xxmikexx

By their oil cooler airscoops shall ye know them ... "Two R-2900s" (or whatever it was called) is Connie, yes? I'm having a senior moment and can't retrieve the name of the aircraft you're standing next to as a tyke. Please help. (Is it an Aeronca Whatever?)

They're gorgeous! "Green Flash" sticks in my mind though there were other equally good shots. (Like "South Pacific", as I recall.) Can't wait to see the aviation photos.

For many months I had been saying that under no circumstances would I pay more than USD $30 for a payware addon aircraft. Well, like a politician running for office (any political party) my position has ... er ... evolved ... ... As in "I never said it. But if I said it, it didn't mean what it means. And anyway it was taken out of context, even though what was quoted was a complete sentence. And in point of fact I've been saying exactly the opposite all the time." :D ... Ahem ... I'm now willing to pay roughly USD $40 provided the aircraft comes with both FS2004 and FSX versions. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You see, for most of a year now I've been eyeing the CLS DC-10, wanting it for FS2004, lusting for it ... But my policies of the time argued against buying it. So I waited, figuring that it would go on sale at the Pilot Shop some weekend. Wrong. Completely wrong. In almost a year of waiting, it never happened. So yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered the download at a price of USD $40 and change. I did it only because I finally noticed that the product includes both FS2004 and FSX versions, important to me since I run both sims regularly. So there is now a chink in my armor. A vendor can get USD $40 out of me by offering both versions of an aircraft, though it may be as much as a year before I order, and even then I will be very selective about what I buy. In contrast, Friendly Panels has extracted something like $140 from my wallet over that same one year period -- by tempting me with very nice panel and gauge products priced at around USD $15-20. This is price elasticity at work, folks, Economics 101. Had CLS reduced the price of the DC-10 to $30 I'd have bought it a long time ago. Similarly I'd love to own the newly announced highly detailed A2A B-377, however, the vendor has not been listening to me. They want ... Are you ready for this? ... USD $37 for the base package, and then they apparently want an additional USD $25 for the stuff that adds all the detail. That's USD $62 for the aircraft, even though they're trying to make the price seem lower, in my opinion ... And this product is for FSX only, even though FS2004 still represents half the addon market. I don't think so, A2A. Not me, moi, Mikey. On a similar note I will not be buying Space Shuttle Simulator 2007. (But thanks for the free demo, which may be all I want.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx During the past year I have written many times about "optimum price", another Economics 101 concept. I'm not going to do it again other than to observe that the investment a vendor has in a product has zero to do with what the optimum price is. The fact is, most addon vendors are leaving money on the table -- my money. So they're going to have to work very hard to get it. They're going to have to work as hard as Friendly Panels does. Those folks clearly understand the concept of optimum price.

I think there may be something amiss with your site/browser settings. Anyway, I'm going to repeat all of the steps even though you know some of them because other people are reading this too ... User CP Albums Add Album <Give the album a title and description.> Submit Upload Pictures You should then see three text entry boxes, each with a Browse option. Browse to the photos separately, up to three of them, and then click Upload Photos, I think it is. Repeat as necessary till you've uploaded everything you care to. The captions don't appear beneath the photos but do appear when you do mouse hovers.

I may not have the button names correct but it's roughly "Create Album" followed by "Upload Photos", at which point you'll see the browse logic. If this doesn't work, let me know and I'll create a second album, this time making careful notes about every step in the process. Re the adequacy of 600x600, if your photos don't look good on this site would you be willing to upload them to the fsOpenComponents ftp site? I don't have any file size restrictions in place there and could download your photos and look at them on my machine directly.

Six years ago my wife was hired as a project manager by Transgenomic here in Denver, a leading maker of DNA sequencing equipment. She was fired because she insisted on prioritizing her group's work whereas management wanted everything done all at once, an impossible task. Somebody had to take the fall for the system that customers were hardly able to use, the system that was built and shipped before she arrived. She was elected, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it hurt because she had been making a high salary. She had come to Transgenomic from Qwest, where she had been a well-paid technical lead in a telephony switch software development group. That job lasted two years -- until Qwest decided that all the old US West people had to go. Fortunately for us she was in the last group of people to be offered salary/retirement buyout packages. The remaining old timers after her were simply layed off with two weeks severance pay, as I recall. She found the Qwest job only after nine months of looking. You see, she had earlier been layed off from a high paying software team lead position at MCI, where she had worked 3.5 years -- and it had taken her six months to find that job. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do you see the pattern emerging here? You spend months and months and months looking for a high tech job, then you spend a year or two or three with the company, then you get shown the door. When she came home from Transgenomic at noon one day five years ago without having called ahead I knew immediately what had happened. "They fired you, right?" I asked. "Yes" she said, "And I've had it. I'm not going to look for another high tech job. Instead I'm going to do something I wanted to do as a little girl, which is to become a nurse. The health care field is crying for people, I'll be layoff-proof." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx She was 59 when she made that statement. She already had an MBA but she put herself through a nursing program that took five years to complete. Six weeks ago she finally graduated from University of Phoenix with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. One year into that program she was qualified to work as an LPN -- Licensed Practical Nurse -- and she subsequently worked full time while going to school to pick up the BSN. As an LPN she made half as much money as she had been making in high tech. As a result we now have student loans to pay off, loans well into the five-figure range, because we had no other way to get her health care education accomplished. This morning she went on an interview at Denver Health, the city-owned-and-operated hospital that treats all comers regardless of ability to pay, formerly known as Denver General Hospital. Based on a phone call of two weeks ago she thought she was being interviewed for a position in the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and she expressed to me that she would find that assignment depressing, though she was willing to do it. Instead the interview turned out to be for the MICU, the Medical Intensive Care Unit, the job offer made on the spot. This is a prestige nursing position, right up there with Operating Room. Her new boss has a PhD in nursing and immediately understood what a valuable find she had made. (In fact, the only reason my wife won't be an OR nurse is because she doesn't want to be standing in one place all day. At our age she needs to be moving around a lot.) And here's another important job benefit: As a MICU nurse she will be caring for only 1-2 patients at a time. "I'll finally be able to give my patients the care they need" she said, her current place of employment being deliberately understaffed by new management, and under-supplied and under-equipped as well. (And this place refused to let her work as a nurse, perhaps because they would have had to pay her a lot more.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So my wife was able to make her vision of five years ago come true even though we are in our 60s. She has always been a trouper, and we have been going together :D since we were 16, so I've been seeing her in action for a long long time. I hope that as a nation we can avoid truly massive rounds of layoffs during these difficult times. However, I'm greatly relieved that my wife will not be hurt regardless of what happens in the economy at large. Furthermore, after a couple of years in the MICU, and given her MBA, even more doors are going to open up if she wants them to, regardless of the state of the national economy. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx P.S. When she starts her new job in 2.5 weeks she will be making about 50% more in base pay than she had been making as an LPN. Given bonus pay for night and weekend work the result will actually be fairly close to what she had been making as a technical manager when you consider the time required to find new high tech jobs ... And the job satisfaction will be much higher for her. She will be working nights for the next year or two, and she has volunteered to work every Saturday night along with her fair share of Sunday nights. This is fine, we're used to it. In fact, it will be much better than the period when for two consecutive years she worked "only" on weekends -- two brutal 16 hour shifts so she would have weekdays free for school. You make your own luck.

Okay ... I made a simple album. It's really easy, you just open an album, give it a title, create some descriptive text and then start uploading pictures, a maximum of 600x600 pixels. (Anything larger will be squeezed down with unpredictable results.) The uploading process is very simple. You hit a browse button, navigate to a photo and then click Save. You can do three photos at a time this way. As the old commercial went, Try it, you'll like it. To see the album I created, click on the xxmikexx link immediately below and then scroll down on the right side of the resulting page till you see the album title "Pocket Digicam Photography".

Steve, I suppose a blog can be used for anything, including asking for technical help, so let me try to address your problem here ... It sounds as if the aircraft was built and tested using a particular FSX revision level. If I'm right you will have to determine which rev level the aircraft was built for and tested with ... a) RTM (the version in the retail box) b) SP1 c) Free standing SP2 (includes SP1) d) SP2 as created by Acceleration (includes SP1) Unfortunately, to install any of these the FSX product manager, Phil Taylor, strongly recommends starting from a clean reinstall of FSX RTM. (Deinstall and then reinstall.) Furthermore, he said that Microsoft cannot guarantee that the SP2 incorporated into Acceleration is identical to the free standing SP2. He also said that installing Acceleration to get that version of SP2 requires that the free-standing SP2 be de-installed first (assuming free standing SP2 had been installed earlier). So reinstall the RTM version and then try the aircraft. Then work your way up to the highest rev level that will support the aircraft. (Which may require your rolling back from the rev level beyond the one that allowed it to start working.) However ... Since not all products conform to SP1 or SP2 it is possible that you will end up with an aircraft that runs on SP2, for example, with some other aircraft not being compatible with SP2. I wish I had better news but I don't. You might want to post your issue to the FSX forum with a link to your blog, asking somebody to confirm or change what I have said here. I hope this helps.

Yesterday I told Johann Dees that I would do a blog about the capabilities of AirBoss. This is that post ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx AirBoss is a human interface utility. Its original intent was to serve as a "joystick enhancer" as discussed below, though it has been extended in certain ways so as to do important things for keyboard-based shooter/slasher games, that product variant being known as GameBoss. I’m not going to speak further about GameBoss other than to mention that, among other things, it can be used to add joystick support to games that lack it. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My goal for AirBoss was to allow a $40 joystick to be enhanced to the point where it becomes a “poor man’s HOTAS”, a way to stave off the purchase of even a flight yoke much less a flight yoke with rudder pedals. In particular, I set the technical goal of being able to execute bad weather final approach, landing and rollout of a jet transport without ever taking one’s eyes off the screen for any reason. However . . . AirBoss also turns out to be very useful in learning to fly a) those propeller-driven aircraft that are subject to P-factor, b) helicopters, and c) carrier landings and other situations where extremely precise flying is wanted, like formation flying. The reasons for this will be made clear elsewhere in this thread. There are other benefits, such as the fact that it can replace obscure keyboard commands with easier to remember operations, and the fact that to a first approximation it can be used to create a standard human interface to military flight simulators. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Let’s look first at the $40 HOTAS issue . . . AirBoss can be used to give multiple meanings to joystick buttons through the use of modifier keys like Control and Shift. It can also be used to give additional meanings to buttons and keys through the use of doubleclicks, and modifiers can be used in conjunction with doubleclicks of any key or button. Finally, almost any keys can be used as modifiers, not just Control and Shift. Not obvious from the simple discussion in the previous paragraph is that AirBoss allows a hatswitch to be treated as a set of buttons. So, for example, in the factory defaults AirBoss setup, we get the following subset of meanings for the hatswitch . . . No modifier, Hatswitch left,/right/forward/back - - “fly by thumb” pitch and roll control. Control+HatswitchForward/Back - - increase/decrease throttle. Shift+HatswitchForward/Back - - toggle landing gear. CapsLock+HatswitchForward/Back - - lower/raise flaps by one notch. DoubleclickHatswitchForward - - full throttle. DoublclickHatswitchBack - - zero throttle. I’m not going to list everything here regarding HOTAS but I will say that 90% of aircraft operations, including all of the ones required for final approach, landing and taxiing, can be accomplished through the use of modifier keys, the hatswitch, the joystick trigger, and nothing else. Furthermore, these definitions are all contained in cfg files that get loaded at runtime, and these cfg files can be changed by knowledgable users, just as various FS cfg files can be changed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So while there are other uses as discussed earlier, what we have just seen is a quick look at HOTAS. But who cares about HOTAS? The answer almost certainly is, Only people who care about hand flying IFR approaches in poor weather. I estimate this set of people to be only about 5% of serious FS users. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’ll stop here to see whether anybody wants to comment or ask questions regarding what I’ve presented so far.

I'll research the photo album stuff by creating one of my own, after which I'll report back to you here. Give me a couple of days. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx We did our first driving vacation in 76 in honor of the Bicentennial. Before planning that trip I didn't even know exactly where certain states were. I certainly had no idea what most of them looked like. Ground truth is a wonderful thing. One of the things that surprised me was the fact that there are glacial moraines along the banks of the big rivers in places like Indiana and other regions relatively close to the Great Lakes. Then it dawned on me that the rivers must follow the edges of the ancient ice sheets as they began to melt back. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, my two favorite states are WY and MT exactly because of the low population densities combined with the majestic scenery. (Until that first trip I had no idea what the term "big sky" meant, because we were east coast people at the time.) But we're rooted to CO now because of the kids and grandkids. My point was simply that we could make the deserts bloom while hiding a huge population in those areas. Re pumping water, I meant desalinating seawater and then pumping it inland. Given sufficient nuclear power this will be cheap and easy to do when the time comes. And the time is coming. Here in Colorado we're already seeing state restrictions on agricultural draining of the Ogallala Aquifer. Probably a third of the farmers on the eastern plains of CO have been forced out of business in the past two years because they have no way of replenishing what they take out, which is what the state now requires. I don't feel that as a nation we're wasting the aquifer resources, but we're soon going to have to do something different. We'll run out of Great Plains water completely in less than 50 years, maybe a lot sooner. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I should mention that for three summers in a row -- 76, 77, 78 -- we not only toured the country, we did it out of a station wagon, camping out in KOA campgrounds. A wonderful experience for our then-young kids as well as for us. We kept coming back to Wyoming and, after the 78 trip, I estimated that we had been over 90% of the paved roads in the state at that time, as well as over many of the unpaved ones east of the Rockies. Wyoming is full of wonderful places like Thermopolis, places that nobody has heard of, thank goodness, because they're unspoiled, or were back then. At that time Wyoming's state motto was "Wyoming is what America was", and it was absolutely true. It probably still is if you stay away from places like Casper and Douglas, the oil and coal boomtowns. If our kids ever move their families away from us we will move north for sure, but only to some place like Kemmerer which, as I recall, is where NikeHerk67 grew up.

I too like driving around. I've driven in all of the lower 48 as well as parts of Canada, and I'm well accustomed to distance driving. From Denver I can make the west coast in a single day without breaking any speed limits. I've done this three times, twice in the dead of winter over the continental divide through Aspen. I can make NYC in 44 hours (done it about ten times), and I can drive coast to coast in 3.5 days (done it three times.) In fact, I just got off the phone with a company that does auto and truck deliveries. Business is slow for them at present because of gasoline prices deterring their customers, but I just may end up doing things like truck deliveries to Albuquacky, Durango, places like that. I wouldn't want to do this full time but at the moment we're under some financial pressure and a weird part time job like that would suit me just fine given that I still have my software development and joint venture responsibilities. Who knows -- I might even get a book out of the experience, if they ever call me. :) Trouble is, I'm up against four retired airline employees all of whom have travel privileges. But that's fine, I can always take the bus back. What I said to them was, "Let's at least qualify me as a driver with you because you never can tell, and I'm the guy who will say "yes" when everybody else has said "no". I strongly suspect that if they use me once they will not stop using me. You and I are both of the generation that understands that always showing up is important and is in fact most of any nitty gritty job. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Like you I always wanted to see the country from the ground. The broad driving coverage has given me a complete picture of the whole nation, including many of the secondary roads and routes. It has made me appreciate what a marvelous country we live in, and how big it is. At some point we'll be piping water in to the desert areas. At that point we could support a population the size of the entire world's population today, without crowding, I do believe. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx P.S. Nels informs us that the site now has a photo album capability. Perhaps you could create an album of some of your favorite cloud and sunset shots. Certainly I for one would be very interested in seeing them.

Yes, the personal blogs behave like personal forums. Presumably the restriction in Outer Marker and certain other forums that things must always be aviation or FS related does not apply to blogs, we shall see what we shall see. Anyway, I too got tired of the sniping which is why I've been away. If people pursue us to the blogs and continue to harrass us I will simply turn the tables and formally report them to site management, something that I've never done before even though it has been done to me several times. Anyway, why don't we discuss more pleasant things. Like how you are after the <month-long?> leave of absence you took about the time I pulled out. Now ... I'm curious about something. When you were an airline pilot did you spend a lot of time admiring the scenery and the clouds? I certainly do -- even as a passenger I spend most of my time looking outside. (But I don't in FS, where my interest is strictly 2D panels.)

Nine AM to five AM. :D It has ever been so because there is no other way to design and build complex technical software. I don't recall whether it was the OS team at Microsoft or Apple, but it doesn't matter. They had T-shirts that read "Working 80 Hours A Week And Loving It". Well, when I was a young system programmer I worked roughly 14x7 or roughly 100 hours per week. The degree of concentration required to have multiple people design and build a complex piece of software requires that at least the architect/designer/manager work these kinds of hours. While I can no longer put in 48-hour days the way I used to, even today I do most of my work at night because that's when I am free of interruptions and distractions and can concentrate on the technical work. So what is a system programmer? Well, one of the Microsoft marketing guys referred to one of their system programming groups as "The guys who do their taxes in hexadecimal." :D

Hi skylab, I like the above description of blogs. I plan to use mine to post information that really doesn't fit with Outer Marker or any of the other forums. You and I had been doing an extended interview in the temporarily suspended fsOpenComponents forum. Had blogs been available a year ago I would have done the interview in my new blog. Also, blogs can be a kind of vanity thing as this one is for me. I'm assuming that as long as the content is wholesome and non-offensive, blogs can contain anything. So I plan to post all kinds of strange stuff to my blog simply because I enjoy writing.

For the vast majority of you, Flight Simulator is a hobby. These days, because of my involvement with both the FS Flight Training joint venture with FlightSim.com, and with AirBoss, FS is now more of a business for me than a source of recreation. Most of what I do in FS these is test flying, sometimes with students but usually on my own as I work on both shaping our approach to training, and on refining the human factors of using AirBoss. So where do I do my test flying? Well, out of Colorado Springs (local), out of Denver (IFR, usually Denver International to Salt Lake City International), and out of a long runway (location doesn't matter) where I can test helicopters and warbird taildraggers. A good example of what I do was during the night and early this morning when I made several dozen takeoffs and short flights in the FSX Acceleration P-51. With helicopters the issue is coping with main rotor torque. With high powered taildraggers like the P-51 the issue is "P-factor" which shows up as a) the need to use considerable right rudder during takeoff, and b) the need to constantly change rudder trim during flight as airspeed changes. I won't bore you with the details at this time but S2 and I have been doing human factors work. He is new to both computers and FS and it has been very interesting seeing what comes easily to him versus what takes time. Interestingly, he bears out something that many of us believe which is that learning to fly in FS is more difficult than learning to fly a 172 in the real world. (S2 has a PPL, as do I.)

Most writers take pleasure in the act of writing. A known readership is nice but at least for me the risk that somebody might actually read my stuff is reward enough. I often write for audiences of one as various email friends will attest. While I certainly can't put myself in his league, T.S. Eliot did the same thing with poetry. In fact, "Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats", http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Summer97/SemGS/WebLex/OldPossum/oldpossumlex/ is simply a collection of cat-related poems that he sent to friends supposedly anonymously. (This collection, by the way, served as the basis for the hit musical "Cats".) Anyway, the post I'm writing now is a perfect example of what I like to do. I have no idea whether anybody will read it but that's fine -- it's sufficient to know that somebody might read it ... because art is largely about taking risks. A certain forum member who accused me of writing just to hear myself talk is only partly correct. Another forum member was annoyed that I edit and re-edit my posts. "Writing as art? Surely you jest" they probably would say. But yes, to me it's art. I edit and re-edit and re-re-edit my posts partly to fix spelling and improve grammar, partly for editorial content and partly for appearance. In the latter respect I'm like the scribes and tomb painters of Ancient Egypt. The form of their hieroglyphic writing -- the esthetics -- was just as important as the content. Chinese poets wrote under the same constraint -- the writing had to look good as well as having meritorious content. However, the Egyptians took this a step further. Even if you were a tax collector (a common duty of Egyptian scribes), your tax records had to look good. So ... My writing has to look good to me when displayed in public. That's why I capitalize the first letter of every word in the title of every thread I start, or in the titles of other things. I also put periods after quotations at the ends of sentences. I simply like the way the result looks, and the heck with those aspects of grammar. (Good grammar is whatever educated people agree is good grammar. More and more literate people are doing what I do.) It's irrelevant to me whether other people appreciate the layouts because I only have to please the man in the mirror. I hope that people will like the result. However, the risk that they won't is fine too. In art as in life overall, it's the journey that's important, not the destination. P.S. My favorite writer, John McPhee, a New Yorker contributor who has been writing for the magazine for almost forty years, once remarked that at the start of every day he forces himself to sit down and write for four hours. I don't recall his exact words but the sense of them was "I don't allow myself the luxury of 'writer's block' just as a plumber can't allow himself the luxury of 'plumber's block'".

GreasyBob, I like people with complex personalities. The title of your blog entry suggests you may be such a person, as does the question you posed. I think that the most insigtful answer to your question has to be "because".

Well now. Blogs ... This is a great idea because I like to think out loud (in writing :)) and blogs are terrific for this. I like this idea so much that I may even steer clear of Outer Marker :D. We shall see what we shall see. Anyway, Like many active forum members I have both supporters and detractors. This is because I refuse to make insipid posts. You know the kind I mean. The short posts that say only things like "That's nice" or "Gee, I'll have to try that" or "Thanks for sharing". Posts that are intended only to drive up the author's post count so that people will think "guru". Posts that never provoke thought or comment. Posts that contribute nothing to the community other than an increase in the noise component of the forums signal-to-noise ratios. Anyway, here I am, back again, refreshed after an eight-week hiatus during which I did nothing but a) relax by the pool, and b) work on the usual proprietary stuff at all hours of the day and night. (Tis a privilege to be able to set one's own schedule.) I must say that the FS Flight Training joint venture with FlightSim.com is coming along nicely though I don't want to give any details in public at this time. Similarly, AirBoss is also coming along nicely. In fact, an actual non-sham sale of AirBoss has been made, nailing down the USA trademark. Both activities involve someone I'll refer to as S2. (He knows who he is.) S2 is not only a customer, he is a very patient tester. New to both computers and FS, he is the ideal guinea pig because he is forcing me to simplify and clarify both Training and AirBoss, always a Good Thing since people refuse to RTFM. (If you would like to become an AirBoss tester, please send an email to mike@pcgamecontrols.com) Anyway, here in my new blog comments (if any) from detractors are just as welcome as those from supporters. Paraphrasing something Mister X (he knows who he is) once said, "I hardly ever agree with you, Mike, and you often annoy the <censored> out of me, but I have to say that your posts and threads are very entertaining." Exactly.

eightline, I should have mentioned that the list of military sims I own and like is much longer than the list of military sims I have installed at the moment. So Mig Alley is one of my all time favorites, but for a variety of reasons I don't have it installed at the current time.

Disneyflyer, I own a number of military flight sims, purchased partly for purposes of testing my erstwhile utility program product, and partly for fun. The ones installed on my flight computer at the moment are ... IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 Falcon IV LockOn Pacific Fighters Combat Flight Simulator 3 I'm just getting into the Sturmovik game, on behalf of which I've applied for membership with an online multiplayer squadron named Aces High, not to be confused with the massively multiplayer game of the same name. I will be flying with them this coming weekend. I have not looked into the multiplayer capabilities of any of the games, and even my single player combat time is low. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to formation flying, team ground attack, blah blah blah.

Hi Folks, This is an experimental forum. It's purpose is the discussion of military flight simulators in general. Let's kick things off by listing the military sims we each own at the moment ...