Pug’s Place

It’s amazing how much goes on and how little there is to say about it.

The cake is a lie.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I just haven’t had much about which I want to post.

Today two things happened: I landed at Casa Grande airport for the first time and I had to turn on my car’s air conditioner for the first time in 2008.

Casa Grande is a city of about 35,000 located roughly halfway between Phoenix and Tuscon. It has a busy municipal airport, owing to its proximity to a radionavigation beacon and that it has instrument approaches, allowing pilots holding or seeking an instrument rating to perform practice “precision” landings. It’s also just a short 12 nautical miles away from Phoenix Regional Airport, the airport at which I made my first solo flight and a large portion of my landings. The proximity of Casa Grande Airport to my ’stomping grounds’ south of Phoenix should have made it one of my most common destinations while airborne, but for various reasons until today I had never touched my wheels to the asphalt there. It wasn’t for lack of trying, rather it seemed for a while that higher forces were at work to keep me away: a sudden dust storm, a skydiver mis-jumping and the frantic call to clear the airspace around the airport, etc. However, I tried again today, and despite the heavy instrument student traffic I did do several landings and a leisurely taxi-back across the airport, allowing me time to enjoy the view.

Since February I’ve been regularly driving with all of my windows down and my sunroof open. It’s just that pretty. Today, however, it was a little too warm for that to be comfortable, at least while wearing long pants. So I flipped on my A/C in the Pugmobile. That’s all there is to that story.

So after repeated snubs by the media, I’m happy to see Ron Paul beating McCain for 2nd place in the Nevada GOP caucus today. As of now he’s holding 2nd by a few hundred votes, but not all precincts are reporting yet, so this may change. At any rate, he’s a long way from 4th or 5th place. (Update, midnight: Paul did place 2nd)

So, I’m somewhat annoyed to see to what lengths Fox News goes to avoid showing Ron Paul. Check this out, snapped this evening:

Notice in the bottom right corner that at the time this was shown Paul was in 3rd place. Now look at the three photographs.

These people disgust me. Incidentally, this sort of thing is why I never watch Fox News.

…But it’s all in the best interests of the American people because Glenn Beck on Fox News says Ron Paul supporters are a “domestic threat.”

Update, 11:30 pm: I just noticed that the New York Times doesn’t even show Dr. Paul as a candidate. Even in their online coverage. How can people roll their eyes when I say the media’s snubbing him?

I donated some money to Ron Paul on November 5th, as I said I would. Tonight I did it again. This time, however, I got a screenshot of my name appearing on the donation ticker.

Why now? Well, November 30th also has some loose association with a movement to educate educate Mr. Giuliani about foreign policy, so that seemed like fun.

Just thought I’d share.

This week I moved to Tempe, AZ. I’m now entirely “moved in” and quite cozy.

This was largely due to the cats. As I blogged previously, I haven’t enjoyed living with 3 cats, two of which regularly fight. Now I don’t have to; I have my own little space, complete with photographs and Liz-art on the walls. You can see some pictures of my new place on Flickr.

It’s been too long since I last flew; I’m thinking my next trip will be to Prescott, Az to see what’s up there. That should be next weekend.

Saturday night we had a pumpkin-carving party. Barry, Jo, John and Amy G and we three all carved various masterpieces. In the above picture, left-to-right the pumpkins are:

• Quasimodo, by Chris
• Happy Pumpkin, by Amy
• The Great Evil, by Barry
• Tux, by me
• Canada, by Joanne
• Happy Cat, by Amy G.
• Monster, by John G.

(Lots more pictures are online here)

Barry and I independently made our pumpkins. I, Tux. He, the “scariest pumpkin possible in a house of Linux users.” I must say we were all very entertained by the resulting duo! I’m rather impressed with myself, being able to carve Tux’s likeness so passably. And of course, all honor to Larry Ewing for creating Tux.

Prior to the pumpkin-carving much dinner was had, including Chris’ should-be-famous chili and tasty salsas.

In other news, I’ve decided to move into my own apartment in the next couple of weeks. I’ve found a place in Tempe considerably closer to work (and without cats). More about this later.

I flew my former flight instructor Jason and my brother Chris to Sedona, AZ yesterday for lunch. I had promised this trip to my instructor back in January, so it probably counts as being “long-awaited.” Sedona is about 100 miles north of here, located in the middle of the Red Rock Country; you may remember Katie and I heading up that way last March.

I won’t blather too long about the flight, but we did fly over Sky Harbor on both legs of the trip, got to fly over a landing 737, had turbulence on the trip back and had a nasty crosswind when landing again at Stellar. Now I’m confident that I can navigate to, negotiate and land at Sedona Airport, even located as it is on top of a 500′ tall mesa overlooking the city. So, now people have to come visit.
You can see a Flickr photoset of Chris’ pictures from yesterday here.

xkcd is regularly brilliant, but as a fervent Browncoat (Firefly), I absolutely had to post today’s comic.

I really want to get back into Dungeons and Dragons. Additionally, I like playing with technology. I started looking at making a projection table for D&D games, a setup where the map is projected from a computer projector (often located above the table) rather than drawn on a battlemat. In order to do this, one needs good software capable of showing part of a map at a time to players (fog of war) while ’staying out of the way’ of the DM’s ability to tell the story. I’ve been looking for software like this for years now, and I have to say that I think I’ve finally found it: MapTool. It’s even Free Software!

A major advantage to switching to a projector-based setup is it lowers the bar to entry for remote players — everything’s already on the computer, then, so if you wanted to play from a remote location you could, while still keeping the local players in the middle of the action.

So I’m fantasizing about buying a projector to hang from the ceiling of my house (when I get one) from which I can project the D&D map onto the table. I’m thinking that the aesthetic impact could be lowered by putting a paper lantern around the projector (but with enough room for adequate cooling). The miniatures for the local players would still be on the table and moved by the players, while the remote players would simply move their tokens on the map. The DM would move the local players’ tokens to match their miniatures’ movements. This means that Carmen, Liz, Elf and Crunch could connect and watch via MapTool’s player interface, talk via voice conferencing and see the exact same board as those of us in town see. All without forcing the DM to pull double-duty drawing on a battlemat and updating a computer representation.

The screenshot above is from MapTool; the shaded portions are showing the “fog of war” — players (including what is shown on the projector) would just see blackness there. I made the tokens with the companion program, TokenTool. You can find both tools at RPTools.net.

So, D&D group, have any comments?

Note: This isn’t by any means important, but I’m grasping for things to post here at the present.

I’ve been lurking on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list for some time, but a post made on Friday about aviation prompted me to write a response which was posted this morning. So, yay, I got an email posted by Dave. I’ve reproduced both posts below.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Sedona with Chris and my former flight instructor, Jason. I promised Jason from week #1 that, once I was a private pilot, I would buy him lunch in Sedona (at the Sedona Airport Restaurant, whose Flash-based website sucks!) so I’m going to make good on my promise. I’ve planned out a flight path which avoids high terrain as much as possible and provides plenty of emergency landing locations and practiced flying it it in both MS Flight Simulator and the newly-discovered Google Earth Flight Simulator (which is damn cool, if simple).

Oh yes, while I missed the eclipse on Monday, Chris, Amy and myself were out on our balcony at 4:30 am this morning watching the Aurigid meteor shower. Just as reported in 1994, many of the meteors we saw were bright blue. I’d ask if anyone else watched, but they were apparently only visible to viewers on the western side of the Rockies.

Read on if you’d like to see the pair of mailing list posts I mentioned above without clicking off-site.

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