I wish you all the very best for 2009.

Things to do : Party plenty, work plenty, stay focus plenty, have fun plenty, love plenty, give plenty, enjoy life plenty, keep an open mind and don’t take things too much seriously…

• Be more mindful
• Wake-up early
• Drink less coffee
• Read more books
• Stop wasting so much time scouting the internet
• Be more efficient so I can scout the internet more
• Stay focus on my research and my work
• Get a tenure-track faculty position
• Life is good, be happy
• Fly safe
• Write a SF book
• Run the full San-Francisco marathon
• Get a speed ticket with my single speed bike

Here a great story (after the jump) which has been around for a while. Is-it a true story ? It sounds plausible. However, a similar thing happened to me a while back when I was a student pilot flying cross-country in a C152. My instructor asked Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) a groundspeed check in order to cross-checked my calculations. Right after ATC replied, a guy flying a much faster plane with a million bucks avionics in it (King-Air) including accurate groundspeed asked ATC a groundspeed check. Come-on ! Wanna play this game ? ok…

Read more

The winter weather is definitively upon us. We have this very thick fog everyday, a high humidity level, low temperature and bad visibility. Most of the planes are grounded, no flights, no fun…borring. Well, in some sense, that’s good because I have a lot of work to do, proposals to write, refine, perfect and articles to finish and very little time for anything else.

How can I treat myself with this rush of adrenaline I get when I am on short final for a tricky crosswind landing and wondering if I should throttle up to max power and abort the landing ?  X-plane 9 an ultra realistic flight simulator (sic) is here to help.

I purchased it few weeks ago when I was wandering at the Apple store at Arden Fair Mall. Before starting flying real planes I was ok with simulators like “Microsoft Flight simulator”, it was fun. But now I don’t like it anymore because it feels and reacts weird/not right. I might be picky on that one. However, I have to say that I’m having a blast with X-Plane 9. It is fairly realistic and I have pretty much the same feeling flying the real C172. It is just few settings/adjustments away from being almost perfect on how the plane reacts. The program relies on the blade element theory, which uses fine descriptions of specific airfoils to do real time computations on lift/drag for instance. Other simulators use lookup tables to get the lift and drag for a given flight condition.

There are numerous settings to play with and can also get the real-time weather. X-plane automatically download METAR files and translated them into very realistic weather conditions. The graphics are also really nice and it comes with over 80% of the world terrain on 6 DVD. That’s a hefty 70Gb after installation….The source code of the program seems to be optimized but you still need a good machine with a kick-ass GPU fully loaded with RAM to get most of the awesome graphics. It runs great  and smoothly at a native resolution on my 07′ MacbookPro 2.4Ghz 4Gb/GF 8600M GT 256Mb. It uses around 1.5Gb of RAM and almost all the GPU Ram at the default settings. Sometimes FPS dropped below 20fps in VFR conditions with 25+ miles visibility with lot of terrains, trees and some clouds. Other than that, it runs great.

See Ya ! I’m going back to X-plane. I’m trying to get off the ground with a hefty Cessna 152 in Telluride, CO (9,078 feet above sea level) with 35C outside air temperature … I have this gut feeling it’s not going to be pretty

By Andrew - Does your wireless internet suck? Do you constantly loose that weak signal? Are you trying to get on to your neighbor’s un-protected internet from a short distance away (whether they are aware or not)? Does your MacBook/MacBookPro/PowerBook’s wireless signal seem like a tin can with a shoe lace compared to the massive transmitting power of the Echelon Project?

The QuickerTek Quicky is a very useful device to really boost the strength of your wireless signal (and sex appeal and testosterone and manliness). QuickerTek advertises that it boosts your ‘Book’s wireless strength from a wimpy 30 miliwatts to a sexy 500 miliwatts (basically, you boost your signal range to half a mile). This slender aluminum transceiver is also compatible with wireless standards 802.11b, g, AND n!!! The package contains the transceiver, the connecting cable, an installation CD, and user’s guide. It is so easy to set up that a trained monkey with a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics and an affinity to smashing things with a sledgehammer could do it.

The drawbacks are that 1) you cannot use the Quicky and the built-in Airport at the same time, 2) the Quicky heats up pretty quickly and is painful to the touch, 3) since the Quicky hooks on to the back of the ‘Book, it might cause damage to the screen in the future, and 4) it drains the battery very quickly, so the laptop should be plugged in while using the Quicky.

Overall, this is a great little device, especially if you are in an area with a free, weak WI-FI signal where service providers charge exorbitant amounts for slow service. Within a short time, the QuickerTek Quicky really proves its value.

By Helene - Have you ever tried to take a look at the composition of your food, moisturizers, shampoos, toothpaste, cleansing gels, etc? I know, lots of barbaric and alien words. But I really encourage you to do so!!! Let me illustrate this for you. Grab one of your everyday lotions or soaps. Do you see ‘parabens’ listed on it? If you don’t see it, you can consider yourself very lucky! Unfortunately, I have the regret to tell you that pretty much all the products you buy for everyday use contain some form of PARABENS.  Now, you may wonder what on earth are parabens. Well, parabens are a group of low cost and very effective chemicals widely used as preservatives.  Historically considered safe for daily use, they are becoming increasingly controversial. Recent studies have shown that parabens could be associated with breast cancer, infertility, DNA damage, etc. For some of you scientific aficionados, you can easily find all these studies listed in the scientific search engine website pubmed (entry: parabens).  I don’t really want to scare you, but keep in mind that parabens are just one example among many other unsafe chemicals used in daily products. So, be sure to pay close attention to what you are eating and putting on your skin!

This one will be a great addition to my sleek 96′ minivan. A Back To The Future Flux Capacitor Replica - Unlimited Edition for only $220.00. Isn’it awesome ? I will mount it between the train horn and the hawaii belly dancer….oh ! hold on a sec’…Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor needs the Delorean to reach 88 miles per hour to make the time jump…noooo…my mini-van barely makes 65 MPH downhill…I’m screwed dammit !

Ok that’s Apollo 13 mission to the moon…Wanna spend $9,500 for Christmas ? Sure…why not…then you can treat yourself with an Apollo 11 spacesuit replica. Nice don’t you think ?  It features: the space suit, the helmet with the outer gold sun visor, snoopy cap, front / back pack, space gloves, space boots…So you can look awesome for any kind of situation: shopping at Walmart, Halloween or just to be ready when the evil aliens will finally take over earth and suck-out all our atmosphere…spooky…

link

After having a great time flying for many years there is a place where planes come to die. Those boneyard are filled with carcass scattered everwhere. One of the good place to find amazing parts like cockpits, etc… is at Aviation Warehouse (El Mirage, CA ). One of these day I will treat myself with a full B747 cockpit.  Oh yeah ! I’m sure it will look awesome in my living room… ….hint for a Christmas gift for you guys : A full cockpit of a F14 tomcat so I can seat in there and watch Top-gun with Maverick saying “You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re dead.”….hahahahaha !

a link with some great photos of aircrafts in a boneyard by Troy Paiva

A photo I took last January during a trip to Yosemite with my very close friends . A stunning sunset above the clouds.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is currently selecting 4 new astronauts. Almost 10 000 people originally registered as astronaut candidates, of which 8413 fulfilled the initial application criteria. Out of 8413, only 918 have been invited over in Hamburg (Germany) for the first batch of tests. ESA gave each of the 918 selectee a special gift box with a DVD of ESA activities and a little book about the 2008 ESA astronaut selection. Now we can see this special gift popping out on eBay. Perhaps some guys got pissed off for being kicked-out of the selection program…come on cheers up guys ! The cube thing was tough huh ?…I know, it was a tricky one  There are currently only 192 remainder candidates. Good luck to you guys and keep us posted.

link ; link2

I stumbled upon this today: I just found out that Spotlight (in MacOS X for you people using OS from the darkside) can do some maths on the fly. Awesome…