Monday, August 15, 2005

Today was cool because I went flying at night for the first time. We started out around 7:30 or 8, when it was still light, and practiced some landings. I'm finally getting the hang of landings and can bring the plane down to the ground pretty much all the time without my instructor needing to help out, and most of the time the touchdown is respectable. So that's good. Today I also did engine-off landings, a soft-field landing, soft-field takeoffs, and short-field takeoffs. As you can probably guess from the names, those are variations on taking off and landing for situations when there's a short runway or a soft (e.g. sod/grass) runway. Sod runways aren't uncommon out here; pretty sure there aren't any in the LA area though... you can't have sod runways without sod. =)

Anyway, it got dark around 8:30 or 9, and we did a few more landings, and flew down to Adrian and back to Ann Arbor, all in the dark. It was a clear, calm day so it was perfect for night flying. It was neat seeing all the clusters of lights corresponding to various cities, and seeing all the air traffic coming and going from Detroit Metro in the distance. Flying a traffic pattern and landing at night takes a little getting used to, since the visual references are different. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I look forward to doing it again.

By the way, it looks like perl, and hence the photo albums, are working again.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

The photo albums on this website aren't working at the moment. It has to do with the fact that the department upgraded their web server this morning, and now I can't seem to run perl scripts on it. (PHP seems to work fine, though.) So it'll get fixed eventually, either after I figure out how to run perl, or after I rewrite the albums in PHP. I've been wanting to rewrite them anyway, so we'll see.

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Here are some random pictures.

This is from when I went to Angels Stadium with Jenny and her parents to see Angels vs. Dodgers. Guess which team each person is a fan of.

A couple weekends ago Jenny's friend Caroline came to visit. We had fondue at this place in Troy:

We also went to the Arboretum. I always thought it was weird that they have a call box right in the middle of the Arb:

By the way, I changed the RSS feed so it contains the whole entry, not just the first 500 characters as it did before.