Dance on a volcano

Last week I went to the Philippines for the first time. I stayed in Angeles City and visited Omni Aviation at next to Clarke International (RPLL). Circumstances have worked against me recently but despite license delays and civil unrest in Thailand I piloted an aircraft again. I logged 2.2 hours in a C172M:

• 2 circuits OMNI RPLL 02 (normal for here but low level for anywhere else)
• general handling in area C1
• steep turns
• clean and dirty power on and off stalls
• VOR radial intercept and track to waypoint
• procedure turn
• track to direct entry and two holds at CIA
• VOR/ILS to runway 02R at RPLL
• missed approach
• flew to the Mount Pinatubo crater and experienced some significant downdrafts downwind of the peak:-) The terrain rises steeply so I always had an escape by turning towards the lower slopes. Really good views of the crater lake. The ash smothered terrain downslope has a lush patina of vegetation cut through with deep gray ravines.
• midfield crossing at RPLL
• landing at OMNI RPLL 02

I was supposed to fly the Seneca I the second day (brave soul that I am). It played the hangar queen with battery problems. I still found the time useful for familiarization, especially starting, and I got to run through an engine shutdown scenario with an instructor.

The Philippines has a somewhat longwinded license conversion process. I will have to do a PPL medical (despite holding a Class 1 Canadian Medical), and pass a flight test after a mandatory 10 hrs in type for a type rating. I’ll do the Seneca type rating first and try to get more multi engine time. A Philippines license will allow me to fly without too many restrictions on VFR and IFR cross country trips. Cebu Pacific flies Hong Kong to Clarke direct daily. I can get to Clarke is easily.

Smooth Operator

My smoothie recipe:

• Juice and flesh of 2 young Coconuts.
• Juice of 2 lemons.
• 300 grams (10 oz) of berries (any).

Place everything in the blender and blend. Good to drink or as a dessert.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you only read one book in your lifetime, read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, by Gary Taubes. This meticulously researched book takes the prevailing low fat diet recommendations apart bit by bit. Rather than present a full review of this book I am simply going to recommend it.

Gary presents a well researched and resourced account of the history of the low fat diet and the effects on our health and mortality.

Read Good Calories, Bad Calories; it might save your life or at the very least suggest to you a way of eating that will reduce your risk of succumbing to a disease of Western Civilization.

Time to see

When I fly a non precision approach and use time to deterimne the Missed Approach Point I can get or interpolate the time from the FAF to MAP from an Approach Chart. Many charts do not however give me any information about the time from the FAF to my VDP (or time to see). The time to the MAP along with the MDA protect me from obstacles for that portion of the approach.

I need to have seen my visual references and started my descent to land before I reach the MAP if I want to make a stabilized approach. The FAA calls this point the VDP; we can call it time to see. Working out the time to commence descent does not involve any difficult arithmetic but I need to repeat my workings to cover a range of ground speeds.

I had an itch so I scratched: time to see tool.

More unix filters

I’ve built some more unix filters for Text Wrangler, each quite simple but useful.

Lynx

The filter sends the whole document or selected text the Lynx browser. This shows me what a web page or snippet will look like without CSS styling. I can then use the style filter to check readability based on the Lynx output.

#!/bin/sh
# From TextWrangler sends document or selected text to lynx which then dumps to stdout
#
lynx -force_html -nostatus -nolist -dump "$1"

PHP

The filter sends the whole document or selected text to PHP. I find this useful for testing my PHP code. This filter does not work with code from include files.

#!/bin/sh
# From TextWrangler sends document or selected text to php which then dumps to stdout
#
php -f "$1"

Redcloth

Redcloth implements Texttile text processing using ruby. I’m starting to write portions of web documents with texttile formatting. Redcloth processes the texttile mark up and outputs HTML. Redcloth 3.0.4 seems to implement a subset of texttile formats: it does not understand bc. block code. Redcloth 4.04 does understand bc.: I installed 4.0.4 using gem. Works as advertised.

#! /bin/sh
# From TextWrangler sends document or selected text to redcloth which then dumps to stdout
redcloth "$1"