Clean slate
When we give
Each other a
Clean slate mate,
We release ourselves
Of hate, bitterness
And regret.
We have the time
To embrace and
T’alk face to face
And share dreams
Which begin when we
Wipe our slates clean.
Neil Andrew Granger
Be a tree
Be a tree
A tree takes time to grow
This anyone would know.
Sometimes we feel that things
Should have been done yesterday
We would say to our dismay;
Think of that tree you see
Which experiences the seasons
Of winter, autumn, summer
And spring and each year
Of growth has its own
Special. ring recording the
Wet and dry who like us
Go through good and bad times
In this forest of humanity.
Neil Andrew Granger
Ports for Internet Services
What Camera to Buy???
After having my beloved Sony DSC-V1 stolen from my car..(assholes) the decision must be made …what camera to get to replce it….the obvious and favoured choice is the next camera in the series..the SONY DSC-V3, excellent revies…only one downer with it is the auto ISO setting during the P mode….has the tendency to dive higher ISo valuse during bright lights….reduces the quality…apprently tho u just need to watch the ISo and it is great….
The only other camera I was seriously looking at was the Canon EOS 350D, this cammera is in a totally different league tho…this is SLR whereas the sony is more compact which is what i am looking for…
nice review here http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_v3-review/
also the other golden site www.dpreview.com
will probably go the sony….the first V1 served me well….and all the obvious issues i had with it have been corrected…
Holiday to the North Coast
Well, just finished a nice Easter weekend away, took an additional day of work to make it that litlle bit longer…and to avoid the tourist traffic pain!! Sarah and I went up to Evans head an Tween heads for the long weekend, mainly to visit sar’s family.
Started the drive on the thursday night to get an early start on the traffic, made it Newcastle and stayed with one of sar’s mates, Newcastle is not so bad…..seems relatively cheap place to live which is not a bad thing….got off eraly on the friday morning and drove all the way to Ecans Head with several stops along the way…Kendall, some little place near coffs, and somewhere else along the way..:)…whole trip used 1 tank of fuel in the mighty falcon…775km..not to bad.
Spent the night in Evans Head and then headed up to Tweed heads, went to the beach of course and aslo checked out the Thursday Plantation (Teat Tree oil mainly), stopped at Crystal Castle and picked sar up a little pressies…a nice ring and necklace…Stayed in Tweed for the night and went for a short bush walk at Border Ranges National Park…(Mental note….go back there it is very nice!!) followed up the day with family stuff…
Back to evans head for some more holidaying and then back to sydney on the tuesday..traffic was fine no major dramas….holiday was fine although a camera would have been nice….
and as always holiday not long enough….
Trip to Melbourne….
Well i dont really like melbourne…and i really dont like it now since all i do there is bloody well work….
Arrived down here on the Monday on a morning flight which was uneventful except for the usual jammed in knees and cramps…..curse the small seat pitch on virgins jets…Spent most of monday and tuesday establishing where we are up to in the projet (which is th installation of the Daedulus Line Scanner) and how much stuff the sheeties have pulled out of the aircraft. It seems the project is moving along very quickly and the amount of work we have done currently will be consumed by the sheeties and mintenance guys will be swallowed up fairly quickly. My main job for this project so far has been the Rack installation and the FEA modeling of the pressure box, which has been nothing but painful…mainly due to the requirement of having the ability to retrieve fastener loads from the model, which means there must be beams (BEAM 188) joining keypoints on all of the fastener positions…biggest problem with this is actually modelling the geometry and gett Ansys to do what we want…..key points to remember…
– If drawing in AutoCad ..ensure that all regions line up and there is no strange gaps or misalingments in the regions…which i had to start with….which i painfully removed and check one by one by zooming in to the max to determine if there was any misaligment….
– Find a btter way of generating geometry…..
Once all the data (in the form of a .satfile) was in ansys it was not too bad…..the analysis actually came out real good…and fairly accurate, when compared to hand calcs of Alans….. I have learnt heaps of Ansys during this short time…everytime i use ansys i learn more….
Mental note while i remember…I have 4 days owing now due to the issue of working on Sunday….(3 from last year – 1 this year)
We are staying in lovely Essendon, which seems nice…
will update towards the end of the week…..
Wave Aid Concert
Well again its been way too long since my last plog! This plog however is dedicated to the Wave Aid concert that sar and I went and saw last saturday. Excellent day/nite…. the line up of acts included:
Waifs – missed them cause we were late…shame, i have heard they are pretty good….
Missy Higgins – was good, not necessarily my style but can definitely appreciate her talent…
Nick Cave – never really like him…songs too long and not my style….ate chips and icecream instead!!
Casey Chambers – excellent, one of the few counrty music acts that can make in the ock scene also…very talented singer….her dad is on theband!!
The Wrights – performed Evie (spellin) parts 1-3. The original never did it for me so….what can i say….pretty impressive tho since the ppl included, lead singer from Jet and a few other top bands that i cant remember..
Pete Murray – great singer….top act…plus the girls love hime!!!
SilverChair – never seen these guys before….its been along ime since they played together so one would expect them to be a bit rusty…which they were….nonetheless ok.
Powderfinger – excellent live band….woulda paided the money just for them alone….
Midnight Oil – again…a band who reformed just for this concert…the only one who really made an effort to identify the real reason for the conceert….Peter Garret is an excellent showman….sounds awesome live also.
Got some ok pix of the concert and some neat video footage as well….they had some fireworks during the night….not much to comment on but..hey …better than a kick in the ass….
The walk down cleveland street in thongs was a bit rough….but quicker that getting a bloody bus to central….
Overall it was an excellent day….it was also great to spend some time with sar, time seems to be harder and harder to find now……
Will post some pix and vids of the day on the gallery…..
Mail Server Half way to being completely operational!
Well, after quite some time dicking around with exim, i decided to give another mail server program a go…sendmail was outta the question, qmail i tried but was too fiddly…plus just did not work! so last on the list was postfix….i read mixed comments regarding this mail program…but hey, why not give it a go…in addition it has i good webmin config….
spent one weekend on and off installing and tweakin’ the config file…all up the actual config was quick easy and painless, the most problem i had was configuring the firewalls and bloddy telnet to let access to the system….maybe the system is a bit to secure…or unusable…
none theless the mail server is operational and mail can be sent from the user accounts on the server and can be recieved…..only thing to get working now is the pop server and remote mail delivery!!!
More work!!! – Bring on the SLSA and bloody big holes in kingairs
Bad trend for the plog!!
Well, looking at those dates it would appear i have not blogged anything for some time, does not mean i have not htought about it tho!! 🙂 .What has happened in the last month of any real significance???
not a great deal i am thinking, however a few memorable notes to reflect on …..
second solo flight after a substantial amount of aircraft downtime, surprise, surprise!! second solo flight consisted on 4-5 ccts with the instructor on the saturday morning, it was quite busy which resulted in a number of go-rounds, good for practice. I then proceeded to do 3 solo ccts which all went sweet. Lucky i got a keen instructor who keeps pushing me to keep flying….then again i am just an hours slut!! 🙂
third solo flight, what a gem, scared absolutely shitless but is was fun , no major f*** ups which is always good!! even had a runway change in there!
fourth solo flight…had major head-ache..was tired..first few ccts went well..greased them in….last few were terrible, cross-wind had come up and i was struggling, bounced the last few in…must practice cross-wind technique…
will be heading out the training area for training area training..too many trainings in there!! should be fun..better than flying round in cirlces all day!!
newsworthy item – a duchess came down during the week, it appears the pilots are ok. They were doing a engine failure approach….one engine fully feathered, for some reason unknown to myself the tower initiated a go-round, of course the poor ol’ duchess cant do anything with an engine out! It would be nice to know the facts..will have to wait until the ATSB report comes out.
Spent the weekend of the 23rd up at mums in the lovely countryside, always a nice drive up there…just as long as u dont have to do it too much!!!
Work is exciting as ever, CASA212 is bleeding off, thank f***….no got crazy pod shit….never thought i would be doing this kinda work when i graduated.
Had my review last week, was ok, got payrise and all…still think i am seriously under paided. key points for this month are….do work to hard…its not worth it!! have a life and be fit and healthy…this is more important than a career.
Another item of interest!! had the phone disconnected for about 6 weeks…what a blessing!!! shoulda paided the bill i suppose tho!!..oh well the 60 buck connection fee is heaps less than what it woulda cost to have it on with this household. Speaking of rippoffs…bloody parking fines….fined for parking nose to kerb instead of ass to kerb…the worst part…i went back to the car to put the snorkelling gear in the boot and the parking inspector was two cars away giving some other poor prick a fine….they could have a least said something…lousy f***s
This weekend has been interesting…mums been down, sisters have come out to play…makes for one very stressful visit!!! nonetheleess life will go on..
hopefully the next plog will be sooner rather than later….
Linux….big plans!!!
*did u know u can burn ur knoppix cd onto the hardrive and use it like a real distro….that is so awesome…
*Ultimate Bootbisk 3.0 – excellent live cd….has all the great tools for system rescue and admin, but also has a neat live cd bit call INSERT, which is based on knoppix and used fluxbox as the window manager…very very cool….
* mail server is getting a few steps closer….really need some guidance tho..gotta hit patrick up!!!
Been awhile!!
Well tonite after finishing work i once again went off to goair for some computer therapy…not…i did manage to get the thing working fine, ie the modem and router to work and all the machines obtain access to the internet….bridging was the key…
Was meant to go for my second solo flight tomorrow but again my new instructor cacelled on me…due to night flying or something! not to worry will do it all again on saturday!!
Recently updated half my computer….new motherboard…courtesy of seano , and a new 3000+ XP athlon and 1 Gig of RAM, reinstalled winblows and it runs like a bloody rocket!! all the FEA and CAD progs run like dreams, no more waiting 15 secs for tha darn things to refresh!
Work i flat out…busting a gut to get the CASA212 job done…doing everything in 3d modelling..takes a bit more time but looks heaps better and makes fro much more comprehensive dwgs….plus they will be used again for the next aircraft…
until next time..hopefully sooner then later….
GF gone away and its time to party…
Well i should be partying da nites away but have unfortunetly been spending alot of time do work stuff at home…probably lucky shes not here… 🙂 never get any work done.. and when i am not working i am playing Doom 3, pretty damn awesome..playing it is actually scary!!!
Hopefully in the coming weeks i can get organise to get some specs…been along time since i had them…but nice for a change.
Had a excellent swim the other day after finishing up at Mascot, pumped out 20 laps in just over 20 mins, really had the rythm…
Flying side of life…has com to an absolute grind halt…the aircraft is in for the 50 hourly and to get carby heat cable fixed…darn thing busted just before i was to go solo for the second time….last few flights have been pretty rough due to the extended time off from flying…when it comes back i will definitely look at going 1-2 time a week…specially once this CASA212 and lear projects are over!!!
anyway after a solid week the RSi is setting in!! 🙂
CASA212 is coming to a close…
Well have been pretty damn flat out the last 3 weeks since my last post.. the CASA212 project is starting to wind up…some memorable moments to look back on:
1) FDR install….convincing Arthur that mounting a FDR at an angle is a bad thing…
2) CVR install…i know where i will be put my scared ass if the plane ever crashes….on the CVR tray….probably match the 3500gs the CVR unit is required to withstand 🙂
3) Gps Centre console mods….Arthur did very well with i must say ..much better than any ideas i had, but i have to say the Proe model was so damn spot on…on one dim was out by 1mm!!
At the last count the drawing sheet count was close to 180 pages….pretty hard core!! Both matt and justin have reviewed the project and looked at the aircraft and seem to be pretty happy with the structural fitout, the only issue that was raised was the location of the ELT, it is one frame forward of the originbal location, probably could have gone further back, however the regs only specifiy ‘ must be mount as far aft as practable’ or something like that, so it is not really an issue. Againif want to tie down ur ski-doo or quad bike, u could probably use the ELT mount….darn strong…
‘If u can’t pick the aircraft from it, it ‘aint strong enough’!!
Well i definitely adhere to that philosphy (spelling), i seem to be getting a reputation for making things a little over engineered and strong…rather be overweight and over engineered then explaining to the magistrate why the thing crashed into a kindy school 🙂
Last night about 11 i was able to take a drive out the airport and get some OK nite shots of the foreshore and a 747 taking off…will have to try that again…speaking of images, i have had the opportunity to get some pix of the smick aircraft in the hangar that the CASA212 is parked in, G5, global express, learjet 60, Falcon 200 ..(thats the crappest one in there!!), unfortuntely the pix are not that great but…hey better than a kick in the ass….
Also found out tonite that one of the autoavia boys has given notice…a shame…definitely gonna result in an increased workload on the rest of us…..
Wonder if we are gonna get our reviews some time this year!!! they are already 4 months over due….probably say something next week…as long as the raise gets back paid, am not too fussed….although there are some issues i would like to raise….
Linux…..
well, since my lovely linux boxes work like a dream i spend very little time on them….i guess this is good….i will be however trying to get my email system up and running asap. Got all subdomains up and running, was all very easy…