I really ought to patent my ideas

Years ago, I was exchanging emails with a former co-worker when I brought up the idea of enhancing Mapquest with street level pictures. That idea is now known as Google Street View. A decade ago when I was still working at CompuServe, I proposed an offering that I called MLS Online. This is available today as www.realtor.com. When digital cameras starting coming out, I thought it would be cool to have a service where you could upload your shots to have them printed and mailed back to you. There are a ton of those now, so that one was probably pretty obvious.

So, about four or five years ago I bought a thermostat for my oil preheater since it was a pain to have to go down to the hangar and turn it on or off as the weather changed. I thought it would be cool to build a little box with a cellphone in it that I could just call up and have it turn the heater on or off.

Well, I saw this on the innernets this morning:



Ain't that something? I missed out on another one. It's enough to make me wish I was entrepreneurial. Or at least not inherently lazy.

On the plus side, this bodes well for another one of my ideas that most people (well, to be perfectly honest, 100% of people) seem to think is really stupid: chinese food burritos. No, seriously! You simply CANNOT eat chinese food while driving, but you CAN eat a burrito. Think about it. Trust me, the idea will grow on you. And in a few more years when you see a national chain selling them, remember that you heard it here first.

The 41st day

After what seemed like a biblical 40 days and 40 nights of rain, we had some pretty nice weather today. Low 80s, if that, and clear air all the way up to the stratosphere. Light winds thrown into the bargain at no extra charge. But... all of that rain had an effect on the grass - mowing couldn't really be put off any longer. Luckily I have help in that domain now - it's a shared duty with Co-pilot Egg. My part comes first; I trim around the fence so she doesn't drive into any of the posts. Naturally I plowed right into one myself last week, which to an appreciable degree moots that entire line of logic, but still... it seems prudent. Once she took over the wheel, I jumped in the Miata and headed to the airport.

Papa hadn't been flown for a couple of weeks, and he was still two hours worth light on gas. I figured a quick hop to MadCo was in order. Just a couple of blades swung by before the engine caught, yet again making me appreciate the enthusiasm and willingness that my engine consistently demonstrates to the task of pulling Papa and me along. The winds being calm, the temps being low, the pressure being high, and the tanks being light, we fairly leapt from the runway and made a climbing turn to the west. 2,500' was plenty of altitude for the short ride out to MadCo.

I figured that it would be a good idea to practice a few landings after the debacle out in Indy, then we'd tank up and head home. A plan like that is only as good as the first landing, as it turns out. It was a greaser, and at $5.28 a gallon a result like that one on the first try makes ensuing attempts both an expensive luxury and an opportunity to only do worse. We made a full stop.

Tonight was my first time pumping my own gas at MadCo since they went self-service in the spring. If you remember, I was kind of put off by the removal of the gas pumping guy's job, right up until he spilled fuel all over my left wing. At that point I figured that I might be better off pumping it myself after all. Well, guess what. Spilling fuel on the wing turns out to be pretty easy to do! Now, I'm not saying that I was careless enough to spill a large quantity of very expensive fossil fuel all over my left wing. Nope, not saying that at all. I do also have a right wing, though, if you recall. I don't want to talk about that one.

I loafed along back to Bolton at a leisurely and economical 2000 RPM which, with the slight tailwind from the west, gave me a ground speed of 130 knots. It was nice and quiet, too. Having greased the landing on the skinny runway at MadCo, I was sure that the big, fat runway at Bolton would skew my perception to the degree that I mangled the landing there. 'Twas not to be: another greaser! And no, of course there were no witnesses. Things just don't work that way for me. You'll simply have to take my word for it.

Taxing back in, I stopped to chat with a fellow student from the A&P school as he was preflighting his plane for the return trip home. As we were talking, another guy came up and asked me what kind of plane Papa is. As you know, the only thing I enjoy talking about more than the subject of me is the subject of Papa. I gave him the particulars and answered the questions he had regarding performance, etc. I particularly like the performance questions since most pilots are astounded to learn that I can get 155 knots out of a 150hp engine.

As we were talking, I noticed that he was wearing some kind of ID badge. It turns out that he has one of the coolest jobs I can imagine: he's the pilot for the local NBC affiliate's news helicopter.

Helicopters are wonderful machines, but because of their high cost and relatively slow speeds, they really aren't suited for pleasure flying. I've only ridden in one once, having begged a ride in an Army UH-1 Huey while on a National Guard summer deployment. I've always wanted to try flying a chopper but they're prohibitively expensive. You have to really need their unique flying abilities to justify the cost.

That said, if I was ever going to buy myself a flying vacation, I think getting five hours or so of instruction in a Robinson R22 would be one of my first choices. I've thought about buying a P51 ride, but while it would be fun and interesting, at the end of the day it would be exactly that: a ride. I'm more of a hands-on guy. I thought about doing a three day course to get a second-in-command rating on the venerable DC-3, and while noted that it would definitely be hands-on, maybe to the point of being a bit more hands-on than I really wanted (they're notoriously physical in their handling, at least according to novels and conventional pilot wisdom), that idea carries with it the requirement that I have a multi-engine rating. Which would be a luxury to have in and of itself. I haven't got one.

I'm guessing that five hours in a Robinson would be enough to learn how to hover, and you get right down to it, that's all I really want to do. I get plenty of straight & level flight already, but rare are my chances to hover. Non-existent, truth be told. Completely devoid of hovering opportunities, am I. And I figure that hovering a helicopter has to be one of the coolest things you can do in an aircraft. I visualize it as feeling like trying to maintain your balance while perched on a rocking chair that is in turn balancing on the end of a broom stick. Said broomstick balancing on top of a bowling ball.

The control stick (technical name: cyclic) is used to stay level, but the collective control in your left hand also gives you freedom to move up and down. Said movements in the vertical plane coming at a cost, though: climbing and descending change the torque being imposed on the airframe by the rotor, which causes a change in the counteracting thrust provided by the tail rotor. So, if you move the collective control up or down with your left hand, you then have to compensate against a pivoting caused by the change in torque by the use of your feet, which are used to operate what appear to be rudder pedals. The use of which will probably cause some roll or pitch that needs to be addressed by the cyclic. Which itself cause an elevation change that might have to be compensated for with collective. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

All of this stirring around of the controls eventually becomes nearly automatic on the part of the pilot, or so I hear. I think being able to do that would be one of the more intense man/machine synergies ever. I get a feeling somewhat like that sometimes in the RV when we roll into a tight turn. I just think "turn," and without any more conscious thought I move my left hand a half inch or an inch (the distance depending on the pilot's mood, the passenger list, and/or the number of degrees of heading change to be performed) in the direction of the turn. The resisting force of the stick caused by the ailerons, them being way out there on the wing and being pressed on by the wind stream, feels juuusssst right, it being firm enough to give you a good sense of involvement in the process but light enough to not feel like you're imposing yourself.

The response to the stick movement is instantaneous, and the tightening that I get in my shoulders when I roll into a steep bank feels like what I imagine it would feel like to actually have my own wings. I think in hovering a helicopter, the feedback from the controls and the immediacy of the response (I assume) combined with the freedom to maneuver in all three dimensions would result in an even stronger feeling of control and rapport with the machine. I'll bet it's one of those things that prompted the advent of the term "being in the zone." Concentration required, but not unpleasantly so. Thoughts and instincts unconsciously and instantly responded to with muscles that know what to do, giving the pilot a feeling of individual and unassisted flight as it must be felt by birds. Well, hummingbirds anyway.

After all that, you won't be surprised when I say that I think the idea of flying a helicopter around to gather video for ongoing news stories seems like an incredible day job. Somehow, sitting at a computer all day doesn't seem to stack up very well in the adventure dept. compared to a job like that. Oh well, it's all good since lack of adventure aside, it gives me the tremendous opportunity to share beautiful summer evenings loafing around the skies with Papa. Ah, what a great way to spend the 41st evening! Still a helluva bargain, even at $5.28 per.

Enjoying the gaps (between the storms)

Another weekend for which the sophisticated Weather-out-the-Window(tm) is wholly redundant. When the windows are shaking from the thunder and the electrical power is as unreliable as a politician's campaign promises, there's not much point in even getting up to look. Brave Sir Hogarth is certainly living up to his sarcastic moniker - he has spent the weekend either clinging to the closest pack member or trying to find a deep cave (or the illusion of one) to cower in. Not a big fan of convective weather, he. Not at all. Nor am I of the associated 15G25 winds, to be fair.



We were able to squeeze in one significant outdoor event which thankfully was completed mere minutes before the onset of what were to ultimately become a 48 hour series of violent thunderstorms. Saturday morning was the scheduled date for the Grove City Independence Day Celebratory Parade, Grove City apparently having decided to beat the rush for the true 4th of July celebrations a week hence. Kinda like the Michigan and Florida Presidential Primaries, but without the incumbent loss of interest on the part of the participants.

In any event, this parade was to serve as the coming out for the Central Crossing High School Marching Band's new debutante of the clarinet, one Ms. Co-pilot Egg. And me with a spanking new camcorder and a complete lack of product to spend against my 500MB weekly allowance at Vimeo.com. That presented a prodigious intersection of opportunity and desire, the results of which you can see here in glorious HD:




I'm very happy with the performance of the $50 (half off sale from Amazon.com) shotgun mike that I bought for the camcorder. It's a big, goofy looking thing in comparison to the tiny camcorder, and it had (I recently reconfigured the mounting method) the unfortunate trait of being somewhat of a camera hog (it kept dipping down into the video frame), but it did a wonderful job of capturing the music without a whole lot of the background chatter.

As long as I had a few more minutes on the computer before the next storm came along and knocked out our power (7 or 8 outages in the last 24 hours already), I went through some of my pictures from last week to see if there were any more that I liked. I had forgotten about this one:



Here's one from the Indycar museum trip that I took a second look at:



And, at the risk of re-defining the Chronicles as a "car blog," and also as further proof of the old "An idle Google is the devil's playground" trope, there is this:



After repeatedly chanting the mantra to myself that "A Cobra makes no sense, A Cobra makes no sense..." I got to wondering if there is a kit car based on the wonderful Mazda Miata chassis/engine. And, as you can see, there is! It's a pretty spiffy looking kit, too:



And a hot (yet economical!) little street car once completed:



Being a kit car, there are naturally various ways of putting it together:



And there are dealing-with-the-real-world options available:



200 hours to build. The kayak took 80. Having hours to burn, albeit often interrupted by power outages, I looked at every page in this build log:





A car like that would make a lot more sense given the type of driving that I do and the price of the fuel required to do it than would the voraciously gas-hungry V-8 and straight-line handling qualities of the Cobra. Which is not to say, mind you, that the issues of dollars and facilities aren't absolute show stoppers. They are. But still... something to daydream about on days when the thunderstorms keep me out of the sky.

Our friends, the birds

I haven't been feeling well for the last couple of days. A flu-like malaise, basically, that makes the long hours trapped in the office a waking nightmare. Work is work and can't really be avoided recently; commitments and deadlines and all of that.

But along about noon there was a gap in the schedule. No appetite for food, but I thought it might be nice to at least get some fresh air. We're only a few miles from one of our local reservoirs, and there is a little parking lot right by the flow off from the dam. Top down in the Kiata, relaxing with my head against the headrest, eyes closed to better enjoy the soothing sounnds of the water running off of the dam...

SPLAT!

I guess I should have considered what an attractive target my upturned face was to the circling birds.

Bastards.

London Pit 'O Cobras

They don't call it anything near as cool as the "Pit 'O Cobras" of course, but that's what I would call it. The real name is the London Cobra Show, which I find to be somewhat lacking in describing an event that shuts down a few central blocks of London, OH to provide a venue for a gathering of hundreds of Shelby Cobras (99.999% of which are replicas, but still... each and every one of the possesses the winning trifecta of shiny, loud, and fast!) every June.

Flying being off of the agenda for various and sundry reasons, the criticality of the Weather-out-the-Window(tm) forecast was reduced such that I could safely delegate the task to a lesser denizen of the house:



He reported back that it was weather sufficient to the task of a top-down Miata ride across the 20 intervening miles from home to the burg of London. An early start, as usual, being desired in avoidance of heat, weather, and crowds had us (me and my photographic gadgetry) on the road by 0900. A swell drive it was, with nary a slow granny or even slower farmer to be seen on the country paths that are my preferred means of navigation when traversing the Central Ohio farm land. The problem with a drive like that is, as you may be able to imagine, the temptation to just keep a-going upon arrival at the presumptive destination, but said temptation was easily averted upon the hearing of the deep, bass tones of a high powered V8.

As mentioned, the very, very large majority of the Cobras at the show are replicas, and a very large majority of those are built from a kit, and a good sized majority of those come from a kit manufacturer called Factory Five. Factory Five could be considered as the "Van's Aircraft" of Cobra replicas: they have sold thousands of kits, peer-level support is incredibly easy to find, and the kits have gone through multiple iterative enhancements to refine the building process down to something resembling a science. I think that they are on at least their third re-design of the basic Cobra kit, with each preceding re-design having been focussed on improvements in kit quality, ease of construction, and not least importantly, safety of the end product. There are no air bags in these cars, so they are built tough and crash worthy.

Here's a naked one; you can see the steel cage that protects the driver:



Here's some of the suspension gadgetry - it is no coincidence that it looks like the suspension of a race car:



The Cobra kit can be built by using a Ford Mustang as a donor car for the rolling bits and engine, or you can buy a kit that provides all of the parts needed (except the engine and transmission) brand new.

Here's what they look like with their clothes on:









I've been looking at these things for years with the idea of building one, and I think it would be a great deal of fun to do so, but there's a problem. At the end of the day, I'd end up with an expensive toy, and I already have one of those. A car like this would not lend itself to my daily drive to work (the cost of the gas to feed even a small V8 alone would be prohibitively and painfully expensive) and would be difficult to store. Beyond that, I don't have the tools for facility to support the build. And, as it turns out, you're always having to work on the darn thing:



I could build a variant that could be used for spec car racing, but as cool as that would be, racing is expensive, time-consuming, and puts an uninsurable $25,000 car at risk every time it goes out on the track. Not for me, thanks!

So, best to just look at these every now and then:







From the comments:

Your reasons for not getting one are well-considered, logical, and show great perspicacity and restraint.

So what color is yours going to be?

A very astute question! You guys know me too well! And as fate would have it, it's a question that I have given long consideration to. I was thinking something like this:







The purists would hate it, of course, but a subtle reminder that they themselves are driving replicas should suffice to squelch the criticism.

Kayaking 101

Co-pilot Egg and I attended the beginner level kayaking class offered by Clintonville Outfitters tonight. They hold the class at Aquatic Adventures, a scuba and swimming training facility just a few minutes from our house. Our instructor, Matt, had trailered over a nice selection of kayaks to choose from, and Egg and I chose a pair of Hurricane Kayaks.

I was particularly interested in the Santee 100LT, which is a ten-foot recreational model weighing in at a mere 31 lbs. My 17 ft. touring model is a real strain for me to move at 47 lbs, so I was interested in looking at something lighter that I could move around by myself on those days when I want to take it to a reservoir or lake. I also wanted one that would be small enough for Egg to control. She took the 100LT and I went with the next larger model, the Santee 116. It too is significantly lighter than my Shearwater at 36 lbs.

After a brief introduction regarding some of the different types of kayaks available, we started the in-water training. Egg volunteered to be first in the water and had very little trouble getting into the boat. We were using a "deck launch," which is really just a way of saying that we stepped into the boat from the edge of the pool. On my two trips down the Darby, I didn't have the luxury of an edge to step off of, so I've been using a "get yourself all muddy with the nasty smelling crud on the banks of the river and then try to push yourself across the mud like a freshly born sea turtle" launch, which I'm here to tell you is a vastly inferior cousin to the deck launch.

As I cannon-balled myself into my boat, narrowly avoiding an ignominious plunge into the water, Egg paddled off across the pool. Much like my single experience with snow skiing, she almost immediately learned that getting moving is pretty easy, but getting stopped is an entirely different story. Without the benefit of an actual river stretching off in front of her, it was just a matter of time before she pranged into the far side of the pool.

It was a small class with only four students and Matt, but even with just five boats in the water it quickly degenerated into a kind of slow-motion, water-borne bumper car fiasco. At least until we started getting the hang of turning, anyway. I noticed a couple of things about the Santee as compared to my Shearwater right away: it is much easier to turn, and the seat is MUCH more comfortable. The comfort factor was greatly increased by the type of PFD (life jacket) that I was wearing. I've been using a cheap Wal-Mart ski-type PFD, and it is very uncomfortable in the small confines of the Shearwater's cockpit. The PFD I was using tonight was specifically designed for use in a kayak and thus was orders of magnitude more comfortable.

The easier turning thing was a mixed blessing. The bad thing about the Shearwater is that it takes some effort to get it to turn, but the good thing about it is that it takes some effort to get it to turn. It turns out to be situationally dependent as to whether it's good or bad. When you want to apply some power strokes and stay in a straight line, its tendency to stay straight is a plus. But if you let it get away from you and get into a situation where you need to get it turned quickly, well, not so much.

After paddling around awhile, Matt had us all move to the edge of the pool. This is where he demonstrated the stability of these boats. This is exactly the part that I wanted Egg to experience because she had said that she was afraid of the boat tipping over. These recreational boats are far broader in the hips than my Shearwater is. They're more like the Oprah of kayaks, while my boat is more like a Keira Knightley model. (Use Google images if that comparison doesn't mean anything to you - you'll see what I mean). Anyway, what it all comes down to is that the only way to tip one of these boats is to really want to.

So, having proven to us that it is pretty hard to tip one of these boats over, Matt's next assignment to us was to immediately forget that lesson and tip them over anyway. Which we did. It wasn't very hard to do deliberately, but I did manage to bang my head on the bottom of the boat while I was under it, and Egg, being in a perpetual contest of oneupsmanship with me, promptly banged herself in the face with hers. The point of getting us out of the boats was, of course, for us to learn how to get back in. Let me tell you, even with a boat having the hips of a brood mare, that is one helluva hard job to do. I found it to be reasonably possible if I was in the shallow end of the pool and I could essentially just jump in, but when I went down to the deep end I found it to be much more of a challenge.

The problem was that when you turn the boat back to right side up, it's full of water. That extra weight naturally makes it sit far lower in the water, and it becomes much tippier. You have to kick with your feet to get yourself up out of the water and straddled across the boat, but when you try to get yourself actually back down into the boat, you will either tip over to the side you're climbing in from, or flip right over the far side. It was roughly 50-50 for me as to which side I would flip towards. Eventually I learned to get straddled on the boat and then ever.so.carefully move around to get back down inside of it. Even with an abundance of patience and caution, I'd dump myself right back out 80% of the time. And boy howdy, is it ever TIRING!

This difficulty in getting back into the boat finally made me realize why you want to be able to roll the boat. If I had this much trouble getting back into a boat with hips that could graciously be described as "child bearing," I would have no hope of getting back into my anorexic Shearwater. With the roll, you simply (well, probably not "simply") stay in the boat. Unfortunately, the roll is a topic for the as-yet-unscheduled advanced class. I'll be watching the Clintonville Outfitters web site for that, though, because I can't see going out in deep water without knowing how to do it, and I really want to explore some of the local lakes and reservoirs. For now, though, I'm fine with periodic trips down the Darby.

Egg seemed to have a great time, or at least is no longer afraid of the boat. I asked how much the Santee 100LT costs, but it's a bit steep at $678 or so. There's another light boat called the Featherlite 9.5 made by Heritage Kayaks that's cheaper, but reportedly at a lower level of quality. Affordability is, of course, a desirable quality in and of itself, so it becomes more a question of exactly how much lower in quality it is. Matt was using a Heritage Kayaks boat and managed to stay afloat (and dry, the bastard) for the entire class, so it can't be too bad and a price difference of roughly $225 is pretty significant. It's not like it would see the hard use of a rental or white water boat, after all.

So, great fun, albeit fun that I will pay for tomorrow with sore muscles. I'm very definitely looking forward to the advanced class, and I want to stop by the shop and see how much a better PFD is going to cost me.

Indycar Museum - The Movie!

Note: "There it is" just before "I'm going the wrong way!" refers to the departing Cessna, not the airport!

If the audio is a little wanky after you press the play button, pause for a few minutes to let a little more of the movie download before trying again.

It turns out to be quite a bit of work getting these movies out of the camcorder and into a suitable form for web posting. Part of that is due to their size: it took five hours to upload to Vimeo! It also was a challenge to get below the 500MB weekly quota. I did it by removing some of the pattern after the go-around, the cost of that being that it confuses people. "Why are you showing the landing again?" The other thing I did was to dumb down the resolution a little bit to make the file size smaller. It still looks tons better than the YouTube equivalent, though, so I can live with that.

The editing of the raw video takes awhile too, but that will get better. I was looking for something more capable than Windows Movie Maker, but there aren't many programs out there that will work directly with the flash card video my camcorder uses. Most programs expect DV tape, it seems.

I found and downloaded a demo of a program Sony puts out called Vegas, and while the learning curve appears steep for good editing, it seems to have quite a few capabilities that Movie Maker does not. I was able to edit down the raw video to what you see above, but I didn't spend any time learning how to do transitions or screen titles/text. Hopefully the movies will get better each week as I get better at using the tools. The Sony program is only a 30 day demo, so I'm going to have to decide whether to buy it before I out a whole lot of effort into learning how to use it.