Category: Activities

Finally went flying

I finally got to lift my head up from my computer and go out and do something for myself. I went flying. No goal except to get re-acquainted with flying and have fun. I had our club’s Dakota booked from 1pm, and somebody else had it booked in the morning. I was hoping that would mean I wouldn’t have to pre-heat it, but the other guy evidently didn’t fly. The weather was saying low clouds in the morning, but higher in the afternoon, and the reports were coming in showing it better than the forecast all morning. Sure enough by the time I got out there the ATIS was reporting a few clouds at around 3200 feet and a broken layer way up high, so it was prefect visual flight conditions.

The airport was incredibly busy, as about 4 jets arrived and departed while I waited behind a Commander to take off. And then after take off, it took the tower controller until I was at 2300 feet before he could turn me over to the departure controller. Within 2 seconds of the GPS saying I crossed outside of the outer ring of the class C airspace, the controller turned me loose, so obviously the rush was going to continue for him.

I decided to try a couple of steep turns, and they weren’t good. I had trouble getting over a 30 degree bank, and I kept gaining altitude. And then I tried one stall, which I hate doing in this plane because it seems like the nose never drops. That was enough practice stuff, so I flew over and did a touch and go at Ledgedale (7G0) and another at Batavia/Genesee County (KGVQ). Both were passable but not great. I flew the first bit of the VOR-A approach into Canadiagua (D38) just to get some experience flying a VOR radial again.

My feeling is that I’m still rusty, and I’m going to need at least one more flight before I’m ready to do my club annual ride. And then I’m going to need to do 6 approaches with a CFI-I or a IPC in order to get instrument current again.

The Dakota is a nice plane, but I miss my Lance. I felt perfectly at home flying that plane, but not so much with this one.

Ethical dilemma

I’m in the middle of a big refactoring job for my work project. I’m basically restructuring all the classes that make database calls so that they use connection pooling with a per-thread “DatabaseHandle” that caches PreparedStatements. It’s a big job, and it’s going to take a LOT of time and concentration, which means that home is a far better environment to work on it than at work. The problem and dilemma comes because I was on a roll when I hit 40 hours for the week. I’m not allowed to bill more than 40 hours, and I’m sure as hell not going to do it for free. Nor can I work from home without prior approval and that’s not easy to get.

So my question is, do I quit now and hope I can quickly get back in the groove on Monday morning, or do I work on it this weekend and then when I’m done spend an equivalent amount of time at my desk at work working on personal projects, like my photoshop stuff? I’m thinking it’s probably safest, although nowhere near as productive, to shut down Eclipse right now and don’t look at it until Monday morning.

Anticipation

My new computer skinIn anticipation of today’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro, I ordered the computer skin a few days ago from iToppers.com. Today the guy producing it sent me this image of what it’s going to look like.

I can hardly wait. I hope there is an airshow nearby where I can get the team to sign it.

I guess you can call me a convert, then

A few hours ago I was complaining to a bunch of friends how annoying it was to do Photoshop with a ball mouse. My optical mouse broke (the first button went down and didn’t come back up) a few weeks ago so I’m using this old ball mouse, and no matter how carefully I clean the rollers, it seems that when I click and drag to the left, the mouse will stop. If I just move the mouse without with the button down, no problem, it follows it all over the place. But it takes multiple attempts to drag anything to the left.

One of my friends, Harry, is an extremely experienced graphic artist, and he said “forget the mouse, buy a Wacom Bamboo tablet”. At first, I was reluctant, because the logo for this thing looks like the word “Bamboo” drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch, which doesn’t say much for its drawing ability. Also, the Wacom promo stuff talks only about it as a device for mouse-replacement and handwriting, with absolutely nothing about using it for drawing or other artistic work. But I found a couple of user reviews where they pointed out it has force sensitivity, which is not something you need for handwriting and mouse-replacement. They said it was an excellent tablet for amateur artists, as well as something professionals might want to put in their laptop bag for use on the road. So on the way home from lunch we stopped off and bought one.

I’ve been using it continually since then, and as far as I’m concerned I should throw away all my mice and buy one of these things for every computer I use. I’m using it for general mouse-replacement and it’s great. The only thing I reach for my mouse for is for the scroll wheel, and that’s mostly force of habit since the tablet has scroll buttons on the top. This thing is extremely great.