Come fly with me

I've rediscovered Flight Simulator. I used to play it religiously but stopped about three years ago for lack of time and processing power. But I picked up a copy of Flight Simulator 2004 in Hong Kong (legitimate, of course) and finally got around to installing it a couple of weeks ago. Now the last version of Flight Simulator I had played with was 2000, I missed 2002 altogether. Apparently 2002 was the real groundbreaker because 2004 is mindblowing. The graphics are unbelievable as always, the flight dynamics are true to life but the additions/enhancements that really blew me away were the ATC and AI traffic.The ATC is amazingly intelligent. You file an IFR flight plan and you have to get clearance from the tower, they know exactly where you're going, then they hand you to ground who tells you where to taxi to, you tell them when your there and they clear you for takeoff or hold you short, depending on traffic (more on that later.) Once you've taken off, you're handed off to the appropriate departure frequency and the handoffs continue with proper routing (turn left heading 260) and altitude management (descend and maintain flight level 250.) They even get you set up for an ILS approach and hand you off to the tower for landing clearance. Amazing. Coupled with this is the truly amazing AI traffic. Instead of flying around empty skies, you now fly through jam packed skies into jam packed airports. Not only are the planes truly autonomous, taxiing, taking off, flying, landing and parking, they also interact with ATC just as much as you have to . You can enhance this already great feature by downloading real aircraft and schedules from sites like projectai.com. These guys have spent days collecting real world airline schedules and putting them into Flight Simulator with the appropriate aircraft. So now when you go to, say, San Francisco, the place is teeming with aircraft that would be there at that time of day. When it comes round to their scheduled departure time, they get the appropriate clearances and they're on their way. It's great to be able to pull in to SFO about midnight and see the Cathay plane sitting on the tarmac! Not only is there an abundance of commercial traffic but also a ton of civilan traffic. Fly into Livermore and you'll see a whole host of other recreational pilots flying in the pattern or coming and going. It's fantastic. The addition of real time weather etc make it a very impressive experience. Even for the non-aviation enthusiast, it's definitely worth taking a look at. My evenings just got booked solid.

Hands off!

Update: Earthquakes GM Johnny Moore just resigned. F*CK!!!Update 2: Manny Lagos traded to Columbus for Draft Picks "Mexican soccer giant Club America could take over the Earthquakes before the start of the upcoming season, according to Club America President Javier Perez Teuffer and Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber." Oh you've got to be kidding me. Yes, this was reported in the San Jose Mercury News this morning...and it has fans like me, foaming at the mouth. We have a good investor/operator in AEG, why change things. But wait, it gets worse, look at what the potential changes might be: - Teuffer said that Mexican players would be brought to the San Jose squad. We already have a good team...a CHAMPIONSHIP team. Look, I know how international soccer works, you bring in better players to make the franchise better. But don't bring in Mexican players just for the sake of bringing in Mexican players, that doesn't make sense. - Teuffer also said the Earthquakes' name would be changed to ``America.'' Ack. Double Ack. There is no currently-used name in American professional soccer that has a longer history than "San Jose Earthquakes", and they want to dump it? - ``In the long term, we will not be able to stay in a city without a viable stadium situation,'' Garber said The only way a team is going to build up any type of loyalty is by staying in the same town with the same name and catering to the same fans. Granted, the stadium issue is problematic but AEG already talked about that when acquired the club. Several loyal fans have already cancelled their season tickets in protest (something I NEVER thought I would see) and the debate is raging over at BigSoccer. Sadly, as soon as someone protests this news, they're branded as a racist and a xenophobe, neither of which are true. We're fans of the San Jose Earthquakes, the development ground for some outstanding American players. If this happens, it's a giant step backwards for U.S. Soccer and the MLS. Update: Earthquakes GM Johnny Moore just resigned. F*CK!!!

Freshness Guaranteed

Update: Thanks to Mike's excellent suggestion, you can now pick up and post the postit note anywhere you want on the site. Good call, Mike! (Sorry, IE only)I've decided to update the look and theme of my blog slightly. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the whole "mediocre" thing; just didn't fit my personalty, I don't think. So last night I was playing around with some ideas and in the back of my mind was how little I was looking forward to going to work in the morning...DING! Inspiration! The "Notes from..." part is an homage to travel writer and linguist Bill Bryson whose books "Notes from a Small Island" and "Notes from a Big Country" I have enjoyed very much. The postit note was an afterthought; when I told Deanne I was "rebranding" (God I hate that word) my blog she was disappointed, saying that people knew about "Adventures in Mediocrity" and they wouldn't know it was the same blog. So I decided to use an old CSS trick and made the postit note appear to be on top of the rest of the page, as if it had been stuck there. It's really easy to do, you just create a layer using div tags and then specify the exact pixel values of where you want the image to appear. Here's my code: <div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; left:580px; top:145px; width:230px; height:125px; z-index:1; visibility:visible"> <img src="http://www.haebc.com/mt/archives/postit3.gif" name="b" border=0> </div> The z-index gives the layer top priority so it is displayed on top of everything else. Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design.

New Horizons

I went to my first Muslim wedding on Saturday. I don't know many people who can say they've been to a Muslim wedding but it was a very enlightening experience. Our friend Chief had recently had his official wedding in Fiji (where he is originally from and his wife lived until very recently) but they wanted to have a ceremony in the U.S. so that all his family could participate.I have to admit, I didn't really know what to expect but I'm always up for new cultural experiences so I was excited about going. We arrived at the hall where the ceremony was to take place and found it lavishly decorated. There two "thrones" at the front of the room for the bride and groom and about 30 tables laid out for guests. We found a table and sat down. We were some of the first to arrive but those that were already there were dressed in beautiful traditional dress; brightly colored saris, ornate henna work on hands, men in kofias (or koffes). As the room filled up, it was clear that they had a very large extended family; there was easily 250 people there. Deanne and I made up the maybe 10 non-muslims attending but we never once felt out of place, everyone was very welcoming. When it looked like everyone had arrived, a family member who was to act as MC for the night, welcome everyone in arabic and then in English. The majority of his speech was in English but he punctuated every now and then with an arabic phrase which I discovered later were deriviatives of "God willing" etc. Afterwards, Chief and his bride Sofiana came in and took their seats facing everyone. Then a tiny young lass, can't have been older than 4 got up and recited, from memory, an arabic blessing that must have lasted at least three minutes. It was incredible. She didn't stumble once or forget a single word or line. Following here was an elderly gentleman who lead everyone in an arabic prayer as well as gave a blessing. Fortunately we had our friend Taz sitting next to us explaining what was going on, otherwise we would have been totally lost as everything "official" was done in arabic. Shortly afterwards, the celebrations began. Everyone went up to greet the bride and groom who were dressed in the most amazing outfits. Sofiana wore a stunning sari and headdress and had henna on her hands and forearms. They both looked very relaxed, all things considered. During the greetings, the MC announced that dinner was served. The food was incredible. Homemade chapatis, dall, chicken curry, rogan josh, lentils, rice. Fantastic! I love Indian food and since Fiji was originally inhabited by Indians, alot of the culture has stayed, especially the cooking. Interestingly, counter to most western weddings, the bride and groom did not eat until after all the guests had been served. After everyone had eaten, and the cake had been cut, the DJ turned off the lights and hit the disco ball. Everyone was up dancing in no time. The music was a mixture of arabic techno, arabic rap, US rap, and fijian dance music. Everyone young and old was up there dancing (except me of course.) It was great to see traditional Indian dance moves sped up to correlate with the music! I'm not sure what time the party ended but we left after about three hours. It was an eye opening experience and definitely a lot of fun. It was a great honor to be invited and I want to thank Chief and Sofiana for including us in their celebrations.

We built this city...

We just had a 6.5 magnitude earthquakeA strong earthquake occurred at 11:15:56 AM (PST) on Monday, December 22, 2003. The magnitude 6.5 event occurred 11 km (7 miles) NE of San Simeon, CA. The hypocentral depth is 8 km ( 5 miles). http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40148755.htm To put 6.5 in perspective, the 1989 earthquake that did so much damage in San Francisco was a 6.9 on the richter scale.

Where does he come up with this...

An excerpt from my family's xmas letter, regarding my brother Andrew's upcoming plans:"It is an exciting time for Andrew and the New Year holds a number of challenges and opportunities for him. He hopes to divide his time in years to come between Ice fishing and raising barns for small, nocturnal Amish communities. In April he travels to southern Italy where he will teach ancient Aramaic to shopkeepers and develop time travel theories. Andrew

End of an era

Today came the somewhat inevitable announcement that the San Jose Earthquakes' Head Coach Frank Yallop is leaving our team to coach the Canadian National Team. Even before the MLS Cup final, there were very strong rumors circulating that he was in negotiations with the Canadian team but we fans always hoped that the lure of San Jose might be to strong. Alas, our fears have come true and he is due to take the reins of Canada's National Team on January 1st. I have a great deal of respect for Frank Yallop - I had many chats with him, espcially while I was running quakefans.com and he was affable, eloquent, intelligent and an altogether great guy. Every player I talked to has nothing but good things to say about him. I daresay he made Landon Donovan the player he is today. Frank is the one that made sure Landon didn't get to big for his boots. Landon often referred to Frank as a "mentor." A lot of Earthquakes fans are happy for Frank, as am I; afterall he's only been a coach for three years and in that time he's won two championships, with the worst team in the league, and became the Earthquakes winningest head coach of all time. So to seem elevated to the world stage makes us fans very proud. But still, it's sad to see a coach go that had so much time for the average fan. So what's next for the Earthquakes? Well the good money is on current assistant coach Dominic Kinnear taking the helm with Jeff Agoos taking up a unique player/assistant manager role. I'm comfortable with this. Dominic was exposed to Frank's coaching style for three years and they seemed to work well together. But I worry that Frank's eye for talent and relationship with the player maybe unique. I guess only time will tell. As Earthquakes guru Goodsport put it "I'm happy for Yallop personally, but am sad for the Earthquakes and its fans. The Frank Yallop era is now officially over. "

Dukes O' Hazzard

So I'm not sure if anyone will find this interesting but I thought I'd relay the epic tail of machine vs. nature (kinda)The city I live in had recently been doing some resurfacing work on the street that leads to my neighborhood. They had a detour in place for the longest time but towards the end of the project they made a makeshift dirt ramp on the shoulder of the road for residents to go over. Now I'd seen a woman in a Corolla or something get stuck on the apex of the mound so when I saw this I went up (what turned out to be) the very shallow grade at about 15mph so I wouldn't get stuck, not knowing that the other side of the ramp was at about a 65 degree angle. Needless to say at that speed I landed hard on the nose; well actually I landed directly on the gravel guard just behind and underneath the front bumper. As we hit, my brother, who was in the passenger seat, said "Oh..(ow)...that's not good." The rest of the drive home (about half a mile) was agonizing, listening to my poor car vibrate and rattle. I pulled into the garage and immediately inspected the damage. I feared the worst (smashed in bumper, etc) but to my amazement, there was no visible external damage. Looking underneath, I saw the gravel guard had a hole in it and was looking pretty worse for wear. I called my insurance company and told them what had happened and luckily they said they would cover it. Bear in mind that this was about two days before I was due to go on vacation. So once the insurance company said they were going to cover it I told them I was going on vacation and wasn't going to deal with it til I got back. So when we got back three weeks later my brother took it to the local body shop and explained to them what happened. After lots of "Dukes of Hazzard" jokes, they gave him a ride home. The Dukes of Hazzard jokes were started by my lovely and sympathetic wife on her blog :P I get a call a few days later saying I had crushed one of the engine snub mounts, shattered a cooling support assembly and pinched one of the tubes that goes into the cooling assembly. There was a pause and the guy asked me "What the hell did you do to this thing?!" So I told him the story and he replied with the ubiquitous "Dukes of Hazzard" comment. So they gave me the estimate and said it should take about three or four days to fix. Oh, that's not too bad I thought. THREE WEEKS LATER I got my car back. Apparently, or at least this is what the body shop told me, the snub mount (pictured below) had to be shipped from New Jersey because none of the VW dealers in the area had it. Now I'm not one for pointing fingers but New Jersey? C'mon. I have a sneaking suspicion that they forgot to order the part and as such needed an excuse to account for the delay. Anyway, I was so excited to get my car back seeing as it had been 6 weeks since I had last driven it (had gone on vacation right after the accident happened and refused to let it ruin my trip.) When I got to the body shop, they had forgotten to replace the gravel guard (claimed they didn't notice it was supposed to be there til last night) and then when it came time to pay my deductible, they told me they don't take credit card, only cash and check; isn't this 2003? Doesn't everywhere take credit cards? So I sign the paper work, get the car back and thank my lucky stars that this chapter was finally over. Oh boy was I wrong. I get in the car and start her up. Hey sounds great! No vibration! Until I put it in gear...wow...did they replace my 1.8T with a Ferrari engine cos it sounds and feels like this thing is trying to jump right out of the car. Turns out that the engine needed some time to settle onto the new snub mount. It seems to run pretty smoothly now. Moral of the story? A shortcut may not always be a shortcut. ..and as for the best Dukes O' Hazzard comment? I like this one from a poster on clubb5.com "Now Luke, don't be treatin' the General that way in the future!"
Cooling Assembly
Snub Mount

In the jungle...

hippo2.jpg My dad sent me this in an email, it's classic. After some research I found it's part of a series of animations done for French television. It features Pat (The Hippo) & Stanley (The dog) doing their version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Even though it seems like it cuts off at the end, that really is all there is; the creator, Pierre Coffin, claimed that his company was put on another project before they had a chance to finish.Anyway, very amusing nonetheless. File is a little under 5MB and requires sound...obviously WARNING: PLEASE DO NOT LINK TO THIS FILE, DOWNLOAD IT TO YOUR OWN SERVER - I CAN'T HANDLE ALL THE TRAFFIC. You can download the file here: http://www.haebc.com/Lion_seul.mpg

gimmegimmegimme

Usually around this time of year we're all asked the ubiquitous question: "Hey my handsome and venerable chum, what gifts can I shower upon you this Yuletide season?" - and usually I reply with something like "Gosh, kind friend, the air that I breathe and the water (read: Diet Coke) that I drink are all I need, they bring me joy unbounded!" For the most part that's true...ok the conversations don't really go like that, it's more like "Hey what do you want for Christmas" "Dunno" "...k"But the truth is I really don't mind what I get for Christmas. For me Christmas is about spoiling the hell out of people; I get that from my dad. I love buying presents for people. I love seeing the look on people's faces when they open their presents, and the reactions you get, from "Ahh sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet!" to "....what the fuck is this?" This year however, things are different. I'm still having a blast buying presents for people but this year, I'm using a wish list - I know EXACTLY what I want. I always have things lurking in my Amazon wish list but I never publish it or tell anyone how to find it. Not this year. Why the change? Y'know, I don't know. I think it might be a couple of things; usually when I see something I want, I don't have the patience to "wait until Xmas to see if Santa brings it." This year, I have that patience so I've just added things to my wishlist instead of hitting the ol' "check out" button. Also, I know how frustrating it can be when you have NO idea what to buy people for Xmas, and wishlists can alleviate that frustration, albeit slightly. Now of course, as I'm sure some of you are dying to point out, this directly contradicts my feelings on wedding registries. I don't like wedding registries. I was forced into having one for my wedding because of "cultural reasons". See a wedding is (hopefully) a once in a lifetime event, and if people are kind enough to give us gifts, I want it to be something that THEY came up with, something unique that will remind us of them every time we use it or look at it. This isn't a very popular point of view, especially in this country, but it's something I feel strongly about for some reason. Anyway, Xmas happens every year...so I don't feel so bad about using a wishlist. So without further ado, I bow down to the Gods of Consumerism and Materialism and present to you my wishlist for 2003/2004 http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/102-1270900-9076136?%5Fencoding=UTF8&id=1YAW3DPRRCC6O And for those of you out there who have your own wishlists, tell me where they are! Leave me a comment and let me know how I can find it.

Two Linux tidbits

tux.jpgA lot of people I know are your archetypal Slashdot posting, Microsoft hating "Linux" users. Then I also know some practical, reasonable open source supporters who use Linux - like my friend Mike. He's able to see through all the hype and BS and slashdot flaming to make very cogent points about the pros and cons of open source and Linux in particular. I found some interesting tidbits today regarding Linux and the Open Source movement that I thought I should post before they're skewed out of context by the first type of person I described: The first is the discovery of a "major" security flaw in the 2.4 Linux Kernel -"The flaw allows users on a Linux machine to gain unlimited access privileges, according to a security advisory posted by developers of the noncommercial Debian Linux distribution." Ouch. More here... The second is a comment by co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy when asked what his thoughts on Open Source are: "Open source is fine, but it doesn't take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there's nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn't assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don't need to see the source code. I just want a system that works." I couldn't agree more. I don't claim to know much at all about Open Source and Linux but from what I've read, I tend to lean toward Mr. Joy's way of thinking. Some interesting tidbits to ponder...at least for me anyway.

Championes! Championes! Ole! Ole! Ole!

4-2!! WE WON!!! The San Jose Earthquakes are the MLS Champions for the 2nd time in three years....and I was there. Mike, Mindy, Deanne, Andrew and I drove down to Carson on Saturday night. Captain Tindle piloted the Minivan with grace and aplomb. We stayed at a Courtyard Marriot near LAX, which was very nice - I can always fall asleep to the sound of jet engines.On Sunday morning we piled back into the trusty Minivan and headed for the Home Depot Center which is magnificent and clearly not deserved by the Galaxatives. We somehow managed to get killer seats despite only getting them the week before. We were 4 rows back from the field and despite being rather close to the Fire fans, I think we were all pleased with the seats. The game kicked off after the national anthem and a flypast by 2 F-18s. We couldn't believe our luck when the Quakes were awarded a free kick just outside the box after only 4 minutes. Richard Mulrooney, Jeff Agoos and Ronnie Ekelund all lined up over the ball; any one of them was capable of slapping the ball into the back of the net from that position. This time, it was Ronnie's turn, and he delivered...GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!!!! After that, we never looked back, we led the whole way through the match, despite some spirited effort by the Fire (except Ante Razov who couldn't score in a whorehouse) and an own goal by Chris Roner. A great penalty save from Pat Onstad and 2 goals by LD were enough to bring the trophy back home. Sir Frank Yallop, who is likely leaving the Quakes as early as next week to take the Canadian national team coaching position was deserving of Coach of the Year, but somehow the MLS overlooked him and gave it to Dave Sarachan. After the crowd left and we had soaked in all the glory, I managed to snag three of the Champions hats that they give the players when they win (see the above pic.) Exhausted and glorious, we piled into the minivan and began the trip home. After a brief detour to drop Andrew off at his hostel in Beverly Hills (?) we hit the road. A quick stop at Del Taco later and we were back in Tracy. God Bless you San Jose!

The Lion sleeps tonight

rhino.jpg I've uploaded the game drive photos. They're pretty sweet though the video that Deanne took is MUCH better, gives you a really good idea of how the animals looked, acted and sounded. But I got some good shots here and there. Almost all of the shots were in low-light situations, and with a zoom lens, it's rather hard. I still have to learn the best way to do that. Anyway, check them out...

The Eagle has landed

Back home. Actually been back since Thursday evening but we had to dive right into some events on our arrival and now I'm back at the office I have some time to post finally.Well, 5 flights, 54 hours of flying covering a total of 22,000 miles. Yes, it's tiring. Our longest flight was 14hrs 19mins from San Francisco to Hong Kong (which btw was only 11hrs 8mins on the way back because of the 140 knot jetstream we were in.) Our shortest flight was 1hr 35mins from Cape Town to Johannesburg. We saw some amazing sites, met some amazing people, ate some amazing food and forged some amazing memories. Though after three weeks away, it was rather nice to touch down at SFO the other day. We received some difficult news while we were in South Africa and in a way, we were a little anxious to return home to family and friends. It was wonderful to see my parents. I hadn't seen my mom since our wedding so it was almost a year to the day that we saw her again. I have been trying to upload all the photos (I took nearly 700) and get them organized, discarding all the crappy ones. I only have a few left to do including the game drive ones which are arguably the most interesting. I also have over three hours of video to edit into something a little more watchable than it currently is. The photos are separated into albums so take a peek around in there, let me know what you think! Deanne is working on finishing off her journal of the trip today and over the rest of the week. So, it's back to ordinary life after three weeks of extraordinary life. Oh yeah, and I can't hear out of my left ear.

Locomotion

Wow, the interweb is slow in South Africa. Not THAT slow, but slow enough to piss me off. Anyway, it would take me forever and a day to upload the pics from our travels so far but I know Mike is foaming at the mouth for some pics of the train we went on for 2 days - so without further ado....
Engine
Engine
Observation Car
Our Room

Day 1

Well we're here! We've been here for about a day now and boy has it been non-stop ever since. Deanne has already posted a very detailed account of our adventures so far so I won't go into details of exactly what we've done since we've been here.I have to say it's weird being in Hong Kong again. Sometimes I feel like I'd never left, other times I really feel like a tourist. A lot has changed, somethings for the bad, but mostly for the good. Prices are still good, the people are still great, and the overall atmosphere is fantastic. I was so excited just to be back and able to share with Deanne all the great places that I was able to see during the 10 years (on and off) that I lived here. Unfortunately, I've had a bastard of a cold ever since we've been here which is making me feel pretty rundown most of the time. I ache and we've been doing a lot of walking which is tiring but I think adrenaline is counteracting some of the discomfort. Well I'm off to seek some herbal remedies, I'll post more later. I've posted the first round of photos at http://www.haebc.com/gallery/Trip