Marc's Public Blog

My coworkers found a way to tell me that they missed me somehow :)

a nice lifting bridge with counter balancing weights

nice weather

gondola going up

one of the few trams

wells fargo had a 'history history exhibit'

it was a nice little history museum

the guided sub visit from the Omsi science museum was well worth it

it was a nice diesel electric sub

nice torpedoes

The OMSI science museum was pretty good, even if portions of it were closed too due to low attendance (just like the St Louis one for that matter), but at least their planetarium was open, and I saw a couple of nice presentations on stars.
One exhibit I specifically liked, but that most people probably miss the significance of, is the one below that cleverly uses gravity to show gravity as ripples in space-time that try to trap passing objects, or accelerate them and slingshot them by as they get near. One of the balls goes through quite a long trajectory without any additional "trust" like a satellite would as it goes through our solar system on its way to Jupiter or even pluto:

click for video

Unfortunately, after going to the museum, I tried to skateboard to a bridge that was supposed to take me to the gondola I had seen on the other side, but the bridge was cars only and some moron put some thick black rubber tubes on a bike path to count bikes and speed, but those were way too big and stopped my skateboard dead in its tracks, throwing me forward (with the lighting and the exact same color between the tubes and the path, I did not see them). This cost me a nice hole in my right knee and elbow along with other pavement rash, making it a lot less fun and more painful to skateboard for the rest of the day.
After that, the tram I wanted to take broke down and I never really made it to their Japanese garden, so I just skateboarded around the city a bit, went to chinatown and a chinese garden (which were both slightly underwhelming), and called it a day.

For a first year, the conference was actually very well run and I'm excited that we finally have a yearly US linux conference again, even if it means that some speakers won't be able to come because they boycott the US or can't get through immigration. Also, now that OLS is pretty much dying out, Linuxcon will make for a fine replacement.

It was great to see some of my conf buddies again, including Mark Bolzern, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years, and some of the talks were pretty interesting too. I'm definitely happy I got not to miss this, just a few days before I was scheduled to go back to work.

Mark at the linux Pavillion in 1996

Mark and I 13 years later

Monday night, we had a bowling outing

I even got a whole 78 :)

The highlight was definitely the Penguin Bowl run by my friend Jeremy. He definitely outdid himself again, being Steve Balmer this time, starting with the "developers" hysteria walk, and the sweat stained shirt. Absolutely classic!

Jeremy was outdid himself

(click for vid) unfortunately I missed the beginning of the developers hysteria dance

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am :)

(click for vid) the last question was to fly a very crappy RC helicopter to a landing pad

I actually tried flying the heli after the game was over since I'm reasonably familiar with flying RC, but it was an unflyable cheap ass 2 axis (power and some kind of yaw control), so the contestants just threw those things uncontrollably into the room. It's actually a good thing no one got hurt by an uncontrolled RC heli :)

Anyway, the conf was a success, kudos to the organizers and 'till next year.

A few F430 scuderias were there

As well as all other kinds

and other kinds of cars :)

The HOD folks were a bit nervous with my driving: many folks in the group weren't used to driving their cars fast, or had no interest in doing so, which is fine, but that made me look aggressive compared to them, although I was not specifically. The other half was that I wasn't working my way back up gradually enough and was just driving about as fast I felt could. This was kind of the point for me, but at the same time sometimes I overshot the braking zones just a tad, which made the orgnaizers rather nervous, even if I always kept it in check and on the tarmac.
Anyway, I just dailed it down a bit, which made them happier and gave me a chance to work on my line, and that never hurts. In the end, I only got my times down to about 2:10, which I guess isn't too bad, but slower than what I've been able to do before. I suppose I was a bit off that day, which may be linked to the fact that I was half sick the day prior.

this was a slow session, but I got to pass a few cars there, which is good for video (click for vid)

However, I was also able to use lunchtime to fly my RC plane around the track and take a bunch of mid res pictures (see other post)

short video with takeoff from turn 11 (click for video)

turns 10, 11, 12-13

another vantage point

both straights

5, 6, 7

better view of 14-15

5 looks kind of flat from the sky :)

closeup on 14

another vantage point of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15

Shot of one of the instructors who went out for fun during lunch

I did a test run of the new camera pointing forward, forward+down, and backward

a forward facing 180 degree view without seeing the prop or the wheels is hard

obviously the prop doesn't look good when spinning

I pointed the camera down some more, it helped a bit

you definitely get a bigger field of view, but it's distorded

but the big field of view is nice

and the curvature on the horizon simulates being at 100,000ft like a U2 :)

pointing back looks nice but it's near impossible not to get the tail in the shot

Here are a few picts, along with my recommendation to go check it out if you're driving by. It's not pretentious or huge, but it's worth the time.

the bay area used to have lots of airports. Too bad almost all of them are gone

the former santa clara airport

I'd totally want to fly in that.... Not! :)

the tailwheel dolly is actually removed before flight

golf car tow to the runway

our tow plane, an old cropduster with a nice biker dude pilot :)

cabin room is limited :)

Hollister runways

tow plane unhooked and flying away

much closer to the rocks as I would have gone in a no engine aircraft :)

wolf was in the back, taking care of the important flying

nice garden maze by the runway

Even though we didn't get any lift whatsoever, it was quite an interesting experience. Thanks Wolf for taking me along.

When we were in Kauai, I signed us up for a flight in 2 trikes, each of us flying one with a CFI.

This was our first time in a trike

Flying the trike was interesting, but from the back seat it was very tiring to extend your arms so far forward to control it. The other bummer was that for safety reasons, they did not allow us to take a camera due to the risk of it flying off into the prop in the back, which would be a problem if it were to happen.

Unfortunately, the flight was underwhelming because of high winds and too many clouds to see the ground (you can see on the map above that despite 1H of flight, we didn't get far). We had groundspeeds of barely 25kts (i.e. slower than our driving on the road there) and didn't get very good views outside of a few places, due to the cloud cover.

This could have been quite nice, but it turned out to be fairly disappointing unfortunately, especially when we were charged full price for their pictures and we only got a few good ones, the others were pointless or bad due to a fogged in lens :-