I’ve been trying different noise cancelling headphones but none of them gave me a good satisfaction. During the summer I finally got the QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphone from bose. The main reason was that I had to fly long routes often between august and october and sitting in the back of a noisy and cramped coach for 12 hours is no fun. Honestly it is so noisy, especially in an old B747 or 767, that it is painful to listen to something else that the loud ambient noise of the plane racing in the sky at M0.85 . The QuietComfort 3 from bose dramatically reduces the ambient noise and it renders the sound from the iPod very clear. No need to jack-up the volume so high that slowly but surely you’ll be deaf.  Since it cancels much of the ambient noise, you can listen to your music at a volume level quite low. The QuietComfort 3 is freaking expensive, but being in a haven of tranquility with a crystal clear sound in a noisy environment is priceless. I use it almost daily in the lab and it cuts down all the background noises like AC and fan noises. It is a truly amazing headset. Beside its price, the main drawback I can find is that it tends to put a little bit too much pressure on the ear. No big deal…really !

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X-ray crystallography : The “gold standard” in structure determination. Yep ! Sometime, it is a lot of pain to solve a structure…but no pain no gain right ? But the result is awesome. Science is art !

…instead we had some great teriyaki chicken thighs cooked on the barbecue along with some yummy sweet mush potatoes and asparagus. A couple of bottles of Bordeaux and some unknown, strong but yet delicious home made liquor from a remote village somewhere…helped to get everything down the hatch smoothly. Happy Thanksgiving holiday !

Davis is definitively a quiet college town with no much going on but I like it very much and I will definitively miss it when I will have to leave. I love Davis for many things: the bike lanes everywhere, the feeling to live in a small village even though Davis is not that small. I like also running west Davis around the fields, the airport. It’s only a few blocks away from my house and it is just great for an easy run.

It was this last sunday (11/23/08), a nice afternoon for a sweet flight to the San-Francisco bay with Miriam and Frank. Masayo was there to take great shots of the take-off.

11/23/08 C-172 N711PG Take off runway 34

Among all the MacOS X releases, 10.5 (leopard) is definitively not the most stable. It’s getting better update after update though. In my experience 10.3.x was the most stable.

If for some reasons you get the infamous grey screen which last for ever during the boot, or if the mac keeps on doing loops during the boot, here a solution to your problem by booting in single user mode.

1- reboot the system or force reboot the system if it is stuck by pressing : ctrl+apple+start button

2- immediately after the starting chime, press and hold apple+s

The mac will start in a single user mode which is just a hoardcore unix terminal mode. At this stage, be very careful because you will have full privileges on the system.

3-  type:   fsck -fy  then press enter. fsck command will check/repair your hard-drive.

4- type:    mount -uw /  then press enter

5 –  type:   chmod 775 /  then press enter

6 – type:    reboot   then press enter. The mac will reboot and the glitch is gone…(hopefully)

It was on March 15th ’08. Nice clouds over Davis.

This other day, I tethered my cellphone (Samsung SLM A747) on my MacbookPro over a bluetooth connection. Now I can use my cellphone to connect to the internet virtually everywhere. The nice thing is that you don’t have wires in you way. How to do it ? First you need a cellphone with an edge/3G network and bluetooth . After it is very straightforward using with Mac OS X (10.5) . Once your cellphone and mac are able to see each other, go to Preference panel / network / bluetooth. Click on “configure a bluetooth device” and follow the instructions, select your cellphone in the list. When it asks  “do you want to connect to internet using your cellphone ?”  select yes. When you are done on the bluetooth panel (network preferences), select “display modem status in the menu bar”. Done ! To connect, just go to the menu bar and select ” bluetooth connect”

The good thing: Internet pretty much everywhere totally wirelessly. The speed depends on the strength of your cellphone reception. The bad thing: expensive since without DATA plan, ATT charge $0.01 per 1Kb. So I added the unlimited DATA plan (MEdia Max Unlimited) to my contract so I won’t have to pay a ridiculous expensive bill.

Saturday (22Nov) I ran the 10K Turkey Trot in Davis along with friends Frank, Miriam and Milena. Masayo didn’t run but she was there to take photos and cheers us up. I was a fun 10Km run despite the very thick fog and the cold. The weather is always great in Davis…but this saturday morning, it was not too great..oh well ! I ran the all thing in 48m 39s  I’m happy with that, and we all did it under 1hour. To celebrate the run, we all went to Cattlemen’s for dinner. I had a gigantic steak (2lbs) called “The Sheriff”…yummy !

California is awesome for many things. Among them, San-Francisco, the bay area, Marin County, the Pacific ocean offer great scenic views especially from the sky. California is also great for the weather which make flying a real pleasure around here. So I flew a couple of Cessna 172 skyhawk (N4624D and N411PG) over the bay area for a stunning and premium sight of San-Francisco, the Golden-Gate Bridge and Sausalito and of course the shinning pacific ocean. Flying from Davis airport (KEDU) is pretty straitforward. In order to avoid Travis AFB airspace, I flight straight over Napa airport at 4500ft and stay above the class Delta airspace, then turn south west and track the Sausalito VOR. When reaching the end of the Napa class Delta airspace, I descent to 2500ft to sneak underneath the SFO airport class Bravo airspace. I translate altitude loss into extra speed which bring the C-172 over Sausalito real fast. Then the view is daunting. I turn south over Marin County and stay north of the Golden-Gate Bridge so air-traffic controllers don’t freak out too much. In this area, the airspace is crowed with aircrafts flying pretty much everywhere at the same altitude (we all avoid SFO class B airspace). Then it’s time to head back to Davis unfortunately. At the Richmond bridge I pull up and climb to 5500ft to clear both Napa airspace and the mountains. Around Vacaville, I start a quick descent which bring extra speed and cooling to the engine. After a quick descent at 115kt, I slow down to 90kt for a left downwind entry at Davis. Flaps 10 and 80kt abeam the numbers; flaps 20 and 70 kt in base; flaps 30 and 65 Kt in final then 60kt on short final. Flare and gentle touchdown. It’s done already ? Maybe I should taxi back to runway 16 for some more fun don’t you think ?

A nice and easy bike ride between Davis and Winters. It’s definitively one of my favorite local bike ride with zero difficulties, little traffic most of the time and a nice scenic view. With a grand total of only 42Km, the round trip Davis<->Winters can be done in 2H with a comfy coffee break at the Steady Eddy’s Coffee House in winters. I like to ride my bike “Bullitt” on those country side roads. Bullitt is fast as hell. She’ll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself. Oh yeah !

Welcome to my brand new sparkling website dazzlingly craft by Thomas (www.zenhysteria.fr)

Thomas is still working under the hood to fine tune the engine, but soon it will be fully operational. 

Stay Tuned !