happylife

Frost

This is the fuel vent under the left wing of the Cessna152. It is set so that the fuel can smoothly going down into the engine. In this season in Vancouver, the temperature sometimes goes down below zero degrees Celsius in the night and the surface of the airplanes get frosted. The frosted control surface is very dangerous because it cannot create enough lift and it has to be defrosted before the take-off. Defrosting work is bothersome  because we have to spray an anti-freezing solution over the whole surface of the aircraft. If the temperature is not so low, we can omit the work by facing the wing towards the sunlight. Today this airplane was almost defrosted except for the fuel vent. Why does it remain frosted? I think the excess fuel dropping down from the tube vaporized depriving the heat of vaporization and frosting the tube itself.

Happy traffic congestion

Highway 99 is always busy in the late afternoon because the south bound lanes are filled with cars from downtown to suburb area and the north bound lanes are narrowed down to only one lane at the bottle neck tunnel. I am usually a little bit irritated with the jam but today I wasn't because I could enjoy the beautiful sunset clouds which were lit red by the sun from below the horizon. It is often said that a beautiful sunset implies bad weather on the next day, but it doesn't matter because I have no booking tomorrow. I'm thinking about doing the last review for the written exam in this weekend and finishing it next week.

From AIP to AIM

A.I.P (Aeronautical Information Publication) used to be an information source for Canadian pilots. It was a ring file made of hundreds of pages and amendments were sent periodically to registered pilots so that they can replace old pages with the latest information. It seemed rational because the whole page had not been republished, but the replacement work was boring for most of the pilots and some of them didn't do it. A few months ago, A.I.P was abolished and changed into A.I.M (Aeronautical Information Manual) which has a shape of normal book with about 400 pages. The contents themselves are not different but the new A.I.M seems to be handy and friendly. It's easier to turn the pages, and the page and font size is bigger than before. All these things contribute to the better readability of A.I.M. I think it was a good change.

Mt. Baker

The weather was not good but the south sky was blue and we could see Mt. Baker clearly from the airport. It reared above the clouds beyond the U.S. border. I heard that it is one of the most popular mountains for American skiers because it has a lot of snow every year. Sure most of the mountain surface was white covered with snow. It looks close and far just like my PPL and I hope to fly to the mountain after getting the license. I wish to do accomplish this plan while the mountain is still white.

Lost in the sky

Today I was lost in the sky while the navigation training. To do a good navigation, we need to catch the set heading point and the check point in the sky, however the whole ground was covered with snow today and I couldn't find both of them. It was terrible because the two points are essential and without even one of them, no one can calculate the ground speed and the estimated arrival time to destination. I hope not the same thing would happen in my real flight test. Anyways, the scenery covered with snow was beautiful enough to compensate for my failure a little. I hope to get the license in this year but it seems to be getting harder because of lots of causes. I don't want to talk about the detail here but there are some problems which I can't manage by myself. I wonder why I have to take flight lessons for so many hours.

Hibernation

It is still before 5 o'clock but the sun is almost setting and a day VFR flight is not permitted. The daylight time in this season in Vancouver is really short. For me especially as a late riser, it is so short that I can have only four hour daylight time after getting up in the afternoon. In this summer, I felt rather tired because of over working like sailing, cycling, and flying. But now, it is in the opposite situation. I live almost always in my room facing towards my PC, books, or TV, and the time living outside the room is very short causing lack of exercise. I feel myself hibernating deep in the cozy cave.

A young seagul

He is a young seagull who was born this summer. The brown feather implies that. He is now practicing flying over False Creek; he seems to be doing circuit training. He is not so good at flying, but his flight is much better than I because he can do precise landing just onto the 2 inch wide handrail of my balcony. He is not an enthusiastic pilot and often takes a rest on my balcony looking at my filthy room. I don't know exactly what he is thinking about tilting his neck, but I feel a kind of sympathy with him. It's a great challenge for anyone to fly in the sky.

iTunes DRM

As you know, iTMS(iTunes Music Store) is the most successful and the only successful music download service operated by Apple computer. We can now get almost any songs whenever we like through the Internet. Most of the songs are priced at less than $1.00 per one song which I think reasonable. Once we downloaded song data, we can play it on our PC, iPod, or CD. We can copy the song data into iPod or CD-ROM as many times as we like, however, the copyable count from the PC to another PC is limited up to 5 times. It was the only problem for me because I worried what happen if I change or update my PC more than 5 times. My main note PC is now affected by a so called "spyware" and I'm thinking about reinstall it, but if I reinstall it, do I have to consume the iTunes counter? If so and if I do such re-installation 5 more times, can't I enjoy all the music data any more? It was my fear which I found was utterly groundless when I looked into the structure of iTunes DRM(Digital Rights Management). It was better designed than I had expected, that is, when we copy the music data from the old PC to the new PC, we can "de-authorize" the old PC to rewind the counter and if we broke or lost the old PC before the de-authorization we can de-authorize all the PC and re-authorize another PC up to 5 times. Therefore, we can own the music data forever. What a reasonable and well designed system!

What for?

I found this sign board which says "NO AIRCRAFT BEYOND THIS POINT" in the airport. In spite of the warning, there fly lots of airplanes beyond this point. What is this sign board for? It is impossible on earth to read this warning from the flying airplane. Do you know the purpose of this sign? Well, it is written for the airplanes which are to park on the apron. Beyond this line, there lies the threshold of the runway and it is of course dangerous to park the airplane. That's it. It's a kind of trick of a photograph.

A strange article

I found a very strange article in the newspaper which says that a sexual offender has come out of the jail and plan to live in Vancouver. The offender's name and photograph were published in the article which seems to be very strange for us Japanese. Of course the sexual crime itself is bad thing and he had to be punished, but he should have been punished in the jail and therefore should have come out of the jail. Why is he still punished in the newspaper like this? Where is his fundamental human right? Anybody will commit the same offense if he was treated like this; surrounded with lots of cold eyes of people. I think that If he is still dangerous he should not be released in public and should be sent to a mental hospital or some other facilities.