Had a good day today. Went to Sawgrass in the morning, and hung out a bit with Junior. It was kind of hot, so he pretty much wanted to sleep the entire time. The only time he woke up was when someone came in to pet him, and even then he would go back to sleep before the petting session was over! I don't blame him; it was really muggy.

Afterwards I hightailed it to the property to feed the kitties. I got some really awesome photos of Shoshauna and Mystique. I hadn't seen these cats for nearly a month and it was great to hang out with them again.

Tomorrow I gotta do my taxes (bleah) and run a ton of errands (double-bleah). It's just as well; if gas prices keep going up, I'm only going to be able to drive to Davie once a week; if they go up even further, I'll have to start skipping weeks. Darn oil companies!

Anyway, I took lots of pictures today. I didn't use RAW so I could force myself to practice setting white balance manually on the camera. I think I did a pretty good job; sometimes it's hard to judge the color temperature of a scene... For instance, in some cases, there was some sunlight shining in, so even though the subject was in the shade, the sunspots would look way too orange. It'd be nice if there were a way to tweak white balance in the camera after taking the shot, then save it. I should suggest this to Canon.

Note that I'm not posting full size pics on the VSW pictures site anymore. Sorry to anyone who had the password, but they're just taking way too much space on Sarabi and very few people were looking at them. If you want a full size version of a pic, just drop me a note and we'll talk.

Feel free to check out the photos and leave comments below. }:)

So, yesterday I was at the Dade County Fair at the Vanishing Species Exhibit. We currently have a couple of year-old lion cubs, an eight year old tigress named Darlene (whom I've talked about before), a six-month old leopard cub, and the cougar cubs Sierra and Montana. There's also a wide variety of other animals, so if you're in the Miami area and want to see what this is all about, stop on by!

Pictures of my office at work!

I just decided to post these so folks can see my work environment. Not bad, eh? I find photos of peoples' offices to be interesting; you can sometimes learn a lot about someone by how they decorate their office.

This weekend I was in the Orlando/Kissimmee area, and decided to stop by Warbird Adventures. I flew a T-6 Texan with them last November, and it was awesome, so I wanted to take them up on their other offer, a 30 minute flight in a Bell 47 helicopter, the same kind that appeared in that old TV series M.A.S.H!

One thing for sure, flying a helicopter is NOT easy. There are three major controls: The collective, which controls motion straight up and down, the cyclic (or control stick), which controls motion forward, reverse, and side-to-side, and the foot pedals (tail rotor), which control rotation from left to right.

This sounds simple, but a helicopter is far from stable when it's hovering; you have to constantly apply control input on the collective, tail rotor, and stick just to stay in one place! In fact, there were a few times the instructor had to take over for me because otherwise I would have crashed the helicopter.

What's interesting is, in forward flight, a helicopter behaves a lot like an airplane; the control stick becomes your primary control, and the wind blowing past the chopper keeps it stable. But when you slow down to a hover, the torque from the main rotor takes over and you start to turn to the right; if you don't apply left force on the tail rotor, you crash, pure and simple.

It's such a nice rush to accelerate from hovering close to the ground to a nice brisk forward pace; the wind starts rushing past and the ground creeps away and suddenly you're cruising at a nice 80-90MPH. Such incredibly smooth control from a machine designed in the 1940s!

I made a few mistakes, but more or less managed to figure it out by the end. The instructor said I did better than most first-timers, but he probably tells everyone that to make them feel better. }:)

A fun experience, and well worth it. Feel free to check out photos a friend of mine took while I was flying!

So I spent the day at Sawgrass today. Sierra was there, and wow, she's growing fast! I think her ears are growing fastest of all, as they used to be tiny little flaps on her head, and now they're big huge kitty ears!

She was extremely curious and kept trying to pad into places she wasn't supposed to go. We kept her on a leash and she was the hit of the day; nearly everyone who saw her commented on how adorable she is.

Junior was there too, and felt a bit left out due to all the attention Sierra was getting. He was actually grumpy at one point, hissing at a couple volunteers, including myself. Luckily we made peace by the end of the day, so all's well!

Anyway, click here for today's pictures. I also have some video of Sierra that I may post soon, once I cut it down some as it's much too long!

(Heh, every time I hear the name Sierra, I think of two things... The video game company, and the character Sierra from that spiffy 3D animated comedy NBC had last season, "Father of the Pride". Dangit, that was a fun show. I miss it.)

So lately I've been playing with SuSE 9.2, a linux distribution recently acquired by Novell. I must say, it's pretty spiffy. It's the first distribution I've used where nearly everything seems to work right out of the box on installation, and which handles things like removeable media properly, which Linux has historically been bad at.

I tried installing it at home, but then remembered how many local customizations I have, and have decided to revert until I have a large uninterrupted block of time to play with it. I did save the install-in-progress in a big tarball so I can quickly resume where I left off.

Meanwhile I got submount, the spiffy removeable media system SuSE uses, working on Fedora Core 2. Now you just put the media in, cd to the mount point, and there it is. You can also eject the media any time you're not using it without having to umount it manually. Fun fun fun!

Links:

Submount
SuSE Linux Distribution

This weekend was sorta fun.. I went to Sawgrass and then helped feed the property on Saturday and then went back to Sawgrass again on Sunday. They planned to bring Montana or Sierra out, but the weather was kind of iffy, so I didn't get to see them. Awww, I bet they're getting big!

On Friday I saw the movie Born Free for the first time ever. I felt it was odd for a cat person such as myself to not see this 1966 film until now, but it turns out lots of people haven't seen it. This must be corrected immediately; it's a must see, especially if you like lions, or big cats in general...

Speaking of movies, I slapped this together today. It basically shows Junior, doing what cats do best. }:)

Link: Saturday's Pictures

Not much has been happening lately, but there's a few minor things...

All Bellsouth DSL Extreme customers (like me!) are being moved from a 3008Kbps to 3552Kbps sync rate. This means another 500kbps of speedy goodness. Mine hasn't moved yet but it will soon, hopefully!

I've started going on bike rides after work. I hadn't ridden a bike in 10 years, and it's nice to be doing that again. Of course I'll probably get tired of it in a few weeks; you know how it goes...

Not much VSW stuff this past weekend.. I went to Sawgrass Saturday morning and then checked out a show that VSW put on at Bass Pro Shop, but the rest of the weekend was a loss because other stuff kept interrupting me. Darn other stuff!

I like this guy. He has a technical problem, but at least he admits that it's his fault. I wonder why he has an affair with the caps-lock key, though...

Reason for Request:
I NEED TO DOWNLOAD THIS AGAIN BECAUSE I DIDNT FOLLOW THE STEP BY STEP
DOWNLOADING INSTRUCTIONS AND I DIDNT GET THE SOFTWARE TO INSTAL ON MY COMPUTER
AT HOME. ALL I HAVE ON THE CD IS THE DOWNLOADER ICON, NOT THE ACTUAL SOFTWARE.

So I've found .torrent files of the complete Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers TV series on gawkerweb.com, and have been downloading it over the past few days.

I was obsessed with this show when I was a kid, and it's been wonderful to re-live all the memories! Of course, it's also a reminder of how much TV animation has gone downhill since the mid-90's. You just don't see creative, well-animated shows like Rescue Rangers anymore.

So if you remember this old cartoon and want to re-live it, here it is, right near the top. Be sure to seed when your download completes, so that others can finish their transfers too! I hope this series is someday on DVD so I can own a legitimate copy.

Oh, and I still want my very own Ranger Wing.

Gadget: "That's the hover switch. It should turn the Ranger Wing into a helicopter."
Chip and Monty: "SHOULD!????!?"