TOM'S BLOG THREE

[Tom Goodrick]

It was very neat. I left the bedroom at 6am, as per custoom, stopped by the computer den and went in quietly and turned on the router without disturbing the sleeping bird (normally, my copilot). Then I went down to the living room and turned on the laptop to check my email. There were two new items, one from a friend in Miami and one from a freind in San Francisco, both confirming that my new email system works for output.

After doing my dog and cat chores, I started FS9 (on the laptop) and placed my Merlin 300 at San Diego. I set up dynamic RW so the wx would be updated on my flight to Phoenix. I made a realistic flight plan that bypassed all the restricted areas in the desert where aircraft swarm and things go bang. The sky was dark at SAN but I saw a few clouds. I took off, climbed out over the ocean and then turned back to get on the track for PHX.

There was a beautiful sunrise as I headed across the border into Arizona. At 19,000ft I was above most clouds but there were some high build-ups between me and the sun. Great view! (I have full cloud density and high details). The sim ran on at 20 fps while seamlessly taking the WX updates.

This is the start of a great flying experience. If there is any interesting weather anywhere in the US, I'll be flying in it.

[Ed Burke]

Good news Tom, it sounds as though you are on the verge of having a whole lot of fun, enjoy!!

[flaminghotsauce]

Sounds great. I haven't been doing much flying lately. With all the school starting up, several kids taking classes in another town, including music classes (woohoo!), I've been busy. I'm glad to hear you have a computer that runs the sim well! That's been on my mind for a while.

[Tom Goodrick]

Knowing the RW in Phoenix (rain in area, mostly cloudy) for yesterday morning, I set up the Wii on my LAN, looked at its weather channel and selected Phoenix, then started Tiger Woods PGA Golf for 2010, went to the Difficulties section, selected Weather Channel Weather and found myself on the first tee at TPC Scottsdale under cloudy skies and in 64 degree weather (mid morning). I played one of my best games (63) in the light winds (4-8 knots).

I intended to do more flying , to Albuquerque, etc, but things got hectic and I didn't get back to it. My doctor (or at least his nurse) is on a crusade to lower my blood glucose with drugs. That also means walking more (hurts a bit) and sore fingers, slowing down my music production. I gripe a lot but I follow their directions.

Last evening I finally got my Aero Commander 560 down to my laptop. This is a favorite that I tried to upload to my old web site but gave up when the upload failed after one hour. First I went to Avsim and downloaded the AC 500 that seems to be the latest product from Shupe and his people. The 11 gig file came to my laptop in a little over a minute. Cool! So then I decided to email the 13 gig AC560 zipped file from the old Dell to my laptop. That took about 5 minutes. It flew right off with no changes needed since I had tuned it up several months ago. Today I'll check the AC 500. It will need some adjustment because they claim a cruise speed of 199 KTAS for this little first version of the Aero Commander aircraft. That should probably be 199 mph which is 173 KTAS. Even that seems a bit high for a pair of 250 hp engines compared to 180 KTAS which I get with the pair of 295 hp engines on the AC 560.

More fun today. I intend to play all golf on the Wii this year in Real Weather with flights into the area of the golf course in Dynamic RW. I'll hurry up to get in some late fall golfing in the northern areas. Perhaps the Twin Cities (Mpls/StPaul) today.

[Tom Goodrick]

My nanomouse died yesterday. He lived about 20 months. As the mouse for my laptop he lived a rough life. My laptop moves around the house a lot, or at least it did before getting the router. It moved frequently between the second floor den (for computers with a connection to the Internet), the "recording studio" on the second floor where it records my music and posts it on the Internet and the downstairs living room where it sits on my lap while I recline to watch TV and mess with the Flight Simulator of Tranz railroad. Now i do some Internet surfing from that location too.

The mouse gets dropped in my pocket any time the laptop gets moved. It is great having the nano mouse because "nano" stands for the small receiver that sits on the end of a USB plug allowing the mouse to move without a wire attached to the computer. It is also an optical mouse with no moving parts. However it acquired some moving parts doing duty on the arm of the sofa where cats and an occasional stray human arm knocked it off. It would bang into the end table on its way to the floor where it often hit the flange at the bottom of the end table before coming to rest. I put a spare towel on the floor to cushion it from the flange. Evidently that was not enough. The other day it fell for the last time as a functioning device. Its laser does not lase anymore.

I am off to the computer store to get another one. Lessons have been learned. Maybe the new one will have a better life.

I covered over the touch pad on the laptop long ago, finding it useless for many tasks that a mouse does so well. I certainly cannot fly with a touch pad to adjust the autopilot and various paneel "switches." Yesterday I uncovered the touch pad and rediscovered why it is virtually useless and, worse, how it interferes with typing. (This is done on the Dell with its optical wireless mouse (big 3-inch receiver)).

[Tom Goodrick]

It is now 8 days later and I have not dropped my new nano mouse yet.

I regret that I have not yet activated my new web site to support the graphics for my articles on this Forum. Currently, the article on the coffin corner for the Learjet 45 is unsupported. Some other articles written some time ago have lost their support. I don't even remember what they are - probably you have also forgotten. NBD (no big deal).

I do have a free web space with my new ISP but it is only 10Mb, 1/5 of the space my old site used. Curiously that had just changed to 700Mb. But I will use this 10 Mb wisely as soon as I figure out how. I mainly want just an addressable space in which I can store images to be used to support these Forum articles. Part of the delay has been the difficulty of getting the proper info from the support people at the ISP. Evidently, few people use their 10 Mb space. I just succeeded in getting onto the Webe Site Buider page from which I can construct the web site. I'll find and put up a nice scenery photo to hold the spot. But that may cost me a bit if I have to rent my own domain name. Not sure I want to do that.

Until I get this sorted out, I apologize for the blanks you'll look at as the illustrations to my articles.

[Tom Goodrick]

Okay. My new web site is up and the Forum article on LJ 45 Coffin Corner is properly illustrated once again.

Look for a short article with illustrations on the Piper J3 spin in a few minutes.

The new web address: www.knology.net/~tomgoodrick/

Right now there is just a graphic showing some of my TGA aircraft. I am not sure if I'll add to that in the future. If i do put any downloads there, I'll list the URL on this Forum properly so you can get it with a click. there is not much memory space.

The trick to getting it to work was to ignore most of the garbage Knology gave me and to just FTP the files. I am having some trouble getting the graphic to display properly. It was a complete screen in Paint and the text was very clear. I tried making the page using a word processor but ended up editing that page to get it as good as it is. My Dell has a nice web page maker so I may spiff it up a little.

[Tom Goodrick]

Now there are more complications in my attempt to get settled with broadband. Those of you who have bookmarked my Soundclick URL will have to use the link currently in my signature, at least for a while. The trouble is due to my attempt to start up a Facebook account and to link that with my Soundclick account.

The two companies have a cooperation agreement that permits people visiting my Facebook page to get to my band page (Tom Goodrick's Jazz Band) on which they can listen to some of my music. There is also a link on that page to my Soundclick site. The problem occurred when Facebook asked me to name a band for the band page. I gave them the "... Jazz Band" name. Previously, the name of my "Band" on soundclick had been "Tom Goodrick" which was the same as the artist and the account owner. But this changed the soundclick URL from

www.soundclick.com/TomGoodrick

to the abomination you see currently listed in my signature below.

I am curently talking to Soundclick about the possibility of reverting to the original URL.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They fixed the problem. Both links work.

[Tom Goodrick]

I have discovered Google Earth. What a great proghram! my old system could not support it but the new broadband. It has a neat "flight simulator tool" that lets you fly a Cirrus SR22 over the three-D landscape. I have been flying around various places. Ii's pretty neat.

[Tom Goodrick]

My routine of flying anything anywhere in FS9 has been shaken a bit. For over a dozen years while retired, I have been flying around in a perfect world with the screen almost filled with great scenery, but with a line of options across the top that I can click on easily and a line of several file names across the bottom that I can click on and then use for a bit before continuing the flight. That has made it easy to do fie editing in rapid-fire fashion.

But those days of smooth operation have come to an end. Now it is much more difficult, at least on the laptop that I use now most of the time. The first problem was caused by Windows Vista. That OS does not allow FS to occupy essentilly the entire screen while shgowing the menu line across the top. It does at some times but most of the time it blanks out part of the display and causes the motion to freeze. The second problem was caused by Google Chrome which I accepted as a new browser. It moved the taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the side of the screen in a vertical strip. Now when I land with a full screen, I can't pull up the small spreadsheet to enter my landing data while it is hot on the screen. I can't pop up and edit the aircraft.cfg file. To do these things, I have to shrink the panel screen and can no longer read data.

Chorme did this without asking me if I liked it. There seems to be no way to change the screen except by going back to Internet Explorer. Of course the first problem has no solution except to continue to run FS only on my Dell desktop computer which seems to be on its last legs - although it is doing this service now.

But I must admit I like Goodle Earth. This morning I was exploring the river where I used to cruise in my boat. There are many more homes there now with docks. I saw parts of the river I did not know existed.

And Google Chrome acts much faster and with less fuss than IE used to.

Such is progress.

[Ed Burke]

Tom, as you like Google Earth, try the next step up in definition www.nearmap.com/
You will not get much joy in the USA but have a look at Australia where the obvious blocks of HD coverage are indicated. I can almost identify the type of vegetables in my garden. No relief, just 2d images but very good indeed.

Ed

[Tom Goodrick]

Thanks, Ed. I'll check that out.

[flaminghotsauce]

I don't know for sure, but the task bar should be moveable. You should be able to drag it where you want it. I guess you're flying in windowed mode?

[Allan_Lowson]

I went for the "free" upgrade - except I had to pay for the CD coming across the pond from California - to Windows 7 from Vista, so this may not apply in Vista.

I can right click on the taskbar and change the location from bottom to side or top by selecting properties - and that allows me to lock the taskbar wherever I have chosen.

A few gauges don't seem to work under W7 that still did under Vista, and I'm not sure I've noticed any improvement over the Vista installation that came with the PC some 14 months ago. The pop-out dock is a pesky nuisance too at times.

[Tom Goodrick]

My problems with moving aircraft files from the old Dell to the new Toshiba laptop have been solved. I had tried using a flash memory USB chip before without success because my Dell, running Win98 would not accept it. But son Scott found a USB chip that just needs USB1 and has very simple programming so it works fine for this purpose. I demonstrated the capability yesterday moving two airplanes and a program. Today I just moved 8 airplanes in just a few minutes. You plug in the chip in a USB socket and put files into its drive E:. Then you take the chip out and plug it into the other computer and read drive E: but this time "cut" the files and move them into a folder on the other computer.

The program I moved yesterday was "Yeager", the air combat sim in honor of Chuck Yeager. But that has to run in DOS mode. I was stopped until Scott found a good solution for that. He told me to download "Dosbox" from www.dosbox.com. It works great. It creates a space within Vista where Dos can come alive and can run old dos programs. After installing that the Yeager program came alive and enabled me to get my behind shot off by two ME 109's! There I was over France with my oil lines shot up and the engine about to catch fire trying to look up in the manual the command to jump out!

So yesterday I transferred the Rockwell Shrike and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. They both flew fine and the ground support unit worked great with the Dreamliner. It landed very smoothly. Today I transferred the Yankee Blimp, the Falcons 900 and 2000, and the military trainers: T-28, T-33, T-38 and AT-6 II (modern turboprop).

Time to go fly.