Posted by mstroud in Flying
I must have really bad luck with equipment, or something. The 19th flight lesson was short because of the rapid onset of darkness (stupid wintertime!). The 20th was fogged out with visibility of less than 500 feet. The 21st was only 30 minutes long thanks to a weak engine. Needless to say, I won’t be flying that particular airplane for a while.
If there is a silver lining out of all of this, its that I’m really learning not to trust the engine in the aircraft I fly in, so I’m extra paranoid about finding an emergency landing spot each time More >
Posted by mstroud in Photos
I’ve finally gotten around to posting up some photos from my last few trips. You can now find imagery from the following events:
Enjoy!
Posted by mstroud in Flying
I managed to go to a new airport and put a plane into the fix-it shop in this installment of flight training 101.
First up I got to go to San Carlos, just a quick hop up the peninsula from Palo Alto, and just close enough to completely throw off my check list for landing. Other than one completely hosed approach, things fared fairly well. Well, I think I did OK, anyhow.
This morning I headed out in the same plane as flight 17, and no one had flown it since I brought it in the night before. After doing all the More >
Posted by mstroud in Flying
The most recent flights were more of the same: flying the pattern, learning how to properly setup to land and then takeoff again. Should be getting easier, but I’m still finding ways to blow the base to final setup and then to be a bit early on roundouts at landing.
One exciting new event that happened was my near-night flying where I began losing spatial awareness, cutting my downwind leg short, and ending up a little closer to the runway than I’d like prior to landing. That was a bit rough, but nothing compared to the student ahead of me who More >
Posted by mstroud in Rants
Recently I went through a setup related exercise for work where I needed to get a Windows Media Center PC to talk to a Media Center Extender. An extender in Microsoft’s view is a device that attaches to a TV and enables interacting with a Media Center UI without the PC actually having to be in the same room as the TV. There have been a few of these devices shipping for a couple of years so I thought this would be a cakewalk. Boy was I wrong, really wrong.
I spend nearly two hours hooking up the Media Center PCs More >
