Two days ago I had my second instrument lesson. That was a lot of fun. We went back over instrument scanning, VOR approaches and intercepts, and then we started to tackle NDB bearing interceptions and what approaches might look like. I had a lot of trouble with those for some reason. Doing the math in my head right in the middle of the approach is...challenging. I can't imagine trying to do that in the middle of an approach. I guess I'll just have to work on it until it's second nature. We did some NDB tracking in the simulator and flew an NDB approach.

And continuing the flying fiesta yesterday was just gorgeous so I went flying. It was in the 50s here in boston at the end of december, which is unheard of. Light winds and clear skies. Nearly perfect flying weather. In order to build a little cross-country time and to keep my pilotage and dead reckoning skills from completely vanishing, I flew from Bedford down to Hartford-Brainard and had lunch with a couple of friends. I took one of them up for a couple of turns around the pattern and he seemed to really enjoy it. A very nice man on the field was good enough to loan us a headset because I was dumb and forgot to bring an extra pair.

A couple of crappy notes about the flight:

• There is a closed airport right next to KHFD. I didn't realize this and it was a little hazy, so I called on my base on the closed airport runway. Someone has built a huge fucking building right next to one of the closed runways so the thought went through my head "why in the hell would someone put a building right there?" Then I saw the huge Xs on the runway and had to look at the sectional to see where the airport was in relation and had to admit my mistake to the tower.
• I was coming in too fast when landing at the airport and floated down the runway a bit. I suspect I didn't get down until half way down the runway and ended up using the entire length. I haven't had that happen in a while and was kind of embarassing. I should have gone around, really.
• Then, I didn't know what to do once I was on the ground. I've never had to deal with landing and parking at an FBO and tried to ask ground where I should park. I got back something snotty like "Sorry, we don't deal with anything on the ramp" which didn't make me feel much better. So I just pulled into an FBO there and parked. Got some fuel from some reasonably nice people inside. I'll have to ask around to see if there's some kind of unwritten system for dealing with FBOs. I suspect there is.
• After dropping off my friend on the ramp I took off again. About 200 feet off the ground I realized that the top door latch was not latched properly. (I had checked it on the ground as per the checklist and I guess I just didn't see it.) After climbing up to a couple of thousand feet I slowed the plane down to 87kts (as per the my recall of the POH) and tried to close the door. At this point I would like to point out that the plane I was flying had a slight rolling tendency to the right. That is, you can trim out the elevator and rudder but if you let go of the controls the plane very slowly banks to the right. I had about 7 seconds of time before the plane would be over in a 20 degree bank and that doesn't give you much time to fidget with the door. And fighting the wind and pressure from an open door definitely requires two hands. Eventually I managed to get the door shut and the latch tight and continued on my way.

This completes our comedy of errors.

On the good side:

• The weather was as advertised. It was a beautiful flight down in slight haze - just enough to make the rolling hills look quite nice. There as almost no turbulence at all up at altitude (like flying on fucking glass) and very little down near the ground. There's normally at least a little bumpiness during the day due to thermals, but not on that day.
• This was the first time that I got to use the GPS that I got for my birthday and I have to say, it is amazing. How do pilots fly without these things? I mean, it basically emulates a full HSI including vertical guidance. It contains all of the various frequencies that you need, shows you airspace and what you would see for localizers on approach plates. It warns you when you are about to enter airsprace and lots of other fun stuff. Just to give you an example: on the way back to bedford I had a very nice tail wind. About 20 miles out from bedford, the GPS starts giving you vertical guidance in order to plan your descent to your destination. Thanks to that planning I was able to get that little warrior up to a ground speed of over 150kts. Just to give you an idea, that plane cruises at about 105kts and I was only getting a ground speed of about 90kts on the way there. It was fun to see the ground moving by that quickly. For a moment it almost felt like I was flying an arrow.
• All my other landings were pretty sweet. I think I was just a little rusty. You just gotta keep that speed nailed on final. Gotta gotta.
• I did a good job of filing a flight plan on the way down (I ran out of time on the way back), used flight following the entire way there and back and did OK on the communications side. Also, my flight plan (yes, I still do the math and even pick out checkpoints on the flight) was almost right on the money for en route times and fuel consumption. That makes me feel pretty good about being able to calculate what's required for cross-country trips. (Oh, yeah. Another thing the GPS will supposedly do is keep track of fuel burn. I need to set that up.)

This is one of the best facial expressions I've ever seen caught on film.

These pictures have shown up everywhere and naturally I can't resist posting them.

Seriously, if you have the time go and find some Lenny Bruce recordings. They do exist and they are still relevant, funny and moving. He was so far ahead of his time. He was also insane.

Two days ago was my birthday. A bunch of my friends got together and purchased a nice little toy for me. It's pretty impressive. Does both car and avaiation navigation including driving directions and plane-related things like fuel burn, logs, etc. I can't wait to have the chance to use it in the air. Should be a blast.

Apparently yesterday Scaled Composites managed to fire up the engine on SpaceShipOne. This is a big deal and I wish them the best of luck.

They have some great photos up, but I was most interested in the flight test logs. They contain a lot of really interesting geeky information.

Good article in slate about Dean's foreign policy positions. Good one-liners, too.

Oh, yeah. Today is the 100th anniversary of flight. Yay!

Had some good landings in the arrow. I think I'm finally comfortable in it. Now, if only I had another 20 hours, I could actually fly thing thing on my own. If the weather is nice on Friday I'm going to try to do a cross-country and pick up a friend. We'll see how it works out.

James Kunstler who wrote the really wonderful Geography of Nowhere has gone totally batshit insane. Maybe it's time for me to stop whining about the office not being accessible from a rail line.

Today is zabbo-day. Everyone rejoice!

As seen on #mozilla:

<biesi> Couldn't get registers: Kein passender Prozess gefunden.
* biesi kicks gdb

I've taken a couple of lessons now in the arrow in order to get my complex endorsement. Now I understand why there is a seperate endorsement. Landing and takeoff can be a good bit busier and you need to plan ahead a bit more. This plane is also a bit bigger and heavier, so you need to be on top of speed on final and can't let it get away from you.

I went up with my instructor yesterday and did some landings at Lawerence. They were...messy. Mixing the fact that I haven't really been up a few weeks with the new plane means that I'm feeling the rust. They say it's a skill you lose. They aren't kidding.

However, on the upside, it's a damn fun plane to fly. A good bit faster than the Warrior and certainly easier to manage things like cruise and fuel usage with the constant speed prop. And it feels like you can cross the distance from Bedford over to Lawerence in a heartbeat. As well as getting up to altitude. When we took off from Bedford and went out to the practice area I wasn't watching that closely and found myself suddenly at 3000 feet. I would normally be up around 2000 feet in the warrior. All my landmarks looked unusually small.

I think I'm going to have fun doing cross-countries in this plane once I get the required hours.

Yesterday I managed to get a gtk2 plugin working in Mozilla without any Xt. No X errors and only one GLib-GObject-CRITICAL warning that I can't fix as near as I can tell. I had to fix one leak that was hiding other problems that turned out to be in the sample plugin that I had built.

Next up is to build a simple easy to use gtk widget that will allow people to build plugins really easily.

I have to weigh in. I was pretty damn impressed with the new Battlestar Galactica that scifi put together. I hope they turn it into a series. Of course, I'm lucky in that I didn't have a lot of experience with the original, so I'm not biased. In my world it's OK for starbuck to have an exposed midriff and to be nippling. Some of us are not so lucky:

<dria-nwn> but starbuck's a -chick-!

It's that time of year again. This is the first big snow storm of the year. It is also, I suspect, the only snow storm of the year that I will actually enjoy. Snow is always nice for the first couple of weeks that it's around. Before it turns into the brown and crusty stuff that sticks to the curbs and the bottom of your car and you just miss the heat of summer.

Lately I've been trying to get gtk2 plugins working properly. After finding a leak (It's in this patch. Can you find it?) and working through a huge number of weird ownership issues I finally have something that's close to working. I still get an X error when the plugin is destroyed, but I have a good lead on what is causing that. More hacking on Monday.