Flight Log 2011-03-03

Sigh... I didn't get the flight track data because I was looking at the wrong button on the side of the device.  Oh, well.  Beautiful day for flying.  A little windy, but it is March, so not really unexpected.  Not bumpy at all, which came as a surprise given the wind.  Just takeoffs and landings.  Temp -4°C, alt 30.57, wind 090@09 (windier at altitude, around 25kt), clear.

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.