Now we're talking!

There'll be flying today!



Later:

It turned out to be my first ever "Two Rick" day today. Co-pilot Rick and I braved the early morning cold to take a ride up to Urbana for breakfast. He had a new little camera with him that he wanted to try out. According to the meta data of the pictures, it's a Canon PowerShot SD1000. It's a tiny little thing, but delivers 7 megapixels of resolution in still photos, and a nice 640x480 resolution in video. I've always been disappointed in the smaller digital cameras because they are so unresponsive when you press the shutter release (and isn't that a really archaic term? I don't think they even have shutters), often taking 2 or 3 seconds to actually take the picture. That's just enough time to miss the picture you wanted often enough to make them virtually unusable. The little Canon didn't have that problem, though. I wouldn't say that the picture quality is as good as my Olympus (and for 25% of the price, I'd be pissed off if it was!), but it does a pretty good job and is insanely convenient. Rick and I often battle for space in the confines of the RV if we both have our full size cameras with us, but there was no crowding at all this morning.

Here are some of the pictures he took:













At under $200, we're talking stocking stuffer here.

As we were on the way back out to the runway to head back to Bolton, the second Rick called. Rick Lee is a professional photographer from West Virginia, and you've probably seen some of his comments here on the blog. If you've ever followed his Blogger name back to his own blog, you've seen some of the pictures he takes. If you haven't tracked him down that way, you can just follow this link:

http://rickleephoto.blogspot.com/

Rick and I know each other from way back in the days when the Internet still lived in the petri dish that was Compuserve. More specifically, we know each other from the Flight Sim forum on Compuserve. I flew down to Charleston, WV to visit him once many years ago, and have felt like I owed him a plane ride ever since. Back then, I was renting and was due back in Columbus before we could get it done, but since he was in town this weekend I was able to re-pay his hospitality from all those years ago with an RV ride.

We met at the airport right around noon and took a short hop out towards MadCo. The weather was friendly in that it was nice and smooth, but I've been warmer. To be fair, I've been colder too, but still... winter is definitely coming. The winds weren't too bad, being out of the south at about 7 knots. I managed to make a pretty good landing (in fact, all four today were pretty good) which is always nice when a guest is on board.

It's supposed to be nice tomorrow too, so at a minimum I hope to get over to MadCo to gas up before the prices shoot up.