Ones and Zeros

After almost two weeks of various delays I have another lesson! Instructor R and I get to go flying in the clouds today. We got a late start tonight, but start we did.

R watched over my shoulder while I filed our trip. Filing seems to work better if you fie one leg at a time. Filing for multiple airports in one flight plan doesn’t seem to work I’m told. R said “Don’t confuse people.” So, we made one flight plan to KOKV, then another back home. We would do two approaches to KOKV, a VOR-A, then an ILS. Then a GPS approach to home. He straightened me out on alternates and made it clear: the 1-2-3 rule.

We took of after getting our clearance. I’m using the standard acronym CRAFT stands for Clearance, Route, Altitude, Frequency, and Transponder code to remember the items in the clearance. When we’re ready to takeoff I call back and get the return “cleared to depart, right turn to STILL intersection, if not off by 2133 call me by 2135 current time is 2130.” (All times are UTC.) I now have a slot in the IFR system to go with my route and clearance.

We take off, and I get that little “yahoo” moment of every flight when the plane changes from an ungainly ground vehicle to an airborne magic carpet. When clear of the runway I make my right turn and set my heading. On downwind I continue climbing above the pattern altitude and ascend into the clouds.

No foggles today. I won’t need them as the clouds will provide the view limiting.

We climb through broken clouds and haze, then into a solid layer of complete white. Looking out the window is like looking into nothing. There’s light drops of water collecting on the front window, then running off to to the sides and top with the slipstream. Shortly before our assigned altitude we broke out above the clouds and were flying along in a bright new world.

For the most part on this flight, my control of the plane was more automatic. It was important and I was paying attention to it, but it wasn’t the primary obsession that I have had on some prior fights. It’s coming together, bit by bit. I wasn’t perfectly on heading and altitude all the time, but I surprised myself most of the time. I flew at one point for a minute with my arms crossed, just watching the gauges. But it isn’t all to my credit, part of it is that we were flying in a warm front and so had more stable air.

I dealt with the radio - R has his students do that unless the student needs help. Listening and talking on the radio always messed things up, it’s a very effective distraction. Working on “time sharing” is something I’ll have work harder on.

We made the VOR-A approach to Winchester and did a low pass and missed approach. We re-contacted Potomac Approach and got the ILS-32 for the same airport. He vectored us around to the ILS, then cleared us for the ILS after we intercepted it. This would give us a tailwind on landing, but it was a small tailwind. Normally, this would have been good cause for a circling approach, but I did this to try landing with a tailwind. Something else novel for me! (Not that I plan to make a practice of this.)

We pulled off the runway and I canceled our flight plan. Then I called right back and opened our flight plan back home. This would be a GPS approach.

We took off and turned to heading 053, but with a little tailwind from the right (210 degress) I found 060 was better. Potomac asked which approach I wanted. I suggested MRB, but should have chosen one closer to our current position.

More clouds and white out on this route too. At one point I turned to R and told him with a smile that, “This is crazy!”. He smiled back and replied, “But it is fun.” He warned me when we flew straight into a bank of clouds, “This will be a little disorienting”. He was right. But I just had to focus on the gauges and consider the clouds a full airplane wrap-around set of foggles.

The GPS approach went reasonably well. I do need to review some of the details of GPS approach minimums later. R corrected my minimum altitude understanding at one point (I was above the minimum).

But in the end it was good and it was fun. I now have 25.2 hours of IFR training with 2.5 hours of that actual IFR flying. Instructor R mentioned that I now had more actual time that some new instructors from a major aviation university.

I took the kayak out recently for a largely successful short journey. First upstream, then down. Get the harder paddle over with first. Turns out it was a little more work than I’d thought. Next time, I’ll check the water flow on the web first.

I was able to get some tips from an experienced paddler there. He gave me the picture of what the river was doing and recommended somethings. It’s always good to get local advice! The current was high, although not near flood stage. I could see a large branch floating downstream out in the middle of the current as I launched. My plan was to use the shallow draft of the kayak and stay mostly to the sides.

The upstream paddle was work I was making a slow speed as compared to the nearby shore, but was carving an impressive wake for a kayak. My route was short, but I lingered for a while near a side inlet and on an island in the middle of the river too.
(GPS tracking by InstaMapper.com)

(My start and and are at the red dot, but I didn’t start tracking till at the green dot.)

At the inlet I took pictures of a groundhog and turtles while floating on the calm water. The turtle in the front has its legs and head fully out and is sunning himself.

I crossed the river in the kayak. I angled my kayak’s bow into the current slightly and let it push me a little sideways while I paddled to counteract that push. In this way I slide horizontally across the current while moving upstream slowly. I watched for branches and the like in the current but encountered nothing substantial to modify my path.

In the current shadow of an island in the middle I rested. I’d always been curious about these islands and now was my chance to see one. I slid the kayak against a shallow shore and got out taking care to secure the kayak. I didn’t want to have to swim that current.

The island was overgrown and solid. No larger animals lived there that I saw as there were no paths or eaten vegetation. It was wild and unpopulated but within sight of a busy bridge and roads on the shore. For all I know, I was the first human footprint there. These islands are destroyed and remade in floods and have a geologically infinitesimal lifespan. Many of them have changed drastically or been made in living memory.

Getting back into the kayak went smoothly, at first. I have a closed kayak which means I have to raise myself up and slip my legs forward into the covered area ahead of my seat. The island was muddy and I wanted to rinse off the mud before I put my feet in. That involved dangling my foot over the side. Well, that proved to be my undoing. I got off balance and wasn’t able to regain it.

Fortunately, all critical things (camera, cell phone) were safe in plastic dry bags. I ensured that before crossing the current in the first place. My legs and butt would dry. I ended up getting more mud and water in the boat than I would have in the first place. That’ll teach me.

I paddled out to a rock in the river and sat in its lee, then drifted downstream to Point of Rocks bridge on the MD side of a large island. The downstream drift was pleasant, I watched the shore go by with the rocks on the hill above the C&O canal. And I watched the bridge approach.

I knew the current was strong enough that I wouldn’t be able to cross it between the bridge and the island, so I planned my route under the bridge. I went upstream close to the shore on the VA side and got back to the launch point.

All in all, a short but nice trip. I had plenty of exercise paddling, and found a good way NOT to get into a kayak.

On inauguration day I lost my wedding ring.  My wife and I got back on the shuttle bus and my hands started to swell with the sudden warmth.  I took my ring off and later when we got off the bus I couldn’t find it anymore.  Despite backtracking and rechecking our path it was gone as was the bus we’d been on.

I was pretty upset.  My wife, who loves me very much and doesn’t put as much store into attachment to things, consoled me.  Her idea was to make a new ring out of some older family rings no longer used: my father’s old wedding ring and my wife’s engagement ring.

I found a jeweler who did this kind of thing: Designer Goldsmiths.  It took a couple tries to get it right, but get it right we did.  He duplicated my ring!  The jeweler and owner Les Thompson did a great job and I’m delighted in having my ring again.  The problems were, I think, due to his trying to copying a design that I could only describe.

When I picked up my new (old) ring, Les resized it for me a bit as we were talking.  I noticed some business cards of his for a music studio: Cabin Studios.  (There are MP3s of music he’s recorded there on his website.)

“So you are a musican too?” I asked.

He said, “Yes, I was a musician before I was a  jeweler, but I got married and needed a more stable income.  I’ve been working in music again.  I thougth I might do that more when I eventually retire.”

We talked about the kind of music he played and then he mentioned, “You might have some of my music”.

“Oh”, I said carefully, “What band were you in?”

Turns out my jeweler is a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, they had songs like “Mr Bojangles”.  Les told me that he used to have his grammy in his jewelry store.  My wife and I like their music and in particular their album “Uncle Chaley & His Dog Teddy”.  The wikipedia version of the band omits some early history apparently.  The band’s official history, as expected, is slanted to the current band members.

These days in addition to making and selling jewelry, he’s producing and handling the mixing board for other musicians at Cabin Studios here in northern Virginia.

I really like talking to people and hearing their stories.  It’s always interesting, and sometimes I find wonderful connections.  There are great stories just laying around to be found.

More and more services are becoming subscriptions. If you check you bills you’ll see that you pay more of a percentage of your income on various subscriptions now than you did ten years ago. There’s the usual: phone, cell phone, cable, DSL or internet access. Then there’s various online subscription services: websites you belong to, a domain name purchase, ISP for a hosting service. Or perhaps a yard service.

Then some people lease their car, that’s a form of subscription as well. In the economic technical term all subscriptions are referred to as “rents” after all.

On a very prosaic level, if I pay money and buy something, I have ownership and within various social and legal limits I can do what please with this thing. If I subscribe to a service, I by much more limited rights. Not only time-limited but the range of what I can do is more limited. I typically don’t own that data that I subscribe to. Someone else does and their rights trump mine.

Kevin Kelly in “The Technium” post “Better Than Owning” talks about how everything is going to subscriptions. And, how all this will make our lives better. One only has to look at the RIAA suing its customers to see the problems there.

Kelly’s also being economically ignorant in not making the distinction between government produced commonly-held assets like roads, with privately produced and privately held assets like music and movies. I like his writing and his futurist pieces, but he’s off the mark here.

If I own data (i.e. bits. Once text or music or movies are bits then it’s all data.) then I need to find a way to store it and update as necessary. This is taken care of for me if I subscribe to it. However, subscription gives me time-limited access. If the owner decides to terminate business, my access purchase (really a subscription) is void. Yahoo Music demonstrated that recently and they won’t be the last.

Plus, there’s the need to keep paying for the thing too. The increasing subscription fees for TV, movies, and many other things etc. raise my monthly costs and require me to have a consistent income or sufficient financial reserves. Ownership does not require that, at least not in the same way. This is great if you’re a business owner charging subscription fees, but is increasing problem for a consumer.

While it’s easy enough to realize that I don’t need HBO, NetFlix, or whatever and simply to terminate that service. At some point various subscriptions, like my ISP or cell phone connections, would become essential enough that I would become a lesser member of society if I didn’t have that.