antipaucity

Diagram.ly – it’s sorta like Visio, but free, and web-based.

Meetings.io – like webex, including conference calling and file and screen sharing.

Qama - a calculator that doesn’t give an answer until you provide a “reasonable” guess.

Udacity – a free computer science program.

Urbanchickens - dedicated to raising chickens in “non-traditional” environments (like cities).

I think I might have to boycott Groupon: a few months back they had a deal for an introductory flight, first ground school time, and pilot log book for about 50% off the normal rate from the local flight training company, NexGen Aviation.

I arrive at the airport a little before 1400 for my flight on Sunday. Adrian, my instructor, is an intensely friendly man. He’s originally from Zimbabwe, though has spent enough time in Kentucky that now his family think he has an accent

NexGen has a Piper Warrior – a four-place, low-wing, single engine airplane they use for lessons.

Things I did not know about operating an aircraft – you steer while you’re on on the ground with your feet.

Adrian opened the door and told me to get in first. That was not what I expected – that put me in the pilot’s seat. After doing a quick preflight, he started the engine, and we started taxiing… more accurately, while he radioed the tower for clearance, he had me taxi us out onto the runway.

So that was pretty cool .. but it got better: when we got to the runway, and the tower had cleared us, I got to take off =D

Adrian ran the throttle, and he took care of the trim tabs and explained to me what I had to do, but otherwise he let me fly for the about 30 minutes we were up – the only time he took over was for our landing. We toured around Lexington at ~2500 feet (buzzing up to nearly 3000 as I tried to maintain our heading, steer, look around, and keep us flying level-ish.

I got to see our house from 2500 feet, and a variety of other parts of Lexington that I think may help when it comes to driving, too.

Now for the bad news: I’m hooked. And the total time and outlay that getting my license will entail will be at least 40 hours of flying time (including different type of solo time), along with several hours of ground school. And all of that combined with needing to take a written test so the FAA will eventually be willing to give me a check ride so I can get my license.

Sigh.

That’ll run ~$6650 … if I go as quickly as I can. Taking too much time between lessons will help to reduce retention, so I’m probably more realistically looking at about $10k to complete my license.

I’m accepting donations, though

Wired has an interesting infographic today from WordStream on where Google makes its money in advertising.

No surprise on some of the top entries: but the last was surprising (both to me, and the folks who did the analysis): Cord Blood. Seems “rich parents” are wanting to store their newborn’s umbilical cord blood for the stem cells contained, in the hopes that they could be used later in life if some health crisis arises.

Fascinating.

My wife and I are participating as judges in the state finals for the Kentucky 4-H presentations at UK’s campus Saturday. We’ve both gotten tagged to judge speeches.

This’ll be my first time ever involved with 4-H, whereas my wife has been doing something with them every year for about 15 years

Saw in a tweet from David Pogue that someone has finally implemented a DVR-for-radio. Only took three years for someone to build

I haven’t started playing with DAR.fm yet, but it looks pretty cool!

Though it’s not the ideal we have of owning our own home, my wife and I will be one step closer in a few days as we will be signing a lease on a rental home here in Lexington and moving out of the apartment complex we’ve been in since we got married.

I think she’s pretty excited

A recent Final Jeopardy! question said there are two pairs of countries which differ in spelling by only two letters: Australia/Austria and one other. The answer they were looking for was Niger/Nigeria.

Well, I was thinking about this recently and realized there is a third pair: Mali/Malawi.

It’s not often you see errors on Jeopardy!

In follow-up to a previous post, I saw this on Wired.com today.

Seems Ford sponsored a class at UMich to develop Cloud Computing apps… for the Commute.

The new Fiesta can Tweet while it’s driving. Not sure I like that idea… but it’s interesting, to say the least.

I’ve not yet been impressed by any of the e-book readers I’ve seen – with Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader being the apparent “market leaders” in the segment.

However, Barnes & Noble’s new Nook may change my mind. From the early reviews, it appears to have a better screen, longer battery life, and more natural navigation than either the Sony or Amazon offerings.

My previous experience with eBooks has not been overly positive, with proprietary software and awkward navigation on my PC. However, with the multi-format-capable Nook – I may be ready to give eBooks a try again.

I just found this article from David Pogue that indicates how to avoid the voicemail prompts and greetings:

It turns out that each carrier offers a “bypass the instructions” keystroke that takes you directly to the beep. (It bypasses both the person’s own recorded greeting and the 15-second carrier nonsense.)

To be as evil as possible, the carriers do not promote or tell you about the existence of this keystroke. Furthermore, the key to press is different with each company:

* for Verizon

1 for Sprint

# for AT&T

# for T-Mobile