experimenting with slow flight. We just barely got the flight in under cloud cover that would start snowing later in the week, but it’s time logged, and right now I’m still of the opinion that any flying day is a good day.

I finally got to try out my new flight bag too. I’d been using a backpack I’d gotten as a freebie at a game developer’s event a couple of years ago, but for my birthday, my Lovely and Gracious Wife got me a dedicated flight bag from Sporty’s. She even got my initials monogrammed on the bag! I’m really blessed to have a mate who supports my crazy plans and dreams.

Tuesday was another flying day. Lesson number three, and my introduction to stalls and instrument flying. It was a really bumpy afternoon, and of course, I would be under the hood (a vision restricting device that blocks your view outside the airplane) during the worst of it, just fighting to keep the airplane straight and level. In some ways, though, it’s easier than trying to do the same thing in a simulator, since your tactile senses help tell you the airplane is moving. Not that I can entirely trust them. I’ve “enjoyed” some lovely vertigo sensations while playing simulators, when I knew my butt was nailed to the floor, and could tell my inner ear to shut up, I know better than to trust my sense of balance when the airplane really could be banking left.

Stalls in the DA40 are interesting too. It’s a very well behaved trainer, and after the stall warning horn starts, the next thing you get is a mild buffeting on the stick, then buffeting of the entire aircraft, before the nose finally drops at around forty-five knots. Basically the aircraft gives you plenty of “Don’t do that”, “No, really, don’t do that”, “Seriously, if you keep it up, stuff is going to happen!” feedback beforehand. It also seems to glide quite nicely at seventy-eight knots, as demonstrated when my instructor decided to give me my first taste of emergency procedures with a brief bout of “engine trouble”.

Assuming the weather holds out as good, I’ll go up again tomorrow morning (Saturday). Apparently I’ll try landing for the first time *twitch*.

For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Please Help Global Warming!

2008-04-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

Note: I did get to fly on Thursday, and will have a post about that and my schedule up in the next couple of days, but first, this important message!

HELP GLOBAL WARMING!

Because it's past the middle of April, it's Seattle, and it's snowing outside. Seriously, can we get some extra CO2 here? Blizzards in Cleveland in April I can deal with, because it cancels baseball games that give me lovely double-headers to attend in August (anyone else remember the fun that was the first couple weeks of last year's baseball season). But Thundersnow-storms out my office window I have a little more of a problem with.

Well, at least my kids are happy. Per the Lovely and Gracious Mrs., The Boy and The Girl are standing at the dining room window shouting "Snow!" right now.

Getting Older

2008-04-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

As my younger brother noted, today, in addition to being Tax day and Buy A Gun day, is also the annual anniversary of my release from the womb.

I've been blessed with two wonderful children, a beautiful and tolerant wife, a dream job, and the ability to reach for my dreams.

My occasional complaints about a lack of cooperation from the weather for accomplishing my aviation goals pale in comparison to things like that.

Flight Lesson #1

2008-04-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was my first official flight lesson. Oh, look, I’m already behind on my ground school reading *nervous eye twitch*. Granted, the reading was my own fault, since I decided that spending the weekend submerged in the sea of manga, anime, and Japanese culture that is Sakura*Con was a good idea. I regret nothing.

Fortunately, I’m familiar with most of the material in the first couple chapters of my ground school book anyway, so I should get caught up in short order. I’ve got to remember to ask my instructor what kind of information I’m supposed to be reading out of the DA-40 reference manual though. That things as dull as the FAR/AIM book, and laid out less coherently.

But book learnin’ is boring anyway, when compared to actual flying. Tuesday was graced with partially cloudy skies, and while unseasonably cold for early April (seriously, we had snow over the weekend. That DOES. NOT. HAPPEN. In Seattle during the last few days in March), still sufficiently good flying weather for a low VFR lesson. I finally got my checklist cards, and tried to follow along as my instructor demonstrated proper pre-flight and checklist procedures. They seemed simple enough, provided you can remember where everything is.

Then we were off, with me tap-dancing on the toe brakes to get us to the run-up area. Boeing Field didn’t seem terribly busy at the time, with just a couple of corporate jets, a twin, and a couple of other trainers leaving at various times.

Once off, we headed to Galvin’s designated primary practice area for my introduction to basic maneuvers. So far, so, … adequate… I managed to mostly hold altitude correctly while flying straight and level, and manage decent level turns. Turns while climbing and descending, and just descents in general, are going to be trouble until I can really get a good feel for proper power management. We also tried steep (about 45 degree of bank) turns. My first one wasn’t so hot, but on the second one, I did a bit better. That was basically the last maneuver I tried, and I think by that time I was starting to get used to the feedback coming from the instrumentation in my inner ears and gluteus maximus.

I think I was finally starting to get the whole “terrain picture” thing my instructor was talking about too. I still feel a lot more comfortable trusting what my instruments tell me I’m doing, but I think with a few more flights, I’ll start recognizing the visual picture as well. In some ways, comprehending the picture outside feels like learning to read a new language: until you learn the patterns that make up the letters and words, it’s all incoherent gibberish.

Hopefully this weekend I can get my reading caught up, unbury my home flight-sim stuff. If I can get in a couple of sim hours before next Tuesday, I’ll be really interested to see if there’s any kind of noticeable improvements.

Until then,
For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

Weather Intervention

2008-03-26T09:48:00.001-07:00

No flying this week. My scheduled first lesson yesterday was scrubbed due to the predictably unpredictable Pacific Northwest spring weather (don't like it? Wait ten minutes) that meant nobody but the big boys in their jet toys were leaving Boeing Field. Well, this is why I started doing the work now. Better weather will come with summer, and hopefully I can get my Private rating completed before fall brings the unpredictable rains and shorter days back.

The day wasn't a total loss though. I got to meet my instructor, an IT refugee who did a career change to flight instruction. I think we'll get along just fine. I also got books. A lot of big, thick books. One for the FAA regulations, three to study for tests, two plus a syllabus and a DVD for my actual groundschool, and the manual for a DA40. Good thing I'm comfortable with homeschooling, because there's going to be a lot of studying going on.

I also stumbled on a website selling a DA40 set of add-on aircraft for the version of Microsoft Flight Sim that I own! One of them even has the Garmin G1000 cockpit I'll be flying in. So my task for the rest of the week is to start hitting the books, get my desk cleared off to where I can use my sim setup again, and see if I can set up the G1000 equipped DA40 sim.

For those with wings, fly to your dreams

Introductory Flight

2008-03-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, March 18^th, 2008, a second entry went in my logbook. At around 3pm local time, Keith, my instructor for the day, and I took off from Boeing Field in a Diamond DA40. Amid mostly sunny skies, we looked into Safeco Field (home of the Seattle Mariners), turned west to fly over Bremerton, then headed back south-east to overfly SeaTac airport before returning back to Boeing Field.

It took me two days to stop smiling.

I was impressed (and very surprised) by the amount of flying Keith let me do. He handled all the power management, and was never far from taking control when necessary, but for the most part, he let me do the vast majority of stick and rudder work. It’ll be interesting to see how that compares to actual lessons.

The most valuable thing for me though, was that the whole thing just felt right. Sometimes you worry that when you’ve wanted to do something for so long, when you finally do it, reality fails to match your expectations. Not this. For me, getting off the ground and playing with the birds, even if only for a little while, felt good.

I’m really excited for my next lesson, happening next week, weather permitting. As a side note, this should guarantee at least one blog post a week, as I write about my training experiences. :)

For those with wings, fly to your dreams.

The Logbook

2008-03-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

I have a little black book. Not THAT kind of little black book, but a small pilot's logbook. It was purchased sometime in spring of 1992, a few weeks before my twelfth birthday. The first entry was made on my twelfth birthday, an hour of dual time in a Cherokee 140 with the pilot friend of my dad's. After that, the logbook went onto my shelf, looked at on occasion, but never added to.

When I went to college, moving across the country to the cradle of Naval aviation, Pensacola, Florida, the logbook went with me, on the off chance I got work at the airport or something. Twice yearly, the book was packed into a box, shipped cross country, taken out and placed on a shelf, then put back in the box and shipped back across the country. I did this for all four years of college, but never had opportunity to actually open and write in the book.

When I graduated college, and made my final cross-country drive, the logbook went back on a shelf while I tried to find a job. I got married, my wife and I moved into our first little apartment, and the logbook found another shelf. We bought our two-bedroom condo, and the logbook ended up on another shelf while we busied ourself with bringing two little children into the world.

And the logbook sat on a shelf, slowly gathering dust. Out of sight, but not entirely out of mind. Until one gray February afternoon last month, I walked out of a physician's clinic in Kirkland with a small, yellow piece of paper tucked into my jacket pocket. There were a bunch of words and phrases on the paper, but the ones that were important said this: "Medical Certificate 3rd Class and Student Pilot Certificate".

I was actually supposed to go up today for my first official lesson, and make my second entry in my little black book. Unfortunately, Seattle's temperamental March weather forced a rescheduling of that flight, but that entry will go in the book soon. And, Lord willing, it will be followed by many more.

Sometimes dreams take a little longer than we expect. But I'm reminded that sometimes, if you wait long enough, and have the courage to take a big risk and grasp at the opportunity when it's given, you really can fly to your dreams.

Roadtripping the Caravan

2008-02-25T16:28:00.001-08:00

For the President's Day weekend, my wife and I decided it was time to take the new Grand Caravan out for a test of its road-trip qualifications. To that end, after leaving The Boy to spend a few days of quality time with his grandma, the remaining three of us set out for the three hundred-some mile jaunt from Seattle to Canyonville, OR to visit some college friends.

Despite my general ambivalence towards all things minivan, I have to admit that the GC is a fantastic road-trip vehicle. Comfortable, never short for music thanks to the Satellite radio and MyGig systems, plenty of room for our stuff, and it actually surprised me with the gas mileage. While the around town MPGs are generally horrible, averaging about 65mph on the freeway gave us real fuel economy numbers around 25 miles per gallon. Considering the EPA estimate is 23, I'd call that pretty darn good.

Hanging out with our friends and seeing their five-month-old little girl for the first time was great, but far too soon it was time to head back. Unfortunately, we brought something unexpected back with us: another evil version of The Flu. Urgh. The Lovely and Gracious Wife was the first to succumb, feeling the symptoms on Wednesday night, and in full-blown illness by Thursday. This also left me staying home playing Mr. Mom, a role I didn't exactly manage with my usual aplomb. By Saturday night, The Boy had succumbed, and let me tell you, I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything more pathetic than my tow-headed two-year old laying on the couch whimpering because he's got a fever and his body hurts.

Oh, and then on Sunday, I started showing symptoms, leaving The Girl as the only healthy one of us all. Well, at least work hasn't been too stressful today. Much like being in the eye of a hurricane, I don't imagine that this calm spell will last much longer, but it's nice for the moment, and well timed at that.

Things are going to change... Part 00

2008-02-14T15:46:00.000-08:00

When I said I was going to get more material to blog about this year, I really didn't intend to switch to a three posts per month mode. That's just how January ended up. On the bright side, while I've been busy elsewhere, things have begun to change.

There's a chorus to a song that gets sung a lot as special music at my alma mater. And while I can't seem to find the audio anywhere on the internet (What? Nobody wants to pirate PCC Ensemble CDs? Whouda thunk it???) here's the start of the chorus that's been periodically pogoing though my head for a while

"Things are gonna change someday.
Trouble's gonna fly away.
Things are gonna change for the better
and I know that the better's gonna stay."

It's going to be a big year. And the first major step happened on the last weekend in January, when my wife drove off the lot of our local Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealer in the vehicle pictured below (I was following her in our VUE, recently returned from the repair shop with a brand new muffler and back hatch)

My Lovely and Gracious wife now has a minivan of her very own, and for the first time in our nearly six years of marriage, we're officially owners of two cars.

Now for those who know us, no, we didn't suddenly find out that we need more space for car seats than the back row of the VUE provides. However, where we do need more space is in our living arrangements, where the two bedroom condo that was roomy for two adults and two cats has become rather cramped when two toddlers are added to the mix. Since we're highly unlikely to find a larger home within our budget that still allows me to walk to work, and since I really like my job, procurement of a second vehicle became a necessity.

The Lovely and Gracious wife really, really enjoys her new ride too. She's spent pretty much every drive thus far burning our entire CD collection into the MyGig system, and her sole complaint is that it's too easy to go too fast. And while I would have probably preferred something more expensive that exuded masculinity (hey, you can probably fit three carseats in the back of an F350, right), even I have to admit that behind the wheel, when you turn on the heated seat, adjust the height, and let the 251hp 4.0 liter V6 take you from 0 to 60 in about 8 seconds, the fact that you're driving a minivan doesn't seem to matter nearly as much.

I guess it's appropriate though, that the herald of all the upcoming changes this year is a car. After all, cars get you from place to place, and in this case, start the first domino in a long chain.

See you space cowboy.

Final Approach to a shipped game

2008-01-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

It's almost noon here on a typically rainy Seattle Saturday. The blinds and sunshades that keep the summer afternoon sun off my bank of monitors are all open, and I can see the ripples of raindrops hitting the puddles on our building's North-West deck.

I'm in the office again.

Since coming back from Christmas break, I've had one day off. This looks to be another such week, and I'll likely be in on Monday even though we're officially closed in observance of MLK day.

I started the day with sixty-one bugs on my plate. Yesterday I started with fifty-two, fixed or moved about eight of them, and left with sixty assigned to me. We're a week and a half from sending our game to be certified by Microsoft and Sony, and I'll probably see everyone else left on the team at some point this weekend. We're not work-a-holics. Well, not most of us anyway. I'm sure there are some who are, but the vast majority of us would rather be spending the long weekend with friends and family, rather than hunkered down at our desks squishing bugs.

But that's the price you pay for turning your hobbies into a career. Life on the bug lines continues...

Playing Now Update

2008-01-11T11:56:00.001-08:00

I finally finished Kingdom Hearts last night. It took close to a month, and forty-five hours or so of playtime (Thank you Square, for those wonderfully depressing "Hours Played" counters), but at least now I understand why this game is beloved by so many people. Mix Disney characters with Final Fantasy characters, add world-spanning plot to allow the fusion to make sense, set blender to Frappe, and viola. And I'm only five years behind the times on this one too. :)

At this point, though, it's on to something newer. One of my Christmas presents this year from my Lovely and Gracious wife was Assassin's Creed for my PS3, so now that I've wrapped up the epic RPG, it's time for something a little more action oriented, and shorter. I just don't have the time for epic adventures that I used to. Of course, I'll also be working in the new Sam & Max episode sometime soon...

And believe me, I am still alive

2008-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

I'm doing game development and I'm still alive...

With apologies to Jonathan Coulton and GlaDoS. Seriously though, I'm still here, just working my slowly expanding fanny off as we push to get Big Game Sequel out the door by the end of the month. Not that I'm working any less than I did when I was on the QA side of this equation, but it's a whole different ballgame when you're responsible for fixing bugs rather than writing them.

Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T20:33:00.000-08:00

Here are three New Year's resolutions for me and this blog:

1. Blog more. Resolution #2 ought to help with that.

2. Get better material. Hopefully in 2008 I'll take up something that will furnish me with more material for the direction I want this aviation/video games/media blog to go in.

3. Stop stealing music by listening to my iPod. At least, that's what the RIAA thinks I do.

Oh, and in honor of #3, here's Weird Al's video for "Don't Download this Song".

A Christmas Salute

2007-12-20T00:03:00.000-08:00

The wacky hijinks will be back soon, I promise. I've got the next two weeks off, and regular blogging ought to improve. For today, though, I'd just like to give a salute to my brother-in-law, Seth.

Now Seth and I haven't seen eye to eye on a lot of things. I married his big sister, moved her out of Iowa, there've been some ongoing family issues, etc. Let's just say we never quite got off on the right foot and leave it at that.

But, while I'm muttering about the Seattle rain as I make my mile and a quarter walk from my condo to my climate controlled office, where I'll stress about about my part in getting a video game into the hands of the clamoring masses, Seth is "enjoying" the hospitalities of a barracks, scanning for IEDs along the roadway, and spending Christmas thousands of miles from his girlfriend and his family.

So while we don't agree on everything, I'd just like to say thanks to my brother-in-law. It's men and women just like him, from all over the country, who are spending Christmas far from home in warm, sandy places, so that the rest of us can enjoy warm homes filled with our loved ones.

Hooah Private, come home safe.

Walking Oddities

2007-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

One of the perks of walking to work (aside from my apparently lower risk of being hit by a moving car) is some of the occasional odd or funny things I see. I'm trying to remember to use my cell phone cam to actually get pictures of these from time to time.

Here's one I enjoyed today, parked in an apartment parking lot.

It's the South end of a North-bound Dodge Intrepid. Aside from the owner's poor choice in cars, the things I want to point out are the placards hanging from the rear window. On the left, is the ubiquitous and obnoxious "Baby on Board" sign that tells us we should be extra careful to not rear-end this car. On the right, however, is a somewhat less common placard, advising us "Wife in Trunk".

A Plaything of Murphy's Law

2007-12-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

Some days, it's good not to be wound too tightly, and to have a well tuned ability to laugh at yourself.

Today was one of those days for me.

It started out well enough. Sure, it took The Boy all of thirty seconds to defeat the refrigerator lock I'd installed the night before when he got up an hour and a half before we wanted him to, but he went to sleep when we put him in the playpen, and at least the eggnog carton had its lid on tightly and didn't leak on the floor during the time it lay on its side, unnoticed.

I even got to eat breakfast at home today, rather than having to microwave some oatmeal at work and eat at my desk. I had time to peel a couple of kiwis and put them in my lunch pail, make a cup of coffee to go (so that I could enjoy a hot cup of my current starbucks blend brewed with my Toddy once I got to work) and since I was driving instead of walking, I got to use my big lunch pail which meant the kiwis would still be in their normal shape when I went to eat them later.

Even the rain, which had been pouring almost nonstop for the past couple of days, stopped an hour before I left, leaving me with patches of blue skies overhead.

I probably should have recognized this as a sign.

So off I went on my merry way. Light traffic on the surface streets, no flooding along my route, psychologist and insane caller on the AM talk radio. Hey, there's one of my co-workers walking. I'll stop at this crosswalk and see if he wants to ride the rest of the way. It's nice now, but it could start pouring any second, and this way he can be dry.

There's no traffic, so I come to a leisurely stop, roll down the window, and ask him if he wants a ride. He turns toward me, says something, and then I'm staring at a blurry, fuzzy version of my crossover SUV's roof trying to figure out what the crunching noise somewhere behind me was.

Things I learned today:

The rear crumple zone of a Saturn Vue can pwn the front crumple zone of a Honda Accord.
Wearing a C-Spine collar and being strapped to a backboard for an hour and a half is not comfortable.
Seatbelts are good things. So are normal CT Scan results.
When being rear-ended, it is possible for your glasses to launch off your face, bounce off the windshield, and land somewhere behind your seat.
You can run into fans of games you've worked on in the oddest places.
I'm glad I read AmbulanceDriver, MedicMarch, and BabsRN. Somehow, having read a fair number of EMT horror stories made me a little more comfortable with my first (and hopefully only) trip in the back.
It's difficult to keep track of where you are when all you can see is the sky or ceiling.
Going to the hospital is more fun when you're there for a childbirth and the wristband is merely for identification as the father.
And finally, my walking commute is apparently safer than my driving commute.

Low and Slow in a Big Airplane

2007-11-28T14:07:00.000-08:00

Watching an expert airshow pilot do a controlled, slow pass in a small aircraft is an interesting thing. Watching an expert airshow pilot do a controlled, slow pass in a military jet fighter is loud and interesting. But watching an expert do a controlled, slow pass in an airliner? Well, it's very loud, and also extremely impressive.

I found this clip last night thanks to the AvWeb newsbrief, and thought I'd share it.

In other news, I should be back to a more frequent blogging schedule now that my side project has ended. Now I just have to figure out what topics I want to write about.

Rockin' Review: Guitar Hero III (PS3)

2007-11-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I picked up Guitar Hero III for my PS3. It's the first GH game I've ever owned, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, I think this says it all about my response:

Face obscured to allow the victim some semblance of remaining dignity.

For those who are currently scratching their heads going "What's a Guitar Hero, and why is this grown man holding a child's toy guitar?", I'll give a bit of explanation. Basically, the Guitar Hero series is karaoke for people who'd rather play an instrument than sing, or Dance, Dance Revolution for those who would rather play an instrument than dance. The guitar has five buttons on the neck, plus a strum switch and whammy bar. Notes cascade down on the screen, and timing a button press on the neck with a flick of the strum switch does a pretty good approximation of playing a note or chord.

That's kind of a long-winded explanation, but here's a video example, courtesy of YouTube:

You'll have to imagine the person on the other end jamming on the guitar controller to get a near flawless playthrough there.

So that's the explanation, and for me, at least, it's a lot of fun. Really, one of the bigger difficulties I run into while playing is that I'll sometimes get a little too into the music, and miss some notes because I stop paying close attention to the note cascade.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I have previously spent a little bit of time learning to play real guitars, and that I was, in fact, in a bad garage bad while in high-school.

The song list strikes me as being a good blend of old-school rock standbys from the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s, plus some grunge from the 90s, and modern rock groups like The Killers. Not having been raised on these particular brands of music, it's almost all new to me, and that's allowed me to discover some new favorites, Eric Johnson's White Cliffs of Dover in particular. On the other hand, it's caused me to wonder who enjoys some of this stuff and actually thinks it's music (I'm looking at you, Slayer and Sonic Youth).

The periodic boss battles are also somewhat frustrating, as they amp the difficulty way up, and for me, were little more than mostly un-fun progress blockers that kept me from enjoying my pretend guitar playing while I completed the very videogame task of defeating a specific boss. There also seems to be some problems with the PS3 online connections, where it takes about ten tries just to find one live match.

Still, the three boss battles, occasional dreadful song, and online weirdness aside, it's a game I'll be enjoying for quite a number of hours yet. While I doubt I'll ever be completing Through the Fire and Flames at 95% on Expert anytime this century, I'll still be having fun.

Bottom Line:
Platforms: Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PC, Xbox 360, Wii
Rated: T for ages 13+. Some songs, Talk Dirty to Me for example, contain sexually suggestive lyrics that definitely aren't appropriate for children. Also, the avatars are dressed like, well, hard rock musicians. The women's outfit options are generally tight and revealing, while the men's outfits are also mostly tight and revealing, with a dash of hideously ugly to boot.
You'll Like it if: You've ever played air guitar to your favorite rock songs.

Five Airplanes

2007-11-08T11:00:00.000-08:00

Ahab tagged me for a list of my five favorite airplanes, and aside from a lot of difficulty in picking only five, I'll give it my best shot, but I still had to include one honorable mention, making it a list of six.

Honorable Mention -- ViperJet

A high-school fantasy come to life, the ViperJet has the kind of profile I used to doodle in my school notebooks. Pay no attention to the fact that once you get an engine and avionics, this will still cost more than a million dollars, the fact remains that it is (at least in theory) a kit aircraft that can be purchased and built in your garage. As such, it's like a fantasy that's almost attainable: not the movie star you'll never meet in a million years, but the girl down the street with whom you might just have a shot if you could only make the football team.

#5 -- Piper Cherokee 140

It's not particularly pretty, and it's not particularly fast, but the old PA28 Cherokee 140 is on the list for one simple reason: it's the airplane that taught me to love flying. Back in my early teen years, my dad knew an airline pilot who owned one of these, and for two successive birthdays I went flying. After the second year, overflying the Southern California Poppy Reserve and seeing the most amazing carpet of orange, yellow, and purple rolling under my feet, then looking ahead and seeing the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, I knew I would be a pilot someday.

#4 -- Corvair F-106 Delta Dart

It's really difficult for me to pick a favorite from the Cold War era jets. There's so many that I find fascinating, like the F-104, F-89, and the F-8 Crusader. But of them all, the Dart has to top the list. There's just something about that tailless delta shape. To see one of these in person is to imagine scenes of aircraft sitting on alert through cold, dark midwestern winters, their pilots shivering in the alert hut while drinking endless cups of coffee, waiting for an alert siren that could come at any time, sending them scrambling to their jets to ward off a massive wave of attacking Soviet bombers.

#3 -- Consolidated B-24

The forgotten bomber of World War 2, you really have to see one to really experience its power. The B-24 flew faster and dropped more bombs than her prettier sister the B-17, but where the B-17 is curved and delicate, the B-24 is all business. She's a big, slab sided box with wings, four huge round engines, and a massive tail. In flight, she makes a sound that has to be experienced to be understood.

On my nineteenth birthday, the one pictured above (the only flyable model still in existence) was at the local airport. My birthday treat to myself was to go visit. I tread carefully around a few gray-haired gentlemen, most there with their children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, for whom this aircraft brought back memories of a time long ago, when they were little older than I was at the time. I peered at history standing before me, and imagined what it must have been like when aircraft like this formed a swarm a hundred strong or more.

#2 -- North American XB-70 Valkyrie

The supersonic bomber that never was. A contemporary of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the XB-70 was meant to be a bomber capable of Mach 3 high-altitude attacks into communist Russia. Canceled due to budget cuts and lack of suitability for the low-level flight, only two were ever built. Still, it's fascinating to look at this aircraft and wonder what might have been if she'd been built in numbers. Plus, just look at those lines. More even than the Blackbird, this is an airplane built for speed, but that looks pretty in the process.

#1 -- Northrop P-61 Black Widow

Ask most aviation buffs what their favorite WW2 warbird is, and they'll probably say the P-51. Some may throw in the P-38, or the P-47, maybe you'll even get a Zero, BF-109 or FW-190 thrown into the mix. I'd probably be the only one to mention the P-61. The Black Widow was a night fighter, and as sizes go, she was the biggest fighter the USA had during the war, almost the same size as the B-25 medium bomber. She carried a crew of two or three (pilot, navigator/radar operator, and rear gunner depending on model), had her own radar in that massive, bulbous nose, and was armed with four 20mm cannons in the belly, and in the A and C models, four .50 caliber machine guns in a dorsal turret.

They operated almost exclusively at night, hunting other night fighters and bombers in a time before GPS, when most navigation was still done with stopwatch, compass, and map. The C models also participated in ground attack raids, dropping bombs and strafing targets, for which their massive firepower was well suited.

In my early teens (funny how so many life-effecting experiences happened here) I was introduced to a gentleman who along with his wife, lived in the retirement community where my grandfather preached. He had been a P-61 pilot during WW2, and I was in awe of this quiet, older man who had once flown these big birds in combat. One of my most prized possessions is a lithograph he gave me called Symphony in Black and painted by Dan Kelly. Mr. Stewart was one of the five pilots who had signed the copy I have. That piece hung in my bedroom at home for years, and when I grew up, got married and got a job, it moved with me, to our first apartment. Now it hangs in my kids' room, and someday, I'll explain to them what it is, who signed it, and why it means so much.

More Proof the Squirrels are Gonna Get Us

2007-11-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Apparently the squirrels have now taken a page from the terrorist handbook in their attempts to kill the humans.

From the UK Register, we have an example of why the Fluffy-tailed menace and high-voltage powerlines don't mix:

Flaming kamikaze squirrel torches car

Sciurine death dive does for Toyota Camry

By Lester Haines → More by this author

Published Wednesday 24th October 2007 09:55 GMT

A New Jersey woman's Toyota Camry last week suffered a sciurine kamikaze attack during which a flaming squirrel fell onto the vehicle, slid into the engine compartment and provoked an explosion which destroyed the parked vehicle, the Jersey Journal reports.

Lindsey Millar, 23, and bruv Tony, 22, were at home in Bayonne last Wednesday lunchtime when the incident occurred. The animal had apparently decided it was a really good move to chew through overhead powerlines directly above the motor, and was duly fried for its trouble.

Tony Millar explained: "The squirrel chewed through the wire, was set on fire, fell down directly to where the car was. The squirrel, on fire, slid into the engine compartment and blew up the car."

He added: "They're always coming around here, chewing through the garbage."

Ms Millar is apparently fully insured for incendiary squirrel strike, although her brother concluded: "It's something to laugh about once she has a new car. It's not funny yet."

As a rather poignant footnote, the Jersey Journal notes that the Millars' house is fully decked out in anticipation of Halloween, "complete with a tiny plastic tombstone on their front lawn". Tony Millar said the family "will consider dedicating the tombstone to the squirrel". ®

Seriously though, when I eventually buy an actual house, if we live somewhere it's an option to do so, I am buying a varmint gun to deal with these things. I do not want a flaming squirrel doing a dive-bomb into the convertible I'll hopefully own as well.

Late Once Again...

2007-10-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of recent blogging. I'm working on an undisclosable (but paying) side project right now that's taking up most of my blogging time right now.

One thing I will mention though, is that I've finally had the opportunity to read Terry Pratchett. After having seen other people rave about the joys of his Discworld saga for years, I finally checked out The Colour of Magic from my local library.

And proceeded to chew through it in the span of a day. If you've never read Pratchett, I'd compare his humor and wit to Douglas Adams, though he turns his more to fantasy than science fiction. I'm looking forward to reading the second book in the Discworld saga.

I Expect

2007-10-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

That all of my brothers who take this quiz will get the same result I did.

You Are Destined to Rule the World

You have the makings of a very evil dictator...
Which is both kind of cool and kind of scary!
Will you rule the world? Maybe. Maybe not.
But at least you know that you could.

Are You Destined For World Domination?

Seriously, I won't be terribly surprised if one of the se years, probably around Christmas time, we're all gathered together, enjoying a nice Merlot, when one of us says "Let's take over a small third-world country." Ahab will respond "You know, I think I know a guy who knows a guy who can get us some extra firepower." I chip in "Network sabotage isn't all that difficult if you know what you're doing..." Birdy mentions something about killer robots being pretty easy to make if you duct tape a few Xbox 360s together for processors, a few other comments fly by, vacation time is taken, and all of a sudden, the government of the Republic of Suriname or some other tiny country gets overthrown.

Law and Order: SVU Takes on Second Life

2007-10-04T00:06:00.000-07:00

Hilarity ensues.

I don't normally watch legal or police drama shows. They're too serious for my tastes, and those that aren't busy focusing on grisly crimes are usually too into the soap opera side of interpersonal relationships. Suffice to say, I'm not a regular watcher of NBC's Law and Order: SVU.

I did, however, tune in for Tuesday night's episode. The premise, about a woman kidnapped because of her virtual world avatar, was too good to pass up. One of my general rules is that Serious Drama + Technologically Illiterate Writers = Unintentional Hilarity.

I was not disappointed. The plot, such as it was, centered around a woman who's "Another Youniverse" (standing in for real game Second Life) underage prostitute alter-ego is convincing enough to earn her a real-world stalker (and eventual kidnapper). The hilarity ensues when the "crack" SVU team led by Ice-T goes into action.

First off, for a crack investigation unit, these people are amazingly incompetent. They corner and interrogate two different suspects with the line of "We know you kidnapped the girl, where is she", before having to let them go because they were innocent. Meanwhile, their second arrest attempt tips off the real kidnapper, and the second half of the episode is spent trying to find evidence that perp #3 actually did it. But the evidence is where the humor really lies.

Apparently, the Another Youniverse developer gives their CEO a giant video screen wall to gaze upon his creation, granted him superuser access with the ability to pull billing records, and has a server farm 20 acres long just to store the screenshots they automatically log on every player's activities. Also, in the climatic moment, when they turn the game from night to day in order to determine the relative position of a critical evidence location, reveals that the CEO's uber video wall is located IN the 20 acre server farm, and that switching the game from night to day requires a power increase sufficient enough to create an audible hum as the servers power up to full throttle.

Sometimes, a crime show can tackle a weird subject and get it right, or at least play it sufficiently humorous. CSI's episode about Furries is a perfect example. As for Law and Order: SVU, well, maybe they should hire someone who's actually PLAYED more than fifteen minutes of World of Warcraft before they do their next "Ripped from the Headlines" show.

MLB PLayoff Preview and Predictions

2007-10-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

October is here, and with it, and every sports fan is focused on one thing: ~~The NFL~~, Major League Baseball's playoffs and the road to the World Series. Okay, fine, so there are probably more folks focused on Week 5 of the NFL than who's playing in the MLB Divisional Series, but for we baseball fans, it's still a big deal. Plus, this year has what promise to be some great matchups, and some great questions.

Will this be the year that A-Rod and the Yankees shake off their postseason woes?
Will the Cubs break the curse?
Who wins the battle of the ex-Seattle Mariner skippers? Lou Pinella, or the man who replaced him in Seattle, Bob Melvin?
Will the Red Sox and Yankees get another shot at each other for the American League Championship?

So for those keeping score at home, here's a quick preview of the Divisional series games, and my predictions for October Magic.

American League:
New York Yankees (94-68), AL Wild Card vs. Cleveland Indians (96-66), AL Central Champs

It's the best of the weakest division in the AL versus the Yankees. After starting the season at in the cellar and even being swept by the lowly Tampa Bay Devil Rays in May, the Yankees put together an impressive second half to win the wild card and make a serious run at the Red Sox for AL East champions. Cleveland, meanwhile, beat up on their weak division, but it's doubtful they can stop the Yankees.
Prediction: Yankees in 5.

Anaheim* Angels (94-68), AL West Champs vs. Boston Red Sox (96-66), AL East Champs

Probably the two strongest teams in baseball this year meet in the first round. Both have great starting pitching and solid offense. Though it'll bug Ahab no end though, I've got to give the edge to the Angels. I think their bullpen is a bit stronger, and they've got a bit more depth off the bench. Plus, I can't stand Julio Lugo and J.D. Drew from their Dodger days.
Prediction: Angels in 5.

National League:
Colorado Rockies (90-73), NL Wild Card vs. Philadelphia Phillies (89-73), NL East Champs

Two of the hottest teams of September meet in what ought to be a very exciting series. The Phillies looked dead midseason, but put together a massive run (helped by a total collapse by the Mets) to take the divisional title. They face the Rockies, who won 14 of their final 15 and went 13 innings on Monday night to pull out a 9-8 win at home during a 163rd tiebreaker game. This one's too close to call, but I've got to give the edge to the Rockies. They've got crazy momentum, and have proven time and again that anything can happen in Coors Field.
Prediction: Rockies in 5.

Chicago Cubs (85-77), NL Central Champs vs. Arizona Diamondbacks (90-72), NL West Champs

The Cubs managed to be the best of the worst division in baseball, narrowly beating out the Milwaukee Brewers for the championship. Now they face a suprising Arizona Diamondbacks team, which put together a big second half to win the West, and look to be challengers in their division for several more years. I don't think this one will even be close. The Cubs might manage one win in Wrigley, but they look totally outclassed here.

An interesting side note for Seattle Mariners fans, though, will be the meeting of Lou Pinella, a Seattle hero from his days as the Mariners skipper, when Seattle made their only post-season appearances, and Bob Melvin, the man who replaced Lou in Seattle, and who was basically run out of town for being saddled with a bad team and not being Lou Pinella. Personally, I hope the Diamondbacks kick the Cubs collective asses.
Prediction: Diamondbacks in 4.

And that's the divisionals. Here are the rest, assuming my insane picks actually happen.

ALCS: Yankees vs. Angels. A-Rod and the Yankees choke again, giving some solace to frustrated Red Sox fans as the Angels win in 6.

NLCS: Rockies vs. Diamondbacks. The Rockies finally run out of gas against their NL West foes, but not before the highest scoring game in postseason history gets played at Coors Field. Diamondbacks in 7.

World Series: Diamondbacks vs. Angels. In a West Coast showdown, the Angels have more pitching, and more offense. Angels take it in 5.

Oh, and for those keeping score at home, the answers to the questions posed at the beginning of the post?
No, In their dreams, Bob Melvin, and Thank The Lord No.

*Yes, I know they're actually the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I just refuse to call them that because it's both cumbersome and stupid. There's only one baseball team in Los Angeles, and they don't play in Anaheim.

Driving Addiction: The Lure of Racing Games

2007-09-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a sports gamer. If you were to search through my decent sized game collection, you'd find precisely two sports games: old copies of NBA Jam and '94 Winter Olympics, both for the original Gameboy brick, and acquired back in the days when Ahab and I had far more time than money to buy new games. In short, I've neither bought nor had bought for me, a new sports game in some thirteen years and haven't played one outside of LAN parties or work during my QA days.

So why am I so addicted to Forza and Gran Turismo that my WoW and EVE time had dropped to almost zero? I think the key elements are that for me, racing games don't feel like sports games, and also that these types of racing games, in particular, integrate some of the character improvement aspects I enjoy in RPG (role-playing game) products.

Feel. When I say racing games don't feel like sports games to me, I'm referring to team sports games, such as the Madden franchise. These games are an exercise in frustration for me, where the lack of total control over all the players on my team makes me reliant on the sometimes flaky AI systems for my own success. In a racing game, it's all about my own skill. I may be racing against AI opponents, but my own skills, my knowledge of the track I'm driving, and the car I'm using, are the determining factors in victory, not whether the AI can properly navigate through a chicane.

Character Improvement. Gran Turismo probably started this trend in racing games, the idea that as you win more races you receive new cars, new upgrades for your cars, and races with tougher competition. In many ways, it's little different from the RPG systems of characters improving their skills, getting better gear, and going off to slay tougher monsters. It works well there, it stands to reason it should work well here too.

The real enjoyment for me, though, comes from success. While it's true that until cars come equipped with Xbox or Playstation controllers for steering, my success has no real world application, but there's a bit of pleasant satisfaction gained from turning a near perfect lap in a 650hp Corvette on a virtual representation of Laguna Seca or the Nuerburgring. Considering it's also a world where hitting a wall in said 'vette at 175mph only results in a bit of bother and a reset, there is something to be said for it.

Gamer's Corner: Fall Games

2007-09-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Here in Seattle, Fall has arrived, bringing with it cooler weather, overcast skies, and lots of rain. In short, perfect weather to stay inside and play video games without feelings of guilt at wasting a lovely day.

So, without further ado, here are the games I'll be purchasing this fall.

1. Guitar Hero III. No, I don't own any of the previous Guitar Hero games. However, I have played them enough to find them fun. Plus, with a wireless guitar, it's a great party game.

2. Half-Life 2 Orange Box. I own, and have played through, Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. The Orange Box is a no brainer. Half-Life Episode 2, Portal, and the sequel to the first online shooter I ever tried? Sign me up. Plus, I know that the engine will run on my four year-old computer.

3. Sam & Max Season 2. I loved Sam & Max's return to PC adventures in Season 1. No question at all, I'll be ordering another full season.

4. Condemned 2: Bloodshot. The first game really, really messed with my head. If I can finish this one and not end up sleeping in the living room with the lights on and clutching a baseball bat, I'll count it an accomplishment.

There are a lot of other games coming out. Halo 3, Tabula Rasa, Haze, Area 51: Blacksite, Rock Band, and another Age of Empires III expansion pack just to name a few. And honestly, I could triple or quadruple the list of games I'm going to buy just based on what I'd like to play. Rock Band in particular, I'd like to play, but really, who would I play it with? Maybe in a few years, when The Boy and The Girl are older, I'll pick up Rock Band 3 and we can have jam sessions. For now, though, if I can get through the four games mentioned above sometime before April 2008, I'll count myself blessed.

If you're looking forward to any particular games this fall, feel free to leave a comment, and, provided it's not Halo 3, I won't mock you mercilessly.

Four Favorite Fast-Food Burgers

2007-09-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Ahab decided to tag the entire interweb tube system with his fave burgers meme, so since it's Friday and I'm feeling silly, here goes with my five favorites, in order.

1. Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger, Carl's Jr. Yes, there are better quality burgers around, but this combination of beef, cheese, bacon, BBQ sauce, and onion rings is my absolute favorite. No trip passing through Oregon or Spokane (Eastern Washington) is complete without stopping at the first Carl's Jr. I see to get one.

2. Double-Double, In-n-Out. Of course this is on the list, and second only to CJ's as my favorite burger. For the money, I think it's the best pure hamburger you can get at a fast food joint. On Washington to California road trips, I'll have been hitting Carl's Jr's since Portland, so I'm ready for pure burger goodness once I start seeing those In-n-Out arrows.

3. Kingburger, Fatburger. I basically consider Fatburger to be an In-n-Out imitator, with the chief differences being that you can get a fried egg, bacon, and chili on top of your Fatburger patty, and Fatburger has locations within 20 minutes of my house, compared to 20 hours to the nearest In-n-Out. It's a decent, if somewhat expensive burger. My recommendation is to get it with everything: bacon, fried egg, cheese, and chili. It's why quadruple-bypass surgery was invented.

4. Sirloin Cheese Burger, Jack In The Box. I can here Ahab's laughter across eight state lines on this one, but seriously, it's a good burger. Probably the best I've had from a national fast-food chain with branches in Western Washington. Unlike most fast burgers, this one actually has a well seasoned and flavorful patty, and they know enough to let the meat's flavor speak for itself rather than load it down with a lot of unnecessary extras. A piece of Swiss cheese, some grilled onions, a crunchy pickle spear (not the usual awful pickle chips) and some good tomatoes make for an excellent flavor.

Honorable Mentions. My fifth pick was going to be the Jalapeno Melt from Wendy's, but it appears they don't offer it anymore. Sad. It was a pretty average burger overall, but the jalapenos gave it a nice kick. Also officially discontinued, but available at some locations where it's popular enough, would be the Rodeo Cheeseburger from Burger King. Basically a poorer imitation of my Carl's Jr. favorite, the Rodeo Cheeseburger was a beef patty, BBQ sauce, and an onion ring. On the plus side, it's cheap, and available in more locations. Still, I can't peg it as an official #5 due to its random availability, and the fact that it's just a weak imitation of a superior product. Oh well.

Sorry, Ahab, I couldn't quite come up with a full top 5 list. Such is the nature of being a picky burger eater.

I Have a New Favorite TV Show...

2007-09-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

And it's Top Gear, which has finally come to the USA courtesy of BBC America. In my case, I'm watching it through Comcast's On Demand service, which BBC America seems quite willing to put most of their best shows on within a couple days of the episode's first showing.

Some of my readers may remember the Reliant Robin Rocket videos I linked to. Top Gear is the show that did that. For those who haven't seen the show, it can be best described as the unholy union of a Car & Driver road test show and Monster Garage, with a large dose of very British humor. Even my Lovely and Gracious Wife, who normally avoids car shows like the plague, enjoyed it.

Seriously, how many shows can you watch that feature a guy driving a pink convertible with a paper grocery sack over his head to hide his identity, compares minivans to STDs shortly before attempting to turn one into a convertible, crashes a Koenigsegg CCR, and sets fire to a car wash after attempting to drive the convertible minivan through it. And that just in the first hour-long episode shown in America.

If PBS had any brains at all, they'd import this and put it on some evening. It's probably quintuple their viewership during that hour.

If you have cable or satellite with BBC America, or can get it on demand, and you enjoy fast cars and/or Monster Garage, you've got to watch this. Like I said, my new favorite.

Remember

2007-09-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

9/11/01

Never Forget.

Steve Fossett -- Why We Always File a Flight Plan

2007-09-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

When I was a young lad, the local library had a subscription to Flying magazine. I would check out all the back issues I could, and pour over the columns that spoke of a joy of flight that I could only dream of experiencing. My penultimate favorite (Len Morgan's Vectors column was always my fav) was probably I Learned About Flying From That, a place for ordinary pilots to share hanger tales of knowledge gained through experience. Always educational, often thought provoking or humorous depending on the level of danger ultimately involved, they gave me a laundry list of things to NEVER try once I get my pilot's license.

The disappearance of Steve Fossett provides another example of that. Now don't get me wrong, my prayer is that the search teams will find Mr. Fossett alive and well, probably holed up in a cave, and asking what took them so long. Crashing in the mountains is an awfully anti-climatic way to go when you've successfully circumnavigated the globe in a balloon.

However, if there's a lesson to be learned here for other pilots, it's to ALWAYS, ALWAYS file a flight plan. Yes, I realize that it's often common practice to not file when you're flying out of remote airstrips. But seriously, consider for a moment the massive grid that's being searched right now. A flight plan would have helped narrow that area down a lot. If nothing else, it helps searchers locate the wreckage sooner than four months after the crash.

This incident also demonstrates that an ELT is no absolute substitute for a good flight plan. A subsequent report mentioned that Fossett's plane did have an ELT equipped, but no signal has been received. I hope they find him safely. But for everyone else, this ought to serve as an excellent reminder of why taking the time to file can be worth it.

My brother Ahab's favorite phrase for personal defense applies here too: "It's better to have it and never need it, than to need it and not have it."

A Litter Snitch is Born

2007-08-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Washington has a litter snitch program. Probably as an offshoot of their carpool lane violator snitch program, they have a toll free number that anyone can call to report their neighbors, or drivers in traffic, for flicking cigarette butts out their car windows, or leaving beer bottles on the lawn.

They even have incredibly annoying commercials that convey a nice, nanny-state message of "We know you're an irresponsible littering pig, and only the threat of a half-dozen strangers turning you in is going to keep you in line". I positively loath them.

That said, thanks to the jackass who couldn't be bothered to trash or recycle his beer bottle and instead flung it somewhere in a street, I'll be dialing the snitch hotline as fast as my fingers can manage the next time I see some yucca-puck tossing something from his car. It's jerks like him who cost me an hour last night putting on the emergency spare tire after a tiny piece of glass lodged itself with critical hit precision in the right-rear tire of our Vue, and another hour this morning getting said tire fixed.

As a public service to other Saturn owners who haven't had the pleasure of locating the "jack flange" with jack points that are "clearly marked" with an inverted triangle on the underbody of the vehicle, the triangle is molded into the bodywork, and located in the indents on the underbody. Also, be prepared for tired arms, as the combination tire iron/jack lever is too long to rotate through more than 200 degrees while raising or lowering the jack.

However, I will say that Les Schwab Tires has me as a customer for life now. Doing the entire service for free was nice (although expected, since it was under warranty), and remounting the original tire was appreciated, but they went well beyond what I expected when they also put the spare back in the tire compartment, and put the floorboard coverings back on. I'd expected to waste at least five more minutes messing with that stuff later. The only complaint I would have for them was the questionable choice of TV channel on in the waiting area. Understandable, considering the number of soccer moms I saw getting their minivans and SUVs done, but still, how do people watch Regis and Kelly without their brains crawling out their ears and escaping to the Bahamas? Just having to listen to it while I tried to occupy myself with Final Fantasy III, I could feel brain cells crying out for mercy before committing suicide.

All's well that ends well, I guess, and at least I was able to do the tire change in a parking lot rather than on a freeway shoulder. Still, for costing me an hour of D&D game time last night, and an hour of sleep this morning, I've gone from annoyed by litter to ready and willing snitch. Hope the convenience of tossing your beer bottle in the street was worth it, you brainless, inconsiderate, ill-mannered twit.

Crunch Time Initiations

2007-08-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

It was October, 2001. After several fruitless months competing with laid off dot-commers for the entry level programming jobs available in the Seattle area, I'd finally taken a job as a game tester at An Unnamed Game Publisher (AUGP for short). The pay was lousy, but it was a foot in the door of my dream career. Besides, it's not like companies were in any kind of competition for my employment.

I oriented with a group of about fifteen other people. The actual training was short and simple. "This is a bug" they said, as they showed a video of a snowboarding game where the player's character was stuck flying through the sky, "write a legible bug report for anything you see that's wrong, and always, ALWAYS, keep your VCR running. If it's not on tape, it didn't happen." A couple of people in my group were let go within the first couple of days specifically for forgetting to have their VCR running.

I drew an easy assignment. Thrown on to add man-hours to a game that had already been released but was doing an additional SKU for Europe. No bugs, easy deal. After that it was on to another game, a racing game this time, that was in the final states of polish, where I once again did little more than add man-hours necessary to certify that the game could be shipped.

We worked a few hours of overtime for the racing game, but not much was necessary. When it went out the door, I was added to a new project that had just come in for testing: a fighting game! There were a lot of bugs, and the deadline was growing closer. To be on store shelves by Christmas, a game has to be approved and released for manufacturing no later than very early November, and October is preferable. Eight hour days quickly became ten hour days, then twelve, then twelve plus weekends. People periodically quit, done in by the hours (or merely the demands of having to be on time for the first time in their lives), or were fired (technically their contracts were "completed", but we all know it's the same functional thing) for incompetence. They were quickly replaced though, and the marathon testing wore on.

Finally we neared the end. "One last big push!" our test manager promised us. One catch though. We were up against the deadline, and the game had to play for a certain number of hours without a single crash. It all came down to a twenty-four hour marathon shift. "Come in at 2pm tomorrow. We'll go from there."

I showed up ready. I had my CD player, books, and an iron stomach capable of swilling tester-blend coffee black. But a few hours into the test, it was called off. "Build's broken. We'll go tomorrow."

The wait only psyched people out more. The next night, people in my row had cases of Red Bull, Ballz, and other unholy beverages of gamer's fuel. The marathon began. Before we were even a third of the way in, we were a man down. One of our testers had seriously overestimated her caffeine tolerance. Blowing chunks, even when you do make it to the toilet, tends to make your body not want to keep going any more.

We broke periodically for half-hour meal breaks, and fifteen minute relaxation or smoke breaks. By 5am, I was starting to lose it. Head bobbing up and down, characters on the screen slowly becoming blurry as I ran off a cliff for the 500th time. More coffee! Double Strong! The witty banter had all but ceased between test stations as we grimly focused on our TVs.

Slowly the witching hour passed, and with dawn came new energy. Or at least, a sugar buzz from donuts, danishes, and more coffee. We were in the home stretch, and we were going to beat this thing! And then, finally, it was over. twenty-four hours, and no game crashes. People perhaps, but the game could go out.

The smart people packed up all of their stuff, for it was never quite certain that once a big push ended, if they would find you to be unnecessary head count and end your contract. It wasn't the end for me, but it was for some. It's funny though, that after six years, I can think back, and while I can't recall all the names, I can still remember the faces. For people trying to break into the games industry through a QA path, product test and contracted work are our trenches, and twenty-four hour crunches capping ninety-hour weeks are our air raids. The survivors come out stronger, tougher, and with a shared camaraderie helps fill higher positions later in careers. The fallen, well, we wonder about them sometimes. Did he end up as a truck driver? Maybe she's a bank teller now. Who knows? But when you're twenty-one and making video games, it's just the cap to an exciting day. Go home, call your fiancée, then crash. Get up and do it all again.

Crunch Time

2007-08-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

The limited blogging the past few weeks has been brought to you by Crunch Time. Yes, Crunch Time, when the work/home balance gets all skewed and all you can manage when you drag yourself home at the end of the day is to play with the kids for an hour or two before bed, then collapse yourself.

Fortunately, things look to be letting up for a while now, so tune in tonight or tomorrow for a good story about learning what crunch time really is. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll throw up from Red Bull overdoses.

New Blogs on the List

2007-08-23T21:03:00.000-07:00

A few new blogs have been added to the list on the left. These are mostly aviation related, but many of you may enjoy them.

Flight Level 390 is an active airline pilot. Read some of his posts and understand why people want to fly for a living.
Skywritings is an ex-airline pilot and now an LEO. She's got a great mix of aviation stories, gun stories, etc.
V1VrV2 is another airline pilot, with a great sense of photography.

I heartily endorse all of their blogs. I hope that when I finally get my wings, I can convey my experiences with a vividness and passion that approaches theirs.

Sometimes it doesn't have to make fiscal sense

2007-08-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

Rachel Lucas, a blogger whose work I rather enjoy (in spite of her having a mouth that could make some sailors blush) recently did a post explaining why she never wanted kids, and linking a lot of it to the financial horrors that crumb-crunchers wreck upon the wallets and fiscal stability of their parents.

To be honest, I can't argue with her that kids do terrible things to the budget. I do the books for my family, and I can say with certainty that we made more money before my lovely and gracious wife decided to be a stay at home mom when The Boy was born. I also can't deny that all of my favorite leisure activities have seen declines in the time spent on them, directly due to needing to watch/interact with children rather than settling in to read a good book or play the latest video game. She's got me there. My family is financially poorer and I have much less time for myself than before, all because of two small children whose combined weight is still under 100lbs.

But... If I didn't have my son, I'd never know the unconditional love that comes from getting home after a long day at work, opening the door, and hearing "Da-da!" as my boy jumps off the couch, sprints down the hallway and grabs my legs as a walk through the door. I'd never feel the peace that comes from my little daughter falling asleep snuggled up on my chest every night because that's where she feels safe and warm. I wouldn't have anyone I could just make silly faces and noises at and still be the funniest guy in the world, or someone I can sing goofy songs to without feeling self-conscious. And I'd never understand how much love my Heavenly Father has for me, if I didn't know how much love I have for my children, and that I'd do anything to protect them from harm.

Yes, they're expensive, and as a financial investment they're probably losing proposition unless one of them becomes the next Bill Gates. But my own life is far richer for them being in it than it would ever be otherwise, and no amount of entertainment or money could change that.

A Wish for Wings That Work

2007-08-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

In news that will excite my entire family, at least, it's been officially announced that A Wish for Wings That Work, the Opus 'n Bill Christmas Special and perennial family favorite (yes, even more so than A Charlie Brown Christmas) will finally come out on DVD this November.

You can find the product listing and pre-order here:

This and White Christmas are the two Christmas movies I watch every year (and have since I was a kid), and I suspect that my brothers and I could quote virtually the entire dialog of Wings verbatim at this point.

But still I wonder: just where IS the Starboard-stabilizing ailertutter on a DC-3?

Olde Tyme Aviation

2007-08-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Since Ahab started it by talking about the Focker Eindecker ultralight, I thought he might be interested in the KC Dawn Patrol. They're not TOO far away from his current abode. Also, they have some nice plans for a gas powered machine gun.

Personally, I'm partial to the Nieuport 11 and 12 replicas. A couple of the single seat 11s flew into Arlington while while I was there earlier this summer, and aside from being tiny aircraft, they look great. Susceptible to errant gusts of wind, but that's the price you pay for being able to climb out of the cockpit, hoist the tail up on your shoulders, and tow your plane to its parking spot.

To be honest, if I had the garage space and a few extra thousand dollars lying around for tools and materials, there'd probably be a Nieuport 12 replica taking shape in the garage I don't have right now. I'm not sure what I'd do with it during the 10 months of the year when the VFR flying weather in the Pacific Northwest stinks, but it's be a great summer airplane.

New Toys

2007-08-13T15:38:00.001-07:00

Is this a toy for me? I think it is!

The PS3 arrived in the middle of last week. Thanks to work commitments that have me pulling overtime for the next few weeks, it wasn't until Friday night that I was finally able to uncrate and set up the Deathstar of consoles, but as the above picture shows, The Girl had already taken possession. It's fortunate for me she can't talk yet. If she could, I'd likely give her whatever she wanted.

Since this is my first console of the current generation, I believe I'm now required to fulfill the following fanboy rant: "Xbox 360 suxx0rs! Wii is a total fad! PS3 r0xx0rs!

Okay, I'm back, minus the IQ points required for that bit of inane stupidity.

Saturday saw us acquiring a few necessary extras for the new toy: component A/V cables to get at least a slightly better picture, an actual PS3 game (Armored Core 4), and used copies of Kingdom Hearts and Gran Turismo 3 (to which The Boy gleefully screams "Car!" whenever one passes his father during a race). And while I have a hard time accepting the fact, if next year comes around and we haven't acquired a new high-powered gaming PC yet, then I know I'll still be able to play Fallout 3 even if it's not on the perfect system.

Next Generation Gamer Angst

2007-08-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

I've finally gone and bought a new console game system. To be honest, it was one of the more difficult purchasing decisions I've had to make (then again, my wife and I haven't gone car shopping yet), but in the end, I hit submit on an order for a new 60 GB PS3 from the Sony store.

The PS3 will join the Gamecube, Xbox, and Super Nintendo serving to take up space on the top of our small entertainment centre.

So why a PS3? The co-workers I've told react with surprise when I tell them I've acquired a PS3 but not only don't own an Xbox 360, but don't plan to anytime soon. Well, honestly, there's two main reasons: first, I needed a current gen system. I'm a game developer, I work on titles that go on the latest and greatest consoles, so I ought to have one of them. Second, the PS3 works as kind of a hedge against future expenses. While I'm primarily a PC game player, the cost of a new game PC is in the $5000+ range, and I don't know if we'll be able to afford that in the next few years. At least this way I have something for the bulk of big name titles coming out in the next few years. Third and finally, the PS3 fills a gap in my game library that nothing else does. You may have noticed in the list of consoles we already own that there wasn't a PSOne or PS2. That's not a mistake. The PS3 is the first Sony manufactured console I'll have ever owned. Considering my predilection for Japanese RPGs in the Final Fantasy mold, and giant robot games in the Armored Core mold, I've got a good back-catalog to choose from.

Now I just have to convince my wife that what the kids are really going to need for Christmas is a new HDTV to play Blu-ray movies on.

Wow, and Thanks

2007-08-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the way to blogging success is to amuse Ambulance Driver and get a link from him. That, and invoking the name of an oft-searched celebrity. For those of you just coming to this blog, welcome, I hope you'll come for the weird satire and stay for the random hodgepodge of reviews, musings, and wholesale weirdness that is my stock.

Also, a huge thanks to AD for the initial link. In 24 hours this little blog has doubled its total hit count. :)

The Real Truth About Lindsay Lohan's Latest Scrape

2007-08-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of recent posts, however, as you'll see, there was good reason. I was deep undercover to uncover the truth about what could become one of the greatest scandals of this decade, if not the century.

Lindsay Lohan was framed.

No, really, it's the truth. All she wanted was to be a hero. The real culprit behind her high-speed chase and DUI/drug bust afterwards, was none other than that arch-criminal mastermind, Sumdood! It was her claim that the pants she was wearing at the time of her arrest, which contained cocaine in one of the pockets, weren't hers that tipped me off. I had to investigate. And so, after a week long search that took me to the dark, seedy underground of Rodeo Drive, I can finally give the true story of what really happened to Miss Lohan that fateful evening in July.

It had started off so well. Miss Lohan was on her way to an AA meeting that met in the basement of a local church, after which she was scheduled to practice the hymn she would be singing at that same church on Sunday morning. Pre-occupied with her choice of hymns (Amazing Grace, The Old Rugged Cross, or Beaulah Land?), her good judgment failed her when she stopped to render aid to a stranded motorist. Tragically for Miss Lohan, that motorist had been waiting for her.

As AD and Lawdog have shown, Sumdood is a master, both of disguise and deception. It took mere moments for him to place his drug-laden pants on Lindsay's body, and offer her a Jack Daniels flavored breath mint as thanks when his car started running again. Then he was off, and Miss Lohan none the wiser. Save that a few minutes later, she realized what had happened. It's likely she reached into her pants pocket to touch her pocket Gideon New Testament, only to revile in shock and horror when she found not the Word of God, but drugs, the Devil's Sugar. From someone, she must have learned of Sumdood, and surmised his involvement in her predicament. But what to do? The police wouldn't believe her, they'd just assume that she had fallen bak to her wicked ways. Her only recourse was to apprehend Sumdood herself.

She must have thought she'd spotted him in the back of the car she began chasing. Poor Lindsay. All she wanted was to be a heroine. By capturing Sumdood, she would have done what law enforcement has never been able to accomplish, and would lhave instantly put her name in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Lifetime Achievement Award Oscar. Countless of her Hollywood starlet sisters would have been saved from the ravages of Sumdood, for he is as much a predator in the mansions of Hollywood as he is in the trailer parks of Louisiana.

Alas, it was not to be. Like an ethereal spirit, Sumdood slipped away from the pursued car, leaving only a frazzled former assistant, her mother, and Lindsay Lohan to await the police.

And that, Gentle Readers, is the truth of what really happened to Lindsay Lohan.

My Son the Magician

2007-07-25T00:34:00.000-07:00

"Good Morning Dad! Wanna see my new magic trick?"

Kids are great. As Chris Taylor told me once, "Kids are great! You should have more kids!" He should know, he's got four of them.

The catch though, with toddlers, is that they like to surprise you. These aren't the "Here Dad, I made this for you!" kind of surprises either. These are the "I didn't know a 21-month old boy could pee high enough to hit the bathroom ceiling" kind of surprises.

About a month ago, the Lovely and Gracious Wife and I realized that The Boy had figured out how to take off his own diaper. This meant no more naps in just a diaper on hot days, and required him to be in at least a "onesy". (For those who haven't experienced the joys of baby clothing, a onesy is basically a shirt with snaps on the bottom that allows it to cover a diaper.) Actually, what happened was the Lovely and Gracious Wife found out that The Boy could remove his diaper and started putting him in a onesy, I had to learn by cleaning up soaked sheets after getting The Boy up from a nap.

This morning started like most mornings do, with me getting up The Boy and turning on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for him while the Lovely and Gracious Wife and The Girl sleep for a bit longer. It took me a while, but I happened to look over to see The Boy scratching himself, and thought that I'd seen something that shouldn't be possible. Mostly because there's supposed to be a diaper covering the area he was scratching. Picking him up, I realized just how grateful I am that he seems to be taking to potty-training and bladder control early, otherwise there could have been wet spots all over the living room. Sure enough, sometime after he woke up, The Boy had somehow removed his diaper from inside his onesy. Some talent.

Tonight he went to bed in a sort of 1-piece tank-top/short thing. If he's free-ballin' tomorrow morning, his night diapers are going to start getting help from Duct Tape.

Playing at McDonalds

2007-07-24T01:02:00.001-07:00

Well, it's official. As of Sunday, my wife and I have officially become "those parents". I can't say I'm terribly proud of our decision, but truth be told, I doubt it will be the last time. When you've got an extremely active 21-month old little boy, and you live in a >900 square foot condo, he's got to play somewhere.

Here's the deal: we live in a small condo. It's what we could afford when we bought it, but we knew at the time it was only a starter home, not where we'd be living in the rest of our lives. Lord willing, we'll move into something larger, preferably with a yard, in a year or two, but for now, here we are. On the summer days when it's not raining, the Lovely and Gracious wife usually takes the kids to the park in the morning so that our son can run around and play. In the afternoons after everyone gets up from their naps, they usually go to one of the local malls that has an indoor free play area.

Unfortunately, naps ran late on Sunday. Since the mall closes earlier, we realized that we would only be there for maybe ten minutes before things started to close. This would have been somewhat less than optimal, since our son prefers to play around other kids, and our daughter needs lots of noise and people to hold her attention and keep her awake. The question was simple, really: where do we go at 7pm on Sunday that's open, has a play area, and most important, is free/very cheap.

Which is how we found ourselves in the play area of a local McDonalds, eating Chicken McNuggets and Chipotle Snack Wraps, and helping our son climb up into their large slide/gym thing.

Yup, despite our college degrees and my white collar job, I'm pretty sure we're even closer to being a redneck family than we've ever been before.

Still, I guess the important thing is that The Boy had fun and got a lot of exercise. He was sweating pretty good by the end, and slept well that night. Which, of course, only means that we'll be making more McDonalds trips when we need a cheap indoor play area in the future.

Ba-da-da-da-da... I'm lovin' it. I guess. Maybe

Community Recharging

2007-07-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of bloggage Friday and Sunday. As previously mentioned, I had an off-site activity I needed to attend on Friday, and Sunday I was enjoying the last day of the Arlington EAA Fly-in.

I've attended the fly-in every year for the past three years, and in four of the six years I've lived in the Seattle area. One of the most useful things I've learned from these things is that for me at least, they're a useful and important part of keeping the fires of my enthusiasm stoked year round.

I've always enjoyed aviation. It's my biggest hobby, followed in no particular order by baseball, anime, and video games. It's not always easy to keep my enthusiasm for flying though. Winters in the Northwest are long and damp, I work in an office, and the money needed to actually start taking flying lessons seems so far away. It's easy sometimes to get discouraged, wonder why I'm dreaming this impossible dream, and start considering what other uses the small savings I've made towards flight school could be used for.

A few hours at an air show brings it all back. Sitting in the grass, the wing of an old Cessna providing shade while I watched pilots perform aerobatic maneuvers that shouldn't be aerodynamically possible. Hearing the deep rumble of a massive AD-1 Skyraider as she taxies in the parade of warbirds, then hearing that engine sound the way it was meant to be heard as she thunders overhead. Even just walking the flightline, seeing aircraft buzzing overhead, and looking at finished and unfinished projects reminds me that Yes! This can be done!

I think this encouragement of being around like-minded people is a built-in thing, inherent to our human nature. Even the "loners" of the world tend to find community and encouragement with other loners, often through MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, or through message boards. It's part of what we are, and I've got to believe, it's one of the big reasons why God knew we needed church, rather than just trying to go it alone.

Someday, I will have an airplane to work on. It will start as a pile of parts sitting in my basement, garage, or my parent's garage. I could build it alone. I'll have an instruction book and blueprints to tell me what to do, it can be done. It's also much more likely that after a couple years of turning lots of small parts into slightly bigger parts, I'll get tired. After another year or two of having half the garage taken over by dusty bits of aluminum, my lovely and gracious wife will suggest that I should think about doing something with said bits of aluminum. And finally, after another year or two of vacillation, I'll admit defeat and the whole mess will end up on E-Bay and in Trade-a-Plane, just like so many other partially completed kits.

That's where the go it alone route leads, and is why when I do get the kit, I'll be working with other people, and plugging in to my local EAA group for additional support. Because I want an airplane, one that's safe, flyable, and fun; not a pile of dusty metal in the garage.

If community is that important a factor for something like a project, how much more vital is it to things that really effect our lives?

Late Today

2007-07-13T11:45:00.001-07:00

Sorry, Friday review will be up late tonight. I was to be somewhere this morning that wasn't conducive to blogging.

And the children shall lead us

2007-07-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

When you have an extremely active 20 month old boy in the home, and your home is a sub-900 square foot condo with no private yard and a 10-foot communal patch of grass, you tend to go out a lot. To parks when it's sunny, and to indoor play areas when it isn't. Since we live in the Seattle area, we spend a lot of time at indoor play areas. For us, the closest (free) indoor play area is at the local mall.

The local mall has a pretty diverse population. A lot of Asian families, a fair number of black families, etc. What's really striking is to watch all the kids play together. It's a good reminder that little kids don't see skin color, just other kids to play with.

I think that's the way I grew up. Racism was, to me, an intellectual concept, one more entry in the list of stupid ideas that some people believe.

Then I went to college, and found out that not only do these idiots still exist, sometimes they go to college and become educated idiots.

And sometimes, when I see my little son running around the play area, shrieking with delight and being chased by a little boy with skin of a different color, following a little girl of another ethnicity, I remember some of the conversations I had with the educated idiots I once shared a dorm room with. And I wonder how anyone can see skin color and think that it matters, if they've ever seen little children at play.

Weekend Aviation Fun: Inside the Cockpit with Bob Hoover

2007-07-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

Oldie, but a goodie. Video clip from a BBC documentary inside the cockpit with Bob Hoover.

Video Game Review: Tomb Raider Legend

2007-07-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

I knew the dame was trouble the moment she walked into my office. Dames with curves like that always are. But hey, what was I to do? I'd just set up the new office on Gametap Avenue, and a client is a client. Of course, if I'd known that talking to her was going to end with me free-climbing in the Peruvian mountains, swinging across pits of spikes hoping that the vine I'm clinging to won't break, and getting into more running gunfights than I'd care to count with the thugs that were after her, I might have have said something different when she plunked down on my desktop and said, with a British accent in her voice, "Hello, I'm Lara Croft, and I need your help." Then again, I'm a sucker for an accent, and like I said, the dame had it where counts.

She said that she was trying to locate some sword fragments. "Fair enough", I responded, "but archeology really ain't my shtick. Have you tried Dr. Jones down the hall?" It wasn't like that though. The sword fragments were connected to the Arthurian legend of Excalibur, along with more personal connections to the disappearance of her mother, and her father's research. How could I say no to that?

I've never been a huge Tomb Raider fan, to be honest. Yes, I've seen the movies staring Angelina Jolie, but the last TR game I played was the original, and it had a protracted argument with my PC's video card that resulted in a less than amicable split. But TR Legend is available on the free side of Gametap's all you can eat game service, so I figured I'd give it a shot. The game was released last year for every major console and the PC, and got decent reviews as well.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. I usually have some annoyances with the camera controls in 3rd-person perspective games, but the camera here was surprisingly trouble free. Combat was generally fun, and save for some scripted button pushing sequences that I thought were totally unnecessary, the game moved along pretty well. It took me about 10 hours to finish the single-player campaign, although there are a lot of unlockables that could double that play time if you wanted to play Barbie dress-up with Lara and all her outfits. Then again, I'm married with two kids, and well past the Jr. High days of being amused with "Look at Teh cartoon B00biez" by taking 10 hours to unlock a bikini to dress Lara in. (Spend an extra 10 hours for this? No thanks.)

The story, while not the best I've ever seen, worked for me. The voice acting was also good, and the game had some genuinely good emotional moments.

One irritant that I dealt with that I suspect most people won't (and haven't) was in controls. For some reason I couldn't save my custom control scheme. While I finally devised a workaround via my programmable gamepad, it was still a perpetual annoyance everytime I started the game. Of course, if you play on a console, or even the normal PC version, you likely won't have this problem.

Here's the final stats:
Genre: 3rd Person Action/Adventure
System: PC (also availabe on Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, and Gamecube)
Rated: T (Ages 13 and up)
Appropriate for Ages: 13 and up. I guess the ESRB agreed with me, since they rated TR: Legend T for Teen. As previously noted, boys of a certain age will chuckle about Lara's "assets", but the game is worth playing regardless.
System Requirements: If you've bought a new computer in the past three years, you should be fine. Or, just play it on the console.

Fireworks and the Fourth

2007-07-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

I've always enjoyed watching fireworks. The colors, the noise, the potential flirtation with danger, has always made an appealing combination for me. Growing up in the People's Republic of California, there were (are still) pretty severe restrictions on what can be legally purchased, so I didn't shoot a lot of big stuff. Still most years, the brothers and I would gather in the yard in the evening of the Fourth, arm ourselves with Supersoakers to extinguish any stray fires (we lived in the desert, and fireworks don't absolve you of responsibilities) and set off a few Piccolo Petes and wave sparklers around.

Of course, boys grow up, and sometimes they move to states with less restrictive regulations. The shot below is what we hope to be firing off this year.

Lots of fountains, mortars, Roman candles,
and a hundred pop-its.

There's a rich history of celebrating the Fourth of July with fireworks, dating back to 1777. Before that, fireworks were so popular in Elizabethan England that they were mentioned in some of Shakespeare's plays. While they've certainly gotten fancier in the intervening centuries, I like to think that when we light off our Roman candles and mortars on the Fourth, we join in a tradition that connects us to the days of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and the rest of the great men who founded this nation.

It's interesting to realize that, when this tradition first started, America was still very much a untamed continent. Most boys learned to hunt, and if they weren't apprenticed to become tradesmen in a city, would likely become farmers. Losing a finger lighting or throwing the fireworks of the day was likely very far down on the danger list.

Now, of course, we strap our kids into special car seats and keep them there until they're 8. God forbid that they should ride their bikes without helmets, or play in the grass for five minutes without being slathered in mosquito repellent. It saddens me to say that I know multiple parents (okay, mothers) who forbid their kids from watching anything even remotely violent (awful fodder like Disney's Sleeping Beauty is right out), and ban toy guns and swords from their homes.

It was a big day for me when I was finally allowed to light something more dangerous than a sparkler on the Fourth. I just hope that when my son reaches that age, there'll still be something legal to light.

Weekend Aviation Fun: Jimmy Franklin's Jet Biplane

2007-07-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

I remember seeing this act during one of my family's visits to Reno in the mid-90s. It's a biplane, with a jet engine. Enough said.

Friday Review: Burn Notice Pilot

2007-06-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

The Mrs. and I watched the pilot episode for Burn Notice last night on USA. I liked it enough to do an initial review on it. My plan for shows like this is that I'll do an initial review, then around the middle or end of the season, come back and revisit any issues that I brought up in the initial impression.

Show: Burn Notice
Genre: Action
Network/Timeslot: USA, 10pm Eastern & Pacific
Appropriate for: Probably 14-15 and up. I'd say most anyone who's up at 10pm on a school night.

Burn Notice is USA's latest "Quirky Character" show, following in the similar vein of Monk and Psych in this regard. In this case, the lead quirky character is a CIA freelancer named Michael Westin who receives a "burn notice" while on a mission in Nigeria. Apparently, in the Burn Notice world, spies, at least those who don't officially work for the government but are contracted unofficially, don't get fired, they get burned. Meaning that since you can't remove the knowledge of how to operate from a spy's head, you take away the tools he uses to do his job. No money, no supporting agents, etc.

It's a pretty good setup, but fortunately for our hero, he apparently graduated from the McGuyver school of spying, since his suddenly limited budget only makes him get more creative with his tools. In the pilot alone, we see him assemble a bug out of cell phones, a pipe bomb out of household implements, and convince a drug dealer to leave using duct tape, a stud finder, a coffee can, and a .45.

It also bears noting that one of the supporting cast members is none other than Mr. Bruce Campbell, playing a burned (and burnt out) friend of Michael's. Bruce "If Chin's could kill" Campbell apparently put on a few pounds for the role, but he still manages to steal pretty much every scene he's in.

It's not all rosy in this show though. One of my biggest complaints is that everything Michael does gets a voice-over explanation. I don't mind a little bit of this (it works well in Psych), but I swear, everything he does has to be explained in the manner of
"When you're a spy, you can't just go to the bathroom. You have to check the exits, make
sure there's no one with a gun lurking in one of the stalls, then pick a urinal with an easy path
to the exit just in case. Oh, and once you finish, don't forget to wash your hands."
The deadpan delivery isn't bad, but by the end of the episode, I really didn't want to hear any more explanations.

Still, I remember that Psych took a while to come into its own, and the premise here isn't bad. It's been a long time since we've had a good McGuyver type character on TV, and if the show sticks to the spy out of water and making do formula, preferably toning down on the voice-overs, I think they'll have another hit on their hands.

Aggressors in Odd Places

2007-06-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, while trying to find something on TV to watch while I fed The Girl and rocked her to sleep, I came across Fire Birds on Comcast's free movies On Demand service. Since Monday night TV is a vast wasteland of drivel (at least until Ani-Monday comes on at 11), and I hadn't seen a decent aviation movie in a while, I figured I'd give it a go.

What I learned is that Fire Birds basically attempted to be Top Gun, only with Army AH-64 Apache helicopters instead of Navy F-14 Tomcats. Unfortunately, it does so in a way that makes the plot and dialog in Top Gun seem Oscar-caliber. Aside from Tommy Lee Jones, who basically plays the same grumpy old guy character that he plays in every movie, nobody seems to know what they're really doing. Still, just like in Top Gun, the actors aren't the real stars, the aircraft are. And if you're into lots of footage of Apaches doing Cool Things, this isn't a bad movie to watch.

It also, and this brings me to my real point, used the Saab J-35 Drakken, one of my favorite aircraft of all time, as the Bad Guy "aggressor" fighters.

I've always been a fan of Sweden's Saab jet fighters. Most countries Sweden's size long ago abandoned any home-grown military fighter development in favor of buying other countries' designs, but Sweden keeps on going, creating enormously capable aircraft that are designed to operate off roadways all over their country, and that can keep up with the current fighter generation.

The Drakken is one of those jets that looks fast sitting on the ground. I know there are a few in private hands here in the USA (imagine if they went after warbird owners the way they go after gun owners!) and if I had the money, this is definitely the ex-military bird I'd buy. (Anyone got a few million bucks around they'd like to donate to me?) Just watch the video below, and you'll understand.

Oh, and for a bonus, here's the Drakken's successor, the Viggen, doing a maneuver I'm pretty sure makes F-16 drivers green with envy.

Watching something like that, their "Born from Jets" car slogan actually does makes me want to buy one.

Rocket Hijinks with Top Gear

2007-06-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

I was going to do a Friday review post for kids shows today, but it'll have to wait until next week. Sesame Street, the Wiggles, et all will still be doing their thing then, I'm sure.

However, after the last post and the discussion on model rocketry, I have to direct your attention to these videos. Courtesy of The Highly Official Weblog of Phillip A.V. McCarthy, I give you

Rocket Robins

In the words of Calvin: "Why can't my successes be as spectacular as my failures?"

Father's Day 2007

2007-06-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Sunday was my second Father's Day where I wasn't just giving attention to my Father, but also a dad myself. I think most of my Father's day present to my dad was providing tech support for their computer (Office 2003 suddenly decided it wanted to be installed again), but I got a couple of great gifts.

First off, my kids (as directed by my lovely and gracious wife, since the kids are still much too little to make these kinds of decisions) purchased a ticket to a Mariners - Indians doubleheader in September. I think I've made my abundant love of the American National Pastime clear, and while I'd still rather watch a National League game, spending the day at the ballpark and taking in a pair of games is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

The second gift was The Dangerous Book for Boys. Just skimming though it, I think it's an absolutely phenomenal tome. When I was a certain age (about 8 to 13) this kind of book, with its wide range of subjects from great historical battles to instructions on the proper hunting, skinning, and cooking of rabbits; would have been poured over countless times. I look forward to sharing much of the knowledge contained therein with my son.

After all, looking back on my childhood, what do my brothers and I reminisce about? It isn't the time we spent all day sitting on the couch watching TV, it's the time we chased one of Birdy's (my second brother) rockets down the street after it underwent a somewhat less than optimally successful launch.

Stupid Aviation Tricks: Citation II Roll

2007-06-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

Far too many aviation accidents have started with words to the extend of "Hey guys, watch this!"

Food is not that expensive!

2007-06-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Ahab's blog commentary on fat folks, I linked over to this wonderful post by Zuska on the trials of being a person of larger than socially acceptable size.

Other than to say that Ahab and I are pretty much in agreement, I won't say much about the fattism (is that really a word? I weep for the English language) debate in and of itself. However, one of Zuska's comments really rankled me because I've heard the argument before and it's demonstrably untrue.

Here's the quote from Zuska's post that really knotted my knickers (bolding added by me for emphasis)
"I do not, however, hold any bitterness toward the person who is working from 8-5 and rushing to pick up her kids from day care and who potentially can't afford to shop at Whole Foods, and who does stop at the drive through window at McDonald's because a Happy Meal costs $1.99 (or whatever they cost these days) while cooking a decent meal costs at least $30 ..."

$30 for a "decent" meal? If that was the case, my family would starve, since we're blessed if we can spend $50 a week on groceries. Seriously here, a "decent" meal for a family of 4 (what we have) can be easily done on $10 or less, and still leave leftovers for lunches the next day. For example, here's a common dinner at the Caster residence: Spaghetti ($.99 for a box), spaghetti sauce ($3.50 for a jar), 1/2 a bag of frozen veggies ($1.99), and juice (from concentrate, $1.25 for a can).

I get seriously irritated when I hear the argument about how much home meals cost. A loaf of wheat bread is 99 cents. A jar of natural peanut butter that'll make 20+ sandwiches is 4 bucks. Apples range from $.99 to $1.5 per pound. A big sack of flour, from which you can base tons of meals, costs $5.

Do you know what's expensive at the supermarket? Twinkies. Ding dongs. Ice cream. Convenience foods like Pop-Tarts, Hot Pockets, and frozen pizzas. Basic staple foods are not expensive, and the people who claim that they are obviously haven't spent any time in the grocery store buying them.

Book Review: Ten Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships

2007-06-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Author: Dr. Laura C. Schlessinger
Genre: Self Help / Relationships
Appropriate for: Probably 15 and up.

First off, I have a confession to make: my wife and I received this book as a wedding gift more than five years ago. To whomever gave it to us, and took the time to get it autographed and personalized, I'm sorry it took me this long to read it. Had I done so sooner, perhaps my wife and I would have had a bit less Stupid Pain.

This is a book for anyone who's in a relationship, or looking to be in one. Basically, if you're fifteen or older, and not a priest or cloistered monk, this should be a must read. It's sprinkled heavily with anecdotes of callers and e-mailers from Dr. Laura's radio show, which typically are either examples of what not to do, or examples of people who "get" it, and have fixed whatever the problem was.

Inside, the book breaks down the ten stupid things by chapter. While I, fortunately, haven't been guilty of all ten, I do have to admit that at one time or another, I've been guilty of at least five of them, and recognized certain thoughts or tendencies of mine in some of the others. For me in particular, Stupid Secrets, Stupid Priorities, and Stupid Happiness were all things I saw to work on, and in a funny way, the sections on Stupid Mismatch and Stupid Breakup actually served as a validation of sorts, that I really am married to exactly the right woman and not guilty of these particular stupid things.

To me, a marriage is kind of like a car: preventative maintenance is a lot cheaper and less painful than fixing something when it breaks. You change the oil in your car regularly because it's cheaper than sitting by the side of the freeway waiting for the tow truck after your engine seizes. Likewise in a marriage, where stopping problems when their small can prevent them from growing bigger. My wife and I have always had a good marriage, but with two kids and the pressures they bring, it's easy to get a little out of focus sometimes. This book helped me get back on track, and I think my wife's been happier because of it.

Squirrel Wounds Three.

2007-06-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is why we need more people keeping the local squirrel pest population in line with .22 caliber justice. Sure they're just in Germany now, but how soon will the Squirrel Commandos arrive on our shores? No park will be safe! Dogs will cower in terror! Be prepared. Buy a varmint gun today, or suffer the wrath of our Para-squirrel commando overlords tomorrow.

New Update Schedule

2007-06-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, I give in. Unlike Ahab, who's able to string together amusing and thought provoking posts on a daily basis, I can't seem to do quality posts quite so frequently. I blame my two kids, and the fact that Ahab's always been one of the few people who can make me seem taciturn.

So it's time to shoot for a new, and hopefully more workable update schedule, with posts every Tuesday and Friday, plus stupid aviation tricks every weekend. If I have something really interesting to say I'll do an additional post, but for sure content on those three days.

Entertaining Updates

2007-06-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

No update yesterday was caused mostly by needing a day to recuperate from the weekend with friends. While I realize that just hanging out, playing CCG and board games and watching movies is pretty boring fair, it was fun and relaxing for all of us.

You may notice that I've updated the Now Reading/Playing/Watching sidebars. Having finished the 10 Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships (review coming Friday), I'm off to lighter fare, namely burning through the first volume of Full Metal Panic. It's manga, it's funny, and one of the trigger-happy main characters alternately reminds me of Ahab and the prototypical mall-ninja.

Sam & Max is done for the season, so I'm experimenting with the free side of Gametap's service and trying out Tomb Raider Legends. I don't play many 3rd-Person action titles, so I'm having a fair amount of fun with this one, despite irritating little details like the game not saving my custom control scheme after each session. Still, it runs well and looks good on my 3.5 year old PC, and it was free, so I can't complain too much.

Finally, with Shin-Chan in re-runs on Cartoon Network for the next few months (but showing at 11:30 on Saturdays now) I've dropped it from my watch list. It'll go back on when (if) they start airing new episodes again.

Stupid Aviation Tricks: Midair Bird Strike

2007-06-10T00:11:00.000-07:00

Here's what happens when a Canadian Hawk trainer ingests a bird shortly after takeoff. Technically not a stupid trick, but definitely worth watching.

Momentum is easy, gaining it is hard

2007-06-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

My best friend from college, along with his wife, are coming for a visit to Casa de Caster this weekend. I've known R.S. for ten years, and if it weren't for him, K.F., and D.L., I probably would have been among the freshmen at my college who simply disappear after one year.

The short version of the story is that my freshman year was miserable. One roommate was genuinely evil, another was an Alabama redneck named Bubba. Most of my classes were boring. The rules annoyed me.

If it weren't for my five friends, all of whom I knew would be back, and who I knew I'd miss if I bailed, I would have quit. Maybe I'd have a good job doing something else, but if I'd quit after a year, I would have missed out on building the great friendships I still have, and I never would have met my beautiful wife. It would have been the biggest mistake of my life.

Since R.S., myself, and both our wives are graduates of the same school, we'll probably spend the weekend joking about our alma mater, complaining about how things have gone downhill since we left, discussing kids and playing lots of games. It's good to have friends. It's better to be friends.

Video Game Review: Sam & Max: Season 1

2007-06-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Having recently finished playing through the last episode of the season, it's time to take a few moments and review the aggregate first season of Sam & Max.

A little background before I get started, I first encountered Sam & Max in the back of the LucasArts Company Store catalogs that used to be packed in with games purchased in the pre-internet dominant days of the early and mid-nineties. Not too long after that, I found that our local library had a copy of the Sam & Max graphic novel. I was hooked. That book became pretty dog-eared over the years, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the readers were my brothers and me.

A couple of years later I got my first computer, and acquired a copy of Sam & Max: Hit the Road. Arguably the pinnacle of the LucasArts SCUMM engine games, Hit the Road was an instant classic with lines I still quote to this day. If you ever walk into a room and someone says "You're back! And you're bigger than a breadbox. Three breadboxes even!" then you're in the presence of a Sam and Max fan.

Thus it was with great joy that I learned that LucasArts was going to resurrect the six-foot dog and three-foot rabbitty-thing for a new adventure, and great sorrow when I learned that they'd canceled it. Telltale Games announcement that they had picked up the license, and would be publishing new Sam & Max games in an episodic format was met with cautious optimism. Hey, it was new Sam & Max, and they were working with the original creator, but episodic? I wasn't convinced.

I'm convinced now. Each of the six episodes, taken alone, play out as short 2-3 hour games. Some are a bit better than others (Episodes 4 and 6 are my favorites), but each can stand alone. However, much like a good TV drama (Firefly, SG-1, ER) where individual episodes stand out on their own merits, but full seasons weave more complex plots and over-arching stories that cary from episode to episode, so it is with Sam & Max. The first three episodes serve to establish an overall conspiracy and introduce the cast of characters. Things take a dramatic turn in the fourth episode though, and the remaining two are madcap jaunts through ever-growing weirdness before reaching a conclusion of truly global proportions.

For those who aren't familiar with the previous incarnations of Dog and Bunny, here's the ADD summary: Sam is a six-foot dog, and the nominal voice of reason for the duo. Max is a three-foot rabbitty-thing and the voice of insanity and mindless violence. They're private detectives, and freelance police. Each episode opens with a call from the commissioner, providing them with some new case to look into. In each episode they also have encounters with Bosco, the owner/operator of the local Inconvenience store, and Sybil, the job-hopping careerist down the street.

The first episode revolves around a plot to take over the world hatched by the washed up stars of a '70s children's TV show. Of course, they must be stopped, but this is only the grease-tipped tail of the massive rat called Conspiracy.

The games are available now on Gametap or from Telltale Games' website. If you fondly remember the original game, or just want to try a great new adventure game, give these a shot.

For an additional taste of weirdness, check out http://www.maxforpresident.org/

Genre: Adventure Game
System: PC
Rated: T (Ages 13 and up)
Appropriate for Ages: Probably ten and older, although at that age, they may not get some of the more obscure or esoteric humor.
System Requirements: If you've bought a new computer in the past three years, you should be fine.

D-Day Rememberance

2007-06-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

Take a moment today to remember that 63 years ago, 155,000 American, Canadian, British, Free French, and Polish volunteers landed on the beaches of Normandy, on the North coast of France, to begin the great push to free western Europe from the Nazi war machine. The crosses, tombstones, and other markers that now show their passing are reminders of a time when battles were fought with the expectation of a minimum 10% casualty count, and when friendly troop deaths for single battles were measured, not in tens, but in hundreds or thousands.

Let's also be grateful that the modern media and opposition did not have the power then that they have now, or the invasion plans would have been leaked and published in the New York Times two months before the invasion began, and political commentators would be calling for a pullout and impeachment of President Roosevelt after the casualty reports of the first day.

Finally, remember that there are still young men and women serving now, in Iraq, Afganistan, Germany, Okinawa, South Korea, aboard ships, all over the United States, and scattered in countless other deployments that we may never know about, who still serve to protect the freedoms we enjoy today.

Fallout 3 Trailer

2007-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Back in 1997, I picked up a bargain bin game from my local software shack for my shiny new and expensive Pentium 200 computer. The game was Fallout 2, and it included, as a bonus, a copy of Fallout 1 as well.

And thus was an obsession born. I had never really played any RPGs prior to Fallout, and this was like handing uncut Jet to a virgin user. I was hooked. In the ensuing ten years, both my brothers and I have played countless hours in Fallout's post-nuclear world, and experimented with pretty much every character you could think of. Even now, I get the periodic urge to go back in and lose myself for a week.

All that to say why I'm extremely excited and happy to see Bethesda's Fallout 3 teaser trailer. While the pessimistic game developer I've become warns that it's entirely possible they'll still screw things up and make the game suck, the optimistic fan in me says "Look at that trailer! They got the atmosphere exactly right!"

If this won't run on Buuthandi (my current computer) I'll just have to upgrade. Fallout 3 is that important.

Starting to Believe

2007-06-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

My brain tells me it's foolish optimism. It's June, the season's not even half over. Sure, the Dodgers are in first place, but look at where the other teams are in the standings. Sure the Mariners have won three straight, four of their last five, and had a winning road trip, but they're playing teams they ought to be beating, they're still 5.5 games out of first place, and they've only won two games against the Angels this season.

Still, I'm starting to believe it might be a good year for Dodgers and Mariners baseball. I grew up a Dodgers fan, and thanks to Al Gore and the series of tubes known as the Internet, I'm able to listen to the audio broadcasts live or the next day. Of course, I live near Seattle, so much like I'd become a Royals fan if I lived in Kansas City, or an Astros fan if I lived near Houston (the exception being that if I ever have the misfortune of living near San Francisco, the only Giants games I'll be attending are when the Boys in Blue are in town, and I'd be there with every scrap of Dodger apparel I own), I'm now a Mariners fan. Back in 2001 and 02, being a Mariners fan was easy, since they were good teams. It hasn't been so easy the last few years, but this year, I think things are different.

Last night, with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, the Mariners were down by a run. The teams of the last few years would have simply rolled over and died. The team of this year put together five consecutive hits, two of them pinch hits off the bench and one of them being the third hit of the night for a sub who'd been batting .225 to put up four runs and ultimately win the game.

So it's June, and if the Mariners can put together a good run, and figure out how to beat the Angels, they've got a shot at making the playoffs for the first time since 2002. If the Dodgers can keep it together and stay ahead of the Padres and Diamondbacks, they will make the playoffs for the second year in a row. All I know for sure is that I'd better stalk up on antacids, because it's going to be a wild summer and fall.

Bleeding is Easy

2007-06-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Before work today, I headed into the local blood center and had them take a pint of O+ out of my right arm. I try to do this every eight weeks or so, assuming my health cooperates.

It tends to leave me feeling a bit light-headed for a day, and I hate being stuck by needles, so why do it? Simply put, it's any easy way to do something good. I'm not a cop, a fireman, a soldier, or an ambulance driver. While I'd be willing to do so, I'll probably never rescue someone from a burning car, use the Heimlich to save a choking person at a restaurant, or stop an out-of-control bus carrying nuns and orphans from crashing into a gas station.

But I can do this. I can get up a half-hour earlier on a Monday morning, answer a bunch of check-box questions about my travel and sexual history, and sit in a chair while someone sticks a tube in my arm and drains out some a pint of blood. And maybe, for somebody, somewhere, one of those pints of O+ has been the difference between life and death.

Which Star Trek Character are You?

2007-06-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

Because Ambulance Driver and Ahab did it first...

Your results:
You are Uhura

Uhura		70%
James T. Kirk (Captain)		70%
Geordi LaForge		65%
Spock		65%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)		60%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)		55%
Jean-Luc Picard		55%
Data		52%
Will Riker		50%
Beverly Crusher		50%
Worf		45%
Deanna Troi		35%
Mr. Scott		35%
Chekov		30%
Mr. Sulu		20%

You are a good communicator with a
pleasant soft-spoken voice.
Also a talented singer.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

I'm so humiliated. I should at least be Geordi. Then again, I use Scotty's advice about giving time estimates to your superiors on a regular basis.

Weekend Aviation Fun: Stupid Citation Tricks

2007-06-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

For my new reader(s), here's a weekend feature I'll try to keep going: Stupid (or sometimes cool) aviation tricks. For this week, though, it's definitely stupid: video of a pilot trying to land a Citation CJ 525 on a wet 3000' runway near Atlantic City. Note, the Citation model in question lists 3250' as the minimum runway distance.

TV Review: Shin-Chan

2007-05-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

For my first non-introductory post, I'll kick it off with a review of one of the animes I'm currently enjoying, Shin-Chan. I'll try to set up a format that I'll use for all subsequent reviews.

Show Name: Shin-Chan.
Genre: Comedy Anime
Network/Timeslot: Cartoon Network, 12:30am Mon-Thurs
Appropriate for Ages: Old enough to watch South Park

Review:
Shin-Chan is a slice-of life anime dealing with the trials and tribulations of its protagonist, the overly self-aware first grader Shin, and his baby sister, overworked and cranky mother, and dead-end job working salesman father. I find the show hilarious, with the best bits being the ones with some slight basis in reality, that remind me either of myself as a child, or of my kids now. To me, that's some of the best kind of humor: the kind that can make you laugh at yourself, at your own foibles, and at the stuff that sometimes seems so serious.

It's not everyone's bag of candy though. Mrs. Caster was in the room for one episode and went to bed afterwards saying she felt dumber just for having heard the show. If cartoon first-graders with potty mouths offend or annoy you, just pass this one by. Also, the art style, while less ugly than South Park (and really, just about anything short of stick figures looks better than South Park) is still minimalist to the point of ugly. Presumably this is a result both of the show having a slim production budget, and also that it was originally created in 1990.

Like all animes on Cartoon Network, Shin-Chan has been dubbed into English. While I'm sure this upsets and annoys some purists, for a show that involves Family Guy proportions of pop-culture references, it's probably a good thing, and the re-writes are generally pretty sharp. A woman in the supermarket begging Shin to "Be her Bill O'Reilly" and tell her what she needs to think is a lot funner to me and likely most Americans than whatever Japanese cultural reference was originally there.

Final Analysis: If you like South Park or Family Guy, give it a shot. Because it makes me laugh consistently, I give it a 4.5 out of 5.

Moving on Over

2007-05-31T15:53:00.000-07:00

Having given up on doing a blog through IGN, it's time to try on a real blogging service. Since all the cool people (or at least many of my friends) are on this boat, here I am too.

So what should you expect to find here? Since I'm a game developer by trade, expect some amusing industry stories from the various companies I or my friends have worked for, with the company names changed to protect the guilty. Generic references to An Unnamed Game Developer (AUGD) makes everyone happy.

Since I'm a father of two, expect some nauseatingly cute kid stories, or at least some semi-philosophical discussions on why the Doodlebops aren't that annoying, how Spongebob Squarepants is the modern cartoon equivalent of the Three Stooges, and the reasons behind Bob the Builder and Barney being banned shows in my home.

Because I've been an aviation geek with avgas on my brain since before I could walk, expect some aviation posts, or at least cool videos.

Finally, because I'm an avid gamer, a voracious reader, and an anime fan, expect the occasional review of whatever book/game/show/movie I've been playing/reading/watching.