Category Archives: travel

Aviation, photography, travel

Reno Air Races 2023 – Airside photos

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I took a trip to Stead Nevada, to attend the Reno National Championship Air Races Final Flag. Having attended almost every year since my first trip in 1989, it was sad to see this great event coming to a close, at least for Stead Nevada.

This time around, it was about taking in the event, the vendors, the statics and the racing, more than trying to capture it all on camera. A few photos made the cut from a small collection of photos taken over the weekend. These photos are offered here, for anyone to enjoy.

Note, if there is a photo you’d like to purchase, many sizes and materials are available. Links to be added to post once I’ve finished setting them up with my art vendor. Stay tuned!


automotive, Aviation, Formula 1, Motorcycles, photography, racing, Santa Cruz, Sports, Texas, travel

Some Favorite Moments in Pictures Years Past

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Looking back at 12 years of blog posts, photographs and tech articles, today I’m pulling up some of my favorite photos from years past.

Photo descriptions include a link to the story where it originally appeared.

May 2009 – Turn 2 crash at the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona
McLaren Test Drive Day during Car Week in Monterey CA. 570 Series cars (mine is on the right).
Alan DeMartini preparing for his First Solo – October 2018 in San Marcos Texas
Fleet Week 2016 in San Francisco CA. – NAVY Blue Angels demonstrate opposing pass low over the spectator boats.
Rare Porsche 917 Le Mans cars at Rensport Reunion 2016 in Monterey, CA.
F22 Raptor at the California Air Show in Salinas.
Rafting the American River’s South Fork (class 2-4+).
Lamborghini and Ducati in my garage. What an amazing day taking in the roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
An evening at Los Gatos Lamborghini with Lambo’s Chief Test Driver, Valentino Balboni.
First winter in Santa Cruz CA. Attended the O’Neil Classic pro surf competition in 80 degree weather; amazing!
Data, Raspberry Pi, Software Development, Technology, Texas, travel

Creating a Personalized Recreation Dashboard – Installing Software (Part 2)

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Rasperian Buster has a working desktop out of the box, but to run NodeJS Roosevelt and Java, some installations will need to be done first.

INSTALLING JAVA JDK / JRE

This is pretty simple. I like to install both the Dev Kit (JDK) and the Runtime (JRE) elements. To do so on Buster, simply request the default packages:

sudo apt install default-jdk default-jre

Let Apt do it’s work. Once done you should be able to verify java is installed and available:

java --version

My installed version reported openjdk 11.0.7 2020-04-14

INSTALLING NodeJS and NVM

Next, NodeJS will be installed and built from git

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo bash -

Installing NVM follows a similar process

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

Now the Pi is setup and ready to install other helper applications.

INSTALLING ROOSEVELT SCAFFOLDING

For this project, I selected Roosevelt based on successful prior experience with a complex NodeJS / Java web application built on Roosevelt. Follow the prompts to create the basic application.

I selected a directory called lakedash and an app named app .

npx mkroosevelt

SETTING UP THE BASIC APP FRAMEWORK

Change directories to the path lakedash/app (or whatever you picked). 

cd  lakedash/app

Now, run the node install process to download and localize the packages used by Roosevelt. It’s easy.. just do it.

npm i

Starting up the simple little app in development mode. 

npm run dev

Next phase will be setting up some swap space by re-partitioning the little Pi’s SD card.

Sports, Texas, travel

Kayaking the Guadalupe River in December (1-Dec-2018)

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Following up on Friday’s shenanigans above The Horseshoe, we were at it again, this time we started at the River House and headed downstream on the Guadalupe River.

Weather was even nicer than Friday, with good temps and plenty of sunshine. What a great way to keep up the weekend rocking.

Heading into The Horseshoe is a nice easy paddle, providing plenty of time to get warmed up, acclimated and ready for the Class II+ challenges ahead. Piece of cake in a raft, but a bit of a challenge for someone that’s not been kayaking rivers for more than a few months (aka. me).

Even with the leaves mostly gone now, it’s still a great river to run. The terrain changes quite a bit along the river.. with some low-bank sections with homes and others lined with trees.

The banks get a little steeper and the river a little quicker as it narrows up, providing some nice warmup sections before hitting the remains of several dams paddle wheels along the river.

On the left side, are some campsites that are part of the Whitewater Amphitheater, which is right on the river. Check the schedule, the summer season kicks off with Wille Nelson shows.

There are some fun little rapids where the river splits through a small grove of trees.

There are 6 places the roads cross the river, they have a numbering conventions, starting from the edge of New Braunfels (crossing #1 is right as you get into town). This here is crossing #4 and due to a minor mishap on the river, was the takeout point for our trip.

It was a fantastic day. As is the tradition, we cap off the day with a fire.

I’m going to look at some ways to take some better pictures, and probably some video next time out. I just hope the weather holds and the Army Corps of Engineers don’t cut the flow back too much more; having to drag boats and portage around exposed dams is a little less than idea.

travel

Kayaking the Guadalupe River in November (30-Nov-2018)

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Sure it was a Friday, and yeah.. maybe I was supposed to be in Austin at the office.. .but.. with the temps coming back to normal, and the opportunity to go kayaking on the river while the flow is still up.. going INTO the office was just not going to happen.

The plan was to kayak the Guadalupe River from the base of Canyon Lake Dam, back to the River House.

After finishing up some work in the morning and dealing with the ever annoying Scrum Standup meeting, we packed up the truck and headed to the River House, where Uncle Senior Tim was waiting with the kayaks loaded and ready to go.

We reached the dam around 1:00, put in below the hydro plant and I immediately set to capsizing the kayak. I figure it’s best to get that sort of stuff out of the way first.

About 30min. into the trip, the sun came out, the temps jumped up and it turned into a glorious afternoon!!

Not far down the river, you hit Horseshoe Falls.
It’s not that tall, and when the river is up, rocks are a lot less of an issue, but the hydraulics of the upper damn and the falls itself would make for a fun rafting run.. but.. in sit-on kayaks.. eh.. we opted to portage around as the sign suggested.

You can certainly see some great homes along the river.

You can also find some interesting art installations and other oddities, such as a caboose outbuilding or a 3/4 size longhorn bbq pit.

The weather was nice enough that the turtles were out on the logs and rocks sunning themselves all along the river.

The weather is supposed to be pretty decent again today so… I think we’ll do it all over again.

automotive, travel, YouTube

Texas Highway Turnarounds – an idea with real merit

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Upon arriving in Texas, one of the first things I had to get used to was the difference in highway design philosophy compared to other states I’ve driven in. Personally, I think it’s a brilliant idea. It even works in the city cores, which is where I clipped this short video from yesterday.

Part of that design, is ability to implement these easy turn-around lanes, and I use these all daily. I like the way the turnarounds (generally, there are a few that do) do not require traffic controls, which improves the overall flow of traffic. Typically, if I needed to change direction on a freeway, you’d have to exit, wait for the right of way to make 2 left turns, and then re-enter the freeway.

You might be able to see, in this street map, there is a loopback lane that connects the opposing directions of the frontage roads.

These little turn-arounds are dedicated lanes that let you zip under (and sometimes over) the main roadway to return the other direction, either on the frontage road or the main road via a separate onramp. This is what the sat view of this intersection looks like:

This is basically how it works:

Technology, travel, YouTube

New Dashcam Test – Testing DDPai Mini Smart Dash Cam

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Trying to catch up to the year 2010, I’ve finally installed a purpose made dash cam, as opposed to my temporary GoPro installs (which were disappointing at best) of the years past.

After a few days of testing, I feel that the installation location is good, and the amount of dashboard reflections I’m seeing have been minimized to the maximum extent I can.

The camera I am testing is the DDPai Mini Smart Dash Cam which I paid $46 for on Amazon.

To date I have clipped a hand full of videos, looking at hte day and nighttime performance. I plan a more informational post in the next week, but for now, his is a short example I shot while getting gas at a local Buc-ee’s station here in Texas.

Here is a snapshot for a night time clip. There may be settings I can adjust on the camera to improve night capture. It works OK, but unless headlights are on, it’s able to resolve almost nothing.

Aviation, Military, photography, travel

Pima Air & Space Visit – June 2017

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Our time in California is quickly coming to a close. As part of this process I took on a 3000 mile road trip from Santa Cruz CA to Canyon Lake TX.

Along the way I decided to spend a day in Tuscon AZ and visit the Pima Air & Space Museum. And it was WELL worth the stop! Along with that visit I took a trip to the US Military “Aircraft Boneyard” (actually known as Davis-Monthan AFB).

The Air Museum itself is absolutely amazing! With 300+ aircraft and endless artifacts, it is really a 2 day visit if you want to even read all the ID plates, much less spend the time to learn about the amazing history some of these very unique aircraft, including the Boeing 787 Dreamliner Prototype 002 which is currently on display in this collection.

I could attempt to wax poetic about this visit, but instead I’ll simply post about 90 snapshots I took while trying to take do it all in one day.