Walking on the Moon

It looks like Brenda and I will be flying East this year for the holidays, which means I’ll be finding extra excuses to go out flying this month.  Today’s excuse was a trip out to Corona, a small uncontrolled field out near Chino and Ontario.  Corona strikes me as a good community airfield and it’s usually a good trip, though it does get busy there.

The flight out through the LAX special flight rules corridor was pretty uneventful.  The Inland Empire had some haze in place, but nothing too bad.  I heard some people land at Corona ahead of me, but as I came in, I had the pattern to myself.

I tied down and moseyed over toward the restaurant, and spotted this cool Ercoupe on the way.

There are so many cool Ercoupes running around these days that there must be some kind of Ercoupe hot rodder’s club or something.

Anyway, I like Corona because it’s the kind of little field where you can see the planes along the town’s roads near the airport.

Of all the things at Corona that I liked in the past, the restaurant made the least impression on me.  It was fine, but I don’t remember it fondly.  And now I’ll have to remember it. A new place has opened up in the old restaurant’s place, called Bobby A’s.  I talked briefly with Bobby when I was there and he says he’s only been open since mid-September.  He should stay open for a while – the food is good and priced reasonably and the place feels like it’s run by people who care.  It’s pretty much a 50’s diner, but there were vegetarian options, and the breakfasts looked good.  I’ll definitely be back.

On the way out I passed this little vehicle outside the airport security office.  I don’t think I’d mess with a security guard riding it.

As I walked up to the place to move on, I saw this gorgeous Stearman running up and departing.  Boy do I love the old biplanes.

As I was getting untied and ready to go, I’m pretty sure I saw two planes almost meet in the middle.  A Cessna was in the pattern doing touch and goes arriving behind me and going into the wind.  I saw him land and heard an engine run up, which I assumed was the Cessna following through.  I looked up, though and saw an airplane that was coming toward me and turning right to the downwind. Then I saw the Cessna follow through.

I’m pretty sure they were headed right at each other, though they were never very close.

Not a good thing.

Anyway, I cruised over to Chino and got some landing practice in.  I was going to do a few at Corona, but honestly the pattern was pretty busy, and though some people were ignoring it, there was a sign saying no touch-and-goes on the weekends.  I try to be a good neighbor, so I flew the 2 miles over to Chino.

After a few trips around the patch, I filed an instrument flight plan back to Santa Monica just for the chance to drill procedures and practice working in the system.  The trip back went very well.

I’m looking forward to a few more before the big trip in December.

I have a new set of short reviews up on Bell, Book and Candle, covering Three Cups of Tea, Passionate Declarations, and What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

Auto upgrade to 2.8.6 today. That was slick.

Today I finally finished the latest hardware upgrade to ylum, the server you’re probably reading this on.  I’ve been trying to upgrade it in one form or another for a month or a month and a half.  The original goal was to get a FreeBSD gmirror running for backups (along with filesystem snapshots for file recovery).  That required upgrading my hardware because the old cheap motherboard I was using wouldn’t support the SATA disks I was moving to for mirroring.  Then I had another bad bargain basement experience, and a second motherboard with transient lockup problems.  All in all frustrating.

This weekend I stopped by Fry’s and picked up an Intel motherboard and Intel i5 4-core CPU.  Gotta dig the matching boxes:

Matching Boxes

The only problem is that I didn’t realize that this board has no parallel ATA controller until I was standing there with nowhere to plug my old disk in.  I was able to use the unreliable motherboard to move my data and OS over to a SATA disk, which just booted and ran on the Intel motherboard.  Not an upgrade path I would recommend, but overall things are pretty good.  FreeBSD doesn’t quite see the onboard ethernet yet, but that should be a minor problem, and I have a legacy PCI ethernet in there now that’s doing fine.  The new ylum internals look like this:

Ylum innards

There’s some cleanup and tweaking to do, but 4 2.66 Ghz CPUs make software updates fo much faster.  And mirroring should go into use shortly.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and as always we thank you for your support.

Another short review posted on Bell, Book, and Candle.  This time William Gibson’s Spook Country.

I know I’ll want to find this flowchart for understanding Total Eclipse of the Heart again. Now anyone reading this can find it again, too.

A short review of Freakonomics is up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

These get more irregular all the time. Nonetheless:

Will Eisner’s The Spirit #32, Ploog & Green. Some nice Eisner-esque visuals, but really too much going on to too many characters I didn’t care about. This is drifting towards dropable.

Doktor Sleepless #13, Ellis & Rodriguez. This was a nicely ominous issue signaling that the pot that’s been simmering is going to boil over. As a single issue, not much happened (though I suppose one extremely interesting thing did), but in the big picture, I think this is a necessary and elegant timing issue.

Doom Patrol #1-2, Giffen, Clark, Livesay. Interesting. Giffin’s usually interesting, and I like his pragmatic take on everyone’s favorite set of misfits. It’ll be another issue or three before I’m sure I’m happy with all the subplots and new characterizations, but so far I’m interested. There are some Giffin repeating motifs – or pet ideas – bobbing around in there. I think that the director of the supercollider is a nod to an old Heckler character, for example. There seems to be enough fresh stuff in here to keep me around. And there’s a Giffin, DeMatteis, Maguire Metal Men backup, that’s basically a JLI flashback. It’s almost trying too hard, but it’s still fun.

Incognito #6, Brubaker & Phillips. The ending felt a little rushed, but not too much so. Zack squeeks a little more redemption out than I was quite willing to believe, but overall the run was a lot of fun. I’ll show up for the next series. And it dragged me over to Criminal, too.

Batman & Robin #3, Morrison & Quitely. There’s a lot to admire about this book, but I don’t feel its heart yet. I guess it’s the nagging feeling that this is just a fill-in run until the main Batman gets back. I don’t know how you make readers care about characters when their fate is known to some extent, but no breakthroughs yet. Still, it’s beautifully drawn and tightly plotted. There’s a lot to like here, and I’m sticking around.

Secret Six #12 & 13, Simone, Scott, Hazelwood. Certainly my favorite book on the racks these days. Unlike most superhero stuff, I barely notice the plots – they’re fine – but seeing what these characters will do in a given situation is always exciting. Every single issue makes me laugh, sigh, and shake my head with disappointment at an all too real human error. This is really great stuff that doesn’t take it self too seriously. Or too lightly.

My capsule for Vidal’s Selected Essays is up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

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