Merry Christmas

To the 2 of you out there that actually read this, Merry Christmas.  I posted my Christmas letter on my server.

Flight Log 2010-12-23

Matt is home this week (until Christmas morning), so it seemed like a good time to go fly. When I reserved the plane, it looked like it was supposed to be clear and sunny, but that isn't what we ended up with. Temp -1°C, alt 30.35, winds 300@09, clouds few @ 2500, overcast @ 3600. Matt actually spent most of the flight on the controls (except for in the pattern). He needed to knock some significant rust off, he did lots of steep turns, S-turns across a road, etc.  Since I haven't flown over snow in a while (a year or more, obviously), I had forgotten how difficult it is to pick out Buckeye Lake when it is covered with ice and snow.  Ah, well, as the say "a bad day flying beats a good day doing just about anything else."  1.2 on the Hobbs and some good crosswind landing practice.

Flight Log 2010-11-03

Just out to APE, then the GPS 27 and around the pattern.

fun with Google Earth

GSE (GIAC Security Expert)

I haven't posted much recently because the last 6 weeks have been very busy for me.  As I noted earlier, over Labor Day, Sherry & I took a 10 day trip.  Since then, I had a 3-day trip to DC for work, followed by 1 day home and then 10 days in Vegas.  That 10-day trip included 2 days sitting for the GIAC GSE hands-on lab.  The GSE is an interesting certification.  It requires at least 3 other certifications before you are eligible to sit for it.  There is then a 150 question, 3 hour proctored "written" (online multiple choice) exam and if the score on that is high enough you can register for the hands-on lab.  The lab is 2 days of actually demonstrating you can do the things described in the 3 underlying certifications.  I won't go into the exact things covered in the exam, in part because we signed an NDA and ethics pledge before we began the labs, but some of the prep materials describe it in general terms.  Chris Mohan was 1 of the other 8 people who sat with me for the exam.  In his blog, he wrote a nice story about his experience.  I was pretty nervous going in because, with all the travel immediately before, I didn't get to study as much as I would have liked.  The 2 days were long, but at the end of the second day, I was pretty warn out, but my first thought was "I expected it to be worse."  That left me feeling cautiously confident.  One of the hard things was, unlike in previous years (and due to the number of us taking the exam), the results would not be known immediately.  We were told that we would have the results within 30 days.  Fortunately, it didn't take that long.  Last evening, I received the e-mail telling me that I had passed the lab.  The results haven't been posted on the web site yet, but I'm proud to say I am one of at least 24 28 persons who have achieved this elite certification.

The Reds win the pennant! The Reds win the pennant!

Okay, so they actually clinched the NL Central title last Tuesday, but I'm slow getting around to writing this up.  This is a good feeling that we Reds fans haven't had in a while.  After 15 long years, we are back in the playoffs.  They didn't finish off the year quite as strongly as I had hoped (they should have had home field in this round), but Jay Bruce is on fire right now, and the (presumptive) NL MVP Joey Votto has come out of his mini-slump.  I was kind of surprised that it was Cueto rather than Wood in the starting rotation for this round, but with Wood and Bailey both pitching well here at the end of the year, I don't think any of the starters (except perhaps Arroyo) will have a really long leash.  If the good versions of Volquez and Cueto show up, this series against the Phils could really be a pitching duel.  As much as their rotation scares me, we are actually 3-1 against them (Halladay, Coles, and Oswalt).  Plus, the Browns and Buckeyes both won this weekend, so I'm loving life right now.

50 @ 50 status update

Yup, two posts in one day from me.  We got home Monday from a 10 day, 3400+ mile road trip.  We went up to Grand Forks, ND to see Matt, then to Medora, ND for the musical, then to Miles City, MT where I checked off state #48, then to Sturgis, SD to check out a cemetery where some of Sherry's relatives are buried (I have geo-tagged photos of the tombstones that she'll probably put up on ancestry.com soon), then to Rapid City, SD, then Mt. Rushmore, then over to Sioux Falls to pick up my mother, back to Mitchell for a family reunion, then down across Iowa to the Amana Colony, to Galesburg, IL and on home.  It was a lot of driving, but we had a good time and it was great to spend time with Matt and my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  As a result, I have now been in all of the contiguous 48 states.  The only remaining ones to accomplish 50@50 are, of course, Alaska and Hawaii.

Flight Log 2010-09-10

A beautiful day to go flying.  Temp: 19°C, winds variable @ 03, altimeter 30.07, clear.  It was a bit windy at altitude, but still a great day.  The purpose of today's flight was to get some instrument practice with the autopilot.  I've used the autopilot en route before, but I've never actually flown a complete approach with it, I always hand flew from the FAF.  Today, I finally flew a coupled ILS (though there was a button pushing problem with me on the first one, so only the second ILS was actually coupled).  2 x ILS22 @ KZZV followed by the GPS27 @ KVTA (circle to land on 9).  A very productive 1.6 hours.  Unfortunately, I didn't get the tracker started (and up on the glare shield) so I don't have the track on Google Earth which I hope to start doing on future flights.  I still need to work on my checklist discipline a bit.  Ah, well, a great day flying.

Flight Log 2010-07-15

Instrument practice with a safety pilot. Temp 29°C, wind 220@06, alt 30.08, hazy and hot. I was originally going to go "in the system" and do some practices into KLCK or KCMH, but when I looked at the NOTAMs, the glide slope was out of service at LCK, one of the runways was closed for a few hours at CMH, the APE VOR is still out of service (though the TACAN should be back in at the end of the month), so I decided to do the ILS22 @ ZZV including the DME arc (it has been years since I did one of those) and the full missed approach procedure including hold, then another ILS22, then the GPS27 back into VTA. By that time, I was starting to get nauseated and was very hot, so I called it a day there. It was clear that I need more practice. I hand flew everything, my scan was pretty sad, I failed to hold altitude a couple of times and heading a few more. On the approaches themselves, I didn't go full deflection, but I did over-correct a few times. Had it been actual conditions at my personal minimums, I would have gotten in, and I didn't bust anything so bad that I would have failed an IPC or checkride, but I must get more practice before I fly again in (hard) actual IMC.

Flight Log 2010-06-29, etc.

Tuesday was a very busy day, but one of the results was a successfully completed flight review. My hour of ground was actually kind of fun. Harold had a couple of quizzes for me that I did pretty well on and we reviewed some of the FAR/AIM that I haven't looked at recently. Then we went out for some air work. Temp was 22°C, altimeter 30.03, wind at the surface was reported as 070@06, but was closer to a 90° crosswind as we got going and about 100 feet up it was probably closer to 20 knots. We did the GPS27 approach and circle to land on runway 9, then actually ended up spending most of the hour on crosswind landings (which is not a bad way to spend an hour). One thing I discovered is that I'm much more comfortable landing (or taking off) with a crosswind from the right than I am with one from the left, so it was good practice with this one coming from the left. Ended up with exactly the required 1.0 on the Hobbs, so I've jumped through that hoop for the FAA and I'm good for another two years.

Tuesday was also Erin's 22nd birthday and my parents had called the previous week to say they were bringing my nephew up to visit Cincinnati, so we all went to see the Reds play at Great American Ballpark. It was a pretty good game, but not the outcome I would have preferred. Joey Votto hit a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 9th to tie the game, but then Arthur Rhodes had his first bad outing really of the season and gave up 3 runs without retiring a batter in the top of the 10th, so the Reds lost to the Phillies (I suppose my baby sister was probably happy about that). Oh, well. So, all-in-all, a mostly enjoyable day. We did the traditional birthday meal at a (new) Japanese steakhouse on Wednesday instead and that was also nice.

On Wednesday, I finally (after 6 years) got my online logbook working the way I had envisioned it from the beginning, so it now pulls from the database dynamically rather than just showing static pages that I had to manually update everytime I updated the database. Unfortunately, I haven't configured the widget at the left here to do so yet, maybe next year.

Oh, and one more thing

One thing I forgot to mention in that last post was the James Taylor/Carole King concert. I've been a huge fan of James Taylor since the mid-1970s, but I had never seen him in concert. The last time he was in central OH, I had to teach the night he was here. When I heard he was coming to town again, I really wanted to finally see him. I figured this may be about my last time, 'cuz face it, neither of us is getting any younger (although for 62, his voice was in unbelievable form, but I'm getting ahead of myself). A couple of weeks before the concert, I asked Sherry if she wanted to go and we got a couple of the less expensive tickets in the upper level of Value City Arena. My overall impressions were that it may have been one of the best 2 or 3 concerts I've ever been to. Carole admitted she was suffering from a cold and her voice was a little "off" at times, but then she never had the greatest voice and she is 68. I thought she sounded better in person than on the Troubadour Reunion CD that I heard over at Beau and Cyndy's the week before. There were a couple of songs I hadn't heard before, I really enjoyed both of the duets with just guitar, but the biggest applause of the evening were for the fantastic performance of Fire and Rain. Just a great evening.

Random Thoughts: Smokey, stress, depression, weather

I don't know if anyone out there actually reads this.  I really started doing this mostly for myself, but I have told a few people about it.  If there is still anyone out there, you've no doubt noticed that I haven't been posting much lately (except my occasional flight log).  There a a few reasons for that and I'll touch on most of them in this post.  I've actually been somewhat more active on Facebook and have even briefly considered shutting this down, but for the time being I think I will leave the blog up.  That said, I'm still likely to be more active on Twitter (I'll reach my 1000th tweet this week, I think) and Facebook, but I hope to get back to writing here more often.

First off, on Monday, 26 Apr, my 19-year-old cat, Smokey, passed away.  He had been struggling and I actually thought we were going to have to put him down in Feb., but he hung in there until the end of Apr.  Unfortunately, that was a day that I had to teach, so I probably had the worst class I've ever taught that evening.  This was probably even more difficult for me than when Ellie passed away.  I really didn't have a lot of use for cats when Smokey wandered into my life, but he adopted me and for the next 16 years, he was my cat.

One of the other reasons that I haven't posted much has to do with stress in my life.  In fact, moreso than I really realized until about the last week.  In Jan, my friend Lenny asked me to write some new material for his malware analysis class for SANS.  It was something I really wanted to do, but I had a lot of trouble concentrating on it and really didn't get quite as much written as I would have liked, though Lenny seems quite happy with my material.  Couple that with a pretty short deadline (only two weeks because someone else had originally agreed to do that part but had to back out at nearly the last minute) and the SANS class that I mentored from Feb-Apr and TA-ing at SANS 2010 in Orlando, and some stuff that I really needed to get done at work, oh, and Erin had a rough quarter, too, and preparing to sit for the GSE exam, and I was having trouble concentrating on anything or getting anything accomplished.  In fact, I still owe Lenny an appendix from Feb, that I hope to write this month yet. Well, the class I was mentoring ended the first weekend in May.  I passed the GSEC certification exam in Mar (with a 93, I think), and the GSE written 2 weeks ago (with a 98.67% that should have been 100%).  All of those have helped.  Also, for the last week or so, I've been making a concerted effort to simplify and only work on one thing at a time and as a result, I've had the two most productive weeks at work in over a year.  Oh, and on Monday, we should close on our refinancing on the house which will lower our interest rate and allow us to roll half the credit cards into it.  This should result in us being completely debt-free in 7-10 years.  The take-away from that is, I need to learn how to remove some of the stress in my life.  I think that has also resulted in my weight remaining stagnant (202±2) rather than getting down where I expected it to be by now (about 195).

Another topic I wanted to touch on, as listed in the title of this post, is depression.  Until I lived with it, I didn't really understand mental illness.  A week or so ago, someone I know ran out of their medication and the mail order refill didn't show up on time.  So, this person is off of their meds for a few days and someone who is supposed to be close to them says this person should "man up and get over it".  Would you say that to someone with cancer? kidney failure?  Mental illness is no less a "real" illness, it results from a real chemical imbalance in the brain.  Clinical depression isn't just the "feeling down" that we've all experienced from time to time and telling someone to "get over it", really pissed me off.  To date, I've refrained from telling this other person what I really think of that statement, but that may not last.

The weather this month has been pretty ridiculous.  Lots of thunderstorms and heat, but I haven't been able to get in the pool yet even though I've had it open for a week.  Sigh...  Another severe thunderstorm watch just kicked in and the Reds game is in a rain delay.  More again (relatively) soon.

Flight Log 2010-06-10

Another beautiful evening for flying.  This time it was an opportunity to take my sister, brother-in-law, 2 nephews, and 2 nieces flying.  The first time in a private plane for all the kids.  Temp 27°C, winds 310@06, altimeter 29.98, and clear at the start, calm and 22°C by the time I got back to KVTA.  I also got night current while I was at it (although the cockpit lights in 626 suck).  So, a total of 7 take-offs and landings.  Now, I have my medical in 2 weeks and need to schedule my flight review (and if I can get some approaches in with a safety pilot or instructor, I'd like to get instrument current again, too).

Flight Log 2010-04-17

Very windy day, but I really needed to fly.  I wish I had been able to fly earlier in the week when the weather was so beautiful, but alas, it was not to be.  Not to say today was bad.  It was just chilly and really windy.  This was another of the proverbial $100 hamburger flights (and this time I really did eat a hamburger at KPHD).  I very nearly didn't go.  After the preflight, I was sitting in the cockpit listening to the ASOS and watching the wind sock.  They were reporting winds 320@20G32 and N785SP was really trying to move even with the engine off.  The wind died down a little and I decided to go ahead and go.  Winds at takeoff were 320@14G21, alt 30.02, temp 6°C, dew point -1°C, and clear.  I took off and departed the pattern to the northeast.  It was a little bumpy, so I decided to go up to 5500', but when I got there the cloud bases were at about 5600, so to have VFR cloud clearance I had to come back down some.  When I got the KPHD weather, they were reporting ceilings of 3800' (AGL, which would make it about 4700' MSL), so I decided it was time to descend to 3500'.  I called 10 miles out and another pilot was also inbound.  He saw me and said he was lower and would get in before me.  I didn't actually pick him up until he turned final to runway 32.  Anyway, I followed him in and parked over by the restaurant.  The burger was okay, but you can't beat the price.  Their Saturday special is $0.99 burgers and $0.99 fries, so that's what I had (and then a slice of pumpkin pie for dessert).  I walked over to the FBO, but there wasn't much happening there, so I got back in the plane and flew over to KTSO where I did a touch-and-go, then down to 6G5 for another touch-and-go.  My original plan had been to also fly down to I10, but looking at my watch, I decided I had done enough.  I added 3 new airports to the list.  So, back to KVTA.  Final total was 2.3 on the Hobbs.  The touch-and-go at 6G5 and the final landing at KVTA (runway 27 at both) were pretty serious crosswinds for me (340@14G25) since I hadn't practiced any in a while, but they went very well.

Yes, I'm still alive (still)

I'll post another entry in the next day or two, but I didn't want to let another day go by without pointing out these two posts by Bob Cornwall. Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoffer at Flossenburg concentration camp. I've always had a special place in my heart for Bonhoffer since I first picked up "Letters and Papers from Prison". The second post was about a resurgence in Christian terrorism (yes, the "fundamentalist" fringe of any religion is a danger). Bob covers it better than I, so go read them.

Advice and consent

When I got home from class the other evening, Sherry was watching some PBS show about Dolly Madison.  I knew the name from the snack cakes, but never understood why her name was associated with them.  Other than that, all I really knew about her was that she was the wife of James Madison and all I really knew about him was he was President after Jefferson and during the War of 1812 (something else I didn't know a great deal about, which sounds pretty sad as I type that sentence out).  I now have a great deal more respect for him.  Although accused of cowardice and all sorts of things, he strongly believed that the rule of law was important.  In a time of war, he felt it important that the opposition voice be heard and refused to jail his opponents (as had been done by some of his predecessors who are held up by some as almost gods).  It was a very interesting program, especially in light of my view that Washington is currently crippled by a lack of civility.  It was apparently worse in the early 19th century, although they weren't doing it to posture in front of TV cameras then.  At least, today congresscritters aren't killing each other in duels (and/or otherwise physically assaulting each other) that spill out from arguments on the floor of the Senate or House.  I wonder if Michelle Obama could pull of what Dolly Madison did getting members of both parties to at least talk civilly to each other in a social setting at the White House.  I guess we'll never know because I just don't think it could happen today.  Anyway, my rant today is because several Senators (Bunning is the latest) have used a silly Senate rule to block all judicial appointments.  I know this isn't the first time that either party has played this game, but I think it is time to consider changing the Senate rules.  Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution gives the President the power "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" to appoint "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law" (http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A2Sec2.html).  I have no problem with that provision of the Constitution.  I also don't really have a problem with the Senate voting down a nominee on ideological grounds, that has been happening since 1795.  I would, however, like to see them at least have an up or down vote on the nominees so that the positions don't remain vacant for years on end.  As I said, I know this has been a problem for both parties, but I think it is abusing the advice and consent power granted in Article II.

50 @ 50 update

I guess I didn't mention at the time that I added state number 47 to the list last month when I attended SANS Security East in New Orleans.  The class that I facilitated, FOR408, Foresic Essentials, was a really good one that I think I'll probably try to bring to central Ohio, probably in the late summer or fall.

Pictures from the snowpocalypse

I posted these pictures over on Facebook, but in case there is anyone out there who reads this, but isn't a FB friend, see them here.

Flight Log 2010-02-19

A beautiful day for flying (and in the midst of the snowpocalypse that is saying something). Today was the one clear day between rounds 3 and 4 of the continuing parade of snow storms. The temp was -1°C, wind 260@04, altimeter 30.15". Officially, clear with 8 mile visibility, it was a little hazy horizontally, but brilliant blue when you looked up. At altitude, you could see "cloud" tops, so the haze was real. I did some soft-field takeoffs and landings and just enjoyed the day. One nice thing about winter flying, it was smooth as glass. You could take your hands off the wheel and just fly with your feet. This is why I love being a pilot.