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Travel

Stuff related to various trips

A little (simulated) flying fun…

If you've been reading here much, or have ever seen me speak, you know that I'm somewhat of an aviation fan. I'm an instrument-rated private pilot (though not current, thanks to family, money, and Oregon weather!), and X-Plane is one of my favorite diversions. I love being able to pilot aircraft I'll never have the chance to fly here in reality, and to fly in weather conditions that I wouldn't dare to go near in a real airplane. X-Plane also features real-world weather, so I can fly around the Portland area in conditions that closely match what I see out the office window.

Yesterday, it was foggy here. Really foggy. Almost all day. So during lunch, I took the Nike LearJet (OK, the X-Plane version thereof) out from Portland International for a little spin. Take-off in foggy conditions is relatively straightforward--full thrust, max rate of climb, maintain runway heading (instrument departure procedure? Nah!), and I broke out into the blue skies above at about 3,500 feet above the ground. I flew off to a clearer airport for a couple touch-and-goes, then headed back to Portland. Given the fog, an instrument approach was definitely required. I chose the ILS for runway 28R, and maneuvered the plane towards the final approach course.

Then I got lazy, something I couldn't ever do when flying instruments in the Piper Warrior I trained in: I set up a fully-coupled autopilot approach, including auto-throttles. As pilot, my job was now reduced to system monitor--I only had to choose the desired airspeed on the autopilot panel, remember to drop the flaps and gear, monitor the system's progress, and then the autopilot would take care of the rest. Just for fun, I used SnapzPro to record the approach, from the ILS intercept to touchdown, and uploaded them in case anyone wants to see X-Plane, or what a really foggy approach might look like.
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Why I love air travel…

And before you ask, yes, there's a "Why I hate air travel" post coming. It's in progress on my home machine, though, so I thought I'd post this one first.

Early Sunday morning, Portland Oregon: The weather is abysmal. Winds are 20 to 30mph, the rain is falling lightly but continuously, getting blown sideways. It's not cold, but it's far from warm. Sunday morning traffic is light, and 30 minutes later I'm being dropped off at the airport, saying goodbye to the girls (always the worst part of any business trip...they seemingly change so much in a week!).

Although I checked in at home and have my boarding pass, I do have a bag to check (a larger-than-standard bag is requisite for Macworld Expo travel, in order to bring home any potential loot acquired at the show!). So it's off to the United counter, where the lines are non-existent. A few minutes later, I'm in security, where there are also, amazingly, no lines. The only hold-up here is that removing two laptops, coat, and shoes takes a while (two laptops because I need a demo machine in addition to my Keynote slides machine for my presentation; it's hard to demo a hint that requires a logout while running Keynote!).

Boarding starts on time, and I settle into my window seat in the workhorse Boeing 737 (a -300 variant this time). Yes, I know experienced travelers prefer the aisle, but not me--I hate having to stand up every time a "row mate" wants to get up for a restroom break, to reach something in the overhead, etc. I also love watching the world go by, as it makes the flight go more quickly, and there are often some wondrous things to see.
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Scuba diving photo albums

While on the MacMania V Geek Cruise last week, Macworld published a brief photo album of our scuba diving day in Belize. However, due to the connection speed on the boat, those images are both small and of low quality.

Now that I've had a bit of time at home, I put together some larger albums, with higher-quality 800x600 images. I created a separate album for each of our dive days along with a Google Earth placemark file that shows the approximate dive site for each day:

I've had a few emails asking to see more pictures, so here they are. Please keep in mind I'm a rank amateur at this--what you're seeing here are literally my second and third attempts ever at underwater photography.

A few people have asked about the technology for such images, which were shot at depths ranging from 30' to 90'. The setup is amazingly simple—I have an underwater housing, good to 100' or thereabouts, for our aging Canon PowerShot S30 (there's a shot of the housing in that review).

I use the built-in flash, get as close as possible to the object, and rely on the LCD viewer to frame the picture, as there's no way to use a viewfinder while wearing a dive mask. Bring spare batteries and an extra RAM card (change both between the two daily dives), shoot a ton of shots (as you can never be quite sure what you'll get), and make sure the flash is set to always go off.

The above 35 or so "best of" shots represent about 28% of the 125ish images I shot on the two dive days--ah, the joys of digital photography. There's no real "cost" for taking a bad shot, beyond a bit of RAM card space and battery usage.



Swimming pools, high winds, and waves

Ah, it's nice to be back home on solid ground again! After over 5,000 air miles and 1,800+ nautical miles in the last 11 days, I returned to Portland yesterday. All in all, I'd have to say my first cruise experience was more fun that I was expecting it to be, and it was great meeting a bunch of Mac users in a relatively informal setting (and in a small group, so there was lots of time to talk to everyone). You can read all about the journey on Macworld's MacMania blog page, where both Dan Frakes and I posted lots of text and images over the course of the week.

I thought I'd post a couple movies here, though, as they're not really part of any of the blog content we worked on for Macworld. During the last 30 hours or so of our cruise, which was spent crossing the Gulf of Mexico from Costa Maya back to Tampa, we were in some amazingly strong winds--over 40 knots coming from just off the bow! Couple that with 20 knots of boat speed, and the effective wind on the deck was about 60 knots. I walked to the rail on the forward deck at one point, and it was quite the experience (walking back to the stairs from the rail, with 60 knots pushing from behind, was most interesting).

But I thought you might find it interesting to see what that kind of wind (and the accompanying rough seas) did to the pools…

Despite how things seem in those movies, the boat was amazingly stable during the windstorm. You could feel it moving a bit, but there wasn't ever a point where I felt it was moving too much to walk around. It takes quite a lot to move 55,000+ tons of vessel enough to really disturb one's walk, it seems.

I'm signed up for another "tour" on MacMania VI, headed up the inside passage to Alaska from Seattle in late May of next year. I'll be talking about (at least) Leopard in a couple of sessions, and I'm really looking forward to it--although I doubt we'll be doing any scuba diving on that trip!



Geek Cruise: MacMania V

Macworld logoFellow Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes and I have just returned from a week on a Geek Cruise in the western Caribbean. We both wrote quite a lot, and took a bunch of pictures. So instead of linking to a huge collection of articles, I'll just link to the two relevant sections on Macworld's site, where you can find everything: the MacMania archives for October 2006 and November 2006.

Macworld's site has changed over the years, and there's no longer a section for each cruise. So here's everything from this trip that I was involved with:

Separately, I posted some of my scuba diving pictures from the trip here on robservatory.com.



Roller coaster fun in Tampa

As the six of you who still read my too-occasional postings here may already know, I'm speaking on a Geek Cruise this week, on a ship sailing through the western Caribbean. When I found out that I would be doing this, my wife and I decided to try to turn it into a bit of a working vacation. We arranged to have our children spend the week with family, which let us book our first trip together sans kids in 3.5 years.

Marian and I are both roller coaster fans, and living in the Pacific northwest, we're frustrated roller coaster fans. There aren't any full-size amusement parks in Oregon, and precious few anywhere in the northwest. The closest "real" roller coaster park, at least by my definition, lies 600 miles south in San Jose, California. As such, it had been over six years since she and I had been able to go ride coasters together. But this Geek Cruise, which leaves out of Tampa, Florida, gave us the chance. Tampa is the home of Busch Gardens, Tampa, and they have six separate coasters.

So when we booked our tickets, we left a day earlier than necessary, using a vacation day yesterday to go ride the coasters at Busch Gardens. It wasn't a cheap day, given that we had to take a cab to and from the park, but since it will probably be another five years before this chance comes up again, that's OK. Overall, it was a fun day at the park, though we both felt that only three of the six coasters were worth repeat ride activity.
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A look at the near future of air travel?

As I'm getting ready to head home this afternoon, and with the events of yesterday, I started to wonder where this was all heading...

Air travel, circa 2008

Good morning, Mr. Smith, and thank you for choosing Luxo Air. Please place your checked baggage on the conveyor, and head to gate 23. You're all checked in.

'Thanks for the help!'

You're quite welcome, enjoy the trip!

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Strange things afoot at the San Luis

weird waterI was playing around with Google Earth (a recent Pick of the Week over on macosxhints) tonight, when I stumbled across the very odd image you see here.

For those of you who have Google Earth, here's a location file that will take you right to the spot. It's the San Luis reservoir, located in California off of highway 152, between Highway 101 and I-5. (I used to drive this road often when making the trek from San Jose to Los Angeles.)

The oddity is--what's with the bottom third of the reservoir? Has it really frozen solid along an arrow-straight line? Has it been converted into salt flats? Some strange cover to prevent the satellites from seeing what's hiding in the lake?

If you zoom in using Google Earth, you can see that the odd fill color runs precisely along the edge of one particular 'piece' of the overall image, so it's clearly just a glitch in the satellite or the software that processes the images. It definitely caught my eye, though.