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Showing posts from March 21, 2010

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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I finally have real broadband access! Through my ham radio connections I managed to get a terrestrial link using a Motorola Canopy solution (5.7 GHz) and a 15 mile (plus) path. Of course, I would have never been able to do this except for I am on a hill that faces the tower in Binghamton. It is a haul. It is safe to say I am at the far fringes. I am working to help expand the system with the installation of a new tower on my property. The dish on the roof is fairly big (nothing like the old c-band TVRO dishes though). I was hoping we were going to get 10 or more Mbps, but I have to settle for speeds just under 5 Mbps. Considering with Wildblue (satellite) I was only getting 600 kbps with 900 ms latencies; I am very pleased.
Here is a nice you tube video of a difficult landing, more difficult than Greene NY.
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I had a small ceremonial fire of logo wear this weekend. All the polyester and rayon really stunk. I took these pics when my mentor was at the controls. We flew down to Towanda (Bradford County PA) a few days ago for lunch. I have been getting quite a bit of cross-wind landing practice. The first pic is Owego NY and the second pic is the normal view of The Raymond Corporation as we turn baseleg on runway 25 in Greene.