Over the couple of months, I’ve gotten a bit of my aviation fix taken care of for the year. I attended Air Expo 2005 at Flying Cloud Airport at the end of July. This past Friday, I took a little time to walk through the Fargo Air Museum when I was passing through Fargo. I took a bunch of photos of both.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the one airplane that really caught my eye is the F2G-1 Super Corsair that is normally on display at the Fargo Air Museum. It was down at the Air Expo for the show. What an amazing airplane. It is painted as it appeared in the lat 1940s when it was raced as #57 in the Cleveland Air Races.

Can’t you see me flying one of those??

For more of my photos of cool airplanes, click here!

–Pete

A coworker of mine recently suggested that I should be listening to an excellent podcast called “This Week in Tech” or TWiT for short. It is hosted by the legendary Leo Laporte and is a weekly podcast about all things technology. The regulars include such big names as John C. Dvorak and Steve Gibson, as well as a host of others from the former TechTV. I’ve listened to about five of the twenty episodes so far and found them all enjoyable.

Related to TWiT, is another useful podcast called Security Now!, which is also hosted by Leo. Security Now! focuses on security related topics and includes security guru Steve Gibson as the expert that Leo talks with. It was episode #2 of that podcast that inspired the title of this post. Apparently I have been living in a cave and hadn’t heard about Microsoft’s newest research project. It involves Windows machines crawling the web looking for websites that try to exploit holes in their Internet Explorer browser. Strangely enough, the researchers involved in this project refer to their Windows clients that are doing the browsing as “honey monkeys”, which pays homage to the term honeypot — another tool used in security research. Definitely take a listen to the podcast. It gives a fascinating look at this new research and is worth a listen.

–Pete

In 7th Grade, I met another kid who was a year older than me. His name was Jason, and he was every bit as big of a nerd as I was. In fact, he was even a little more nerdy than me — he wore glasses. I don’t recall how we met, but I do remember that it didn’t take long for us to hit it off.

One of the things that was very cool about Jason was his family had an awesome boat. It was a Starcraft SS160. The tan hull was an open bow variety and it was powered with a 50hp Mercury outboard motor. At the age of 13, Jason had studied diligently for his Minnesota Watercraft Operators Permit. He took the test, and passed. Even more amazing to me was that his parents trusted him with the boat, and whenever asked, would drop us off at the local lake for a lazy afternoon or evening on the water without any adult supervision.

Whenever we got the chance, Jason, Matt, and I would take the boat to Long Lake and just hang out. We’d cruise the lake a bunch of times at full speed thinking we were on top of the world. When we grew tired of that, we’d just drift and talk endlessly about things that seemed important to us at the time. We’d talk about boats, about computers, about school, about our parents, about our futures….and……we’d talk about girls. Of course, we didn’t know anything about girls. None of us had girlfriends. We had no idea how to get a girlfriend. You have to remember, we were nerds. It made us feel better to talk about it though, so we did.

Those boat trips were some of the happiest times of my childhood. It was amazing to be trusted by our parents to be in charge of that expensive machine. It was exciting to be on our own for an evening. We loved it so much, we would keep doing those trips even when the weather didn’t make for ideal boating weather. I remember one trip we made in early October. The water temperature was probably 50 degrees and the air temperature was probably not that far from there either. We got dropped off in the lake right after school and we boated until sunset. When the motor was running, you could seem steam rising off of the water jet of the motor. When it was running, you could hear the crowd at the football game at Irondale, which was only a couple of blocks from the lake. We loved it.

Today my brother and his two kids arrived at Beacon Shores to enjoy a few days with us. My niece, who is 13, loves to drive the watercraft and over the winter got her Minnesota Watercraft Operator’s Permit. This little piece of paper, which she had to study hard to get, legally gives her permission to drive the boats. In addition, it gives her permission to drive the personal watercraft if she is being supervised by an adult either with her on the boat or watching from shore. I’m always amazed that we don’t make adults do this too, since driving a boat is a whole different animal from driving a car.

I took my life in to her hands today and let her take me for a ride on it. I was a little hesitant about doing this, especially as she accelerated away from dock and I almost tumbled off the back. It turns out that there isn’t much to hold on to when you are the passenger and I wasn’t expected to be thrown around as much as I was. It wasn’t my niece’s fault either. She did a good job of driving — it is just tough being a passenger. As much as I enjoyed the ride, I have to admit that I like it better when I’m driving. I’m sure she likes it better when she is driving too.

–Pete

Twenty five years ago, my parents dragged our whole family to a little resort on the shore of Whitefish Lake. Beacon Shores was a little Mom and Pop northern Minnesota resort nestled in among the pine trees. There were a half dozen rustic cabins, a large lake, and plenty of things for a soon-to-be sixth grader to explore.

It is funny what I remember about that trip. I don’t remember a lot of the details, but there are some things I remember quite vividly. I remember building a plastic model of a Ford F150 pickup truck on an otherwise boring and rainy day. I remember spending lots of days boating in our old boat and playing in the water. I remember laying on the dock late one evening and watching a meteor shower with my brother. Most of all, I remember having fun on those days and wishing for more.

Tonight, I pulled into Beacon Shores Resort again. It looks different than it did when I was a kid. A lot of the change, I think, is not really so much the resort. A lot of it is my perspective. I’m seeing it from the eyes and perspective of an adult. It doesn’t seem nearly as big as it did then. It also doesn’t seem to be as big as an adventure as it was then. It does, however, seem like it will be as much fun.

My parents rented a cabin for a week. I arrived tonight and will be spending a few days hanging out with them, enjoying the quiet resort life, and cruising the lake in their boat and on their Polaris personal watercraft. Some of my nieces and nephews will be dropping in as will one of my dad’s brothers. It’ll be fun to relax and recharge for a few days.

–Pete

OK. Hold the phone. Stop the presses. Break out the Kleenex.

I am finally starting to feel a little old.

This past weekend I attended my 15th High School Class Reunion. 15th! It has been 15 YEARS since I graduated from high school. That is an eternity! I can’t believe it has been 15 years.

I have to admit that I was one of those people that enjoyed high school. I’d loved being at school. I was involved in an absurd number of activities. There were days when I’d arrive at school at 7 AM and not get home until 10 PM. Because of that I have always looked forward to getting back together my classmates and talking about the “good old days”.

Whenever I go to something like this, I’m fascinated with how people have changed — physically, emotionally, and intellectually. People that I guessed would turn out to a be a burnout loser have turned into successful business people — and vice versa. People that I thought would be heavy and unattractive have lost weight and changed their look — and vice versa.

I wonder if I turned out the way people envisioned. Anyone know??

–Pete

My wife added another pair of animals to her “petting zoo” over the weekend. She purchased a pair of Llamas.

To see pictures, surf to their photo album.

I know…..I know…… It is a little weird.

–Pete

A week ago I attended the Air Expo 2005, put on by my old friends from Wings of North, a non-profit group based out of Eden Prairie, MN. Wings of the North grew from the ashes of the Planes of Fame East Air Museum that used to be based at Flying Cloud Airport and closed in 1997 when the owner of the aircraft decided to pack them all up and move them to Palm Springs, California, to the Palm Springs Air Museum.

It was a good show. They had a nice variety of aircraft flying and on display. My favorite for the day had to be the Goodyear built Super Corsair, flown by Bob Odegaard. This is an extremely rare version of the famous Chance-Vought Corsair. It was built by the Goodyear corporation and had the extremely large Wright R-4360 engine in it. The R-4360 was the largest radial piston engine ever built, with 28 cylinders and producing up to 3500 horsepower. That is one monster piston engine!!

It was also fun to see a pair of beautifully restored WWII bombers. They had a B-25 Mitchell that belonged to the Southern Minnesota Wing of the Commemorative Air Force and B-17 Flying Fortress that belonged to the Yankee Air Force flying for the show.

I’ll be posting some pictures of the event in the next few days.

–Pete

I’ve been in Austin, TX this past weekend, visiting my in-laws after an extended business trip. I joined them for church this morning. At the end of the service, an usher dashed up to my mother-in-law, who is a nurse, and said, “I need you to come with me.” She pointed over to her left and I immediately saw that there was a young woman collapsed on the floor with people hovering around her.

It turns out that this young woman was having a seizure and within moments of her collapse she was being helped by my mother in-law and a physician who was also a member of the church. Once they had assessed her condition, they directed another person to call for an ambulance as this poor woman continued to have seizures.

I was thoroughly impressed with the fact that after only about four minutes, four fireman from the Austin Fire Department were on-site with emergency medical equipment, including a blood sugar monitor, oxygen, blood pressure cuff, and other important emergency equipment. The fireman had been there no more than 5 minutes when the ambulance arrived to transport this young woman to the hospital. In all, I think it had been about ten minutes from the time she hit the floor to the time she was being loaded into the ambulance. Pretty amazing, huh?

I’m so glad we live in a country where skilled medical care is just a few minutes away if you really need them. Have you taken the time to thank a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic, or a fireman lately? If you haven’t, take a minute and do it. After all, they might just save your life one day.

–Pete

Thanks to those of you who gave me suggestions for webhosts for Helping Paws. I picked a company called Deafing Urge as the host. They were a little more expensive than some of the others I looked at, but I heard from several people that they were absolutely rock-solid reliable, which is something that was extremely important for us.

We’ve been using it for two weeks now, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. I’ll let you know what I think after we’ve used it for a while.

–Pete

It has been a while since I’ve done any kind of update on Daisy, so I thought now might be an opportune time. To start off — yes — she is still with us. As remarkable as it seems, Daisy continues to survive with her cancer. I know what you are thinking, but don’t worry, she is not in pain.

We just recently had her at our vet for evaluation and he was quite surprised at how well she is doing. He palpated her belly and commented that her tumor has grown quite a lot and is now easily felt in her belly. He then quizzed us:

“Is she eating OK?” he said.

“Yes”, I said. “She is usually the first one to line up for food at breakfast time and supper time.”

“Does she still go on walks with you?” he queried.

“Yes,” I said. “She walks more slowly than she used to and for shorter distances, but she always wants to be included and is always excited when the other dogs get leashed up.”

“Does she seem to be in any pain?”

“No. Not anything I significant,” I said.

“Yeah. I agree. She doesn’t seem to be in any significant pain. Hmmm… Has she slowed down?” he asked.

“Yeah. She has slowed down a lot. She spends most of her time sleeping now,” I said.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I would expect that will continue. To be honest, I’m surprised at how well she is doing, considering the size of the tumor now. I would have expected her to be in pain or at least show some signs of discomfort. She isn’t showing that though. Based on the size of the tumor though, I expect she is nearing the end. I would imagine a few more months at the most. Of course, with this type of cancer, if the tumor ruptures, she could be gone tomorrow too. You never really know.”

“Yeah,” I said, shuddering at the thought of her tumor rupturing. “Let’s hope it doesn’t happen that way.”

“Well — keep doing what you are doing guys. She continues to look great and she has already lived much longer that I would have expected,” he said.

With that, I took Daisy home and thanked God for the extended time we’ve had with her. As I write this, she is curled up on the couch next to me, softly snoring and dreaming her Labrador dreams. I will miss her when she is gone. I’m glad I get a little more time before that happens.

–Pete

If you haven’t seen Wikipedia yet, drop everything and point your browser to http://en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a type of wiki, which is a special type of website. In a wiki, everyone who reads the webpage also has the ability to edit, add, or delete from the page as well. This sounds like it would lead to chaos, but strangely enough it doesn’t. Wikipedia is a great example of this. It is an encyclopedia. Anyone can read the articles, write new articles, edit existing articles, or delete existing articles. So far over a half million articles have been written on the English version of Wikipedia.

I’ve even gotten in on the act. I’ve written a half dozen or so articles on things that interest me and that I have a little knowledge in. I wrote one on the USCGC Sundew, one on the USCGC Mackinaw, one on Split Rock Lighthouse, and one on the Two Harbors Lighthouse. Take a look and if you feel like I’ve made any errors, feel free to edit them or to add additional articles.

–Pete

I learned about a new command line command today for Mac OS X. The command is drutil, which is used to interact with various CD/DVD drives on a Mac OS X box. My favorite, of course, is drutil tray open and drutil tray closed, which opens or closes the CD drive tray on a Mac with a tray loading drive.

The fun part of this is when you combine this command with the power of Apple’s Remote Desktop, you can do fun things like what are depicted in this movie.

–Pete

Lately I’ve been looking for a good webhost for the non-profit organization Helping Paws that I work with. Up until now, we’ve been hosting our web and email stuff on a server that belongs to one of the members of our board of directors. For complicated reasons, we’ve decided to move it to a professional web hosting company.

Being a non-profit, we are of course interested in getting the most bang for our buck. I’ve been doing some searching around and have found that it is quite difficult to find good information about web hosting companies. I’ve got a couple of prospects that I’m chasing down. If I find a good one, I’ll be sure to post something here so others can benefit from my research.

–Pete

As a Mac OS X geek, I find myself at the command line quite a bit to do various things. One of the things I’ve always thought was awkward about the command line was reading man pages for a command. I always wanted to be able to quickly scroll back and forth through a long man page and/or be able to print it out for later reference. That is not easy if you read a man page from the command line.

Recently, a friend pointed me to a nifty application called ManOpen, which allows you to open and view man pages from the GUI of Mac OS X. You get the typical nice things with the GUI, including a scroll bar and the ability to print it using the standard print dialog box. I’ve found it to be very convenient.

Check it out at http://www.clindberg.org

–Pete

It has finally arrived! As part of my new job, I get a company car to drive. As of a couple of weeks ago, I finally got my new ride — and it is a real chick magnet too! It is a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan.

Seriously though — I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now and I’m really liking it. It has loads of space and seems to be very comfortable for longer trips. I haven’t really put it to the test yet though since I haven’t had any trips longer than an hour or so. I should be able to put it to the test in a few weeks.

This is actually the very first new car that I’ve ever had. All the cars I’ve had previous to this have been used ones. I always bought cars that were about two years old. I was usually able to get a much nicer car for a lot less money by doing that.

–Pete

I know a few of you have been following the saga of my dogs, so I thought I’d throw in a quick update about them as well. Belle, our dog with the injured tail is doing absolutely awesome! Her tail is healed now and we’re just waiting for the fur to fill back in. She does look a bit different though with her shorter tail.

Daisy, our dog with cancer, is amazingly still hanging in there. She was just at the vet today for her yearly checkup and heartworm test. After palpating her belly, he told us that he can feel that the tumor has grown significantly since he last saw her and it was really quite large now. He wondered if we were seeing any problems with her appetite or if she seemed to be in any pain. Thankfully, the answer to both of those questions is no. She is the first one in line for food and she’ll still play frisbee if offered the opportunity. We have, however, noticed that the amount of energy she has has dramatically changed. She sleeps much more often now and for much longer periods of time. When she plays with the other dogs, she is always the first one to quit and lay down. Our vet thinks our time is now very short with her — perhaps a matter of days — perhaps a matter of months. I guess time will tell. She has proven him wrong before!

–Pete

It has been way too long since I’ve had any time to write anything for this blog. Tonight I have a good excuse. My buddy Tim Wilson recommended I try out the MarsEdit utility from Ranchero to write my blogs. I’m hoping that have something like this will help encourage me to write more often, since I’ve now removed the convenient excuse of, “Gee — I can’t write anything cause I’m not connected to the net!” I’ll keep you posted.

–Pete

As a person who has worked supporting large numbers of Macs, one of the things that can be hard to keep straight is the various models of the Macs. I recently stumbled across a really cool application that makes this task much more manageable. It is called “Mactracker”. This a very cool piece of freeware and if you support Macs, it is a must-have app for your aresenal. Check it out!

–Pete

Synopsis: A bedraggled group of oil workers suffer an airplane crash in the Mongolian desert. Using pieces of the wreckage, they build a new plane to carry them home.

The Good: Miranda Otto. What can I say…she’s nice to look at and an enjoyable actor. I also enjoyed the flying scenes of the C-119. You don’t see too many of those these days.

The Bad: Parts of this movie are so unbelievable. For example, if this is the middle of the high desert with nothing but sand dunes and rock, what the heck are smugglers and nomads doing riding horses through the middle of it. Horses need water too! Also — I find it hard to believe that a sandstorm could bury their newly built plane all the way to the top and not cause any further damage to it.

The Ugly: The scene where they find one of the men who was sucked out of the plane during the crash.

The Bottom Line: I enjoyed this film, but it sure wasn’t the blockbuster I was hoping it would be. I give it a 6 out of 10.

–Pete