I decided to push the limits a bit for my birthday this year and see just how much airplane I could handle. What I learned is that while I can probably fly a bigger, faster, more complicated airplane just fine it isn’t a walk in the park by any means.
This trip included a flight in a rare (for renters) bird indeed: the Beech Mentor T-34A/B. The flying club happens to have one and my CFI is checked out in it so we took it for an hour around the Half Moon Bay area. What makes it tricky for me is the amount of “new” stuff it has: constant speed prop, manifold pressure, retractable landing gear, flaps, fuel pumps, 250+ HP and all sorts of tricky on the ground handling. It was fast and slippery in the air and I felt like I was behind the the airplane whenever we had to change the flight configuration. But while it was flying it was silky smooth and the best handling plane I’ve yet flown.
If it weren’t so expensive to fly (over $230 per hour) it would be a great plan to check out in and have in the back pocket to impress visitors. As it is, in today’s flight dollars, the T-34 is a rare treat to experience when you can afford the ability to do so. Definitely recommended to fly.
more photos in the album
It has been almost a year since I was forced to give up my wonderful HD-Tivo box for the “improved” DirecTV version called the HR20. Since I’ve had the box I’ve needed to make a lot of adjustments, but one new adjustment just isn’t sitting well with me: lock ups and reboots once per week.
You see, DirecTV doesn’t seem to understand the concept of QA or beta testing. Whenever they get a new update for the software inside the HR20 they just push it out the door to millions of customers. For anyone that has ever gotten a bad update on their computer, you know what happens sometimes… things just fall apart. Well, in my case I lose TV programs and the PVR just stops working.
Normally this would seem to be just a silly rant, after all, it is only TV, right? Well, what if you paid nearly $100 a month for that TV signal and some of the programs provided were watch-it-once-then-it’s-gone sorts of things? That’s what I have and that is why I’m so mad about this latest round of mess ups from DirecTV.
The best part is that they kept me waiting on the phone for 48 minutes the other day just to tell me to reformat my PVR (that didn’t work) and that yes, Virginia, they have a problem and they don’t know if/whether they will fix it and if they do/don’t they won’t call me back to confirm the fix (or not). Great customer service!
This weekend on the recommendation of a friend I went to see “Wanted” with another friend. I was promised that this would be an exciting summer movie and that did turn out to be the case. This is this director’s first time creating an English language film and it worked well. His visual style is similar to what you’ve seen if you recall the “Matrix” or BMW “Driver” but with some still unique flair.
In typical movie fashion, the gun-play is completely unrealistic and defies the laws of physics, but that doesn’t make the film any less enjoyable to watch. It certainly helps that the film contains both Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, great music from Danny Elfman and some great locations. There are exploding rats, lots of crashes and explosions and some of the oddest and eye popping gun fight scenes to be watched this year.
If you can tolerate blood and guts and some strong language and would like to see a movie that requires you to turn off your rational brain for a few hours this movie fits the bill nicely. I liked it and it makes for great popcorn fare.
Just over a week has passed since I was RIF’d from my most recent job at AMD. It is taking some getting used to waking up in the morning with no structured day or firm place to go. On the plus side, I am using substantially less fuel than I was just a few weeks ago, so that must be good I guess. In the meantime I continue to look around for what my next gig will be.
Next on the list of things to be worried about is my flying or lack thereof. I’m at a point in my training where I must complete a written test before I can get any closer to getting my pilot’s license. It’s a bear, since it is an array of questions, numbers, arithmetic and other stuff that I have to know cold before I go in and take the test. I’m getting better, but rote memorization has never been my strong point.
Finally, I’ve used my abundance of spare time to go around the house and fix just about everything that is doable by myself. With that complete I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Liberty City (in GTA4) and Turkfrackistan (in BF: Bad Company). Sadly, neither of these locations helps me either exercise, meet women or get a tan. I do get to meet new and interesting people, then shoot them, so it does have some perks.
June 10th, 2008
5:36 pm
Flying
If my calculations are correct after this past weekends cross country flight I now have 133.6 flight hours, 6.5 night hours, 19.4 PIC hours and 3.2 hours of simulated instrument training with all of my required flying done ahead of the written and flight test for the Private Pilot Certificate. This is good news, of a sort, since it means that the first major phase of flight training is nearing an end. And with AvGas at nearly $5.90 a gallon it couldn’t happen soon enough.
I now have to do a few more brush up flights to stay frosty, start figuring out my plan of attack on the written test, take one more check-ride with another instructor then it’s off to the final flight test and oral test. Normally this would make people happy but I am going to take it easy and make sure everything goes smoothly. It’s been a long road to get to this point and there is no reason to blow it at this last stage.
I have now completed two-thirds (or 2 out of 3) of the FAA required cross country flights and am closing in on my private pilot’s license (properly known as a Private Ticket). This flight was a bit more difficult than the previous in one in that I had to fly somewhere I’d never been; I had to deal with a very busy flight corridor around SJC airport; I had light and variable chop coming over the mountain ridges; The crosswinds at the airports were very challenging; And it was over 90 F in the cockpit the entire time. I did however get brave enough somewhere over Watsonville to snap a few photos just to prove I was there.
Getting stuffed into an airplane like sardines in a can. Sweltering heat and humidity during the day with little respite at night. Eating enough bar-b-que’d animals to cause a meat coma. Encountering more trucks than the entire population of some small countries. Bouffant hair. Strange looks from the country folk when driving a minivan. Lots of NASCAR loving yahoos. A crazy amount of turnpikes and toll roads. Gas prices below $3.40 a gallon. The worst B.O. ever on the cramped plane ride home.
What else could all of this be but a trip to Texas?
April 28th, 2008
6:59 pm
Flying
This weekend I completed another milestone in the flight training regimen: a cross country (50+ miles from the home airport) flight with only me at the controls of the aircraft. I chose an airport that I had visited previously, Modesto (KMOD), and it was a pretty uneventful flight. I didn’t get lost and I didn’t use the GPS (mostly) to find my way there. All in all it was very straightforward.
One down, two more and a bunch of little procedural stuff to go before that private ticket is mine.
Current Mood:
Angry
If you have a new HDTV set and are looking to hook up some glorious Blu-ray or PS3 goodness you know that you will have to run to the store and purchase one special component not bundled with any device shipping in quantity: an HDMI cable.
Unlike the days of old when you could run into your local Radio Shack and pickup whatever cheap cables they had on hand and make the new device work, in today’s digital era you are treated the one of the greatest fleecings in modern retail sales history. You see, Monster, the cable provider of over-priced and over-hyped speaker cables from days past has moved in and pushed just about every other provider of HDMI cables off the shelves, leaving only their own brand at the most outrageous prices. And the problem is that retailers gladly let them do this because the margins (that’s the money retailers actually make on each good sold) can be 50%, 100%, even 200% on these cables. Typical devices like TV’s and cameras sometimes net the retailer less than 10% margin.
I don’t begrudge Monster on pushing their cables on the unsuspecting and clueless at the store, that is their business after all. My problem is that their retail strategy has pushed every other provider of similar products to do similarly stupid things, like raise the price for the same product. Don’t believe me about nearly all of the cables being the same regardless of price? Go look at this article on Gizmodo and tell me that you don’t cringe after reading how badly we’re getting ripped off.
The point to this whole story is this: I had to have a new HDMI cable for some new hardware at home, I can’t go get the cheap cables because they simply don’t exist locally any more, and I got ripped off to the tune of $22.99 for a $5 cable. Next time no matter how badly I need one of these things, I’m headed to Monoprice where saner heads (and prices) reign.
Current Mood: Angry
I took one of the last flights home last night from Austin. As is AA’s custom, they placed two rows of children around me on this journey. Normally I just put in the headphones and deal with the problem, however on this flight some of the children decided they needed to be rowdy and play up and down the aisles during most of the flight. This left me and most of the passengers near the front of the plane (no business class for me) to be forever vigilant about our arms, elbows, and any items we had on our trays.
What really made this flight tough (at 3 1/2 hours long) was not just the playing kids (and by playing I mean obnoxious running around, tearing papers and pulling things off trays) but the screaming kids that simply wouldn’t pipe down no matter what their mothers offered them. If ever there was a advertisement for why birth control is needed, this flight was it.
I must restate my request that some airline flights should really be reserved for business people, or at least give us the option to pay a bit more to keep the kids off some routes. By the end of the flight I wanted to see how much it would cost to fly myself home as I really didn’t like the torture that I received from this flight.
