Flyin’ and Ridin’

The ‘rest’ of the bunch of dark-ish photos is HERE on FACEBOOK. )if that works for you).

These were taken with my old Minolta Dimage 7, under bad atmospheric circumstances (British rain), rather late in the afternoon. But impressive nonetheless and I wanted to share them anyway.

Big Time. Been having headaches for the past 3 weeks and that’s why you haven’t seen much of me here. Maybe I should see the doctor after all, one of these days. Meanwhile, we’re pretty busy with all sorts of ’stuff’….. and Vivian and Menno are ‘in the country’. That’ll take some of our time as well.
The motorbike is still covered, and most likely with an empty battery by now. Rotten Winter !

On the FS side there isn’t much to note currently, Maurizio is looking into changing FSCargo X to work with some other programs, instead of re-inventing a couple of wheels ourselves, Bill Womack is working on the Emma Field X ‘land’,  and I myself am working on implementing a brand new Emma Field website. We’re going to need some income, so the new ‘club’ will be FREE as before, but will also have two ‘paid membership levels’ !!

Paying members will get free access to a brand new ‘virtual airline’, in our case more like a ‘bush cargo company’ AND members will get discounts on various add-ons. We’re aiming for forging deals with some like minded developers to add discounted products to the member shop !

Of course Emma Field X will be fully compatible to the recently released Orbx FTX product.

We’ll get Emma Field rolling again, in more than one way !

Our daughter Vivian and her husband Menno are returning to Holland for a 2 weeks. And although we see her a few times per week on Skype, it will be good to have her around for a bit! Will be jumping in the Jeep in a few minutes to drive to the airport. They’ll be landing in a freezing winter wonder land, right off their tropical island of Aruba. Brrrrrrrrrrrr……!

Meanwhile I’ve been hard at work at building us a new Emma Field website. The new Emma Field Club one will have free and paid memberships and we have some exciting plans for that.
Also back in the works is FSCargo X that we are trying to link to some existing products out there to make it a lot more attractive (and those other products too). Stay tuned on this one!

The Gloster Gladiator is coming along nicely and is in Beta now, next should be the Lockheed Hudson.

I’m having a slight problem with the planned Jodel… my contact in France has other worries currently it seems and we haven’t heard from him for quite a while The Jodel family themselves have not answered my mails. Pity. To be continued…….

I guess this should go under ‘grumpy tales’, or at least the first part of my pondering. You see, here I am PAYING for some add-on scenery for once, just because I wanted to support some of my friends, and then I can’t download the thing because the publisher (or his dedicated retailer in this case) forgot to stress-test the download solution. And if you hype a product to the extent they have AND know each copy is a hefty 4,5 Gb (!) large AND you know the number of people that pre-paid……. you COULD have known to properly test it OR to NOT promise a priority download. Tsk tsk tsk. 

Anyway, I’ll shut up. My friends Holger and Bill are involved and the product itself is really good. We knew of course that ever since Holger designed Misty Fjords there would be companies to follow and eventually catch up. And obviously with the same designer involved, that wasn’t too hard in the end.

The good news is that now we low-and-slow flyers (especially) can navigate the Pacific Northwest coast over a much more realistic landscape than what MS presented us with. Just as with Tongass Fjords we now have all the roads and rivers, all the coast lines and lakes detailed as they are in real life.
And Orbx also enhances the textures in many ways, including seasonal changes as well.

We’ll be working on getting Emma Field nicely fitting into it, and we’re also working on a special version of Vancouver Plus to fit the new Orbx surroundings. And hopefully Holger now finally has more time to work on our new Misty Fjords X too.

I can only recommend it…… available at Orbx’ site here.

In the ’series’ of ‘what I look at on the Internet’ here’s a web site I particularly like. It is called 1x.com and shows beautiful photos by a large number of photographers. Click here to see.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have to get back to my bookkeeping AND check on our Dutch speed skaters in Vancouver. GO Sven !!!

Heck YESSSSS I am proud!

My friends at WhyFly, the brand new aviation web magazine from Canada, have read my first story and deemed it fit to join those already there. That means I am in the company of some VERY talented and esteemed writers and photographers AND aviation lovers. I couldn’t wish for a better place to be, really. And this is also the culmination of my life-long ‘quest’ of being involved in aviation. It’s probably as close as I’ll ever be, unless we manage to move to France and get my Ultralight License there. If I do, you won’t see me on-line anymore!

But until then, please have a look at WhyFly. It has some really wonderful articles and videos already and there will be more added every week from now on ! They are also looking for stories from pilots and aviation lovers that fit the goal: telling people in the world what is so wonderful about flying and aviation.

Our friend Kenny Simon lost his job in a similar way I did a a few years ago, after many years of loyal work. He too decided to start his OWN business instead of trying to work for another thankless company again and he now opened his motor service and repair shop. I made him his (first) website and finished it last night. If you’re anywhere in Holland and your motor needs some work, be sure to give Ken a call! Check out his site here.

Let me repeat a message that I wrote on my FSAddon Publishing website "….. From our friend and colleague Allen Kriesman is the Ultimate Terrain series of landscape enhancement programs for Flight Simulator. Ultimate Alaska X is the perfect companion to our own Alaskan sceneries, providing a replacement of the default MS coast lines, roads, rivers and mesh and with increased quality landclass. Not as detailed as Tongass Fjords of course, but ideal to enhance the terrain around it ! Read all about it on his website and order it through Flight1…".

If you’re into bush flying – or just love Alaska landscapes – then you can’t do without this product ! We’re also preparing a special version of Vancouver Plus that will embed in the upcoming PNW scenery from Orbx, by the way. More on that as we have it…..

Michael Paul Smith, a modeler and photographer in the US, has posted his skills on Flickr. Being an old modeler myself AND a photographer, I can only awe at his patience, skills and imagination ! I am glad I have something positive for my blog again

Just CLICK HERE and stay glued to your monitor screen like I did !

Do I really care where you send your messages to me from !? Did our ancestors waste space and paper by having their mail pigeons carry a message ".. sent from my Mail Pigeon….."????????

Is this annoying me just because it occupies extra space on my hard disks, makes me scroll further down than need be and makes me lose time. Or am I just jealous because I can’t afford an iPhone? And is this really just advertising by Apple that cannot be turned off, or is it yet another "mine’s bigger than yours" syndrome of our high-tech information grail?
You choose.

Upon my very strongly worded message yesterday, I was surprised to find a one-liner in my mailbox this morning: "…. your pending image has been re-instated…".

Good, so apparently it DOES help sometimes to get sincerely angry !

Next!

Yeah, you won’t see me angry quickly. I may be grumpy sometimes, but most of that is more out of fun than anything else. But these buggers have really done it now. I’ve been paying for a ‘Premium Site’ since 2002, that’s EIGHT YEARS. I figured I could make a few bucks of some of my photos at the time, and put up (among quite a few others) the picture you see here. You can – or rather COULD – get it on a t-shirt, a coffee mug or a cap. I sold, errrmmm… maybe FOUR of them in 8 years. Whatever.

Out of the blue came a mangled email from CafePress telling me ‘a’ picture was suspended because <insert some vagueries here>. So I replied to please send me the entire e-mail. Returned were more vagueries, but now it became clear that one or the other picture apparently was getting their nickers in a knot. No mention of precisely WHICH picture, NOR what was wrong with it. It took me two MORE emails to get a somewhat clear answer.

Now, if ANY of you thinks that putting said picture (see on the left) of a 50-year old aircraft, from a factory that closed back in 1968, owned by a public flying club, is depriving ANYONE from REAL MONEY, or is in any other way an infringement on copyrights………  then you should go live in the US (if you not already do so). I sure as heck haven’t encountered such behavior on this side of the pond… yet!  But chances are that our society here too will turn into a place where the ONLY thing people seem to be after is to SUE each other out of money for no particular reason, just to feed the lawyers… instead of work. OR to downright steal each other’s work.

This is what I call, and pardonnez-moi le mot, anal retentive! I would use stronger language if I had been brought up to. What a load of BS !

And no, I am not going to write to the Avions Jodel, relatives of the original designers, who now sell the old building plans to home builders. I don’t think they would expect me to, I most certainly do not think I am legally obligated, and I even think they and all other Jodel lovers, would be glad to have the plane distributed on coffee mugs and shirts…….. especially with 0,2 copies per year !!! (So you can see, I am not upset becasue of loss of money, other than the monthly payments to CP… it is a matter of principle!).

I simply MUST tell you about the new website (webzine!) of my on-line friends Glenn Norman, Michelle Goodeve, Hal Bryan and Mike Singer. I have been privvy to some of the preparations and to what drives these people. Needless to say, we have lots in common. And I think that goes for most readers of my blog as well, so you’ll be interested ! Below is the text I wrote for my various publications:

A brand new, on-line, commercial ‘web-zine’ has been born. Conceived, designed and ultimately produced and launched by some friends (Glenn Norman and Michelle Goodeve) and people many of us know (Hal Bryan and Mike Singer, both fromer MSFS gurus)! It is called Why Fly and is all about WHY we/you love FLYING (and aviation). "

……  Glenn and Michelle fell in love with each other—and the sky—while they were still in their teens. After getting their start as aviation writers, they’ve spent the past 25 years working as actors, screenwriters, story editors and producers on numerous TV shows. But as most of their stories were about flying, the couple decided to combine their skills and create Why Fly in partnership with their friends Hal Bryan and Mike Singer….".

You can see the FREE initial version by going here ! I know you’ll like what you see, so get a subscription and make sure the mag takes off into a wonderful future, serving us all with great stories about flying !

1-0 for now.

It appears that it is so much ‘easier’ to quickly type a few lines on Facebook, read about what your friends and acquaintances are doing, check again a few times every day, and move on, then to write something worth reading on a blog. I complained about this before, to myself, who else, and am still not happy about it.
Anyway, I’ll try and turn the tide a little and get back to my regular blogging (on various (!) blogs) without going totally insane by trying to remember where I need to go on the Net every day!

Here’s some stuff I am working on today…. learning/tinkering with Google Sketchup!
I did that last year too, and stopped. But since Arno Gerretsen of FSDeveloper.com wrote somewhere that you can port models made with Sketchup to FSX, I have a renewed interest. I am a publisher and not a developer….. but maybe a would-be developer and would-be ex-publisher? Who knows. I’d like to be able to make ’simple’ objects for FSX myself, using maybe some of my 80.000+ digital photos for textures, and being a little bit less dependent upon time that others don’t have

Don’t hold your breath.

Am also hard at work on some of my many websites/blogs to design new templates for them, using a very nice tool I found: Artistreer.

Ans last but not least, working on designing CD versions of some of the FSAddon products I don’t have in the shop yet, such ast Misty Fjords FS9, the Lysander and some others. Stay tuned.

Now that I am getting more and more involved with doing business in China, of course such headlines draw my attention. Although I am sure that ‘human rights’ are sometimes ‘forgotten’ in athat vast country, I am equally sure that this is the case in more than half the countries on our globe. So I am not going to get into a discussion about right or wrong.

But Google, and maybe other significant information bringing companies, pulling out of China would be a loss for THEM, not so much for Google or for the ‘free world’.

Apparently Google and its email accounts were attacked from sources in China, causing the message that I found today: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Now that is something I DO have an opinion on, and a very strong one. DON’T mess with OUR freedom and privacy…. I pretty much do not care what you di with your own

Lets see what happens next, but China would be ill advised to return to their isolationist policies.

I’ll be posting our best wishes for the next year soon here. But unfortunately I have to finish 2009 with yet another sad story.
For the second time this month I have to post news that will be devastating to many of us.

Herb Morse, aka Lizardo, died of cancer after emergency surgery failed to save him. Herb was a avid ‘bush pilot’ that many of us met for the first time in the Bush Flying United days over at Avsim. He tinkered on airfiles, helped MANY flightsimmers in various forums over the years and was always good humoured.  Herb will be sorely missed by all of us and our condolences go to his wife Amy, his children, his relatives and all of his many flightsim friends all over the world.

Like Jun earlier this month, ‘Lizardo’ will be sorely missed by his family AND friends, leaving yet another empty space in the ‘flightsim scene’.

Rest in Peace, my friend.

It is finally here. Christmas. And a WHITE one at that! So Merry Christmas everybody! Hope you have some wonderful days with family and friends. And also my deepest sympathy to some of our friends whom I know are NOT having such a great time. Chin up folks….. life’s tough, but remember the Silver Linings !

Meanwhile the Lysander got released yesterday amidst a huge cloud of stress on my part. Deadlines, deadlines….. I don’t mind them usually, but this time it was a bit much. Am exhausted now and will have to take it easy for a couple weeks. Yeah, right.

Alright, next activities: make newsletter, magazine ad, then Christmas Dinner for Dad, pack car and move the office to our French Subsidiary to celebrate New Year with our friends in our other country. And get some sleep afterward I hope…..

Wishing you all WONDERFUL DAYS from a white Holland!!

Nina and Francois

The Lysander is ready. The User Manual is ready. Nick made beautiful pictures. The Special Operations Guide is written. We have a bunch of marvelous repaints. All the ’scenery’ (landing zones with objects placed) is done. I compiled dozens of maps, flew 5 routes for days on end.

So why isn’t the package on sale yet??????

Well, it is uploading now and soon I’ll send word to simMarket. The problem is that, as usual with any IT project, things went wrong in the last minute. Pictures got formatted wrong, the pdf-maker program all of a sudden started acting up, I found some mistakes, both PC’s ground to a halt, simFlight news still had to be made….. and time slipped through my fingers.

I am dead tired, haven’t slept well for many nights, had to drop all social activities (I know, it IS Christmas… or is it??), and even had to prioritize some of my work.

Karma.

Lizzie will be on sale tomorrow….. and I’ll be asleep and not checking the sales or support forum. Maybe I need another job? Fact is, this has been such a wonderful project, one that I really loved doing, that it still seems worth all the money and time spent on it. I hope you’ll agree.

Tomorrow.

Is it the financial crisis – whatever that may be – that lures people into trying to sell every bit of crap around the corner? I doubt it. I think actually that it is the Internet that’s to blame.
You see, ‘in the old days’ when you opened a shop to sell t-shirts printed with someone ELSE’s logos, or ‘drinks toasters’ made out of wrongly burned CD’s, or the umpteenth greenish satellite picture projected on some perfectly good FSX textures, you’d not have many people even ENTER the shop. Let alone buy the stuff.

And once the word got around and all 15.000 inhabitants of the town would have frowned over your shop window and passed it without buying, you’d have to close the shop unable to pay for the rent any longer.

Idea busted. Consumers’ money safe.

But with the Internet every Joe and Mary can rig up a $50 a year website, pretend they’re a corporation of some substance even and sell this kind of crap to not 15.000 city dwellers but to a couple million naive (?) Internet shoppers.

Unfortunately some industries are clearly not effected by any consumer watch dogs and flight simulation surely is one of those. People NEW to the hobby can walk into various traps with their eyes wide open. And quite a few do, indeed. Sadly.

Now, another phenomenon I have noticed over the years is that for some reason quite a few FS users seem to be dyslexic, or at least have a tendency towards it. I jokingly inquired somewhere else if this is a prerequisite for being a flightsimmer. Obviously not, but as I read MANY support forums and other community forums, it strikes me that quite often a buyer of PC goods really goes off about a purchase, while all he actually did was not properly READ the instructions or manual. A well-known expression in IT circles is that the ‘problem is between the back of the chair and the keyboard’.

Again, not really an issue with flightsimming in itself, but more with the fact of having computers and Internet probably. I mean, if you buy a plastic model kit and paste the wings upside down because you’ve never practiced with IKEA instruction sheets prior to attempting an Airfix model, what are you going to do? Drive into town and rant at the toyshop owner !!??
Hardly. More likely you’ll pry the wings off and somehow paste them back on, putting the damaged-looking result on a high shelf, out of sight of visitors. Or you just trash the mangled model and not tell anybody of your error.

But with the Internet, people just turn around, fire up their favorite forum and blast away at the poor developer, who did everything right. Except for the fact he sells his program to people who can’t read, are PC-analphabetics, have no patience at all or have some other deficiency making them slash out to anybody just because they can.

It is hugely frustrating to BOTH developers and (bad-reading) customers. The only real solution is to get rid of PC’s again….. hmmmmm……