NikkelNet

Yes boys and girls, Jon is back in Yuma.  Again.  I’ve been working for, what 7 months now?  I’ve already lost count of how many times I’ve come here.

Yesterday we flew; it was wery wery windy.  The helicopter wibrated like crazy man on fire water.

Today we did absolutely nothing.  Steady winds of 40 knots, gusts even higher.  We went and watched “The Astronaut Farmer”, and ate sushi.  Yaaaaay sushi!

I think my brain is going numb from being here too long.

I sprouted my wings today and took the yoke of a 1979 Cessna 172, and flew around Benson for while with my instructor extraordinare!

And boy I’ll tell ya…it’s a lot to take in for one hour of life.  Definitely wasn’t expecting to perform the takeoff and landing myself (with some assistance of course), nor was I expecting to be in control of the plane for 90% of the time!  My instructor only took the yoke a couple times to demonstrate a couple of aero effects for me.  I guess I did pretty well for a first timer (might help that I spent four years learning about this stuff though ;).

The worst part: I chunked out $1k for 10 hours of plane time…definitely isn’t a cheap venture.  But my goodness is it ever worth it! I was too busy concentrating on not messing up and on learning the instrumentation to really take in much of the scenery, but what little I did take in was great…clear day out with 50 mile+ visibility.

I’m hooked…

Yea…so I got me an iPod Nano. It’s a cool lil’ guy. Much better’n my old stupid jumbo sized iPod (which didn’t work very well mind you). Now I can run with it and play with it and drive with it and generally just be merry with my nifty lil’ iPod Nano. Maybe I’ll make a podcast…no…no I won’t. I’m much too lazy to make a podcast.

And lets see…the grandparentals have been in town for a while now. We’re going to build a pergola over my new patio. For all of you who are not in the know, a pergola is a nifty little shade structure that has no roof, from which plants or other hanging items may be hung. My pergola will be sweet.

I’m going to New Mexico tomorrow to help map out some more of Las Playas, which is a little mostly abandoned town down in the butt of New Mexico that we’re going to do our testing at for Urban Challenge. They train swat teams and stuff there too. Then, next week it’s back to good ol’ Yuma again for some more attempted destruction of old Russian tanks (I get the aerial view).

I’m starting flight training too! Was supposed to start last Sunday, but the aircraft got pulled from service for maintainance, so we’ll probably try again this weekend. My instructor is a dude from my church that flies A-10’s in the Air Force. Should be rad. I bought books and a headset and all that what-have-you.

Aaaaannnnd I’m done.

I finally got around to getting rid of the crappy old Wordpress version I was running, and getting an upgraded version going! Looks cool eh?

Still need to add a little customization to put in links for some of the other pages I have on here (especially the photogallery).

Life for me is currently crazy. We’re going full-speed ahead with the Urban Challenge. Things are going well, considering how far behind we were…the vehicle can now perform waypoint following! I and my cohorts are making good progress with the lane detection system too!

Check it out: Team Scorpion.

-J