Picked up a blade mSR today. Tried flying it at home earlier all excited thinking that it would be a bit challenging but manageable and was disappointed. However I went to an indoor flying group tonight and tried it, and found that all I needed was slightly more space and I could fly it fairly well. Not nearly as well as the mCX, but not crashing every 45 seconds. Infact I only had a couple of real crashes, but managed not to have any big enough to break anything. Think if I make flying at this place a regular weekly event I might actually get good with it. A couple of the other pilots complimented me on my skill with it. Not bad for having just gotten the thing.

Next step though will have to be a radio with multiple model memory. Having to manually change the trim settings when I switch models kind of is a pain. Means nearly crashing a few times while getting things dialed in. Also the packets/sec on the radio that comes with the RTF kit isn't that high, while the DX6i and the DX7 series have much better refresh rates. Not a problem with the mCX, but I did notice it with the mSR. It seems to be twitching a bit and commands are slightly sluggish. Not terribly so, but enough when you consider the speed and agility of the mSR. It be a fast little helicopter. Also need to get someone to get some videos sometime too.

Second long weekend in a row. Kind of nice. Getting time to do random stuff. Spending some time flying the little helicopter and spending some time in RealFlight with some park fliers. Feeling like its almost time to get another helicopter though, one of the intermediate level ones in the Blade family. The mCx s300 is lots of fun, but feel like I need a little more to get some more skills. Can fairly reliably land precisely with full rates on the radio. So really need the next step up, and probably eventually a better transmitter, probably the Dx6i. Hopefully in a month or two I can do that. Maybe get the Ember as well so I can get sometime in with a fixed wing craft.

And Java sucks, the language is such a mess. Don't know why anyone would willingly use it. Though for some of the stuff I want to do I will probably end up writing my own libraries for Go. Don't think there is a version of openGL ported to it yet..... sounds a lot like effort though.

Crazy roombas...... Such a nifty and useful device. Must make some accessories and stuff at some point. Bur right now focusing on changing some things around in my Game of Life program. Need to take care of a few refinement things as far as catching some events and adding some more delay functions. Then I want to make it so you can use command line arguments to change the ruleset that is used. Could be interesting to explore other CA patterns.

Google is taking over the world.... but I think I am Ok with it....

Well, this was an r/c heavy weekend. Got in a lot of flight time with the little Blace mCX s300 helicopter. Did some figure eights and precision landing practice. Lots of fun. Glad I got another battery for it. Starting to flight with the high rate transmitter setting now too, instead of the low rate controls. Much harder to do precision landings, but still lots o fun. Can't wait until this summer when hopefully I can afford to get a decent electric plane and maybe another helicopter too. Something that can fly in the back yard. This one is a bit small for that, would worry about it getting blown away with the wind.

Made some more abrasion holograms with ML. Starting to come out good. Will have to try some more intricate ones at some point.

Slowly starting to get a bit of a handle on this whole computer security thing. Bit different than what I am use to working on. So a lot of learning is needed.... But Have been working through some stuff on Webgoat to get a handle on things, and playing a bit with javascript. Just hoping a big aha moment comes soonish.

Also got a little Blade mcx. So much fun to fly. Even made a couple of precise landings. Hopefully next summer will even manage to pick up a plane or two and fly regularly.

And ML and I got the scratch holograms working the other day. Have tons of lexan so should be able to do some really cool things with that.

Have been so lazy about posting anything lately. Have gotten into a routine with work mostly. And got a copy of COD4 for the ps3, so have been 'busy'. On the other end of things though I am in a new adventure of web application security. Kind of complex since I haven't done any before. Starting to make sense though. Also a little system level security. Setting up a snort server in a virtual machine with freeBSD. Could be interesting. An excuse to play around with BSD Jails. Haven't really used that yet much. Similar to solaris containers. Concept is easy to understand, and likely not that hard to use regularly once I use it a lot.

Also ordered a book on rootkits and another on honeypots. Could be interesting to build my own security test network. See how things work at a finer level. Kind of a shift in direction for me, but still interesting. And can use the number crunching stuff to deal with brute force decryption.....