The Doctor's Lair

Interesting times cometh! From now on, I have been warned, the engine will fail atleast one time every single flight. We tried three failures today in the field: the first I tried to put down on a road in the downwind direction, the second I could not identify a suitable field and we had already lost 300' by then and the last I picked a field that was too far away and against the wind, tried but did not make it. Zero out of three does not sound pretty and it is not! That's why its going to happen atleast once from now on. This was followed by an emergency decent, for example if the aircraft depressrises and you need to get down so that you and your passengers can breathe. Bank at 45 degrees and point down till your speeds hits the yellow mark, the maximum structural cruising speed. Its quite a roller coaster ride and you stare at the earth coming up to meet you quite quickly. With in a few seconds a thousand feet whiz by. And again it happened, the engine failed while right abeam the numbers on downwind. So shorten the downwind and come up high on the final. This went of pretty well with me making the runway and still having time to deploy a full 30 deg flaps. Some saving grace today. Better get these right, my life might on them one day! Also did some landings and slips. The flare and landing is improving an inch at a time.

My Debian GNU/Linux server hit 100 days of uptime today.

methane /home/dhingraa%uptime
10:21:35 up 100 days, 59 min, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I use this server for lots of things, code repository(svn), webserver, mysql, wiki, storage, practise unix skills, etc. Over the past few months, even though I have installed a number of new things, it has not required a single reboot. Check out the cricket wiki hosted on the server. The link is the the top right of this page. Oh, did I mention its a retired P-III 800 MHz. with 256 RAM.

Of the cluster we run, there are two machines that have been up 258 days with the other being 140 days and above. The cluster is over 3 years old now running 24 P-4 2.26MHz and 4 new P-4 3.2 MHz

Its snowing today, so most probably I am grounded.

Ann Arbor Tower has been added to list of online ATC audio streams. You can find the stream here. Now you can hear yours truly talking on the airwaves. Contact me for flight times or look at the online schedule. Unfortunately, you can look at the schedule for only the current day. The Pink ones are inactive, the yellow ones are in progress and the blue ones are completed. Time given is eastern which currently is GMT-5.

You would hear me anywhere from 20-50 to after the time slot begins. During this time, I have to get my weather briefing, get instructions from the instructor and preflight the aircraft. You would then hear me once asking for a taxi clearance and about 10 mins later for a takeoff clearance. After that we usually head out to the practice area where we do not have to talk to the ATC at all. With about 1 hour left in the time slot, we head back the airport and practice some landings. This is the rich time to hear since I will be making a lot of calls and getting clearances/instructions from the ATC. The last 30 mins is to land, taxi back, refuel, clean, do the paperwork and debrief.

Obviously, I would not be using my name, but the aircraft's name, which would be either 222UM or 333UM, said over the air as "two two two Uniform Mike" and "tree tree tree Uniform Mike."

So if I was not wasting my time on email, what was I doing in Orlando. Well, there was the conference too remember. Two talks in the same day, the first attended by 30 people and the second by 8 people. Pretty nice overall, but the conference was marked by a number of missing speakers. What the reason for that was, I do not know! But apart from that, it was Disney World. One day for three Disney parks is impossible, I managed to get about 10% of each park. Spending 3-4 hours in Epcot, Magic Kingdom and MGM, I was dead tired by the end. The other days were spent in visiting the Kennedy space center and the beaches of Tampa.

Call me for details. I will not try to sell you something, I promise!!!!

Disney has a neat system where they give you a plastic card and have photographers all over the disney premises where they take your pictures. The pictures are then put online from where you can buy them at $13 apiece. Since I did not have a camera, I used the system and thought would pull off the photos from the Disney photopass website. I had expected them to be low res. But hey, something is better than nothing. So here goes...

This is something I wrote on the first day of the conferance. I thought I would keep on writing offline and post it all here, but then I just happened not to boot my computer for four days and check my email for five days.

At the conference. Finally! They charge $8 for each parking entry. What that means is that if I decide to leave and come back, it will be another $8. Oh....I happen to be an ASME member from University of Michigan, Seattle, Washington. Ooops, that is what my badge said, so I had to go back and get it changed. The lady said, at least my name is spelled right!

I happen to be typing this in a text file at the Dolphin conference center. Will be posting when I get a connection.

The hunt for the net
After one day, I started sufferring from email withdrawl symptoms. So began the hunt for a connection to the virtual world: The Matrix. The hotel I am staying at charges $5 for 30 min access. So out we go. I need some dinner too, so I call Gera and get list of places where wireless is available. I find a Fridays and head there, have a nice dinner and check my mail. Thats pretty much what I did, because they just give you a wireless tablet without a keyboard and you use a stylus to work your way around the painful way. But smart me, what I did was to also check for other wireless hotspots in cafes that I will try tommorow.

On Site internet
Hey, guess what? They have internet on site at the conference. Unfotunately, its only four terminals with IE. People are forming lines to check mail. I meanwhile have completed one presenstion and am waiting for the other one. Lunch was an expensive affair. A $10 sandwich, hmmmm, welcome to Walt Disney World: Happiest place on earth!!!

Heres something to keep up the writing.

*Master Vittal defended.....finally! One down, more to come.
* My saturday flying lesson had to be cancelled because of low ceilings. Thats lots of low clouds for the ground bound folks.
* Indoor cricket got cut down because of misinformation from the Collesiums people. They rescheduled us from 7-9 but told us that it was for next week. Bah!
* Sunday was a nice outdoor, another "last" game this season, in the freezing wind.
* Prepped suits 'n' other stuff. Ironed a shirt after ages and aeons.
* I am off to Orlando, will try to keep up with some sort ones. Its 30C there!!!!