Bryon Blog-O-Rama

Well, it was a Pretty good bday lunch for mom. After hitting the sf library booksale at Ft mason, we had lunch at Greens.

When dessert came they put a candle in it, and we sang a quiet little happy birthday.

Then Grammy award winning singer India.Arie came over and sang it with her mom and godmother/acting coach.

They sounded much better than we did.

Ironically, Lois produced and broadcast “Iron ladies of Liberia” and India.Arie wrote the song for the documentary, which was premiered on Independent Lens. So Lois had a great conversation with her.

Six degrees indeed.

Happy birthday mom!

As part of the “Jay’s Secret Laboratory”/Shed build, I’ve been spending the past few weekends digging a big hole in the back yard (and creating an almost Egyptian dirt pile). This project started with Lois and Rick also digging but I’ve been solo for the past two weekends. Anyway, a few things have come to light, literally and figuratively.

It turns out that a backyard as leisure space is a more recent phenomenon, whereas historically it used to be more of a utility space. Besides clotheslines and gardens, a common activity was trash burning. (This makes me wonder if urbanization and laws against burning resulted in the shift to leisure space? Well, that and supermarkets vs. gardens I suppose…)

Anyway, as any Jr. Archaeologist will tell you, trash piles are a treasure trove of information about previous cultures and people. [Keep that in mind as we create landfills that beggar the imagination.] Anyway I can now state the following about the previous inhabitants: they had a burn barrel, 55-Gallon steel drum, and threw lots of trash in it (I found the rusted remains of the barrel’s bottom, literally scraping it with the shovel. We’ve also pulled a lot of steak bones, rusty metal, broken glass, broken plates, and best of all some intact old bottles from the back yard. Yesterday alone I pulled out 4 good ones. My favorite so far was a smallish triangular blue glass bottle from the “Owl Drug Company” labeled “POISON” right on the glass. I got that one last weekend. This weekend I got a very small bottle which took the cute award, and a still-full bottle of what appears to be lotion of some sort. This looks more recent than most of the stuff out there, but I’m still a little leery of opening it.

So where’s the profit? Well, mostly that had we hired this work out, it’d be about $1000. So we saved a grand and got some cool bottles.

Yay. I’d put an exclamation point there, but I’m not sure my back is up to lifting it…

So after two weeks of being sick, bronchitis, I’ve now got antibiotic pills (huge!) and they’re finally kicking in. And I even got an inhaler, but I have no idea if it’s doing anything. Whatever, I’m getting better so I’ll stick with it. It’s actually a pretty amazing little plastic device, with 14 measured doses, the indicator reminds me of my old 110 film camera. Ka-click, and the number changes.

Anyway, I’m returning to something resembling healthy again. I’m just around the corner from there, but I can still see that it’s a much nicer place to be.

Really looking forward to arriving in the next few days…

So, for the first time I’m hanging out on the Independent Lens set while Lois is working her usual magic.

We’re in a wherehouse on the edge of the bronx. They had to bring in everything and transformed this empty shell into a set. I grew up around this sort of thing, but I gotta say I’m impressed.

And the food is good too, catering has been brought in along with everything else (including a generator, air conditioning, and all the usual shoot kit).

Our yet-to-be-disclosed talent this year set a fantastic level of professionalism and performed so well it was a total joy to watch each take.

Don’t know what I did to irritate the deity of bacterial infections, but for some reason I manage to mostly get sick either on vacation or just before.

So I’m now trying to throw off some sort of chest thing while visiting grandma on long island.

Oh, well, it could be lots worse.

AirVenture was so great, I didn’t post anything being too busy experiencing my aviation nirvana. Aircraft big and small, from the A380 and C-5M Super Galaxy behemoths, to the smidgeful Cri-Cri and air-bike. Entire squadrons of the latter would fit in the former. You could probably fly a Cri-Cri through a C-5M’s cargo bay if you were really good.

Learned a few important things, like I don’t really fit into the current Waiex cockpit. Almost, but not quite comfortable, so I’ll be watching for a mod kit for the spar that holds up the seat back to keep it in the running for “Jay’s Airplane Project”. They are apparently already considering it anyway, a variant of the acrobatic mods for the sonex, so it’s still possible.

The current front runner is now the Long-EZ, likely with a Jabiru 3300 power plant, as an Aero-Vee would be slightly underpowered for the Long-EZ. This may become more of a project than I can realistically take on time/money-wise, so I’m still looking at the Waiex/Aero-Vee combination as a possibility. Mostly the Jabiru is about three times the cost of the Aero-Vee, but would probably be better suited for me power-wise, no point in being miserable. Decisions decisions. Fortunately I don’t have to make any of them soon.

In any case, I’ve figured out which avionics system I’m installing, had a great talk with the Dynon guys about their new avionics system coming out. It’ll be a few years until I’m in a position to get it anyway, so they may even have something newer out, but what I’ve seen now is quite excellent, and affordable. It’s also linux based, not windows, so that was a relief.

American Flyers had a simulator booth set up, and it was nice to touch base with them, since I’m thinking that they’re my future flight school. I also did quite well landing a Cessna 172 at Oshkosh, if only in pixelated airspace.

It has become clear that I’ll be going back either next year or the year after, there was just too much to see. I got to see about 70% of what I wanted to over three days. Each day was about 12 hours of walking and standing, so I might need to figure out what I’m going to do next time, like renting a scooter or something. The place is huge and it was more than a bit brutal on my feet. I’m not good enough on roller blades, and there’s too much turf anyway.

I took about a thousand pictures and an hour of video on the trip, going to spend the next few evenings culling and then publishing that out to the relevant folks, mostly in laws and our friends that went with us to AirVenture. I’ll also post pics online of course. Hmm… I’ll try to remember to link to that here.

Now back to my rather groundful reality…

For a only-child (which I’m not exactly, but I was for my formative years) being in the middle of a huge family for a few days is an interesting change.

I feel the never-to-be mentioned Love. it is the Midwest after all, none of that hippy openness crap here.

But it’s there, in the wise cracks and in the line up for food at dinner. And in the helping with the dishes. Also the dousing with water guns and hoses.

We also took the kids out to the local high school field (vast by urban standards) and launched a rocket a few times. Dylan loved it, so enthusiastic that he launched on “5″, of the 5 second countdown… But then we hung out, a bunch of Vossens and “outlaws” sitting on the field and getting sun-burnt.

While sometimes being on the outside of the clan means that some of the discussion isn’t entirely germane to those of us who weren’t there [when the boot missed Alvin's head and dented the corner strip], it doesn’t matter. My wife is being with her kin and happy, so I’ll sit back and and float in the river of unspoken love with a drink in hand.

Time well spent.

In a few minutes I will be leaving work, and not coming back for a whole 10 days. Yay.

Off to see the in-laws, and then to AirVenture, to see more planes than you can shake a stick at. Really, your arm would fall off before you were done. Big ones, little ones, electric (!) ones. Jet packs, spaceship carriers, dual deck jumbo jets, going to have it all there.

Looking forward to it, the journey of two thousand miles starts with a single step out of this cube (followed by a bunch more steps to BART).

Spent much of Sunday tinkering with my prototype Electro-Magnetic Recovery Ejection System (EMRES? gotta make up something better…). This, ideally, would provide an elegant and cleaner method to kick out a parachute or separate body-segments for a dual-deployment rocket recovery system.

It did not go as I had hoped. Ideally, if something unexpected were to happen, it should have been like in the movies with me staring at a hole in the wall or ceiling and then turning to explain to the wife. Having to patch a hole in the roof would have been *awesome*. (Our roof needs replacement anyway, and I’ve done patching before).

As it was, I flipped the switch and… nothing. Verified cap charge and discharge via voltage measurement, but nada, the ironically named “Airborne” plastic container with magnets taped to it just sat there. I then took a single small neodymium magnet and tried that: it flipped off the table, but since it makes a tic-tac look like the Hindenburg, this wasn’t exactly encouraging. In the words of the Scottish chicken in Chicken Run, I “need more THROOST!”.

It’s gotta move a pound or two about a yard, with enough force to overcome both aerodynamic forces and mechanical friction. and oh yeah, I gotta do it twice. So hopefully the caps are of manageable size and weight…

But… this was valuable. I’m learning what doesn’t work, so I try try again to find what does. Different wire size, different coil windings, and then also orientations/polarities and geometries with ferrous elements as well. Many things to try, and of course bigger capacitors might help too. I’m going to review voltage/amperage and how that affects field density and size. There have been all sorts of “coil gun” projects that do this sort of thing successfully, so I’ll review them again to see if I just have an order of magnitude problem.

On the plus side, I didn’t spend money on the cap I was using, scavenging can be a good skill. The charger was the flash unit from a disposable camera, also free.

And most importantly, my wife was thrilled at me not only not puncturing the house, but also avoiding any heart stopping high voltage capacitant discharges. And she still thinks I’m smart, possibly due to the lack of profanity-inducing shocks that I managed to avoid this time.

So maybe I don’t complete this anytime soon, if I do get it to a point that it’s workable, and can mass produce it, it could be a tidy little project to sell to fellow rocketeers. No more black powder and burnt chutes! That would be awesome indeed.

I’ve been getting more and more excited about the big vacation this year: AirVenture at Oshkosh Wisconsin.

This is basically mecca for homebuilders, general aviation (i.e. private planes), and anybody who loves flight.

EAA has done an amazing job running this show, year after year, and I’m finally making my first pilgrimage!

This is thanks to Lois’s Xmas gift last year, which was my pick of AirVenture or another event (which I’m totally blanking on, so I guess the choice was obvious).

Highlights that I’m looking forward to are the Miller Jet-Pack (technically a fan pack, but whatever gets ya off the ground…), Airbus A380 Double-decker-obscenely-huge-jet, Sonex e-flight plane, the other electric flight projects, the list goes on and on. White Knight Two will be there (mothership for spaceship two, which will be doing space tourism flights via “Virgin Galactic”).

I’m also going to be surveying hands on modern avionics and systems with an eye towards my own plane project. And enjoying the AirShows of course.

Speaking of things that fly, still hopeful that Endevour might get off the ground today at 6:51 p.m. EDT/3:51PM PDT, if the weather improves. Going up for one of the last ISS assembly missions, we’re going to have a lot of folks in space this week. 7 going up in the shuttle plus the now 6 folks already on the ISS now that the crew size is finally at full strength.

All in all, an exciting time for yours truly.