Shallow Thoughts : : misc

BAM Indoor R/C Flying

I gather indoor R/C airplane flying is fairly common in some areas of the country. But here in the Bay Area, there's been a lot of demand and not many opportunities to do it, so there was great excitement at a recent opportunity to rent Sunnyvale's community center gym for some Sunnyvale Indoor Flying.

Indoor flying has come a long way. I remember a couple of years ago when most of the indoor planes were either "3-D" planes like my skunk plane that can stay in a small area by hovering, or weirdo concoctions like the Mini IFO. There were a few pioneers who used microminiature actuators and other fancy hardware to build tiny lightweight custom planes, but that was an expensive and difficult proposition.

But lithium-polymer battery technology and advances in tiny servos and brushless motors have created a revolution in super lightweight micro flyers, led by the Parkzone Vapor (Dave's is pictured at right). At a flying weight of half an ounce, the Vapor makes it easy for anybody to fly in a small gym or even a large room.

For folks who want something a little faster and more aerobatic, the Mustang is a bit heavier at 1.2 oz, but still flies well in a gym. And of course, there are the hundreds of micro-helicopters that are popping up everywhere over the last year or two.

Pretty cool stuff! Anyway, we had a great session on Friday flying these planes, and amazingly avoided any serious carnage (unusual for indoor flying where there are so many walls and basketball hoops to smack into). I'm a little out of practice and found the flying a bit intense, so I took a few breaks between flying sessions to shoot photos.

For the new year this is going to turn into an AMA-chartered club, BAM (Bay Area Microflyers). Watch the BayRC forums for more details.

Tags: planes, radio control, indoor flying
[ 14:13 Nov 22, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Fossil Hunter -- Real Tools!

(I meant to blog this last month and never got around to it, but it was so fun and silly that I want a public link to it.)

For my birthday, Dave got me this Dinosaur Fossil Kit. With REAL TOOLS! proclaimed the package.

(A few weeks later I was at the dollar store looking for something else, and found out where he'd bought it.)

It's an egg-shaped clod of mud. The REAL TOOLS are a little plastic pick and a paintbrush. You pick away the mud to reveal little plastic dinosaur bones, which you can assemble to form a dinosaur.

Okay, it's stupid. But it was also kind of fun. I have the little dinosaur sitting on the stand beside my terminal.

One of the foot-tabs is missing on mine, so it doesn't always stay in the stand. But that's just one of those hassles that we paleontologists put up with. Not every skeleton will be 100% complete. We scientists also know how important it is to document every step of the process.

Tags: humor, fossil, dinosaur, paleontology, toy
[ 18:38 Oct 17, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

On the difference between techies and non-techies

It's so easy as a techie to forget how many people tune out anything that looks like it has to do with technology.

I've been following the terrible "Station fire" that's threatening Mt Wilson observatory as well as homes and firefighters' lives down in southern California. And in addition to all the serious and useful URLs for tracking the fire, I happened to come across this one: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Very funny! I laughed, and so did the friends with whom I shared it. So when a non-technical mailing list began talking about the fire, I had to share it, with the comment "Here's a useful site I found for tracking the status of California fires."

Several people laughed (not all of them computer geeks). But one person said,

All it said was "YES." No further comments.

The joke seems obvious, right? But think about it: it's only funny if you read the domain name before you go to the page. Then you load the page, see what's there, and laugh.

But if you're the sort of person who immediately tunes out when you see a URL -- because "that's one of those technical things I don't understand" -- then the page wouldn't make any sense.

I'm not going to stop sharing techie jokes that require some background -- or at least the ability to read a URL. But sometimes it's helpful to be reminded of how a lot of the world looks at things. People see anything that looks "technical" -- be it an equation, a Latin word, or a URL -- and just tune out. The rest of it might as well not be there -- even if the words following that "http://" are normal English you think anyone should understand.

Tags: tech, humor
[ 20:48 Sep 01, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Breaking out of the Walgreens Infinite Loop

Ever get caught in the Walgreens Infinite Loop?

You're phoning in a prescription refill, going through the automated prompts, everything's going fine, and you get to the point where it asks you, "If you will be picking up your prescription tomorrow, press 1. If you will be picking up your prescription today, press 2."

And you mistakenly press 2 when you meant to press 1.

Now you're stuck. "Please enter the pickup time in hours and minutes." Except it's already past 11pm, and anything you try gives you "Please allow at least one hour. Please enter the pickup time ..." No option to switch days or go back to an earlier prompt. You can't press 0 for an operator -- they're closed, there's nobody there. But you can't just hang up, either -- what would happen to your order then? What if they marked it against one of your allowed refills and ... gave it to someone else! Oh no!

But I found the solution after some experimentation: pressing 0, when after hours, breaks out of the loop and schedules the refill for 10am the next morning. Sorry about the rush order, folks. Honestly, I would have been fine waiting another day. I just couldn't find any other way to break out of the loop.

Tags: misc
[ 09:36 Aug 11, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Back up: sorry for the downtime

File under "Is it really worth running your own server?":

About a week before we'd planned to leave for SCALE, our router/firewall started acting flaky. Every could of days it would just stop routing, for no apparent reason. A few days before a trip is no time to debug a problem like that, so we re-purposed another router we happened to have sitting around. It seemed to work fine; we tested it from both inside and outside over several days, and everything was working fine.

We drove down to LA as planned, spent a few hours hanging out and having dinner with family, then decided on a quick email check before bed. Um ... check where? There was no shallowsky.com on the net ... nor any of the other domains we host from that server. Lovely. Down less than 7 hours after we'd left, and no way of fixing it until we got home a week later.

Luckily for me, a friend was generously willing to host my mail for the week I was gone (including the associated bucketloads of spam). That didn't solve the web downtime, but at least in theory I wouldn't miss any important messages that came in. At least, I wouldn't miss mail that happened to come from servers that checked the new MX record; turns out a lot of servers don't, and just keep re-checking their cached address for days or weeks, bouncing messages accordingly. Not much I could do about that.

Anyway, now I'm back from SCALE (the conference went well) ... and it wasn't the router at all. The repurposed router is chugging along just fine; it was the DSL modem that coincidentally chose our departure day to stop talking to the net. Never underestimate the power of coincidence.

Sorry for the downtime! Maybe it really is time to move this domain to an ISP.

Tags: blog, downtime
[ 20:03 Feb 23, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Boomer Fest '08

A couple of weekends ago, a handful of combat R/C flyers from Dublin (Calif, not Ireland) came down to Sunnyvale Baylands for a Saturday melee with our local crowd. We called it the "Boomer Fest" since the group includes "Boomer Butch" and there are usually several Boomers among the group's combat planes.

No long write-up, but I did upload some still images and video from the event. Adding streamers to the planes sounded silly (and didn't last long in the high winds), but they sure made the combat prettier!

Kasra tried to shoot some onboard video, but unfortunately the camera shut itself off a few seconds into the flight. Maybe next time.

Tags: planes, combat, dogfight, radio control, baitball
[ 10:52 Dec 19, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Life in the Baitball

I'm flying R/C electric planes again. I'd overdone it a few years ago and burned out; it stopped being fun and I had to take a long break from flying.

But lately I'd been hearing intriguing stories from Dave about the group he flies with at Baylands. They weren't doing the endless hovering-and-rolling-circles that's all the rage in electric R/C circles. (Not to disparage 3-D flying; anyone who can coordinate a rolling circle gets my respect as a pilot. I just lost interest in spending much time at that sort of flying myself.

No, what they've been doing lately is combat flying ... dogfighting. The kind of flying I always thought looked most fun, only Dave and I could never get anyone else interested. You mean, there's a whole group of people dogfighting and I'm missing it?

When I came out to visit, a couple of my old dusty planes in tow, Dave let me use one of his old Boomers (a bit easier for a rusty pilot to fly than the full-on Wild Wing) for the combat. We only had 4-5 planes in the air, but I was hooked right away. Dogfighting is way more fun with five planes than it is with only two. It's still surprisingly difficult to hit each other, even when that's what everyone's trying to do. But even when you don't make contact, it's exciting and beautiful.

When you get a lot of planes in the air, twisting and turning and looping and trying to stay in a little compact region because that makes it more likely they'll hit, Dave put his finger on what it's most like. You know those David Attenborough nature shows where a huge school of sardines or anchovies has gathered, and dolphins herd them into a tight compact ball of shining shimmering silvery streaks, and then the seabirds come and dive from the air while the dolphins are darting in and out from below? Attenborough calls it a bait ball, and that's what Dave calls our combats.

We're gradually pulling in fresh mea--er--new recruits to add to the fun. A week ago last Saturday we all trooped up to Dublin to meet with some east bay combat flyers. We had as many as ten planes all fighting at once. Pete has a video online of the Dublin Melee ... video from a digital camera really doesn't get the feeling across, but it's a start, and gives some idea of the challenge of keeping track of which plane is yours.

Try imagining David Attenborough narrating about the bait ball while you watch the video. Helps a little, doesn't it? Or if you're going for the feel of combat, ditch the narration and play something like the "Asteroid Field" theme from the first Star Wars.

Tags: planes, combat, dogfight, radio control, baitball
[ 21:20 Sep 30, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Wheelchair antics

My mother is temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken ankle, so we've been helping out and learning all about wheelchairs.

I've actually been fascinated by wheelchairs for years. I'm not sure why; maybe it was seeing some of the interesting off-road racing wheelchairs built by bike companies like Cannondale, and the amazing feats of various sorts of wheelchair athletes. But it's been fun and interesting getting some firsthand experience. And, I have to say, Mom looks pretty cool in her slick little wheelchair and black high-tech looking ankle boot.

I already knew about some of the inconveniences that go along with not walking, like all the stuff on the high shelves in stores (fortunately Mom can stand up on her one good leg), and how much more complicated baths and showers become. Not much we can do to help there.

The first big issue where we can help is getting in and out of the house. The front porch is out -- it's three steps down, so no chance of managing it in a wheelchair. The garage is the same way. But the door to the back patio is a lot more promising: only one relatively small step down. Getting out is easy as long as you're prepared for the lurch as the chair goes over the edge. Getting back up with no ramp is the trick.

But we found several ways of handling it. My first tries involved getting a running start and trying to wheelie up -- that works for the front wheels, but the rear wheels don't have enough traction to get over the lip. Dave had an idea worked better: lean forward and grab the doorway with your hands and just pull yourself up. (This is really easy if you can cheat and use one foot; without that, it does take a bit of arm strength.)

Mom found her own way, though: stand up on the good foot, reach down and lift the chair up over the edge then sit back down.

We've learned a few other things:

Handicapped parking spots are almost always full. I'm amazed at how often we've seen this. It's not cheaters -- when I've bothered to check, the other cars always the correct placard. Apparently there are just a lot more people with handicapped placards than there are spaces to park in.

Related: A lot of places don't have sidewalk ramps, so you may have to go way out of your way if you need a ramp.

On the positive side, people are pretty accomodating. One of my mom's friends told her "The seas part for you when you're in a wheelchair". We haven't quite seen that, but when people happen to notice the chair, they do try to make way. The biggest problems have been in places like Fry's, full of nerds so intent on their shopping that they have no idea what's around them.

Good thing people are accomodating, because Wheelchairing is hard work: harder than you think it will be, at least on rough surfaces like carpeting or grass. Good way to build up those shoulder muscles! Especially uphill (though going backwards makes the really steep ascents a lot easier).

Perhaps that explains why, when I've visited elderly relatives in nursing homes, I've noticed that although many of the residents are in wheelchairs, none of them use their hands to wheel around. Instead, they push themselves slowly along by shuffling with their feet, looking like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

And speaking of nursing homes, another minor mystery. They initially sent Mom home with a walker (like the walking denizens of the nursing home use) instead of crutches. I'm curious why. I've tried crutches a few times, and remember them as being fairly easy to use. The walker seems much more difficult. You have to limit yourself to slow baby steps, or else you tend to bump into the front of the walker with your legs as you swing through. It's harder, too: your hands get sore from holding so much weight on your palms. I can see how it would be a good balance aid for someone who moves very slowly anyway. But Mom isn't like that -- she gets around just fine when she has two good legs. I hope she won't be stuck using the walker for long once she starts walking again.

Tags: accessibility, wheelchair
[ 18:50 Mar 31, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]