Lee.org

Very nice day at the field. I played with doing a kind of Immelman. Fun! My maneuver was a bit different. I did my 1/2 roll while in the vertical. That seemed like more fun at the moment.Today I felt much more connected to the plane than previously. This gave me a lot more control and smoothness than I’ve had in the past. I’m rolling better, managing power better, managing the exchange of altitude and speed better.

Favorite moves:

• Launching, giving it full throttle and watching it climb directly away from me in a straight line, ascending at 20 degrees. It just gets smaller and smaller.
• I was flying 45 degrees away from being into the wind and straight toward me. I noticed that in order to track correctly, the plane was actually side-slipping a lot. We don’t need no stinking rudder!
• Standing in the middle of the field and having the plane zip around me like a loyal dog darting around in the grass.
• Getting up to 250 feet, pointing the plane directly at me, building up speed and then bringing the plane straight up, right over my head. As it ascends, I roll. My view sees a dark line in the sky rotating around an axis. I then pull out and dart away.
• Flying by low and slow, low and fast, low and really really fast out of a steep decent, low and really slo[crash!] oop! When it flies by, engine off, silent except for a “shhhoo” of air, I grin ear to ear.

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did on Sunday! I went to the Poconos field.   I watched just one Stick 40 combat. Zowie! They had to cancel the rest of the combat because moisture was tearing the streamers after just a few seconds in the air. I saw a plane on the ground rev into a fence, shooting 1/3 of a prop 50 feet over peoples’ heads and into the side of the truck. The fuselage of the plane was broken   in-two. Lastly, back at Great Meadows, I saw a 7′ wingspan pattern plane (?) do looping, rolling, flipping 3-D tricks that blew my mind. My jaw was literally agape! It looked like a sprite fluttering about, only this sprite was larger than me and weighed like 50 pounds. Earlier in the day, I was impressed with a biplane doing what looked like shoulder rolls. But this new stuff was in a class 3 times removed.

Oh, I also tried flying at a local unused baseball field. I can now tell you that I can just barely keep the Zagi flying in a little league baseball field. I can also tell you that it sucks to have to fetch a plane in chest-high grass. Personal note: That’s about the smallest field I think I could ever fly at.

I get around 40 spams a day, every day… some 13 thousand per year. Happily the vast majority get filtered out. But occasionally one makes it through the gauntlet… making it to the right email address, not stopped by Spamkiller, and not deleted by my unconscious brain. Today I got…. it’s just…. so….

Here, you look at it and tell me what you think:

From: “Clara”
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 11:33:25 -0000
Subject: Letter@5CHBSVDfFy3uqHBs

Hi Lee.
Possibly you are waiting for this inventive mail, is it precise?
Expect yes!
My Sugar buddy I have Nice news for you.
Now you can Look at this page and do your prurient things.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
< < http://dreamsonrealms.org[the rest of the url removed by Lee] >>
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

With love, Clara Young.

Now, I’m sure it’s probably just another porn site, but is this email unintentional poetry? Read it again, with feeling.

In other news, I went over for a visit to slashdot and was befuddled by the dizzyingly low signal-to-noise ratio of the comments that people post there. Though there is no lack of volume! What a weird sub-culture. Their headlines are top-notch though. Thinking back to my previous excursions to the site over the years, I recall that they’ve never had any useful commenters there.

The old lead-acid batteries in my workshop aren’t cutting it. I think one cell is shot. The other three are probably good, but they aren’t large enough anyway. With these 4 6-volt sealed cells, I’ve only got 8 amp/hours at 12 volts. And I’m trying to charge a 1.1 and a 1.7 amp/hr pack… At their best, they’d be good for 2 chargings. And it’s just a big pain to keep monitoring my car battery charger –> 12v lead-acid batteries –> peak charger setup. It’s too easy to mess up.Since it’s just 15 minutes to the field, I want to charge my batteries at home. (a reasonable slow charge is 1 hour per battery or longer… times 2 batteries). If the field was 2 hours away, I wouldn’t have this issue, I could just charge in the car… but then I wouldn’t go, would I? I’ve been looking around and the best advice I can find on fast charging vs. slow charging (i.e. 3C charging (20 minutes) vs. C/10 charging (10 hours) is that “fast charging can put more of a strain on your batteries so they’ll wear out faster”. Well, if I’m in no rush, I’m happy to slow charge. But I feel uncomfortable leaving a charger pulling my car battery dry for 10 hours. One day that’ll leave my car battery dead and sulphated. I looked around for a good 12 volt power supply. I could rip one out of a computer… I hear that computer repair stores are a good cheap source. But I lucked out and found a 12 volt, 13 amp supply on eBay for $30, shipping included. That’s way better than the $30 -3- amp supply at Radio Shack. Well, it hasn’t arrived yet, so I’ll tell you how well it works when I get it.

I flew today. Well, not really. I had the Zagi up high at a distance and the prop fell off. I should have remembered that I had knocked the prop off the last time I flew on a rough landing… I had reved the engine -after- I was sliding along the ground and justifiably bumped the prop off. I had just stuck it on and flew again, but I should have fixed it with CA glue or something when I got home.

So, I coasted in, landed the Zagi and looked for the prop. No luck. I really really hate those little canals on the flying field (it’s on a sod farm)!! So I broke out the Firebird. No luck there either. Both control horn-holder-downer-thingies had broken, leaving me with no tail controls. I considered cranking it up and throwing it into the wind anyway. But refrained.

The old lead-acid batteries in my workshop aren’t cutting it. I think one cell is shot. The other three are probably good, but they aren’t large enough anyway. With these 4 6-volt sealed cells, I’ve only got 8 amp/hours at 12 volts. And I’m trying to charge a 1.1 and a 1.7 amp/hr pack… At their best, they’d be good for 2 chargings. And it’s just a big pain to keep monitoring my car battery charger –> 12v lead-acid batteries –> peak charger setup. It’s too easy to mess up.Since it’s just 15 minutes to the field, I want to charge my batteries at home. (a reasonable slow charge is 1 hour per battery or longer… times 2 batteries). If the field was 2 hours away, I wouldn’t have this issue, I could just charge in the car… but then I wouldn’t go, would I? I’ve been looking around and the best advice I can find on fast charging vs. slow charging (i.e. 3C charging (20 minutes) vs. C/10 charging (10 hours) is that “fast charging can put more of a strain on your batteries so they’ll wear out faster”. Well, if I’m in no rush, I’m happy to slow charge. But I feel uncomfortable leaving a charger pulling my car battery dry for 10 hours. One day that’ll leave my car battery dead and sulphated. I looked around for a good 12 volt power supply. I could rip one out of a computer… I hear that computer repair stores are a good cheap source. But I lucked out and found a 12 volt, 13 amp supply on eBay for $30, shipping included. That’s way better than the $30 -3- amp supply at Radio Shack. Well, it hasn’t arrived yet, so I’ll tell you how well it works when I get it.

I flew today. Well, not really. I had the Zagi up high at a distance and the prop fell off. I should have remembered that I had knocked the prop off the last time I flew on a rough landing… I had reved the engine -after- I was sliding along the ground and justifiably bumped the prop off. I had just stuck it on and flew again, but I should have fixed it with CA glue or something when I got home.

So, I coasted in, landed the Zagi and looked for the prop. No luck. I really really hate those little canals on the flying field (it’s on a sod farm)!! So I broke out the Firebird. No luck there either. Both control horn-holder-downer-thingies had broken, leaving me with no tail controls. I considered cranking it up and throwing it into the wind anyway. But refrained.

I get over 40 spams a day, every day. Luckily, the vast majority are received by semi-sacrificial accounts and/or captured by Spamkiller. But it is a terrible nuisance. I still have to wade through them, looking for the occasional email that slips into my spam-bucket. What is the fix? I’ve been saying that it’s legislation…

My new favorite phrase is “Coupe de Jarnac.” It is my great hope and wish to someday get to use it in a sentence. Peter Woodward from the TV show “Conquest” offers this origin for the phrase:

In 1547 in the court of Henri II, King of France, Francois De Vivonne, the Count of La Chastaigneray claimed that Guy Chabot, the Lord of Jarnac had slept with his mother-in-law. This put Guy in a very difficult situation because if he didn’t challenge the claim, his honor would be ruined forever. But to challenge the claim meant that he’d likely have to fight Francois in “honorable combat”. Francois knew the system well… he was widely regarded as the best swordsman in France. And Guy… well, Guy wasn’t.

Guy decided to go for the challenge. Now, the one who is insulted gets to choose the weapon style. While Francois was a great swordsman in every discipline, Guy didn’t tell Francois what weapons they’d be fighting with. He said that Francois should bring 30 different weapons to the contest. This was keeping within the rules of combat but a good way to put Francois off-balance. It’s thought that Guy went to an Italian combat teacher and trained extensively in just a single offensive move with sword and buckler for several weeks. When the combat began, Guy fought very defensively until he was able to play out the one expert move he knew. Guy ran Francois through. Francois was so shamed by his losing to Guy that he refused medical treatment and bled to death where he was struck down.

So, to this day, a “Coupe de Jarnac” is when one plays by the letter of the rules but uses a certain level of trickery to achieve an important victory.

This month’s photo is a shot of the spot my sister will likely be married on this October!

I grew up with an Intellivision. I got a kick out of this reminiscence. It’s a site that lets me play the games in my browser.

I’m using a TI-89 calculator for my statistics class. I got to take one out of the WCCC library. Here’s an emulator for Windows, complete with everything needed for when I don’t have the calculator with me.

I recently heard, “Islamic democracy is an oxymoron.” That doesn’t sound too far off the mark. How might that effect our presence in Iraq? Comments?

Last night I went out with Adam Segal and his wife Kim. On a whim they came down from Boston for a trip to NYC. I was the first one they thought of calling :-). We slipped into a fondue restaurant/bar around 29th & 3rd… soaked in some music, cheese, and good conversation. Then went down to the Lower East Side to see The Porno Jim Show. Got a slice of real NYC pizza (which was much better than the crappy pizza I had at Sunny’s in Hackettstown last week), chatted some more and called it a night. Friday evening traffic made it take 3 hrs to get into the city, which confounded the start of our evening. Although I despise cell phones, I might have to get one for situations such as that one.

Pay phone service is becoming very sparse… because there’s no money in it for phone companies anymore. I had trouble finding a pay phone at the Holland Tunnel entrance in NJ: I stopped at two gas stations. I found 6 pay phones distributed all over the first station… all of them used a private pay-phone company that wouldn’t accept my phone card. The next station had 3 pay phones with the same issue as the first station. The next station had 2 Verizon phones… only 1 worked, but that was enough. It took my card and I made my call. Then when I got in the city, I was a little lost (turns out, I went to 143 West 30th but I should have gone to 143 EAST 30th…). I looked for a phone and the first 3 payphones I tried didn’t have a dial-tone! The days of pay-phones seem numbered. So, what’s the minimum cell phone service I can get?….

I’ve started my summer school in full. A statistics course and Educational Psychology. Summer school is intense!

That’s 4 hrs, 40 min of class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yup, I’m back in school…

Oh, by the way, I’m now using my sister’s monitor. It’s a 14″ Multiscan 100ES… smaller than my old monitor (which is now sadly partially blocking the entrance to my bedroom) but it’s clear…. Anyone want a sick monitor?

I’m chasing my shadow again with my teaching stuff…

I started the summer session at WCCC yesterday. Educational Psychology and Biology. I figured that Ed Psych would be a good primer for the real thing and … heck, I’ve never had a college level biology class so I should round myself out. The Bio immediately lost my interest… Kingdoms, flagellums and endoplasmic reticulum*... boring! And the teacher seemed “moderate”. So I think I’m going to switch to Statistics… another something that I’ve never taken. Since I just aced College Algebra without too much panic, I know I can do well in it and it feels more relevant than amebas (But then that’s just me. Everyone has to pick their route in life…).

The teacher in the Educational Psych class, Mrs. Black knows her stuff. In one class I got an excellent feel. I’m worried that it’ll be a hard class, especially since it’s 2hrs and 40 minutes, 3 days a week for 5 weeks! Intense! Remember, I -need- an “A” or I won’t qualify to get into nuffum in the fall. She told me that CCM has a brand spanking new Alternate Route teaching program that I might be able to get into. So I scrambled and made some calls today…. and left messages on two answering machines. So here I sit, waiting for a call-back.

* Hey, how come “reticulum” doesn’t spell-check in FrontPage? It’s in -my- everyday vocabulary!