Archives for July 2006

Austrian Manfred Ruhmer has again set a world record in freeflight. For years, he was the unbeatable world champion in hang-gliding cross-country competitions (shortest time to goal, often in excess of 100 miles per round, 4-6 daily rounds in a row). Since he thoroughly and indisputably dominated and conquered that world, he turned his attentions a couple of years ago to foot-launched light sailplanes.

He flies a Swift Light, a lighter design variation of the Swift, designed by Steve Morris, a hang-glider pilot and aeronautical engineer right here in the Bay Area whom I run into from time-to-time.

483.1 miles, from morning launch at Zapata, TX to an evening landing at Lovington, NM. This breaks Robin Hamilton’s record of 425 miles, set from Zapata last year. His only power was the thermal-generating power of the sun, and in fact, where normally they only decide to go if they’ve got a decent tail wind, Manfred needed to leave in a couple of days, so it was make or break and he flew the distance with a significant cross-wind component. Noteworthy is that Manfred also holds the flex-wing hang-glider world record of 432 miles, which he set from Zapata in 2001 and hasn’t even remotely come close to being touched since.

You can read about the events of the day beginning from this bookmark on down the page, or hit this, this, and this. For wrap-up and analysis, start here on down, or hit the bookmarks here, here (with cockpit video), here (pics). Here’s some YouTube videos.

My friend and one of my beginner instructors, Don Burns, writes Davis:

I just got back from 10 days of flying in the Owens Valley.  I also just got finished viewing Manfred’s videos in his Swift referenced on your web site.  Man, he’s kicking back, relaxed, moving a stick around and speaking in a calm voice.  He might as well have been watching TV and drinking a beer from the looks of it.

My best flight in the Owens this year was 150 miles.  I realize that this is the distance where you boys in Zapata are just gettin’ started.  However, when we fly the Owens, we freakin’ work for our miles: we get hypoxic, we get cold, we get the crap knocked out of us, and we get fear of God beat into us each time the air threatens to flip us over.  We fly into territory unretrievable, we risk long dehydrated walks in the desert, and by god we land on our FEET!

Then I read your report where Manfred claims he doesn’t fly flex wings any more because "flying a flex wing is hard work".

Distance Shmistance.  200 miles in the Owens Valley is more respectable than a thousand in Texas!

Ha! Yea, it’s a different sort of flying altogether. As Davis replies, "Been there, done that. I’m much more interested in enjoying the air in a
intellectually challenging flight competing or going for a record."

Don is the guy I shared a thermal with to 11,000 feet a couple of years ago.

Warren Weyer isn’t too happy about a new Arizona ballot initiative designed to get more trailer trash than ever before out to the voting booths come election day.

Look on the bright side, Warren; as concerns voting, it just makes explicit what has always been implicit.

I figured it would be better to organize my several hundred photos of the Europe trip first, and then I could refer and link to them as I write more about the trip. I’ve had a Club Photo account for years, but I hate it (too slow, especially since I pay for it) and haven’t bothered to look into alternatives.

Organizing the myriad photos on three or four computers into one cohesive whole is always something I’m going to get to…

Somebody — my brother, perhaps — told me about Google’s Picasa, but when I first looked, it appeared that publishing was via a Blogger blog, which, since I clearly already have a blog (and I’m very happy with TypePad), that didn’t interest me a lot. TypePad has photo-album capability, but I’m not too excited about making the blog that personal, right front-&-center, and photo albums will quickly gobble up my disk-space allotment. But now, Google offers an alternative called Picasa Web Albums, and it all looks very cool. I downloaded Picasa and it immediately went to work finding and organizing every image on both hard drives. Organizing is really simple, and when I get to it, I’m sure publishing will be too. Depending on image size, of course, the first 350 megs (about 1,000 photos of 350 kb) are free and for something like $25 per year you can get several gigs of space.

Best of all, if it’s anything like Google’s other services, it don’t run slow.

Give ‘er a shot, if you’re so inclined.

…I’ve got no problem with embedding at all, and think it’s one of the cleverest ways to deliver video clips yet. So here you go:

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life

Clip 1 (Intro)

Clip 2 (Interview with Mike Wallace)

Clip 3 (Conclusion)

What more can I say?

I’ll say this, though. There needs to be more effort on everyone’s part — from the reporters to the documentarians — to get names and name them in bold. I just love the idea of some of this shame sticking (thanks to Google) for years and perhaps decades to come. Maybe, just maybe, when these cops start googling their own names and the names of co-cops and find themselves in the first page of results in so shameful an expose, they’ll start thinking twice about their behavior.

I doubt it, but I’ll be happy to be wrong.

Update: Here’s another one, via McElroy.

Yea, I’m going against my oath not to blog political stuff until my Eurotrek reflections and photos are done. So shoot me.

Anyway, who said this?

"At this point, I rationally chose to abandon the Leftist philosophy of
my youth, because it no longer adequately explained how the world
really worked. With my Leftist interpretation of the world now
shattered, I looked around for alternative explanations for making
sense of the world.

"I stumbled into reading Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig
von Mises, Ayn Rand—I read all of them. I said to myself, "Wow, this
all makes sense. This is how the world really works. This is
incredible." Then I became Laissez Faire Books best customer for the
next five years. I think I read every book in their catalog. If any of
you in the audience have written books, I have probably read them."

Would you believe John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market? Read the whole thing.

One less idiot is always a good thing. Come to think of it, while in Europe, I became quite fond and accustomed to the "Euro-breakfasts" served in all the hotels. Pastries, bread, cold cuts, fruit, cereal, yogurts. Stuff like that. I settled in on a small bowl of the good quality granola (with dried fruit and nuts), milk, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Stayed with me, and no heartburn, of which I have been a chronic sufferer most of my life. That’s sumthin’, because I’m as hardcore of a bacon-&-eggs-over-easy guy as you’ll ever meet.

But maybe I’ll stop in at Whole Foods tonight, for some granola.

(tip: Neal)

Update: I must confess that I’d only read a portion of the entire (long) speech before I posted the above. Having now proceeded through about a third of it, I’m going to have a lot more to say. There’s a lot to this that resonates in me in ways I’m still trying to work out. Chalk it up to owning and running a business myself, which many libertarians have not had the opportunity of. Definitely more to come. Perhaps a lot more.

It’s a wrap. Got back yesterday to SFO about 12:30 a.m. Home by about 2 a.m. We had been informed by phone and email that it was 100 deg. F in our condo. I’d left the A/C on, set to 82, so that means my intermittent A/C issues aren’t resolved in spite of several things I’ve done.

Dave, my super-brother, was good enough to head over to the condo about 6 p.m. to follow a couple of simple trouble-shooting steps and he got the A/C going. Later that night he drove the 50 miles up to SFO to pick us up and get us back home. By that time, six or seven hours later, it was down to 80. Combined with the fan, good enough for sleeping.

Ironically, we’d had lots of A/C issues along the way in Europe. More on that later.

Alright, the plan is that I want to spend some time filling in the blanks for the trip, offering up some commentary on Europe — the culture and the politics — and upload and annotate all the photos. This is a fair-size project and the deal I’ve made with myself is to abstain from political blogging until it’s done. It’s worth doing, I think, so I’m doing it.

In the meantime, here’s an email I wrote this morning at around 4:30 a.m. (still getting the internal clock adjusted) to a friend of mine in the Canary Islands who’s headed over to Barcelona and Andorra in the next few days.

***

OK, here’s the deal, if you haven’t left yet.

As you know, we came over the mountains from France, through Andorra. The ski resort at the very top was quite something. We only drove through, stopping now and then for photos, but here are the few things I remarked the most:

1. Once you cross over the mountain, it is virtually one gigantic city from top to bottom.

2. Tons and tons of hotels, restaurants, shopping.

3. Tons and tons of construction cranes. I have never seen so many cranes is such a concentrated place.

Regarding the cranes, I noticed a ton of them in Spain, too. Lots of the construction sites seemed inactive, i.e., construction that had stopped in mid-span; or they do it like in Greece: get started, run out of money, save money, continue, run out of money, and so on.

OK, we pretty much drove straight through from Andorra to Barcelona and I really saw nothing that motivated me to stop. Then again, I just wanted to get to Barcelona and get a hotel. So, we get there and I took a route that brought me in to the very northern edge. I wanted to get to water, figuring that if we hugged the coast, we’d find someplace we wanted to stay. But this was a very industrial, very dismal area. It was hot; late afternoon. We found the water and started tracking south. Just as we got to that big building that’s kind of a large phallic symbol, we gave up, and headed north along the coast.

Went pretty far with it being industrial. Finally, at Mataro, hotels and restaurants started popping up and we got the first thing, as it was getting late. As usual, they had one expensive room left :) (a consistent theme).

The next morning we drove the auto-route into Barcelona and discovered we’d given up just before getting to the nice areas (like: less than a kilometer). So, we had lunch and sangria in Las Ramblas and such (obligatory, I suppose) and visited the amazing Sagrada Familia, which you must see. Then we auto-routed it back NE to Mateo and hopped back down to the coastal road. Costa Brava. Loved every inch of it. Do yourself a favor, and if you haven’t downloaded Google Earth, yet, do so and scan that coastline.

In fact, that, and Cinque Terre in Italy, were the absolute highlights of the trip. In fact, I’ve actually begun research into eventually either buying or building a villa in one of the two places, but I’m a bit partial to Costa Brava. I found that I just loved the fun-loving culture there. Even in the height of tourism (mostly Spanish tourists), they find a way to make it seem like not a big, hurried, jam-packed mess.

It was just on the northern edge of Sant Feliu de Guixols that we just happened to see a road going down from the main road to the beach and it had a couple of hotel signs. What the hell. The fist one had no rooms, then, the second: one (expensive) room left. We were in Sant Pol, we stayed two days, and it’s really the highlight of the trip. There are 5 or 6 good restaurants, and you don’t go eat ’til about 10 pm, and the band on the beach then starts at about 11:30 (people are still going into the restaurants up to midnight). Very energetic and fun. It’s families with children eating and dancing on the beach ’til very wee hours. Very uplifting. Lovely, in every respect.

After the two days there, we headed NE and stopped that night in Cadaques. By now it’s getting more desert-coastal. Beautiful, and particularly so because you can see more. Cadaques was wonderful. It’s one of those tiny little crescent-shaped ports with hotels and restaurants. It was lively, but not near overly so. Just the right amount so it feels festive without feeling like an assault.

As you go further northeast, the more touristy it gets, by which I mean not the Spanish themselves, but other Europeans, particularly French.

By the way, if you ever get over to Italy, get over to Cinque Terre. We stayed three nights in a wonderful hotel in Monterosso. Hotel 5 Terre, I believe. The proprietor and part-owner has been there 35 years and made our stay absolutely unforgettable. This was three days of mostly laying in the sun — though I did have to spend one late afternoon in the Internet café rolling some of my positions in the face of options expiration week.

Anyway, have a great trip and let me know how it went.

***

First time ever in all my travels going back over 20 years. We’ve been bumped and are sitting in wait at Charles de Gaulle, our non-stop to San Francisco having departed. Instead of arriving back on the west coast at noon on Monday, it’s now another 5 hours until we leave Paris, on to Washington-Dulles, two-hour layover, and then on to San Fran — arriving about 12 hours later, at midnight. What fun.

The upside is that they’ve given us a travel voucher for 1,600 Euros, which works out to about $2,000 worth of travel on Air France or KLM. So, perhaps a Christmas-time trip to Papeete, Tahiti, is in order. Alternatively, we can take 1,200 Euros in cash, about $1,500. That’s what I paid for these tickets in the first place, so for 12 hours of inconvenience, I’m not too unhappy. Besides, overbooking is all part of the deal and you know (or should) going in.

Off to lunch on Air France. Then perhaps I’ll have some time to post some travel experience updates. On y va.

Waiting for my order of 3 (Not one. Not two.) varieties of bratwurst with sauerkraut and fried potatoes. Yumm.

We’re at Martin’s Brau in Freiburg.

Great view of Brunelleschi’s Dome from the rooftop bar (where to look for me) of the hotel.