Helicopter Experience

As a few of you know, I decided to do an initial experience flight at the controls of a Robinson R22 helicopter. I'd been planning to do this for a while but finally was prompted to follow-through when I saw a Groupon coupon for a half-price ($99) trial at Specialized Heli in Watsonville. Half-off? Bargain - where do I sign up??

Thanks, largely, to a few fatal crashes early on in the era of personal helicopter training, the FAA requires you to pass a basic ground-school course before being allowed to place hands on the controls, even when paired with a qualified instructor. Sound extreme? Actually, no. A small, 2 seat machine like the Robinson is very sensitive to the controls, and in terms of power/weight ratio actually quite well endowed! Think about going out to a race circuit and being let loose in a formula car when your only driving experience was previously in a 30 year old Morris Oxford and you'll start to get the picture. However, even that analogy doesn't quite cut it, as we shall see.

The ground school was actually quite a reasonable test (in the sense of being, well, testful) but having read the basic book on helicopter theory and operations, and sat through an hour instructional class, it wasn't too hard to pass. Having got through that step, and signed on for an hour flight (extending what's offered in the package by some 40 minutes) then it was time to head off into the wild blue yonder, conveniently located right around the airfield.

So here's what I learned: basically, helicopters are machines designed expressly to kill you. Your task, Grasshopper, is to learn how to foil their every attempt, and to do so for each and every minute you are in the air.

Fixed-wing aircraft are, in comparison, the very model of human-loving devices, actively working to keep you from harm. Take you hands off the controls in, say, a Cessna, and by-and-large the thing will sort itself out for you; it wants to fly level, it wants to keep you up there, all gravity-defying and happy. Helicopters, on the other hand, have no such virtues. Take the controls and try to steer the thing, and it wants to crash. Take you hands off the controls, and now it wants to crash even faster. Flying the thing is akin to bomb-disposal: one significant wrong move - including at times doing absolutely nothing - and you're on the ground in a big exploding fireball before you have time to say, "this might hurt".

In order to avoid ending up all KFC (crispy, and able to fit into a bucket), you have to make constant, tiny movements on the main control, the cyclic, in order to coax the thing to the place where you want to be, always nudging it back onto the proper course. However, the problem then is that some of those movements will cause the other two sets of controls you have to manipulate now themselves to require adjustment. (This thing's operating fully in 3D space, plus velocity of course, so both hands and both feet are fully engaged in wrestling your way across the sky.) And don't even get me started on hovering because even the above is trivially simple compared to stopping the thing and staying still in one place. Which, take it from me, is impossible. Judging by the flight path when I tried then looking from the ground, preferably from half a mile away at least, you'd basically conclude I was suffering from whole body tremors the results of which were being directly transmitted to the airframe.

Regardless, after an hour I was starting at least to get the hang of heading in one direction, turning and doing the basic up/down thing. However, hovering is very tough to master, but in my defence then I only got to try this part for a few minutes towards the end of the flight and would hope to do better second time around.

Will I go again, with the intent, perhaps, of seeing if I can qualify for a basic private-pilot's licence?

Watch this space!

Netgear WNDR3700: Let Me Repeat Myself, Wirelessly

After getting round to replacing our aging home PC late last year, I finally decided to tackle the next step in upgrading our home network, namely upping the transmission speed to 1 Gig. Thanks to the - fast growing - store of digital images we collectively produce, moving those things around really does take up an awful lot of bandwidth and our old Buffalo router only supported 10/100 Ethernet. Therefore, downloading from storage cards and saving the results to a network-attached drive was getting pretty painful, especially now I'm using 16 Gbyte CF cards!

In order to allow for future expansion, I opted for the NETGEAR WNDR3700, dual-band 2.4/5 Ghz unit, largely because it offered simultaneous dual-band support and wireless repeating, the latter being key because I wanted to extend the wireless aspect of the network out to the garage. In order to keep things simple, I bought two of them, largely to make sure that the wireless repeat function should operate flawlessly, free of any weird incompatibilities that might result from using dissimilar devices. (Yeah, I know it's a standard protocol these days, but experience tells me that madness lives down the road you travel by believing "it should just work, sir".)

I'll spare you all the extended tale of woe resulting from what I thought should be a simple half-hour job, but suffice it to say that a) the documentation for wireless repeating mode set-up for this unit is pretty much non-existent, b) configuring the two routers to play nicely together uncovers a number of limitations I wasn't aware of going-in and c) I may yet give up and run a cable from the router to the repeater because of poor end-to-end performance. Anyway, for those of you who want to try the same thing, here's how I finally got it going.

Step 1: get the first unit working as yer basic, bog-standard wired router. The provided documentation is OK here but one thing to note is that it will, on start-up, want to look for firmware updates. This was OK for me because I was swapping out a known, working (Buffalo) unit that demonstrably had working Internet access so that process was able to complete OK before going into set-up mode. Mostly, you can leave a lot of stuff in there at the default setting for now and it should basically work, though I should say that I used manual set up and not the provided wizard because I've never had good luck with those things.

Step 2: once working wired, the next step is to make sure you can access the main router wirelessly. Set-up your preferred security options. (I use pretty weak options here because the neighbours are so far away that they won't be able to get any 5 Ghz signal at all, and anyway drive-by Internet theft isn't much of a risk at our house!) One thing to note: once in repeat mode WPS won't work, so don't go relying on it, OK??

Step 3: in wireless repeat mode, there are a bunch of restrictions which you will now need to take into account as we move forwards :

- You can't repeat 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz at the same time. Yes, you read that right. Despite buying a parallel, dual-band router, it turns out that the repeater will only extend one of them. I opted for 2.4 Ghz coverage (the most common band) to be extended.

- WPS doesn't work, but I didn't really care. Setting up wireless clients isn't that taxing after all, and if you think it is then you are probably going to have a hell of a time getting all this stuff to work anyway :-)

- Auto channel selection is a no-no on the band you will be repeating, so just pick one. I noticed previously that in auto-channel mode the router set-up channel 1 so I just used that as the manual selection.

- You will have to restrict maximum link rate. I use 130 Mb on the 2.4 Ghz channel and that worked for me.

- The repeater needs a fixed IP address so you'll need to limit the DHCP range that the base station will grant addresses from in order to clear some head room. I set an upper limit of 240, leaving, for example, 250 available as a static address for the repeater.

- Enter the MAC address of the repeater into the appropriate place on the designated tab (named, cunningly, "Wireless Repeating Function").

Having done all the above, make sure that everything is still working. And by that I mean "turn it off and on again so you really know it works", OK? If so, shut that unit down and plug-in the other one, i.e. the unit that will become the repeater, and connect it up to the Internet and LAN.

Step 4: Kick-off by getting this device up and running as a wired router, as per step 1 above. The reasons for this are to make sure you have both units at the same firmware revision level and that it's working properly overall. Use the same basic settings (e.g. SSID, pass-key and channel one operation on 2.4 Ghz) entered into the base station.

Step 5: OK, so now we'll add the settings that this device, as a repeater, will work from. The tricky thing here is that each change, made on each separate tab on the administration menu, requires you to hit "apply" before moving on. Alas, that means that some of those changes render the device invisible, especially if you are trying to set it up from a wireless connection! (I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to work round that one ...) Therefore, save setting up the Wireless Repeating Function tab for last. (However, if memory serves me then there's one other step that causes problems and that's setting manually your static IP address, 10.0.0.250 in my case. You'll need to enter that directly into the browser you are using for configuration once the setting is applied in order to continue configuring the device.) So in summary, you will a) assign a static IP address to the repeater, b) enter in the MAC address of the base station, i.e. the one that's currently sitting on the floor not connected to anything, right?) and c) tick the box to make this a repeater.

Step 6: Put back the first router in place of the wireless repeater you just configured. All being well, it should be working for both direct wired and wireless connections, exactly as you left it.

Step 7: turn on the repeater while monitoring the configuration of the main router. You should be able to see from the status information that the repeater is seen on the network (look at attached devices for the 10.0.0.250 address).

Step 8: go to your static IP address (i.e. http://10.0.0.250/) and log-in to the repeater. The configuration menus should now show some items as greyed-out and the status information should show that it's operating happily. One thing to note, in my set-up I was getting a reported link speed of only 11 Mbits! Your mileage may vary but it's worth noting that the link quality was reported as "fair" so the radio signal wasn't that bad.

OK, you should now be up-and-running. However, I have to say that this network topology is a bit of a compromise to say the least. I now find that wireless devices, because they like the strongest signal, will attach to the repeater when in fact I want them to be on the base router for maximum throughput on the internal network. At some point, I'll try giving the repeater a separate SSID to see if I can control which devices lock-onto the repeater and which go direct to the base router. After all, a "good" signal at 130 Mb is way better than an "excellent" signal offering all of 11 Mbits! Still, on the plus side then my Internet radio in the garage now gets a signal and we can move around PCs more freely now that there's coverage everywhere.

Postscript:

Robert, a reader of the blog, contacted me to see if I had any additional advice as he was still having some issues getting this to work, albeit with the 3300 model.  The exchange, and additional input from Netgear, follows below ...
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Hi. Thank you so much for your post about setting up your WNDR3700. It’s way better than anything else I’ve found. Unfortunately, it’s not working for me. Would you mind answering some questions? If not, feel free to say no. But if so:

The symptom is that when I turn on the repeater, devices that were connecting to the router refuse to connect wirelessly at all. They report that they can’t get an IP address. I may be missing a few pieces of info:

What do you have set as your Gateway IP address? I set mine as my main router’s IP address as of that moment, but that’s dynamically assigned by my ISP. Also, my router shows its IP address as 192.168.1.1, but in reality it’s something like 76.14.67.xxx

What did you set as your DNS server(s)?

On the Wireless Repeating Function screen, what did you set as the repeater IP address?

One more detail: As you suggested, I was going to turn off DHCP on the repeater as my last step, but as soon as I enabled the repeating function the LAN setup link was greyed out. I assume that turned off the DHCP function but maybe not. Do you know?

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Hi Robert,
 I am happy to answer questions but should begin by saying that, after just a couple of months running that configuration, I did indeed throw in the towel and ran a cable under the house. The throughput issue and lack of dual band repeating made working that way enough of a pain that drilling holes in the walls and through floor joists didn't see so unattractive all of a sudden! 

Therefore, I can't look at my present settings but instead have to rely on memory ... oh dear!

I don't think I changed the main router's gateway address, leaving it to be assigned by my ISP and set however it was when just the main router was connected on its own and working. Just to be clear, under "Basic Settings" I have Internet IP Address set to come from the ISP, as is the DNS address, and don't set those myself (though I have tried the Google open DNS settings in the past to see if lookup were any quicker, which it wasn't). I don't think it matters what shows up in the greyed-out boxes alongside what you see were you to set things manually; i.e. I don't think it's saying that those are the addresses your ISP has assigned.
 However, under "LAN Setup" I then have it set to use IP addresses on my house network starting with 10.0.0.1 onwards and have the "use router as DHCP server" box checked. Alongside that, I restrict the range of IP addresses it can issue to 10.0.0.2 to 10.0.0.199. That leaves a small group of addresses, 10.0.0.200 onwards, that are unallocated and I used one of those as the fixed IP addess of the repeater. That should ensure you don't end up with the possibility of duplicate IP addresses being issued and it also means that you can then directly ping the repeater to see what's going on because you always know its fixed IP address (I used 10.0.0.250, for example).
 The other thing to try that might help illuminate what's happening is to give the repeater a different SSID. That might make untangling who connects to what a bit easier, as least temporarily until things start behaving.
 Hope this helps?
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After getting Netgear support to kick me up to phone support I got the repeater working. First, here are the instructions they sent:

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2745/~/how-to-set-wds-%28repeater-function%29-on-wndr3300%2Fwnr3500%3F

The UI doesn’t match that of the WNDR3700, but it was close enough. The instructions say I can run at up to 270MBPS with WEP, but you can’t do that on the 3700 at least. I’m running it at 54MBPS with WEP, which is faster than what I can actually get. They also only briefly mention that you need to configure a static IP address on the repeater that’s outside the DHCP range of the base station. The key bit of information here is that the channel needs to be the same on both devices. I tried channel 1 at first and that didn’t work. I then tried channel 11 and that worked.

Also, the technician I spoke with said that I can repeat both the 2.4 and 5GHZ bands, but that the range of the 5GHZ band is so low that there’s no point. So I’m just repeating the 2.4 GHZ band. I now have a strong signal and 9 MBPS download speed in rooms that had had no signal before.

Why Is Clothes Shopping So Hard?

I had a spare hour or so between meetings yesterday so decided to head over to Stanford Shopping Center to try and do some clothes shopping.

I find buying clothes to be a painful and highly frustrating process. This is because I suffer from two key failings that render me particularly ill-suited (pun intended) to successfully accomplishing that most simple of tasks: a) I am short and skinny, unlike the majority of the male demographic around these parts, and b) I'm not gay. Taken together, this renders 95% of what's exhibited in stores out there utterly unsuitable unless I somehow gain 50 extra pounds overnight or suddenly take to liking pale yellow shirts with shoulder tabs. However, "needs must" as they say and so I ventured forth regardless. Which brings me to a third reason it's a futile quest: I am the wrong age.

Quite sensibly from their perspective, malls such as Stanford cater largely to the clientele to hand, namely rich kids under 25 in their case. Therefore, SSC abounds with stores catering for the young and trendy rather than the middle-aged and indifferent, the latter category being of course the one in which I am counted. In fairness, however, I should point out that the larger chains at least also have to cater to the older crowd, but largely that means they just carry stuff made by Ralph Lauren. Please, God, preserve me from that fate. I have never played polo and likely never will, and what's worse polo, when it is played at all, is done so by the likes of Prince Charles, someone that no one wants to dress like unless they are certifiably insane. And yes, I know the Macy's and Bloomingdales of this world sell suits, too, but I don't know who buys them. Indeed, when I went up there, purely in the interests of checking out the vibe, the answer appeared to be "no one at all" because the entire floor was utterly deserted.

However, I finally did find a cheap shirt at J. Crew ($15 in a sale, a level to which I bet they weren't sure their price guns could sink to) and a pair of "need to look vaguely smart in the office but without actually bothering to wear a jacket" trousers from Banana Republic, also on sale.

With luck, that should see me through until well into 2011, by which time I have no doubt that the problem will have become even worse.

Of Mice And Men, But Mostly Mice

As highlighted previously, we are going through some minor remodelling work. So far, the ugly wood cladding from the ceiling has been removed and the ceiling refinished. Also now done, the lamps set into the full-height of the ceiling in the living room have been replaced with 50,000 hour LED items so now we can actually turn the bloody things on without forever fretting about how to replace a blown bulb. Next up, redoing the work surfaces in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the entire place is off course a mess, including the garden which increasingly seems to look like a scale map of the battlefields of the Somme, exhibiting as it does countless trenches, holes and tunnels. However, that's just the manifestation of a larger problem: mice have made it through our defences and infiltrated the underfloor.

A week or so ago I woke up to hear odd noises coming from the kitchen. Something was scurrying over the construction paper that was taped to the floor to try and provide some sort of protection while work was underway. Next night, same thing. Each time I'd go down there and of course nothing could be seen, but I knew alright, I knew ...

Things proceeded to escalate. In addition to the "walking about" noises, another sound could be heard: serious gnawing. After a couple more nights trying to figure out where on earth it was coming from, the secret of the mouse army was revealed - one of the buggers had got into the heating duct and was trying to chew its way out from the inside. "This means war", I tell you!

Tally so far: four dead, two captured and released (one with minor injuries) and at least one more to go. And one of our traps was captured by the enemy and now presumed lost.

Definitely a learning experience, with lessons as follows:

1. Mice can get through amazingly small places. I think they got in through a grill set under the house through which air conditioner piping had been (badly) routed. It wasn't much of a gap, but enough it seems for them to slip through at dead of night. Or even during the day. Seems our dogs will chase lizards until the cows (which we don't have an infestation of, thankfully) come home, but rodents leave them cold.

2. Mice literally think peanut butter is to die for. Makes great bait. But after a while it does put you off PB&J for breakfast.

3. Repairing heating duct is hard, so have someone else do it. On the plus side, you may find, hidden on top of a small cupboard the previous owners built, a 1996 copy of Playboy hidden in an envelope addressed to the head male of said household.

4. Reusable traps are great the first time you use them but after that they smell of scared mouse pee and so all future foot soldiers from the mouse army give them a wide berth, thereby utterly negating their value.

5. Mice don't spring rat traps and only sometimes spring mouse traps. Be prepared for a long campaign. with a side effect that all the peanut butter they consume means you are strengthening your foes.

6. There seems to be a natural force of attraction in effect between set mouse traps and human fingers. Oddly, this force only acts when the trap is wound up and ready to go, not when it has sprung. I'll ping Dr. Hawking to see if potential energy effects at the quantum level can explain this. Or rather, I will when my fingers heal well enough for better tipyng.

7. Sometimes, Mr. Mousey isn't killed by spring traps but rather caught by a stray leg, tail or some such. One of the fallen was sans a back leg and that is also why one of those released was not at full fighting fitness.

8. They look cute, even in death. Remember, you have just slaughtered Mickey and all his family.

So there you have it. I'm off now to find a "Mission Accomplished" banner I can hang prematurely over the front door before cracking the champagne and then going back to the battle to capture the remaining forces of oppression.

iPad Unlimited

Spurred largely by AT&T's announcement that the unlimited data plan would be dropped from their available iPad connection options, I went ahead and ordered one before the cut-off date of June 7th. Earlier this week, it finally arrived on my door step, seemingly no worse for wear following it's long, long journey from Shenzen where doubtless small bands of happy elves, living in a forest full of honey, dates and unicorns, knocked it together using fairy dust.

The original promise was that AT&T would still honor making the unlimited plan available to customers who bought their device ahead of the deadline. However, it turned out that there's no longer an option to sign up for this unlimited plan on-line at the time you first set-up the iPad from the internal configuration menu. Seems that for all new devices, the only options offered directly from the device are the 250Mb and 2Gb plans.

After poking around the relevant support boards on the Apple web site to try and fix this, two things became clear:

a) Apple says it's AT&T's problem not theirs, and

b) Be prepared to spend a long time on the phone.

I can agree with (a) and soon discovered the accuracy of (b).

I called the number being mentioned (1 866 640 5125) the next morning and heard a cheery voice say that "due to high call volume, expect to wait more than 20 mins", which was a bit of an understatement given that after 90 minutes of suffering through the single tne playing again and again as hold music, I had to give up and go to a meeting. I tried again that afternoon - and here having a speakerphone on your desk is a godsend - but once more had to duck out after one hour, thirty-eight minutes of listening to exactly the same tune all over again. (Reading some posts that day, others reported wait times of approx. 2 hours so, annoyingly, I wasn't far off getting to actually speak to a human being.)

Next day I tried calling early in the morning (7 am PST) and had the on-hold call in the background wile watching England finally win a game instead of drawing them. This time, I reached an operator in an hour and 45 minutes, but I do have to say that once I got there it all went through very quickly. Basically, they collect some details from you, a step which entails your reading some numbers off of the device (so have it to hand and powered up). You then complete sign-up on the iPad for the 2Gb plan and they say that you'll get a message in up to 10 days noting that you've been switched to the unlimited plan and will be charged accordingly. However, one caveat: don't let it lapse. If you drop down to a lower plan or forget to update your CC card details and a charge is declined that that's it - the unlimited plan is gone and you cannot get back onto it.

Any-hoo, the device is now running both AT&T and Wi-Fi, and I'll post something more about my initial experiences once I have had a chance to use it for a while and hence have, err, experienced something.

Stockholm's old town, Gamla Stan, is largely on Stadsholmen island and located right in the city centre. It's small, compact and very walkable, at least in the summer when not shrouded in snow and ice that otherwise makes the cobbled streets treacherous in the winter months. (And yes, I speak from experience!)

The architecture is what you'd expect - solid, Germanic-style buildings, plain and with little adornment. Interestingly, that description also seems to apply well to the Royal Palace that's also located here. Compare what's here with, for example, what's to be found in cities like London, Paris and Vienna and you'll see what I mean!

Head down the main thoroughfare to the water and you'll find a frontage of old merchants' houses and maritime offices. During the Great Power Era, Stockholm became the centre of Sweden's push to become a major mercantile force in the region, leading to a period of prosperity and architectural development.

The shot above is of one of Gamla Stan's narrow cobbled streets glowing warm in the early evening summer sun.

Spring In Stockholm

Back now from Stockholm where, for at least one day, it was mild and sunny, both at the same time. At this time of year, it's quite possible to do a day in the office, grab something to eat and still find enough daylight to make walking around with a camera a worthwhile experience (sunset was around 10 am with dawn breaking a mere 6 hours later at 4 am.)

On a tangent, it's hard to figure out how to photograph a large church with a small camera and still get something interesting. Details can work, but it's rare you have a lens that can deliver sufficient reach to make that workable. Going wide is perfectly do-able, but often not very interesting.

Art is never easy!

Yosemite #2

Not likely to post much this week as I'm heading off to Sweden for a few days and will only have my work PC with me. However, before I leave I thought I'd post something a bit different from Yosemite - a view of Tunnel View's eponymous tunnel!

Sounds like conditions there right now are perfect. The snow is melting fast and the river is running so high that the Lower Falls campground may close. However, Tioga seems to be open and it also looks like the Glacier Point road is now free-and-clear too. Only thing to note is that while we were there, a couple of weeks ago, there were roadworks along the Wawona road between Wawona and Tunnel View meaning that instead of taking around 40 minutes on average to get into the Village it was over an hour on occasions.

Yosemite #1

As heralded earlier, last week we headed off for a few days R&R in Yosemite. The original plan was to time this so as to hit pleasant spring weather combined with enough snow melt to make the waterfalls suitably impressive. In summary, we missed the first but nailed the second.

S managed to find a cabin rental in Wawona, a small community located about 40 minutes south of Yosemite Village but still inside the precincts of the park. Although booked a bit on-spec, it turned out to be a great location. The privately-owned cabin had been recently updated and so despite being, well, a wooden, rustic cabin, it boasted a very nice kitchen and bathroom and came complete with marble counter tops, stainless-steel appliances and, amazingly enough, free DSL!

The shot above is of a single rock standing firm in the midst of a fast-flowing Merced river. Actually, these kinds of pictures are made much easier with overcast skies to the absence of spring clearing was quite beneficial in that regard!

2010 ALMS Part II

Largely, I'll spare you all from a sequence of shots of sports cars and allied racing goodies filling up the pages here over the coming days, with sole the exception of the above. This was a 6 hour race which means that by the time it finished (8:30 pm) it was almost completely dark. As you (may) know, I did some racing myself both in the UK and US, but never in the dark, though I did have to run in the rain once without any functioning wipers which was itself, err, interesting, so it's hard to say just how tough that must be.

It would be fascinating, though, to see how the lap times varied as the light changed. My guess is that for the front runners it made little difference. Once you are in the rhythm, by all accounts an important part of endurance racing, it's probably not going to matter as much as one might think. However, spare a thought for the back markers who are now being overtaken by things they probably don't even see until there's a set of extremely bright lights burning into their retinas from the rear-view mirrors, followed immediately by very angry-sounding engine roar as they fly past. Now that would help you stay focused, night-time and all!