March 29, 2018 · 23:59

No Pressure, No Diamonds

Another cool sentiment – diamonds are so idealized and glamorous and precious, but we know that they only exist because a lump of coal got squished for eons under billions of tons of pressure and enormous heat. So if we can put up with the pressure in our lives, we too can be diamonds! Right?!

It occurs to me that no one ever asks the coal how it feels about the whole process.

The posts of the last few days have been a bit cryptic and a bit of a buzzkill. Lemme give you the “tl;dr” version….

Busy, busy, busy at work – it’s audit season.

Busy, busy, busy at the hangar – it’s the hangar.

And finally, after 27 years in the same house, which is now way, way too big with the kids grown and the cats and dogs all gone, we’ve got a couple offers on the table which means we’ll have to find a new place and deal with decades of “stuff” in order to get out of here in the next few weeks.

There may be a lot of really short posts here in the near future, if you follow the way I’ve drifted.

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March 28, 2018 · 23:56

The Skunk Opines

I was going to say, “The skunk has spoken,” but I don’t think it made much sound at all. A different set of sensory apparatus has been activated, but the message has been communicated loud & clear.

Still, as a commentary re: recent events, it’s no worse than any ranting and raving I might do. No worse, assuming you don’t need to breathe. Or use your eyes.

I’m not the target here, just collateral damage. The skunk got spooked by a dog or hit by a car somewhere out in the yard or just down the block. But that collateral damage comment might be more on target than you might think.

Not to worry.

I am a calm pool.

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March 27, 2018 · 23:57

That Feeling When – March 27th

That feeling when you realize that the long nights and lack of sleep up to this point where just practice and now it’s about to get REALLY hard – but at least you’ve found a couple of new Sirius XM channels that you like and you got a neat pair of bluetooth headphones for your birthday, so at least you’ll have tunes.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Music, Paul

March 26, 2018 · 23:50

No Context For You – March 26th

It doesn’t matter how detailed the map – if you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you’re going, you’re still lost.

 

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul

March 25, 2018 · 22:32

ISS Pass, March 25th

It’s been a while since I did one of these, partially because the orbital mechanics haven’t lined up for evening ISS passes for a while over Southern California, partially because when they did it’s been cloudy, and partially because I haven’t had a whole lot of spare time available for any of this.

Tonight it was mostly clear, there was a nice pass, and I made time.

Again, using StarStax, a very nice freeware program, to combine multiple short exposures. I could do 30 to 60 second exposures, but with the light pollution they would be all washed out and way too bright to show the ISS trail. Instead, I take a whole series of much shorter exposures (these are all 3 seconds), firing the next shot off as soon as each one is done.

To track when an ISS pass is coming up (or other satellites) I use Heavens-Above, a wonderful website. (You should as well!) Here’s their map which you can match to the photos – rising in the west at the right, headed up toward the top left:

Image: Heavens-Above.com

There she is! Coming up from the horizon in the west at the lower left, heading up through some passing clouds. Again, each “dash” is a three-second exposure.

One thing I need to work on is what the field of view is for the camera. These images could have fit into the previous field of view, but I thought that it might be moving out to the right, so I shifted the camera.

Another happy result from stacking the photos is the way it brings out the stars, even with the street lights and light pollution. The Pleiades cluster is just above the ISS’s track in the middle left, above the lens flare from the street light.

Of course, above LA there’s more than just the ISS moving overhead. Here the ISS was just above its apex and starting to sink back down toward the north-northeast. In the lower right of the photo you can see the distinctive “red-green-red-green-red-green-red-green-red-green-WHITE” pattern of an aircraft.

Moving almost due north, from our front yard we have another street light to deal with, and another plane way off to the north just starting to come up over the horizon.

And there she goes! Wave to the six astronauts and cosmonauts on board, Expedition 55! Check out the free available apps from NASA, ESA, and others, as well as sites like Heavens Above! Know when the ISS is coming over your area in the evening (or morning, if you’re one of those people) and see it for yourself!

 

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

March 24, 2018 · 23:43

Inbound To CMA

A thousand thanks to the fellow CAF SoCal Staff member who took me up for a bit of flying today!!! (I generally don’t ID people without their permission if they’re not public figures, so we’ll leave him unnamed for now out of respect for his privacy.)

It had been a while since I had been up in a small plane and the day was just about perfect for a trip around Ventura County.

In this brief clip we’re inbound to CMA (Camarillo Airport) runway 26, over Thousand Oaks and just coming over the Canejo Grade on the 101 Freeway (lower left). You can see the coast off in the distance, with a number of the Channel Islands offshore in the haze. Most of the bright patches out in the distance aren’t lakes or other bodies of water – they’re fields covered in plastic.

The wavering black band in the middle is the propeller. This is a common effect seen in cell phone videos and propeller aircraft, the “bending” effect of the prop coming from the image on the cell phone’s camera CCD being recorded as a series of horizontal scans while the propeller is moving at high speed, being in a slightly different position as each line is scanned.

The runway is there in the haze almost directly in the center of the picture, to the left of the freeway winding through Camarillo, just beyond that somewhat “L-shaped” silver patch of strawberry fields.

After a long, hard week (one of way too many) it was wonderful to get out of the office and up in the air!

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Filed under CAF, Flying, Video

March 23, 2018 · 23:56

That Feeling When – March 23rd

That feeling when that channel on Sirius XM that you were really starting to like suddenly isn’t there and you think it might just be that you need to turn the app on and off again or maybe jiggle the cable to the internet to bring it back but nothing’s working until you remember that you have the internet so you google it and find out that SXM just made it go away and you try a couple of the channels that are supposedly “close” to the same sort of music and they’re really, REALLY not so you go back to listening to a country channel for a while but somehow it’s become so pop and Brittany Spears-like that you want to stuff your ears with rabid man-eating eels while knowing that you’ll be scarred for life after listening to that crap so in the end you’re back listening to classical because if it’s good enough to survive three or four hundred years it must have something going for it, right?

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Music, Paul

March 22, 2018 · 23:18

Someplace Special – March 22nd

National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton, OH

 

(Another one of those places that I got to spend four or five hours at, would love to spend four or five weeks at. There’s a growing list of those, not to mention the long, long list of places I’ve never gotten to at all. Meanwhile, things I don’t want to do ever again get done over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over every single day.

What’s wrong with this picture?0

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Filed under Flying, Photography, Travel

March 21, 2018 · 23:18

Reminds Me Of Someone

Some nights I just don’t have the right feel for music to keep me company while I work, and silence is not really golden, so I’ll see if there’s something to turn on the idiot box that might be background noise. Not as easy as you think – in many cases it’s still “10,000 channels and nothing on.”

Tonight I got lucky. “Dune” was just starting. I had forgotten just how bizarre and occasionally wonderful David Lynch’s “Dune” (1984) was.

I had first read “Dune” in 1973 in high school, about eight years after it had been published. I was enthralled with the book, but at the time figured it would never be made into a movie since the technology wasn’t even close to being sufficient. That said, by 1984 it still wasn’t quite there, but it was close enough for Lynch to give it a damn good try. I think he hit a lot of the high points about the mystique and power politics of the book, but with a book of that density there was of course so much that had to be left out.

Especially over the top in Lynch’s version was Kenneth McMillan’s portrayal of Baron Vladamir Harkonnen. It’s so far over the top that it’s never been a favorite piece of the movie for me. But tonight I noticed something. Maybe it’s because I haven’t watched it in a year or two.

Baron Vladamir Harkonnen.

Evil incarnate.

Batshit crazy insane.

Diseased and grotesque.

A 100% complete megalomaniac, self-obsessed and narcissistic.

Not to mention the extremely orange skin tones and bizarre orange hairdo.

It reminds me of someone…

Maybe Lynch was a bit more prescient than we give him credit for.

So the next time you’re cussing out that certain prominent politician for being a complete freakin’ idiot, instead be grateful! If he had two brain cells to rub together he might be this guy!

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Filed under Movies, Politics

March 20, 2018 · 23:26

Seeing Is Believing

Saturday morning. Heading toward the hangar. Getting onto the freeway. There are two lanes, both of which have a stop sign at the bottom of  a short downhill ramp to allow for cross traffic into and out of a residential neighborhood.

I’m driving the 18-year old “mom-mobile mini van” with 193,000 miles on it. But it’s been pretty well taken care of, has the big six-cylinder engine, and can get up and go when I really need it to.

Heading onto the ramp I see there are six or seven cars all lined up in the left lane with zero cars in the right lane. I have no idea why, but that’s the way they’ve decided to line up.

I see that the last car in line in the left lane is a Tesla. The S-model. The “mom-mobile mini van” for Mrs. Jetson. The acceleration and speed available should be reserved for drag racers, not mini vans. I love the look, I love the style, I would love to own one. But I’ve never actually SEEN one really floor it and let fly, just heard of it.

I can see that there’s no cross traffic coming.

My mission is clear.

I’m watching the Tesla and the car in front of it, first of all, to make sure that neither of them is going to think, “Why am I sitting in this lane as car #5 or #6 when the other lane’s open?” This thought could be immediately followed by a quick flick to the right, directly into my lane, probably just about the same time that I’m trying to occupy those spacetime coordinates.

More to the point, my brain is telling me that the timing is juuuuuuust right. If they all stay in their lane and take turns at the stop sign and if there’s still no cross traffic to wait for, the Tesla should be pulling up to the line and stopping in the left lane right about the exact same instant that I’m pulling into the right lane beside him and doing the exact same thing.

I’m thinking, “He’s driving lazy, otherwise he would have pulled into the empty lane.” I’m thinking, “He’s probably on his phone or distracted by the radio or something.”

I’m thinking, “I’m going to smoke his ass and show him what a REAL ‘mom-mobile mini van’ can do!!”

And the timing worked perfectly!

I’ll never know what it was that tipped him off to my intentions. Maybe I was visibly trembling with excitement and he subliminally caught sight of it out of his side mirror. Or maybe he just chose that point to pay attention to his driving and see that it was his turn at the stop sign.

Whatever the cause, at the precise same moment that he did his “touch and go” at the white line next to the stop sign, I did mine about eighteen inches to his right. I stomped on the gas to show him…

…and he was freakin’ GOOOOOONE and probably pushing 80 mph before I had a chance for my jaw to drop.

Seeing is believing.

Damn!

I want me one of them!

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