Gravity plays its part

Flying Radio Controlled Helicopters used to be one of my main hobbies, taking most of my time pretty much every weekend until about a year and a half ago, when I joined the ranks of the employed. Unfortunately that took up pretty much all of my free time and hence I shelved the idea for a while... Until this past weekend, when I decided to revisit the past and fire up the beast that is my 3DNT. .

The 3DNT is a german helicopter and a pretty high performance machine. Considering I hadn't flown in a year and a half I was slightly concerned before I took off on the test flight. Anyway, after a minute or two of hovering it seemed that all was in order, and it appeared as if I hadn't forgotten how to fly. I flew around for a bit, landed and fuelled my baby up for the second flight, where I was going to stretch her legs.

The second flight started well - after about two minutes I realized, after flipping the heli inverted, that I could still perform an inverted hover. I flipped the helicopter back upright, and clearly as the purr of the engine came to an abrupt end, the 3DNT did not enjoy the inverted hover as much as I did.

I attempted a downwind nose in autorotation (Landing the helicopter successfully without an engine!) which unfortunately ended unpleasantly as I think i flared and added pitch too soon... Check the video to see how it should be done properly, so guess who's ordering some RC parts from Hong Kong...

Wireless, Vista, and Cement Walls

Make no mistake - Wireless is cool. When it works. I was planning on posting a great pictorial story from the great weekend (St Paddy's, Poker, Wine Farm, 21st, djinx etc) however fate declares otherwise. The magical mix of technology that would normally make this possible has however failed me.

You see, my camera of choice is my Sony Ericsson k800i. What a beauty, takes photo's, synchronizes with Outlook and is 3G compliant, which means when our Telkom NarrowBand ADSL connection goes down, you can hoox this device up with your PC and browse the net, at lightning speed. In a perfect world... yes. So I've taken a whole bunch of pictures of the weekend, and now all i need to do is get them onto my desktop at home, so that i can upload them. Should be a simple task, we've got blue tooth and a USB cable. What more do we need. Well apparently we shouldn't be running Windows Vista.

Sony Ericsson do not provide a version of PC Suite for Windows Vista which means I can't use my USB Cable to download the photos. OK OK, no biggie - we have blue tooth! YAY i will simply push the files over, albeit slowly via blue tooth. Let me think.... No. My blue tooth dongle and Windows Vista result in a, although aesthetically pleasing, horrible Internet Explorer script error, right there in windows explorer. Fantastic. So, photos can stay on the phone then, because i just don't feel like emailing them to myself at this stage!

In amongst all of this our Wireless Router just doesn't seem to have the balls to provide me with a decent wireless signal in my room, a mere ten meters away. This means that during the brief time it has taken me to construct this post I have signed into MSN Messenger 6 times, and lost connection to blog spot as many.

To top this all off my fail safe internet connection, using 3G on my k800i is useless - firstly because I'm an MTN subscriber which has pretty much minimal 3G coverage, and secondly even if i could connect via 3G my phone and computer can't connect.

Wireless communication is great when it all comes together - but on a day like today - give me a bloody wire please. I think I need a drink.

Whiskey Out

New Yawk City

So after a pretty heavy week work wise, four cities in two days, I decided to take some time off on the weekend and head down to New York to visit Vodka for the weekend. I hopped on the 5:25 train from Boston and arrived in New York at around 09:00 PM on friday evening. Any ideas of this being a quiet night were quickly dismissed by Vodka who looked rearing to go, we headed in to his apartment, dropped our stuffs off and headed down to Rockefeller center.



It was here where we ran into our first problem at about 10:30 PM, the Rock Center Cafe, our first destination of choice was already closed! This was to become a common theme as the evening progressed. From there we headed to a very schnazzy place called Blue Fin on Time Square where the drinking began, rounds were quite pricey, $40 for four drinks, but hey, it's not often Whiskey and Vodka are mixed up in New York!



Anyway from there we headed to some other less desirable area, where the drinks were much cheaper... the women.... never mind! Anyway, at about three am we called it quits as everywhere had closed up, we stopped by the 24 hour store, grabbed a six pack of millers, two microwaveable lasagna packs and headed into the apartment, started watching some poker, made a microwave meal and djank some millers.



Gonna head up to Top of the Rock a bit later so will report back on that but for the moment - Whiskey Out!

Whiskey on the Rocks

Well it's been a little while since I posted something, and since it had been quite a while since I'd been this bloody cold I had an opening link with which to begin a blog post. Brilliant I know, save the praises of worship for later. I arrived in Boston Massachusetts yesterday evening into a chilly -4 degrees Celsius.

There is ice all over the place and hence came the title, Whiskey... on the Rocks. Poetic, priceless, whatever you want to call it. Fact is there is enough Ice here to make that many whiskeys that we would be properly smaYshed!

The trip over was interesting for two reasons. The first being the fact that a colleague posted an interesting article on our Company Blog discussing the crashing of in flight entertainment systems. Having read this shortly before embarking on an intercontinental flight I couldn't help but get itchy fingers.

I tried unsuccessfully on the first leg to crash KLM's system however no luck, rock solid, tested by quality people I thought. I had thus given up hope on crashing one of these systems while waiting for five hours at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport over a quick game of Roulette in the airport casino.

Upon boarding the next flight, operated by Northwest Airlines, my hope was restored. Shortly after takeoff they announced that they would be rebooting the system shortly as it was malfunctioning. All the screens went blank, a very Linux looking penguin appeared on my screen and some very Linux looking commands scrolled across the monitor. This process was repeated no less than six times during the flight as the system kept crashing. I was thankful for my Pod, which kept me entertained, and provided an excuse so as to not discuss the state of the American youth with the rather large polish gentleman seated next to me.

I'm not sure if someone else on the flight had read the article and was trying their hardest to ensure no one saw anything on the in flight system, or if it was just particularly unstable, but I had never seen anything like it.

I guess that's coincidence for you, anyway a couple of pics from a sunny but bloody freezing Boston Massachusetts... Whiskey Out



Working Quarters




















The building I go to work in across the road from my hotel.



The Boston Public Library

There seems to be a trend here...

So I went on a bit of a mission Friday night...

It all started at the office with a little award ceremony. I picked up three awards... one up from the previous year. This generally speaking is a good thing, except when the award is for doing something rather random or really out there. For example, the Borat lookalike award... I did not win that but you get the idea... what where the prizes... multiple shots of some form of an alcoholic drink. Since the awards ceremony started at 5pm and ended by 7pm we were all quite in the mood as one would expect! hence the remainder of the evening was very interesting...

After the award ceremony we (Whiskey and most of the company) all went to Panchos, a lovely little place, for a "few" goodbye drinks for one of our former colleagues. This started out rather calm with a few frozen margaritas and general banter with the bar tender of which was keen to show us all... let your imagination run wild for a moment... a magic trick...

As friends started arriving we upgraded from glasses of frozen margaritas to 2l jugs... ooh that stuff... gets you way too excited! I took around 30 photos in 5mins during dinner... bloody tequila! Whiskey was on form as well, having Tequila shots etc. Unfortunately Soda did not make it to Panchos but was just down the road with his girlfriend and there crowed... I am not too sure what happened there but I hope it was a good one Soda!

Once we were all thoroughly inebriated the next step was to goto the local pool club just down the road, which is where we found Soda and his entourage but myself with a few others decided it would be best to go to the primary... TigerTiger...

At this point Whiskey makes the wise decision of going back to The Tavern so as to ensure he is at least sort of capable of cycling the next morning. Do not worry, he will not get away with fading! WHEN DO YOU NOT GO DJINKING?!

At this point the remainder of the group are extremely sober, and fully aware of what we are doing... So we walk into TigerTiger strutting our stuff since we are all that. We do not go for the usual one beer before doing anything too dangerous... no... we are beyond that, we have transcended all... we go straight to old faithful... the shooter bar and the oh so godly shooter button!

I am not too sure what the numbers where but I know we had way too many shooters... a little bit of Tequila, a little bit of Jager as well as a little bit of this and a little bit of that... memory fading...

next memory...

Aahh! the dance floor! I recall being absolutely confident in my dancing abilities... too my detriment I am sure. Whilst dancing the night away with this lovely girl I decide to get all cocky and end up against the wall... do not get too excited ladies and gentleman, I merely strained my leg while performing a dance move only a professional ballerina or dancer could ever have hoped to pull off. None the less I was injured and was looked after by the lovely lady.

next memory...

um... ah yes... I think I must have started to drink less as I started on the dance floor due the fact that the surroundings were getting clearer... one of the revelations I had along with the remainder of the entourage is that it was 04:30 Saturday morning... hmm maybe it is time to go home... maybe...

We end up at the local 24Hour restaurant just down the road. Reason being after the amount of alcohol we had just drank, we need to get some food in our system... The only real issue with this lovely 24Hour restaurant is that the burger patty tasted bloody awful... a likeness to a diseased rat... not that I would know what that tastes like mind you but I would bet not very nice!

Once we had consumed the frozen chips and rat meat one of the entourage had a small revelation... it is dawn... best we get to bed...


Wine
"Life is too short to drink cheap wine"

Maintenance at The Tavern

Ok, I'm not a mechanical engineer, hell, I'm not any kind of engineer but I think I have a fair amount of technical ability when it comes to taking things apart and putting them back together again.

This was seriously tested this weekend when all hell broke loose at the Tavern. The dishwasher door hinge decided it had had enough of being in it's proper place and promptly dislocated itself thereby ending all of it's super hero dishwashing abilities. Can anyone say emo? One thing you get used to when having a functioning dishwasher is not caring about using a glass, or caring about washing it.

This is a feeling I like being used to, and it's a feeling I decided to restore by utilizing my technical ability to repair the dish washer to it's former glory. I happily employed the help of the bosch electric screwdriver to rapidly get the dishwasher into it's core elements. I thought this would assist in me seeing the way the italians had put together this beast of a machine.

No, No, No. The Italians clearly didn't ever want anyone to fix one of these things. If it breaks, buy another Italian one, cause there aint no way u gonna get that hinge back to where it belongs. So after I'd dismantled the entire dishwasher, and I'm talking about a lot of different screws all removed from the beast I realized that logic, a screwdriver, and a spare part were not going to solve this little equation. No, it was time for multiple pairs of pliers, sweat, and brute force.

The dishwasher is back together again, there are a couple of washers and screws left over, but it works again, which should keep everyone calm. The mere thought of losing the Italian was enough to sadden me, needless to say, she would probably have been replaced by a Brazilian.

Whiskey Out.

Power Nap

So I've been feeling pretty shit lately... So shit in fact that I haven't been at work and the funny thing is everyone who hears I'm sick seems to immediately know exactly why. "It's all the drinking", "It's the random chicks at Tiger Tiger", "It's all the drinking", "It's burning the candle at both ends", "It's all the drinking".

After hearing these diagnoses from so many different sources I began to believe them myself, and hence decided (Thanks for the persuasion Wine) to consult a medical doctor just to be sure. Since I moved to the deep south from the deep north my family doctor is still the one I visit in the deep north, and this is where I traveled to this morning for my consult.

I didn't think too much of it at the time, partly because I drive through there quite often, and partly because the aircon in the tractor would be a nice chilled environment for some quality "me and my pod time". Before any of you get any dodgay ideas that's ipod ;-)

Although the doctor did confirm some funny medical things wrong with me he didn't seem to mention all the alternatives listed above, and he was sure that a round of antibiotics, some boosters and a quick voltaren shot would have me on my feet in no time. Following the voltaren shot I was back on my feet in no time, however this was short lived as I could feel myself getting cold... and everything starting to fade around me.

I woke up what seemed like an hour later after some of the most.. um.. I really don't know how to explain this... fucked up dreams I have ever had. Apparently I don't like needles, I should probably have told him this before I fell on the floor in a giant demonstration. Anyway, now he knows for sure.

Needless to say it was one of the best 10 second sleeps I have ever had, I would recommend it to anyone who is suffering from a lack of sleep due to "Fill in lack of sleep reason here".

I decided to have a cup of tea after the consult, with a spoon of sugar, to try and get that I'm back on the floor kind of feeling going, cause I felt kinda up there for a little while. Also thought this may help avoid a similar situation while driving home to the deep south, I didn't think I would get such a friendly awakening if it happened while behind the steering wheel of the tractor.

Anyway, seems to be working - feeling a lot better already, but then again this may just be due to the Power Nap.