To The Skies!

So I finally put some of the poker money to use and got my first full-fledged RC helicopter. I had tried researching my first chopper online but got too many mixed messages so I just went to a local hobby store (Hobby House, located next to Ski Haus) with the plan of talking to somebody for a while. As it turned out, he was just preparing to demo a beginner electric (I have no interest in gas power) to another customer. He flew it around a little, I liked the look of things, and I asked if he would recommend it for a newb. Apparently it's their number one seller, and his favorite intro model, so I went with it.

It's the E-Flite Blade CX, you can see it compared to the trusty Picoo-Z here. Note the two main rotors and lack of tail rotor. The two rotors are on separate, co-axial shaft, and spin in opposite directions. This cuts down on maneuverability a bit, but it gives a ton of stability, so it's a good feature in an intro chopper. Other than that it's nothing particularly noteworthy but for $200 it came with absolutely everything it needed, and I'm extremely happy with it. I'm no expert yet, but I can do successive laps of the living room with (usually) little trouble.

The only drawback is all the things that make it a good indoor chopper (small, electric, dual rotor), make it a weaker outdoor one. A bigger electric can do fine outside, but with this size I can't really fight any wind at all, and the dual rotor can't fight as hard against the wind because it just can't tip in any direction far enough. In fact, since the bottom blades' plane is controlled by the servos and the top blades' plane is always being pulled towards level by the flybar, if you try to lean it too far in one direction you can actually hit the blades against each other, which is a terrible thing. It seems that you can get a smaller flybar (designed for a different model), and at the cost of some stability you can get a bit more maneuverability. I'll hold off on that for now but it's an interesting idea.

Oh, and for the Vernon folks, no I haven't forgotten about the UFO idea (hope none of you have). I think I'll need to step up to a larger, stronger model before we try it though.

I am teh win

This past Saturday was Andrew's birthday, so he gathered the troops for a trip to Foxwoods. The troops ended up amounting to me, Joe, and Doug, but that worked out fine because any more people would have required a second car and gotten rather unwieldy, especially since most people (Joe and Doug included) won't play poker for as long as Andrew and I. I'll spare you all the gory hand-by-hand details, but I will say that I had basically three hands worth playing in the two and half(ish) hours we played, and I made the most of them. I sat down with $80 in chips and cashed out $404, a pretty good return on investment. Andrew did less well, so I bought him dinner before finding Doug and Joe. The best part of that was we went to The Stadium, a pretty nice sports bar. The first question the hostess asked was, "How many?" and the second was, "Which game are you here to see?" We just stared, so she asked again. Andrew managed to get out, "Mets game," so she sat us at a square table, told us to sit in those two seats, and said, "Met's will be on that one," while pointing at a nearly 40-inch HDTV on the wall.

Best.
Restaurant.
Evar.

So yea, it was a pretty good day. I put my four new friends named Ben in the Buy Jay an R/C Helicopter Jar, which is now as full as it needs to be. I figure I shouldn't be spending nearly that much on a first chopper, since there's a decent chance it will get pretty banged up before I get the hang of it. I'll get around to ordering it in a bit, once the cash gets in the bank and I pick one out.

Brilliant New Idea

The other day at lunch I came out with one of those put two words together and it's funny things that isn't terribly original but is pretty amusing, and the general agreement was that I needed to check if it was registered as a domain. As it turns out, it wasn't. And so a new blog was born. This one will remain my primary blog, the new one will serve as a place for trying out some comedy writing. Don't worry I have no delusions of grandeur, but I want to see what I can do when I spend more time editing something than entering it. I would do that here, but I can never dredge up the effort when I'm just making a here's what happened today post. The new place will also probably feature more profanity and less maturity, so this will be the first and last time I mention it here. I realize anybody that really wants to can follow the trail in either direction very easily, but I'm not going to go out of my way to connect the two other than making sure folks that weren't at lunch find the new one, since they might enjoy it. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Catching Up

Some thoughts from the weeks since my last update.

Work is going well. Every day I feel like I understand the whole CIM (that's the technology I work with) thing a little better, which is nice because I no longer feel like I'm slowing everybody down. It's nice to be working with some really smart people, but the downside of that is when it takes me a little longer to get up to speed I feel pretty guilty about it. But things are going quicker now, so that's good.

We added a little one to the house recently. She's a gray-brown tiger named Peanut Butter, cuz she has these little brown smudges. Only other remarkable thing, besides the fact that she's just so adorable, is that two of her feet have black pads and the other two are pink. Zipper has been shockingly tolerant of her. The wrestle a lot, Peanut loves to pounce Zipper's tail, and Zipper is fond of cleaning Peanut, even if she has to pin her down to do it. It's also worked very well to mellow Zipper out, which everybody is very happy about. And neither of them do the hide from everybody thing (yet at least), so we get to see both of them quite a bit.

Got the living room set up pretty good. Nina moved the furniture around to make it a little more conducive to conversation, plus make better use of the floor, and I've got the electronics set up pretty nice. Got my Logitech Harmony 670 controlling everything beautifully. One touch gets me from watching TV to playing the Xbox 360 (it even turns it on), another goes to the Wii, a third gets me back to TV, or whatever. It's great. The machine has a state machine in it so it always knows what it needs to do to get everything set up perfectly.

Played a round of golf today with Chris, over at the College Hill golf course on North Clinton Street, which for people from back home is kind of like finding a golf course down by the Rockville Public Library. We had no idea it was there until Andrew told me about it. It was a brutally unimaginative course, but kept in reasonably good condition, and there is no back nine. It wasn't really cheap enough to warrant not going to McCann in the future, but it's a nice alternative every once in a while I guess. The last hole there was probably the best hole of my life. It was a par 3 with a brutal green, and I had a sweet first shot that ended up going a little off the back of the green because of the bullshit layout of the green and the ground around it, but I made a nice chip on and then two-putted. I know that's only a bogey and I've made a par on a par three before, but this was a much longer hole and I was generally just very happy with all my shots. I even used a little backspin on the chip to keep it from running off the green. That was sweet.

Fantasy football has officially started, and I'm stoked. I'm terrible at it, but much like golf I treat it as a way to have a lot of fun and try not to worry too much about how I'm doing. Obviously I still try my best and seek to improve, but if it doesn't work out I'm not too bummed, and it makes watching the games a lot more exciting. Plus Andrew is even more into it than I am and his excitement gets pretty contagious.

Watching some real football of the college variety, Notre Dame at Penn State, on ESPN HD (which is awesome). Penn State just had a crazy 72-yard punt return for a touch down, and they had this great camera angle from maybe the 20 yard line low, looking at the celebration in the endzone and up into the crowd. I almost shit my pants. There were probably 20,000 people on camera, and it looked like every single one of them was wearing all white, waving a pom-pom, and screaming their damn brains out. That would have been a pretty powerful sight on the old TV. On this one it's total goosebumps.

Mom and Dad are coming to see the apartment for the first time tomorrow, so that should be fun. It will be nice to see some family without having to drive two hours first.