Walking on the Moon

At the Planes of Fame Airshow, Kevin and I ran into a guy who assures us that an RC enthusiast built a flying Spruce Goose. Sure enough, it’s out there.

For a post about a really great event, this is going to be kinda boring. Almost 2 weeks ago, Kevin Lahey and I flew over to Chino for the Planes of Fame Air Museum‘s annual airshow.

If I haven’t said it before, the collection of WWII aircraft at Planes of Fame is really phenomenal, and you can get right up close and personal with them. They have several one-of-a-kind aircraft and many, many rarities. Many are flyable, and on the first saturday of each month they have a special event and fly something cool.

As wonderful as all that is, it really pales before their airshow. Now, I haven’t been to an airshow in a long time. I love to fly, but I just don’t get to a lot of them. This was huge fun. There were tactical displays from the Navy and Air Force flying modern jet fighters and a few aerobatic and wing walking displays, which were all fine. For me, the really impressive stuff was the incredible array of WWII (and even WWI) aircraft that they put in the air. Most, if not all, of them from the Planes of Fame collection.

At one point they had probably 25 flying classic warbirds in flight simultaneously, including 2 B-25s and a B-17. There was also a Spitfire and a P-38. And I know for a fact that wasn’t the whole collection. They didn’t fly the Zero in that formation (though it flew in the show), nor the Northrop Flying Wing.

Of course, I took no pictures. Because, well, I wouldn’t have been able to capture things very well at all. If I get a chance, I’m going to try to get my brilliant photographer buddy Tom Beecher out to one of these.

If you like old airplanes at all, you should check it out.

New reviews are up in BBC.

I’ve been meaning to post some links for a while, but life’s had other plans for me. Here’s a dump of fun stuff on the web.

This is apparently making the rounds, but some clever human(s) have done a pretty hysterical spoof of all the Shakespeare-based teen movies with a Biblical one. Courtesy of the Onion AV Club.

In addition to the AV Club’s other fine work, they also bring me The Hater, without whom I wouldn’t know that the American press thinks that Iraqi love for Lionel Ritchie is news. I also wouldn’t know that the National Review will apparently publish anything. Now I know shooting holes in this thing is, in P.J. O’Rourke’s immortal phrase, “like shooting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.” But just FYI, Frankie Goes to Hollywood quotes Coleridge pretty directly (see #29), but I guess they’re not as butch as Iron Maiden. I see that the “fact checkers” have also realized that Falco wrote “Der Kommissar,” not ATF. It’s amazingly bad work, even on such a puff piece. Though it’s nice to see someone else liked ATF’s version of “Der Kommissar.”
Warren Ellis spotted this televangelist just popping a gasket on the air. The bizarre rant about getting a Ph.D at Stanford so he wouldn’t have to talk to morons is worth it. I hope I remember it when I finally snap.

Heaven knows where Rod Van Meter found this clip of radar showing FedEx arrivals to Memphis as a big thunderstorm arrives but I’m glad he did. If you’re wondering why captains get the big bucks, this doesn’t look easy.

How wrong is this?

I’ve posted my review of One Hundred Years of Solitude on BBC.

For a while, Internet Explorer users haven’t been able to use the holding quiz I wrote.  Brenda loaned me her IE-equipped machine for a little while recently and I think I’ve ironed all that out.  If you’ve been trying to use the hold quiz and had trouble, give it another try.

Brenda and I made a return trip to the Bay Area this week to attend the nuptials of our friends Hal Pearlman and Andrea Leonard. This was basically a party celebrating their marriage, and like most things they do was focussed on the fun stuff.
Having just made the trip last week, the route was fresh in my mind. However, it’s a trip one can make with much more piece of mind when one has full tanks. I like having more gas than I need. The flight out was IFR, but over the top in clear blue skies. We passed through a thin layer going out and maybe penetrated one thin cloud coming into SQL. Brenda was knitting, I was picking out airports and it was a nice trip. We did get asked to confirm and ELT, which we unfortunately did. I’ll have to check the NTSB reports now for someone down near PRB that day.

We stayed up in Pacifica, where Andrea and Hal have a place. Pacifica’s a strange and wonderful place. It’s a really small town that’s right next door to San Francisco, but they’ve managed to keep development all but absent from the area. We didn’t see a house more than 3 stories, and the streets were quiet and pedestrian friendly. We did some shopping, mostly nosing around antique stores and thrift shops, walked the pier and hung out at Nick’s Sea Breeze Motel until the reception. I was delighted to have the room in the plane to bring home furniture for Brenda. (OK, a small knitting cubby…)

The reception was fun with good food, good friends and a goofy and fun band. It was great to hang out and enjoy the evening.

The next day we had time to stop by the Hiller Aviation Museum and check out the displays. It was a well run interesting museum, but didn’t have the more rough and ready charm of, say, Chino’s Planes of Fame. There was much to see and enjoy, though. I found the flying platform displays especially interesting. They also have a great collection of restored very early (even pre-Wright Bros.) aircraft. Great to see that old stuff.

The flight back looked like it would be VFR, and the pre-flight briefing sounded that way, too. We squeezed out of the SQL airspace, and south out of the Bay Area, enjoying a beautiful view of Monterey Bay. However, I heard another aircraft looking for a pop-up IFR into Van Nuys (VNY), which prompted me to check the weather. Sure enough, SMO was IFR. I got a clearance still northwest of Santa Barbara and we settled in for an instrument landing at SMO. It wasn’t an approach to minimums, but was one of the lower ones Brenda’s done with me, so it was interesting for her and fun for me.

All in all a good weekend of flying.

OSHKOSH, Wisconsin (AP) — A woman accused of smothering her infant after she drunkenly fell asleep atop the 4-month-old while breastfeeding pleaded no contest Thursday to child neglect resulting in death.

Now, anyone losing a child is having a horrific day, but it’s really hard to sympathize here.

The reporter has an eye for distilling the sensational, though.

As I mentioned below, I spent last weekend up in San Mateo at Make magazine‘s Maker Faire. As you can see if you follow the links this was an event for geeks and hackers of all stripes to come together and show off neat stuff. Aaron Falk convinced me that it would be fun to see, so he, I, his daughter Katie and Brenda all packed off to see what was what.

Now, for me, nothing says fun like walking in past three vehicles capable of emitting huge blasts of fire, so I knew we were in the right place. The other characteristic of the faire that was to become immediately evident was that they were interested in encouraging kids to play with stuff and that the attendees had never heard of a liability attorney. This was evident when one of the owners of one of the fire blasters handed the remote control to a 3-year-old girl and let her try it out. (I should point out that the owner did supervise the child and no one was in any danger at any time). It was a great “here, you try it” ethic.

There was a lot to see and we spent the first day taking things in. Among the things we saw were:

• An impressive display of lego-constructed computer-controlled trains
• A yarn spinning demonstration
• Intricate steam-powered 1/48 or so working vehicle models
• A set of artificially intelligent blimps that demonstrated hearding behavior
• Pinball machines
• A real time video constellation generator
• A vegetable-oil-powered computing cluster
• A car with a PC hacked into it
• An erector-set-constructed Difference engine
• A PDP-1
• A couple Jacob’s Ladders and at least one big Tesla coil (the displayer of which was encouraging kids to buy old transformers from neon sign repair trucks)
• A ten-foot-high robot giraffe
• A student project from Bennington College: A breadboarded 26-Hz CPU
• Several platforms for robot construction/remote control hacking
• An automatic mural painter

I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff.

There was also a big crafts bazaar – a Bizarre Bazaar according to Brenda – where unusual crafts were for sale and display. Brenda was looking of one of the exhibitors, but wasn’t able to make a connection. Right across from that was a group of people playing polo on Segways, including Steve Wozniak.

We spent the first day drinking all that in and attending the technology fashion show(!) in the evening. Katie was the one who was excited by that, but I actually enjoyed it a great deal. Some very neat stuff. Apparently the designer had been on a fashion reality show that had caught Katie’s eye.
Katie did all right by celebrities. In addition to meeting her fashion designer, Sunday she met both hosts of MythBusters and got her picture taken with them.

We spent most of Sunday building stuff. There was a large room set up for kids to basically build stuff out of junk. We’d passed through on Saturday and were amazed to find this large room filled with 20-year-old abandoned electronics and a vast array of tools (drills, hammers, pliers, glue guns, soldering irons, etc.) open for people to build random stuff in. On Saturday basically every table had a soldering iron and a hot glue gun on it, and all sorts of things were in progress. Again, no concept of liability, and you have to love them for it.

Sunday a few people had gotten hurt or scared and hot glue and solder were adults-only materials. I still got to see a 12-year old take a hacksaw to an old IBM PC keyboard. And he wasn’t alone. Katie and Aaron set out to build a lamp Katie designed out of a circuit board cut into a rectangular box and a spinning set of feathers. Light was to be supplied by a string of christmas lights. They spent several delightful hours building this from parts. Brenda made some jewelry and I generally helped out.

Well, “helped out” may be too strong. I offered fairly useless advice and screwed around with equipment lying around. Along the way I vaporized a Christmas light. We were trying to tell if a power strip was hot, so I cobbled a little continuity tester out of a Christmas light and a plug. Now I remember from shop class that you need a resistor in that circuit, but I figured that the light would get a little bright and I wouldn’t plug it in long. Many of you know what’s coming. Nothing happened when I plugged it into our strip, and Aaron helpfully suggested that I plug it into a known good strip. I did, heard a loud whoosh and looked at my tester thinking “didn’t I have a bulb in there?” I had. The whoosh was the glass shooting off of it as the air inside rapidly expanded from sudden violent heating as the filament instantly vaporized and arced.

As I managed to look like something of a doof and didn’t hurt myself or anyone else, I was delighted with myself. These are the sorts of things that reaffirm my decision to take up computer science instead of electrical engineering.

Katie and Aaron fared much better and Katie now has a super-cool lamp for her room. When we left there we ran into the MythBusters playing Segway polo, and Katie got her pictures.

I can’t recommend the Maker Faire highly enough. even if we hadn’t gotten to touch anything it would have been a great experience just walking around and looking. The fact that everywhere we went people were encouraging us to try out their inventions and play with the toys they’d layed out made it even better. I can’t imagine that they’ll have anything like the playroom going again if the lawyers ever hear about it, so get out there for the next one.

A must.