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Showing posts from March 21, 2010

Honshu and Okinawa

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I am back. I spent 10 days in Japan, 5 days for work on the main island of Honshu and 5 days of solo adventure in Okinawa. Travel is so invigorating dispite the uncomfortableness. Jetlag, anxiety, crowds, and other discomforts aside, it is mind-expanding and rewarding. Work went well. I flew a new airline (Skymark) from Tokyo to Naha. I am always wary of strange discount airlines and all the traps they set. However, I had a great expereince with "Sky". I was actually shocked. Super easy checkin at the airport, no extra fees even with extra luggage. The primary mission in Okinawa was to visit the Peace Park and the suicide cliffs of Okinawa. From what I understand, at the end of WW2 the inhabitants were encouraged to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Americans and get tortured and eaten. Besides other types of suicide, they jumped off the cliffs at the Southern end of the main island. If you have seen the original color footage taken at the time, I am sure you ...
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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.