darryl ramm’s blog

I have wanted to try flying a large wingspan open class glider for a while and now that the Williams Soaring Center has an ASH-25 “25H” available for rent I had to try it out. ASH-25s can have different wing tip/winglet options, and 25H as I flew it has a wingspan of 25.6 m. That’s 84 feet, or about three quarters of the wingspan of a Boeing 737 jet. The ASH-25 has an about a 60:1 glide ratio. For the mental arithmetic impaired, that means a theoretical glide range of about 110 miles from a height of 10,000 feet.

I flew with Kenny Price the instructor at Williams Soaring Center. Kenny has lots of time instructing and mentoring in ASH-25s. I really just wanted to see what flying such a large glider felt like and we only had time for two flights but I got the bug flying it so I’ll finish doing the rest of a checkout with Kenny as I get time.

The undercarriage in the ASH-25 is only lockable from the front seat. The rear seat passenger/pilot can assist moving the heavy gear with their undercarriage lever, this is similar as the original Duo Discus, something fixed in the Duo Discus X and XL.

The front seat is very comfortable, and high off the ground. You are sitting fairly reclined with a great view because of the low cut canopy rail. This reminded me of my DG-303 glider cockpit. The elevator trim indicator is on the right side of the cockpit, where in my ASH-26E it is on the left side, so I was always looking in the wrong place for the trim indicator.

It turns out this is the only glider I’ve flow with a CG tow hook, I’ve just been lucky and all other gliders I’ve flown have had a nose hook. Two reminders from Kenny to remember to pick up any dropped wing (should it occur) with rudder and not to let the glider balloon. With all that wing on the glider, pilots new to the ASH-25 apparently often have problems with it ballooning up behind the towplane as it starts to fly. I was probably overly worried about this and held the glider down too long on the first take off. Once I relaxed things got better quickly. On the second take off off it did drop the left wing a little and some right rudder brought it up.

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I had a great early season soaring flight out of Williams Soaring Center on March 1st, with an over 4 hour, 460km flight along foothills on the eastern edge of the Mendocino Mountain range. This was a chance to try out my SPOT Satellite Messenger again. The SPOT messenger is capable of sending manual “OK” and emergency messages my interest is using the messenger in “SPOTcast” mode where position reports (latitude, longitude and time, but not altitude) are sent automatically every 10 minutes.

SPOTcast messages are available on the SPOT website but unlike the manually sent messages they cannot be sent through email or SMS messaging. There is no ability to preview the web site before you purchase a SPOT so people often believe the SPOT web site can do a lot more than it currently does, and for example people assume that the SPOTcast messages get automatically displayed on a map and updated as new position reports come in. What is actually available is much simpler, current SPOTcast messages are displayed in a table, you select the ones you want plotted and click a button to plot on a Google map. See images of this user interface in my previous blog post on SPOT.

The SPOT messenger appeared to work flawlessly, as it has previously. An interesting recent addition to the SPOT website allows the SPOTcast reported locations to be saved in Google Earth kml file or GPS Exchange (GPX) formats. If you are interested in playing with this in Google Earth, here is spot_messages.kml the file containing the SPOTcast position reports from the SPOT web site and 831c4fv1.kml the kml flight trace produced from my flight logger submission to the OnlineContest (OLC). Just open both files in the same Google Earth session and you should see them overlaid as in the large screen shot image linked to the thumbnail above. In Google Earth you can click on each square “Track” point to show the corresponding time and latitude and longitude coordinates.

I’m still on my first set of Energizer AA Lithium batteries after several flights of several hours each. So while I’d have prefered the ability to use external 12 volts DC power, it does not look like battery life is an issue.

This year’s Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention is in Albuquerque, NM, with main sessions running Thursday February 14th to Saturday February 17th.

I was working on what I wanted to see at the convention and arranging some side meetings and I ended up taking the convention schedule from the SSA Web site and reformatting it into an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet can generate a tab separated text file suitable for importing into Microsoft Outlook or to be printed or saved as a PDF. I’ve attached all formats here. In my case all I care about is having the schedule in my iPhone, I import the tab separated file into Outlook and then synch my iPhone to Outlook.

SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.xls (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.pdf (One page schedule printed from spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.txt (Tab delimited text file saved from spreadsheet)

An example of how to import the tab delimited text file into Microsoft Outlook using the Import and Export Wizard is show below. This was tested with Outlook 2003 but other Outlook versions should work similarly.

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I’ll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I’m impressed by the SPOT messenger and I will be using it in my glider, particularly when flying in remote areas to automatically track my location and as a supplement to my existing McMurdo Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). I purchased my SPOT messenger from my local REI store, it is also available at REI online.

SPOT is a subsidiary of Globalstar, the satellite phone company. The SPOT satellite messenger has an internal GPS receiver and sends the GPS coordinates and message type info via the Globalstar L-band simplex data network. Message types available are an automatic tracking message, or manually triggered events - a “911″ distress alert, a less severe “help” message or just an “OK” message.

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So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I’m at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I’ll just whine about Flickr Uploadr 3.0 — the down-loadable utility that is supposed to make uploading photos easier, well previous versions did, the current one is just broken.

Build 3.0.2 at least is broken on Windows XP SP2. Starting with the big one - the actual button to upload images never appears, oops bit of an oversight there. And lots of sloppy UI things — like not having any rollovers/hints in the UI. And when you view Upload>Preferences but don’t change anything you still get a dialog box saying you changed preferences and asking you whether you want to apply those changes to the current photos. Dragging the main window frame out larger and smaller shows strange behavior of an horizontal scrollbar on the right panel if you resize the window enough to have a vertical scroll bar on the right panel. Don’t they know how to do basic UI QA? There appears to be other strange things going on as well. The vertical partition between the panel should be re-positionable. And on and on…

How do you mess up something so simple and then actually want to release it?

Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including running VMware Fusion.

My MacWorld wish list would be for a 17″ high resolution screen model, with

• Intel Penryn procesor (6MB L2 cache) at 2.6 GHz
• An internal dual layer Blu-ray superdrive (ultradrive?), I guess that would make it something like a BD-RE/BD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/CD optical disk, phew. The ability to play blue ray movies would be a bonus (but not required). Fastmac already has an aftermarket Blu-ray drive available for the MacBook Pro.
• Increased express card connectivity. Ideally two seperate ExpressCard universal slots instead of the single /34 slot in the current MacBook Pro models.  Universal slots accomodate /54 as well as /34 cards. I suspect there would actually be space to put two universal slots on a 17″ MacBook Pro. Failing that one universal and one /34 slot would do. These would give me the ability to carry around an expresscard/54 CF Card reader (for my Digital SLR camera) internally in the universal slot and an expresscard/34 SATA-II controller for hooking up lots of disk for video editing. I’d like Apple, to at least make the single /34 slot a universal slot.

C’mon Santa I’ve been a good boy can I please have these wishes :-)

I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.

I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase - Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.

Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.

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I love it when companies do creative “in your face” marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the following move by Alexander Schleicher against DG Flugzeugbau, two of the leading German sailplane manufactures, pretty funny.

Schleicher make the ASH-26E motorglider I fly, DG make the nice DG-1000S two seat glider I’ve enjoyed flying as a member of BASA (Bay Area Soaring Associates) and they designed the DG-303 sailplane I used to own. Hugh Milne a fellow Californian ASH-26E pilot returns from visiting friends in Germany and forwarded the photos here and this story.

In Spring 2007 DG delivered a new DG-1000S sailplane to HVL (Hamburger Verein für Luftfahrt), one of the largest Hamburg soaring clubs. With new sailplanes this normally involves a long wait, eager anticipation and exchange of lots of money. But the club members do not like the brown trim stripes on this glider. I’m not sure who specified brown, it’s a pretty unusual color for glider trim, anyhow the club members did not like the color. Since the club really wants their sailplane, they accept it, but have contacts at Alexander Schleicher and so drive it across Germany to the Schleicher factory in Poppenhausen so they can replace the trim on their competitor’s brand new sailplane.

Schleicher replaced the standard DG trim stripes with the latest style of their own distinctive “swoosh” underneath the canopies and added a little sign on the tail, which I am told means “With the best friendly greetings from Poppenhausen”. I think the Schleicher swoosh looks a lot better and more modern than the usual plain DG trim strips. Schleicher apparently charged about 300 Euros to cover the cost of materials. I bet the Schleicher factory had fun doing this.

I have heard from a HVL club member who flies the DG-1000S in contests etc. that it often takes other pilots quite a while to realize what is different with this glider.

There are photos of this DG-1000S online on the HVL club website.

The DG-1000S is a good glider, and by the way if you are a glider pilot and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, BASA have both a DG-1000S and DG-505 in their club fleet.

[This post has been corrected, only the trim was repainted, the base white paint on the DG-1000S was fine, and there was only one DG-1000S delivered. Photo credits. Copyright Hugh Milne, DG-1000S with new paint trim. Eckbert Andresen DG-1000S with brown trim. Used with Permission.]

The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple “companion” for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will be the start of a whole new product family. Good luck trying to convince anybody of that. And I know that “the market” often does not recognize the need for new products until they have established themselves—but the Palm Foleo does not pass even the simplest sniff test for a reasonable product.

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Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really slow menu system they work great.

I just refuse to play TiVO games and give TiVO my viewing information and since I don’t purchase any pay for view events there is just no need to connect. And especially post Rupert Murdoch’s aquisiton of DirecTV there is no way I see the TiVO hating DirecTV folks ever following up on pursing requirements to connect the TiVO units to a land line so they can do their daily calls. Sure they’d love to have the pay per view business but if you are no using that anyhow…

Besides being painfilly slow at times the TiVO user interface on these boxes is better than any other DVR/set top box I’ve used. So I’m not looking forward to what happens if one of these boxes dies.

TiVO was an impressive company with great products and technology but suffered the same problem as companies like Healthion that come into established (and technology backwards) marketplaces and try to shake things up against entenched players. You just know with ad skipping fears and copyright concerns and the past laggard behavior of media companies they were going to have a tough ride. Then companies like DirecTV did not want TiVO in the middle of their food chain. I’d like to see TiVO survive and they are clearly playing around with business models trying to work but since the little TV watched in our house is all DirecTV there is no TiVO in my future.