Chazd's (Charles Dowdell's) News Burps

"If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build, end up building us." -- Jim Rohn, Motivational Speaker

I am off to Florida this week. It will be good to see my Brother and Sister. Plans are to see Cape Canaveral, canoe in the springs near the Gulf Coast, spend time on the east coast and generally chill. I had a flight lesson yesterday. I am getting it. It takes me a while, but I get it. I am impressed on how much better I can sense the wind than I could originally. I practiced short/soft take offs and landings. Greene (4N7) is a grass strip with tall trees on the approach. It is in a valley too. The downwind leg in the pattern is really about 300 feet from the hills, whereas normally, it would be 1000 feet anywhere in the pattern except for final. We had quite of bit of snow on the runway so it adds another dimension of training. As I get good at Greene, regular paved strips are going to seem so easy! We had a great lunar eclipse this past week. The sky was nice and clear. This is a great youtube video. I think the quality of the video production and the subject matter really make...

Some cool stuff at the conference. NLP or Natural Language Processing is a way of the future. Computers are fast enough. It is time to have the tools to copy edit english. The payoffs are huge in translation and quality management.

Pilots Arms Next time you have the opportunity look at your pilot's arms. The arms are not strong in an obvious sense. You would think that the particular part of the hero-body that with literal single-handedness guides hundreds of tons of metal and humanity would be well-formed, masculine and muscular. In fact, these very arms countering fears of passengers actually appear weak, almost stick-like. The elbow seems to drop from the shoulder unsupported, without the expected thigh-sized bicep. The short sleeve appears large and underfilled. There are tendons strongly connected from the core without strenght, but filled with confidence and grace. In place of muscle there are highly developed nerves in the elbow and shoulder that firmly connect with the brain and the art of flight.

I am on my way to North Carolina for the FrameMaker Chautaqua conference. This is a meeting of XML, DITA, FrameMaker nerds from around the world. I am waiting for my flight out of the Binghamton airport. There has been quite a weather delay. The driving was terrible. I almost went off the road this morning. The 4WD helps me get up the hills, but it doesn't do much otherwise. It actually creates a fair amount of oversteer. I am refinancing the farm. I am surprised how and fast and efficient the process has been so far. The property appreciated quite a bit in the 6 years we've owned it.

The roads continue to be slick and unpredictable. It would be one thing if the roads were plain slippery, but they are clear and then occasionally have patches of ice or are otherwise changeable. It was 7 below zero F this morning. This guy's company car got stuck just south of here on RT 15 in PA.

I ended up in Watkings Glen Saturday. I went to the Rochester Public Market went and saw some friends and generally had a very full day. This is the falls at Watkins Glen. Some weird and unlikely coincidences came up again with some friends who knew each other and didn't know me.

Driving home from work I snapped this picture. The large tank-milk truck apparently didn't make the turn. Now the milk destined to children across our great land is hazmat waste. I am glad I don't live in that house. Good thing milk doesn't burn. The rain and combination of ice on the roads has made driving an absolute pain in the neck. There is a lot going on for sure. I have a teleconference with some folks for the "real" start up of the Antarctica Ham Radio organization. The core is three folks, one in Denver, one in NJ and the other, well that's me. It is always fun to be the start of something big. This is something big. We have the exact right mix of folks. Ham radio at the bottom of the world will not be the same in another year.