Stjohn's RV-7

Pulled the trigger. Sent the check and order form for the QB kit. Getting float-fuel senders, electric aileron trim, and dual brakes.
What have I done?

filled up the disk last week with Matt’s baby pictures. Naturally. So hopefully this ware still takes new entries.

Flew to San Francisco for the Green Festival this past weekend. Lots of eco stuff, green building, organic farming, alternative energy, etc. We took Southwest from LAX to SFO. It sucked, both ways. They were the cheap seats, so we sat in the very back near the commode, listening to the turbofans. The seats were crammed about as close together as they could have been. On the evaluation card, I think I mentioned that they should just put us in horizontal racks, since that worked so well for slave ships and gulag trains. Airline fun comes from any direction.. It could be the kid behind you, kicking the seatback, or the businessdrone in front of you who has to lean it into your knees every ten minutes with a full body stretch, or the plumpling next to you, arm-fat oozing into your tiny and expensive space after its conquest of the armrest for the duration of the flight. On the other side of you might be a chatterbox who fails to understand that one person’s way to pass the time is another person’s relativistic dilation of hell. And then there’s the screaming kid, who might be in any one of the above zones, but could come from anywhere, the farther away the better. The inverse-square law IS your friend. We got all this and more, this trip. The sound of the turbofans is kind of cool at first, and does a lot to pave over the other annoyances, but it gets on your nerves after a while and the only way out of that is earplugs. I don’t like earplugs, especially in a tube full of strangers where I might, much as I’d rather not, have to interact with one of them at any time.
Every time one of these little annoyances would crop up, from the security checkpoint to the ass-in-the-face waiting to get off the plane, I thought of my little RV in the garage, and my ride with Dan Checkoway last year in N714D. Motivation comes in many forms. Thanks, Southwest, for strengthening my resolve to press on with my plane so that I can take care of my own regional aviation needs.

There will be pictures soon, i promise. Right now, the Li-ion battery in the SD400 has gone tits-up.. I get one or two photos out of it before it fails, so I’m due for a Best Buy run.

I dunno if you can see this, but I now have the entries for the log on the left and the archive/nav on the right instead of at the bottom of the page. I’m not a big fan of all this web stuff, but it’s a necessary evil. But enough about that. Builiding is going to take a 1-week hiatus while we go back to Michigan and visit family and friends. I have no right to snivel either.. I could have been building all summer long.. But the beach was nice! Anyway, this will pick up in a week or so, and hopefully I’ll be motivated enough to take some pics.

Did my BFR at Proteus yesterday. Dang, am I rusty. N400JW is a Piper Archer with a threadbare crushed-velour interior and a fading paint job that I have been flying, off and on, since 1998. It fits like a comfortable old sweater or a favorite pair of jeans. But it took me two tries to hack a basic 45 degree 360. This is what I get for not flying in over a year. But the instructor signed me off, which he did after the skillz came back. I’m a good pilot, but I need a hell of a lot more practice before I feel as safe as I did when I was flying all the time. But renting that ship for an hour a week for a year is about what one of the major kit parts of the RV costs. Slow build. So I’m in a quandary.. I don’t like being this out of practice.. it’s not safe. But I need to get on a regular skills maintenance program of some sort.. And I need to sort out tailwheel/aerobatic training somehow.

Hopefully we won’t have to move again.. With godaddy now, and hopefully this will be easy.. Mostly just a test.
for new entries in the AIRPLANE BLOG.
BTW, there’s been a significant bit of progress, so stay tuned.

5 hours.
This being the first entry since the crash, or the hack, I figured I’d give you a little background on what happened. We got hacked by what we suspect is a group of Brazilian neo-Nazis who used our machine as a way in to attack somebody else on the network. We were taken offline, but I was able to save the data, since I brought the machine home and backed up all the db and domain stuff. Now I’m back on a virtual private server, but getting the blogware to work has been like pulling teeth.. finally got it, but for some reason the main menu page just hangs.. something the webserver doesn’t like to execute. or something. But I’m back up now, and it’s not like there was nothing going on between Christmas and now. I’ll explain.

OK, now this is for all the marbles.
Got the new site going, still a couple of problems, but at least I can update. I think.. if you can read this entry,
then we’re sorted. if not.. hm. anyway, here goes.

Some shuffling going on.. I decided to put the pictures from the activity of mid november 2005 a little closer to its chronologically accurate point. So all the HS and VS pics should now be located further down the page, or you can look in the archives.