GaryGB
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Posts posted by GaryGB
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Hi Bill:
The Mallard looks absolutely fabulous; can't imagine feeling a need to re-paint this one! :D But I'm sure some will want to.
BTW, will this one have damage profiles so we can re-enact the miami crash? (...No disrespect intended to the memory of the victims...) :oops:
I saw the news item on the web shortly after the crash, and was impressed with the appearance of a Turbo Mallard. I can see how the confidence of twin turbo power could potentially lead to some airframe damage as one takes on some waves larger than Grumman intended back in the days of their piston engine powered original design. Even in the LA4-200 EP Lake Amphibian my colleague and I can't take on much over 6 - 9" wavlets and get up on the step, or land without porpoising and risking a prop strike to the fuselage. I can only imagine what its like in a bigger amphibian; I guess you'll help us get a sense of that with the Mallard! :wink:
It's great to have you back, and best wishes for your new ventures.
GaryGB
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Well Francois, in the interim til you get a chance to visit Chicagoland, maybe Bill Lyons' "Flying with the Stars" Red Carpet Xpress air service could shuttle you to the "original" Lake Como in Italy and get you connected with the Lake Amphibian pilots at the air club there (check out their site at: http://www.aeroclubcomo.com/En/Henglish.asp). Maybe they could then connect you with movie star George Clooney to put you up there for a few days in his mansion overlooking the lake (see his movie: "Oceans 11" which has some scenes filmed there)! BTW, there is a pretty cool FS scenery of the Lake Como area at: http://www.fscloud9.com/php/products.php?lang=EN&id=98. :wink:
If you can't get there in person to experience a ride in the plane, Lake Amphibian enthusiasts can see some nice footage of the plane in the movie "The Firm" starring Tom Cruise.
We do most of our LA4-200 EP check rides in a local Lake Como just north of Lake Geneva in south eastern Wisconsin about 20 miles from my girlfriend's home in northern IL. We put on a show, taxi in a ways, tie off to a buoy, and then an appreciative viewer from "Mars Resort" usually saves us from putting on the hip waders (I prefer only simulated "full immersion"!) in the open cockpit and dingies us to shore for some refreshments (non-alcoholic of course!).
I'm wondering what the elevations are at Courcheval; with a Service Ceiling of (Ft/M) 14,700'/4481 for the 250 HP normal Renegade, and 23,800'/7254 for the 270 HP Turbo Renegade, it might make for a nice ride in and out of some mountain lakewater and altiports! :D
GaryGB
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Yessiree, and we'd be glad to take you out for an adventure if you use a few of those miles and come out this way again! :D
We fly out of DuPage (KDPA), and after 45 to 75 minutes (depending on tailwind vs. headwind conditions) we cross over Madison, WI and 20 miles later land at my colleague's condo on Lake Wisconsin after buzzing the neighbors, boaters and patrons sitting on the deck at the Hillcrest restaurant next door to his building. (We drop the gear to grip the sloping river bottom, nose up close to the elevated shoreline, and tie off to a tree near the condo; pretty cool looking out and seeing the plane at the water's edge 35 ft. below in the moonlight at night!) In "iffy" weather, we land at Baraboo Dells KDLL and drive a few miles in the old limo kept there for such contingencies.
When we don't indulge at the Hillcrest, we get on the 90 HP pontoon boat and party up the river to "Fish Tales" (formerly Alice's) or past the ferry and Tommy's Merrimac Marina, under the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad trestle, and up to Fitz's on the water at Okee near the scenic Pine Bluff Peninsula and Diedrich seaplane base (11WN) in the inlet off the river. (I'm working on some FS scenery of this relatively unique post-glacial midwestern area with 500 foot hills as it is dear to my heart, and it helps offset the cabin fever in the winter.)
Other times we go down river to the Lake Wisconsin Golf and Country Club just above the Prairie Du Sac Dam (where eagles are seen year round) for brunch or golf. In a year with good weather, its a rough life deciding which adventure to plan next: the plane, the pontoon boat, or the waverunner! :wink:
GaryGB
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Francois:
Well, what a coincidence... small world isn't it?!!! Yep, I'm a few miles away in Elgin, Illinois (IL), and my colleague is in St. Charles, IL, 3rd and 2nd towns north of Aurora, IL here in the Fox River Valley. We fly out of DuPage Airport on the east edge of St. Charles in West Chicago, IL in the Lake Amphibian when the weather is good, and "out of our minds" in the computer when the weather is bad! (see my initial post: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=48568 ).
The "All Canada Show" I referred to was held at the aspiring Pheasant Run Resort right next to the hangar for the Lake Amphibian at KDPA.
Aurora and its surrounding environs is growing steadily, and I get down there frequently; a nice town. If you get a chance to visit again, I'd enjoy the opportunity to meet you in person, so please let me know if you're passing through "Chicagoland" sometime!
PS: And did I miss reading something about amphibians and Bill Lyons? Please tell me more!
Kind Regards,
GaryGB
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Hi all:
Since there may be those who are opposed to the name "Emma International" for Bill's creative new "OPTIONAL" scenery addition on the basis that the small field ambiance should be preserved with its unique name, then how about an alternative name more in keeping with the "new ambiance" one might encounter when flying a heavy on the new runway.
In light of recent news involving U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, and in recognition of Fritz's dedication to preserving his existing way of life, what say you to the name "Cheney Memorial" to celebrate the proud tradition of firing buckshot at one's friends while "tanked up"!.:lol: And maybe we could get VP Cheney to make an appearance for the official dedication ceremony (wear your flack jackets and visors!!!). 8)
PS: Hey Francois: could we prevail on Bill Lyons to throw us a bone and put a rural branch office for jet-setting vacationers at Emma Field on Bill Dick's new addition? Can't think of any other jet more befitting of the "Honored First Guest Test Pilot Landing" there aside from Bill Lyons' Sino Swearingen except for maybe Air Force One. :idea:
Knowing how things can go at Emma, CBris will probably "turn things upside down" with an unauthorized flyby just as VP Cheney starts to speak, trying to steal the thunder from the "Blue Angels" before they do their famous flyby tribute to the Pilot Lost in Action, as the crowd sheds a tear for the missing Jack "Don I." Donnelly. (I wonder... does Tim Miss Our Talk here at Emma?) :roll:
Of course just as Cheney finishes his speech, the stork might do his own flyby and drop a load on Cheney's suit, so Cheney could grab a gun from the Secret Service guy closest to him and start taking pot shots at the stork. Failing at that (since there is a big difference in "scatter" between a 9mm and a 12 gauge), Cheney could, as once described on NBC TV's Saturday Night Live comedy program, "turn into a cloud of bats" and go flying after the stork! :twisted:
Not wanting our beloved old Emma to be upstaged, Fritz could then step up to the podium and announce that "Don I." had been located in Greenland, and would be returning to Emma that evening for a live via satellite country-fied metaphor bantering smackdown on TV with Dr. Phil at the Emma clubhouse that evening, and in the mean time would every one please "Proceed To Parking". The crowd goes wild, covering up the noise from all the shots being fired over by Richard's FBO building as VP Cheney reappears on the scene, shooting skeet with Fritz's new stock of Edam and Gouda cheese purchased just for the occasion of Don's homecoming: "PULL"... BAM!!!, "PULL"... BAM!!!. Just then Bill Lyons arrives in his new limo and announces he will actually fly the challenger underneath the waterfalls near the ultralite launch area for "old times sake". :shock:
Fritz then arrives in his golf cart and says that Mathijs Kok and Katy (see: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.pt=daughter) flew the Aerosoft Super Cub on floats over to Fritz's dock by the cabin on Lake Cushman for the occasion, and if you wanted to get some publicity pix of Katy's visit, she'd be outside by the dock inspecting Fritz's DeHavilland DHC-2 if you wanted to stop by and snap some "Beaver shots". :oops:
Well as you can see, we've only just scratched the surface of possibilites here (or was that post just the bottom of the barrel)! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
GaryGB
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Thanks Simon, its been a while since I had a fully loaded Emma installation on my machine since I rebuilt under Win XP.
I am sure I speak for all of us here at EFFC when I say we really appreciate your keeping these cherished files in a safe online archive for those of us still solving machine problems and losing things in the huge sea of files on our constantly changing hard drives, as we tell ourselves "someday I'm gonna get all this organized, and keep redundant backups"!
GaryGB
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Yeah, those beavers are distinctive... their appearance with tundra tires and their sound remind me of a huge bumblebee cruising around.
Earlier this year I visited the "All Canada" show (an expo) in the Chicago suburbs, primarily for operators of rural fly-in resorts, lodges, cabins, and itinerant tent camps trying to pre-book clients for this summer/fall outdoor season. They had lots of cool pictures and stories of Beavers, Otters, Norsemans, Mallards, and Caravans used to fly people in and out of lakes, often dropping them off in one lake and then to another with canoe and supply caches in between contact with the outfitters. They seem to live out there in the areas they outfit; what a way to support one's lifestyle! Go on the road several weekends a year to expos in key cites of the US midwest, and book enough clients for the year so you can do what you love. HMMM...
There were some bush pilots there as well, and I enjoyed talking with them about their adventures, the types of engines they used over the years etc.. Maybe I'll take a back country adventure there in Canada some time in addition to my plans to tour the PNW Georender airports and BC!
GaryGB
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Hi Francois:
I was thinking it might be nice for Fritz to be able to visit you on the French Riviera sometime. The location of the movie starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin entitled "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" comes to mind for some reason!:D
GaryGB
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Hey Bill!
Your add-on looks great! That was a really ingenious choice picking the clear cut for the (real world) dreaded high tension powerline pylons as a location to put a runway large enough for other flyers who like the big aircraft. Given the apparent large number of folks into the heavies and jets, maybe this could further bolster membership and participation to even higher levels at the "Emma International" airfield. Fritzois may have to fix his membership hard drive sooner than he counted on if word gets out about this! :D
If anyone is interested, look at our beloved Emma Field area on Google Earth, and notice that the area along Emma in that section of clear cut from bend to bend is 4,900 feet; enough to keep most aircraft happy (if it weren't for all the buckshot from Fritz's shot gun they'd have to put up with!)
I would also be a bit worried about the experience being a bit too traumatic for anyone other than a seasoned combat veteran trying to land there in loud military aircraft since Fritz gave circuitous reference to getting ack-ack guns to protect his way of life at Emma! :wink:
Of course now Fritz will have to get a golf cart :wink:
to go over to the new terminal to clean the restrooms and get back in time to watch Dr. Phil on TV to keep up on his "country-fied metaphors".:idea:
GaryGB
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Chris: which came first: the zany humor, or the flying upside down?!!! :lol:
GaryGB
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Well, I haven't seen any sign of Don I. lately, but I was intrigued as to the origin of his new nom de plume, so i googled and found this site: http://www.larrynortonart.com/printdisp1&click=11
Seems like this pilot's world flight in a small plane would be an interesting read / view according to the web site here: http://www.claytor.com/intro/.
And with Jim Keir's prior expressed interest in Africa, I'll bet he especially would get some great inspiration for some FS scenery from this adventure.
Well, I finally found some links to posts by "timmissartok" (I was spelling it wrong), so I got my "Don I." fix for the season. Hope he's still around and enjoying the recent burst of banter at EFFC!
GaryGB
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Oh, by the way, as to the drive, I just gotta say it:
IT AIN'T DEAD, ITS PININ'... PININ' FOR THE FIORDS (of BC?) :mrgreen:
GaryGB
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Hi Francois:
I know how it goes with a highly commited schedule; been there too lots of times. I'm sure you'll be able sort it out when you get a chance. But because of the little element of uncertainty in the process as described, I'm somewhat intrigued by the scenario, and would like to offer observations which might lighten the load for you when you get to this, knowing how mind-numbing these things can be when our attentions are necessarily divided.
If you don't mind the extra input, and if you get a moment to clarify further...
If I understand correctly, the drive you plan to resurrect later on was an extra data drive without an active boot partition? If that was the case, it should be properly autodetected by nearly all current mobo's IDE controllers or a 3rd party PCI ATA 133 IDE controller card (EX: Belkin, Promise, Maxtor, Adaptec) and fill out drive letters at the end of your existing drive letters and make the data available to you. That's assuming one jumpers the drive to be a slave.
Sometimes regardless of jumpering, depending on the OS, if the old drive has an active boot partition still on it, it may interpose it's C: partition into the drive chain as drive D:, and the rest of the old data drive's letters will follow your newer drives' letters at the end. And with the new PC now having the NT boot loader on it, there may be a prompt for which operating system you wish to boot from (old OS vs. XP) when you turn it on.
If one were concerned about hiding the old active boot partition to avoid chaos when the new XP boot drive loads Windows and looks for everything where it "should" be by drive letters assigned when you loaded everything under XP, one could use the newer Norton Partition Magic version 8.05 (not 8.0!) as I know it can manage 300+ GB drives and "hide" the old active boot partition attribute. I always use the included Partition Magic DOS version off diskettes under a Win98 floppy boot to do the Magic. Because most recovery sofware is only now getting better at dealing with NTFS drives, I have purposely been keeping my drives as FAT32 (no flaming necessary, would-be critics... the machines are all in physically secure settings behind 3 firewalls!).
One must be careful not to re-size the C: primary partition on physical drives over 80 GB total size with Partition Magic, as a known minor partition table attribute writing bug unique to that primary partiton resizing scenario will require some help from Symantec technical support involving use of their Partiton Info utility and Partition Editor to fix it immediately when it happens.
But, I'll bet you get the data back fine when you have some time!
Kind Regards...
GaryGB
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I'll bet Fritz's alter ego, Fritzois, would be very happy in the scenic mountains near Courcheval, but if Francois came to BC Canada, he'd be a very happy flyer too!
Best wishes... and go for it!
GaryGB
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All righty then!!!
I might just try flying the Lake Amphibian in for a "grassy water" belly landing near the light house on the "shoreline" if I have enough of Uncle Elmer's hooch beforehand.
Alternatively, we could put a UV lightbulb in the tower, connect some screen in the cupola to the autogen high voltage electric pylon that keeps popping up near the runway, and see if it attracts the stork or smaller ultralites to get zapped! :twisted:
If nothing else, maybe it will help us out during black fly season and get rid of the mosquitos (the little ones carrying West Nile virus) from the premises. Don't want Fritz to get bitten too badly when he trips and passes out on the mole hill out on his rounds at night! :roll:
GaryGB
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Hi Francois:
I may be preaching to the choir here in light of your I.T. training and acumen, but I once temporarily had ALL my data from 1984 to 2004 on a single large new backup hard drive during an upgrade. Yeah, I know, pretty dumb. But I discovered a trick never seen anywhere on the Web to save my a$$ that almost always works instead of the profoundly expensive commercial recovery service fee. I learned it from... a commercial recovery service!
I was copying from the new backup drive to the existing one being refreshed, and wouldn't you know it, that new one died 2 days out of the box, apparently overheated during a 400 GB transfer with the source drive temporarily mounted too close to its matching target replacement drive. (I never had a Maxtor fail on me except back in the early 1990's when I was younger and "less foolish" than I am now; I was using Win9x power saving on my drives, then with the belief that I'd lengthen the lives of my drives by accepting the default power saving settings and allowing my drives to power up and down during the day. Well, it turned out that I shortened the life of the drives using power saving; now I leave them on 24 hours a day and get at least 6-8 years out of them! I have previously always used 7800 RPM IDE PATA / Ultra ATA Maxtors.)
Anyway, after the Sphincter Factor 10.5 shock eased up, the grim reality of major financial outlay for recovery vs. SWAG (Systematic Wild Assed Guessing) had to be decided on. I quoted and picked the brain of some recovery companies as to my options, and as yet unwilling to spend that much money, I decided to make just one more call to a small new company whose ad I hadn't seen before in the computer magazines and on the Web.
During my conversation with the proud young owner/operator/chief bottle washer he described, either out of sympathy or naivete, that for routine disk failures, recovery companies rarely go in the dust free room and do surgery on your drive platters/head servos for exorbitant periods of time. Rather, they keep replacement controller interface cards (the ones that screw onto the hard drive body and contain the jumpers and cable mounts!) and get new "series" types "periodically" from the manufacturers under an OEM pricing agreement, swap out your controller for a matching or "compatible series" card, zoom your data off onto another drive, and make a nice markup for the presumably complex operations they "performed" to get your data back. No doubt they actually do the complex drive surgery now and then, but light duty volume is probably what pays the bills!
So guess what... I went to the store and got the matching drive, took off the controller card with the mini torx bolt head tool kit from the hardware store, put it in place of the one that failed, and Voila! up she booted and I quickly copied off the data to the target drive. I then wiped that suspect source drive (notice I'm not saying "failed drive" here!), put the old "failed controller card" back onto it , took it back to the store and got a refund for the defective drive. The new card went back onto the new "borrowed" drive and it works fine even today.
The moral of the story, of course, is I chose temporarily to not maintain redundant backups; but hopfully if one's backup fails, this procedure might help someone when pressed by concerns of time, security/confidentiality, budget, or just one's own technical pride. No matter how convincing that "plink-ing" ping pong ball noise is that you hear coming from your "failed" drive, and no matter how convincing the recovery company is when they tell you that noise is probably a failed servo for the drive heads, it's still worth trying this, because when I put the new controller card onto the suspect drive, it sounded absolutely NORMAL and worked fine, and I've listened to a lot of hard drives over the years!
I've also had excellent results with recovering a drive's primary partition that crashed before its backup was scheduled to be performed later that day. I used R-Studio from R-Tools Technology Inc. at http://www.r-tt.com/ (tech support was very helpful despite their heavy russian accents) but that's a tale for another day.
Good Luck!
GaryGB
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I'll have to remember that excuse next time. Hmmm, lets see... "Well dear, I've got to taxi over to the tank and top 'er off, be home after 8 or so!!!" :lol:
GaryGB
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ROFLMAO :mrgreen:
Thanks for the great fun guys! Humor is good for one's health, unless of course you fall backward in your chair and land wrong from laughing so hard.
But with the abundant practice this group might have in falling backwards from being "overserved", I guess nobody here would be at risk for incurring bodily harm. And as for landing wrong, it naturally follows that with our practice landing wrong at Emma but living to tell about it, we'll all be OK!:wink:
GaryGB
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Hey thanks Bill!
I think its about time we had the "option" to put some lights at Emma again, this time in FS2004! And I hope we can stir up a little controversy at the same time as a stimulus to the Emma-ite tribe wandering in the (Alaskan) wilderness to become prodigal sons and "Fly Away Home" to take a stand!
I tried downloading your file from Simon's site at http://www.stansco.co.uk/FSFiles/Emma_Lights.zip , but the link didn't work; anyway we can get him to make this available to us "unknown" EFFC members via his site without the E-mail procedure? Thanks again.
GaryGB
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Hi All...
Having originally bought FSE from LAGO long ago before I knew about the option of purchasing from SIMMARKET, I went to http://shop.lagosim.com/ and didn't login (unless there was a cookie I previously allowed but didn't delete). I then was able to locate the FSE download links from the FSE product page, and finally got the soundpacks and patch files I had tried repeatedly to download for months, this time without a hitch! :D
I even got GetRight to intercept or accept the download after allowing the LAGO popup box to offer the link to each file; only had to retry one time at the "server is busy" status message before succesfully downloading via a mighty quick DSL 5-segmented session on each. :wink:
At last... a properly functioning LAGO FTP site!
I hope FSE ver 1.10 isn't too buggy, because I really have missed using it and all the great add-on sceneries and sounds for Emma and our favorite nearby PNW sites after my total FS2004 rebuild in Windows XP. Hope you are all equally successful with FSE, and you might also try Abacus EZ-Scenery for static and silent scenery creation. Good Luck!
GaryGB
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ROFLMAO!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Chris... You Da Man!
GaryGB
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Hey parse! If you do a "search" for me by author my sordid, but brief, public posting history will reveal to you that we have some things in common! It all started here: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=48568 Then spread to here:
http://www.flightsim-bevs.com/smf_1-0-5pic=1433.0
Probably the spread of my posting will sometimes be briefly stifled somewhat like John Goodman's character in his role as flight director at a training base for water bombers in the movie "Always" (outstanding PBY footage!) wherein he gets "bombed" with red fire retardant "accidentally on purpose" by one of his students as he sits under a patio umbrella on a hilltop drinking, listening to music and watching the proceedings from a "safe" vantage point as his students do their practice runs!
Anyway, we seem to both have concerns about the "physical facilites" at Emma being kept up to par. I think we both advocate the importance of runway lights (or smoke pots ...with sparklers?) for those of us virtual pilots who never believed in the old adage "8 hours from bottle to throttle".
Its hard enought to get a plane off the ground when we've been so ruthlessly overserved down at Dexter's (those bastards! <...sorry Dex!>), but to have no runway markers waiting for us VFR flyers in the early twilight when we try to land back at Emma just adds injury to insult. How are we ever going to hone our skills towards becoming US commercial airline pilots like those flying 200+ passengers after an evening of drinking without a risk of getting caught unless we can get some practice in during the GA phase of our training?!!! Can you imagine trying to land a jumbojet drunk after dark without at least some type of runway indicator? Its just an insult to one's professionalism I tell ya!
And I just can't seem to get a reply from Fritz about his intentions with the purchasing of the Emma bar cheese
see: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.phighlight= and :
( this one really belongs in the Emma Field amateur comic's Hall of Shame! http://www.flightsim-bevs.com/smf_1-0-5pic=1380.0 ; )
But really, as for the runway lights, you must know that I'm just concerned about Fritz's safety: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.p555#311555 (always thinkin' about ya Buddy!)
By the way Fritz, allow me to point out how a rural airplane mechanic who just left the clubhouse bar can tell the difference between a ball peen hammer and a pipe wrench when he resumes "servicing" a plane: the hammer isn't adjustable!!! :mrgreen:
GaryGB
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So the Doctor says to Fritz when he flies in to Emma for a weekend away from Seattle: "I don't like the look of that Mole, I'd recommend you have it removed!" :lol:
GaryGB
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Well spoken parse!
Hey Fritz, isn't that what we all do... "Emma-grate"? I think of it as a way of describing the sound we make when we try to land doing a straight-in Emma landing southbound over the tree tops in anything other than an ultralite!!! :lol:
But really, are you planning to join us here in the USA, or somewhere else instead? (however inconceivable that may be!!!) :wink: We'll have to sponsor a welcome party for you during a sim conference of some kind!! :idea:
Regards to all!
GaryGB
My Dear Old Fritz
in Emma Field Flying Club
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Hey Francois ya tease!
For the sake of making most FS enthusiast's day, I just gotta say that I found the Mallard, and the detailed good news about Bill Lyons' comeback here: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=50694
This FS experience keeps getting better all the time! Thanks for the heads up...
GaryGB