A few months ago I discovered that I have a talent for writing parody lyrics to popular songs. For example, here's one that I posted to the Dreamfleet 2007 forum at that time.
The situation was that a new user of Paul Golding's magnificent 727 had complained that thus-and-such didn't work and that as a result he could not use the aircraft, which he considered to be total garbage.
The problem was a simple one to solve, something like putting the elevator in the green range prior to beginnin
I didn't realise how quick I was at repainting aircraft. An hour after I posted last night, I'd finished. I then made some tweaks on it and added a few details.
http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e136/dobar1/g-dobr3.jpg
Here was the original from the first flight for those who missed it on the Screenshot Forum.
http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e136/dobar1/2-2.jpg
Here it is, as of this morning, with sponsorship logos. I'm going to do another repaint very soon on it. :D
Everybody knows the term "beta test" but hardly anybody knows where it came from or what it really means. Well, folks, it's an IBM term dating back fifty years and more. And beta testing was preceded by alpha testing. Let's talk about that.
Alpha was IBM's term for in-house testing. Like Microsoft they made every effort to use their own products in house, and to become dependent on them. This was because the definition of a product -- its capabilities, look and appearance, packaging, etc -- c
I was forced to close down Golden Midi after about 20 months of operations. I offered the catalog to Passport Designs, a California company that makes sequencing software. Their having asked me a year earlier "How can we get in on this?", they agreed that we should talk. That phone conversation took place just a few minutes before the La Prieta earthquake of 1989, the epicenter of which was not far from the company's location in Half Moon Bay.
I flew out there the next morning, driving south
I've decided to do another repaint! This time, it's purely fictional. I'm currently painting a Christen Eagle, the one from Long Island Classics. Here is the fuselage at the moment:
http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e136/dobar1/eaglerepaint170808.jpg
It's coming on quite nicely and I'm improving it all the time.
After uploading my aircraft repaint last night, it still hasn't been added. I think they don't do it over weekends. However, I have noticed new files appearing today. So, why hasn't mine? Is it because I used a different technique of uploading files. I'm new to releasing add-ons and I'm not entirely sure about the process. Now, before anyone suggests it, I'm not blaming Flight Sim for anything. I'm just impatient.
Yesterday member dobar asked why nobody had told him that a blogging facility now exists on FlightSim.com. I told him I was writing a feature article on that very subject. I sent it off to webmaster Nels Anderson early this morning, but I thought I'd give the readers of my blog a chance to see the article before other people do. I'm particularly interested in feedback regarding the parody song lyrics at the very bottom of the piece ...
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In a recent news article located
Years ago when our home was bursting with life -- two kids, two dogs, five cats, and a squirrel that like to hang out on our deck to pick up the seeds that the birds visiting the feeder would drop ... Ahem ... Years ago my wife named one of the canines Mildred R. Dog. (Get it?) Ever since then our pets have all had first and last names.
If you're a cat person you will understand when I say that, unlike dogs, cats do not have owners, they have servants. This is especially true of our black cat
Wow, I didn't know this was here. Oh well. How come nobody told me about this one then? :mad: Anyway, my first repaint has been sent to the file library, within the next few days, it should appear. Search for C150ZU.ZIP!
Oh yes. I forgot to mention I will post the goings on at Beccles Airfield when I can! Let's start with today.
When I entered the room, I was instantly told my repaint was excellent. I then proceeded to look at the real thing, just to make sure I got it right.
This spark
Summer ended ten days ago, and winter began yesterday with the first snows in the high country. In a previous blog I suggested an early winter. Now I'm sure of it.
It's been raining for the past two days, almost unheard of for August. I'm not talking about thunderstorms, I'm talking about the monsoon that should have occured in June. When the first REAL blast of polar air collides with this moist air coming up from the Gulf we are going to have ... (and I'll commit my prediction in writing he
From the intro to "Make It Funky" ...
Bobby Byrd: What you gonna play now, JB?
James Brown: Bobby, I don't know. But whats'ever I play, it's got to be funky.
So ...
Me: What you gonna write about tonight, Mikey?
Myself: Mike, I don't know. But whats'ever I write, its got to be a) different, and b) something I feel strongly enough about to motivate me to want to write instead of running the next round of AirBoss carrier landings tests, or taking a nap, or watching Wings Of The Red
The full story of my pioneering company Golden Midi Music And Software is for another day. Here it is sufficient to note that we were the first, and the best, to create cover music sequences that were note-for-note faithful to the original recordings, the business having opened its doors to the public early in 1988.
A number of well-known bands used our sequences as intermission music, including Aerosmith, Steve Miller, the German group Kraftwerk, and the mid-west perennial group Hat Trick,
I told webmaster Nels Anderson yesterday that I would like to write a series of short How To ... articles regarding making simple changes to Aircraft.Cfg for the purpose of overcoming common nuisances. He likes the idea because he would like to see more of the technical kind of How To ... articles.
But how did I come to be able to make such changes? After all, the common perception is that when it comes to FDE, only experts can make such changes because "Everything interacts with everything e
Do you know the limits of your knowledge?
I do.
Or rather, I think I do, and I try to behave in ways consistent with that. When I’m wrong I say so. When I don’t know something, I say so. When I know that a given person knows more about a given subject than I do, I request that person's services as a forum consultant.
This approach to life and to technical matters doesn’t make me weak, it makes me strong. It makes me as strong as the combination of all the experts that I know who are wil
I don't want to get into the issue of climate change. Suffice it to say that I believe the sun to be a variable star on several different time scales, and that average global temperature can therefore be expected to fluctuate on several different time scales.
Colorado is on roughly a 44-year climate cycle though this too is subject to a lot of variation. We have been locked into a severe drought for many years now, and while I thought for a short time that we were emerging from the drought, n
In the Alien Civilizations thread I suggested that we would be able to talk meaningfully with aliens only about mathematics and science. (I should also have said engineering.)
This is because physics, and engineering (which is applied physics) are both rooted in mathematics. So the question on the floor is whether the mathematics of an alien civilization would be different from ours.
My answer is, Yes but ...
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Since I expect most alien civilizations to be more adv
It occurred to me the other day that if intelligent life exists elsewhere, and if that life is civilized, then we are going to have a great deal in common regardless of what they look like or how advanced they are.
For example, I'm quite sure that they have steel. They may have miraculous materials that we would have trouble understanding at first, but they will have steel too just as we still have fire.
Twenty years ago I pioneered the business of MIDI cover sequences for computer bands. As a music producer (albeit a strange kind of producer), I hereby declare this, my favorite music video, to be excellent sequenced hip hop ...
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I've written about music before and no doubt I will do so many times now that we have blogs. This post you are reading now was motivated by an email I sent to a friend an hour ago, telling him about all the interesting versions of Get Down
I told a bit of a falsehood, I guess. I didn't actually grow up on a ranch. I grew up 'around' a ranch, for whatever that's worth. I spent a fair amount of time at my Aunt's ranch in Livermore.
My actual home was in Castro Valley, CA; a small suburban settlement of neverending housing developments in the East bay area. Our house was on top of a hill that (on a good day) enabled views clear to San Jose and San Francisco. Castro Valley was caught in a situation unique to California: stuck betw
This is my first Blog! The idea of blogging has always appealled to me; mainly because I talk to much and I've always got an opinion.:cool: If you follow this website's forums you know that I post nearly every day. That makes it automatically a good place for me to start my blogging----just because I'm 'here' a lot.
I've always taken pride in my narrative and descriptive writing skills. I feel I have a natural ability to place a reader (or listener, for that matter) in the situation; to make
In the On-Site And Off-Site Backups Thread skylab mentioned that his daughter lived in California, which is constantly plagued by fires. I promised a new thread on that issue, here it is ...
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My wife hates Southern California. She thinks it's all like coastal Orange County, or the Valley. Even though I've showed her several times that the population is really simply concentrated in a 20-mile-wide band along the edge of the ocean, she thinks of SOCAL as incredibly overpo
In the On-Site And Off-Site Backups thread I mentioned that I had tried Carbonite and found that it did not work for me in my particular situation. Loki asked me to explain so I promised a thread dedicated to that subject. This is that thread ...
(Aside: I can see now that much of this material is going to want to be re-posted to the PC Software Tech forum. Oh well.)
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loki,
I have nothing against Carbonite in principle. I think it's a great idea, and I very much l
In the Backups thread Flargan/John asked how I got into computing. Here's the (long winded) answer ...
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Along about 1956 or so, when I was 12 and Univac was the only commercially available computer, I saw an ad in Scientific American for a mechanical toy that amounted to a simple binary addition machine. It had a register for holding the current sum (the accumulator), and an input register into which you could, by hand, enter the next number to be added to the accumulat
