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 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

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.

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

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

I think she’s pretty excited

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!

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.

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.

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