Flyin’ and Ridin’

Since I’ve discovered Facebook, and became addicted, I am neglecting some of the other writing efforts. Among which is my blog, sadly. On the other hand I sometimes don’t know what to write and then won’t write. Simple. And effective.

Let me collect some of the things that I FB’d about the past week, in case you missed it.
First of all, Tongass X is doing well in sales and we’re all happy about the results so far. Apart from a very few people with problems on their own PC’s there are no issues found and all customers are happy!

Lizzie is not doing so well, because rob Young has disappeared once again… busy with other projects once more, maybe. It is starting to get annoying though, because is hampers our progress now and above all we lose interest of the beta group.

Have started work on the Northern Microlights from Neil Birch. A simple title that we will market under another brand name that I have made special for this purpose. NML should be availale this weekend and encompasses some 40 farm fileds in Northern England. It looks a bit 98-ish, but there is a market for it no doubt.

Accent’Sim is the new brand I made to replace the FScene Design Network setup I started with Ruud faber. Ruud wants to continue to use FScene after all and I need a brand for non-FSAddon products. So this seems a good solution, although yet more work !
I’ll be adding other – simpler than the base products such as Vancouver, Tongass, Plum Island etc. – under it as well.

I finally fixed the new helmet I bought. A Schuberth C3, one of the most expensive around, but the new Nolan’s don’t fit me anymore. The Shuberth is lightweight, fits real snug andnow that I re-did the built-in speakers and don’t feel them pressing my ears into my skul anymore, it is the PERFECT HELMET !

Last but not least I seem to have shut myself outof one of the forums as Admin and I am getting a white screen as soon as I log in. Brilliant! Now what !!?? I love ‘puters, don’t you!?

Last but not least the ‘China project is progressing. I signed a joint venture contract with a partner in China and we’re going to set up a Chinese webshop, selling FS CD’s there. Most people I talk to about it are really cynical….. maybe they’re right. But when they are not, well, than I will have a MAJOR project on my hands… for now I am very enthusiastic and full of energy to make this work! Stay tuned.

Well, time is running out on me once again, departure to France is closing in on us. I’l beter get back to work.

And that, my friends, is exactly the reason why you haven’t seen me blogging here for so long! That and some other work and a few headaches in between. Never mind that. I am HAPPY !! At long last my email is making the KA-CCHINGGG sound again, with every sale being recorded.

Tongass Fjords X has been in the making for more than two years and got delayed due to changing technology, absence of various ‘players’ from time to time, Holger starting to work for another publisher, Bill making other products in between and so on. The change in technology was the biggest delaying factor though, because Tongass had to be built almost from the ground up.

But oh boy what a beauty it has become. Tongass Fjords X is that much more detailed once again and has new scenery added and new features installed. Rivers and lakes now freeze over automatically, there are many coastal strips with aerial photo base textures, and of course detailed autogen placed upon it, the glaciers (all 250+ of them!) have been manually made to look like the real things, the airfields and ports/towns at Sitka, Petersburg and Wrangell are works of art by Bill… and so on.

I’ve been flying around on and off for many months now and haven’t scratched the surface of what can be discovered….. some afternoons I just had the Beaver docked in some remote lake and glanced at the changing views from time to time…. It now really is as iflooking out a window of your remote Alaskan cabin and see the real world outside.

Just totally amazing and proving there is a long future still for FSX, even without Microsoft or FS11…..

Today, when clicking through last night’s Facebook entries, I found a video clip of a float plane landing on Lake Union, Seattle. ‘Hang on’, I thought, ‘gotta see this. That’s what we did two years ago, courtesy of our good friends Barry and Della’.
So I start the clip and am looking over the nose of what appears to be a red turbo Otter. Yup, familiar sights, approach of Lake Union towards the Kenmore terminal at the far end. Wondering if the plane would float just above the water as long as we did too……. it sure does !

Then at the last 2 seconds of the clip I get a jolt. That’s ‘OUR’ Pilot Chris smiling at the camera !!!! Hi Chris !!!

Wonderful memories. I love the Internet !!

Last day in Romania today. Temps have gone up to 34 C and we’re melting (well, I am !). Will remain like this for some days, so I am glad to leave tomorrow. Hope Vienna is more accommodating the next few days.

Headache is gone, but lasted an entire day. Nothing helped; Excedrin, APC, Paracetamol, Antinevralgic…..yuck !!!

Visited the cemetery this morning, put flowers and candles up again. Did some shopping. Car’s tail brake light is ‘out’ and we can’t find the proper replacement bulb….. nor does it show anywhere in the manual how to replace any of the lights !! Duh !!!

Couldn’t do much work this week, contrary to what I planned. Computer and Internet problems remain to haunt me in this country.

Did a short tour to Geoagiu Baie yesterday, taking Florin and Olivia out there. Countryside is nice, the roads have been improved since last year! Amazing!

Dad still wants the commies back… he’s old, so I am not gonna argue with him. Many of the old people think the same. That’s not becasue of the commies being good, but of current politicians and burueacrats being even worse and MORE corrupt than everybody was back then !!! I say ‘toss them out of the EU, pronto !’.

Will be glad to get back to civilization soon, no matter how friendly many of the people here are. This just isn’t our place.

No Internet in the next few days, will be back on-line friday if all goes well…… Thanks for reading, so long !

It really seems like yesterday that I logged off the Internet, got on the bike and rode to Frankfurt and Mainz, Germany, only to pass there again 3 days later on our way to far-away Romania.

And that’s where we are now. Today is the first occasion I have to get back on the Internet, through a DSL line of my nephew Lucian. Fast enough, but unfortunately I can’t get my outgoiing e-mails to work…… ISP must be blocking something. And as usual ‘information’ on whi and what is non-existant here.

‘Who is your ISP’?
"Uh??"

‘Is there a document with your log-in data?’
"Uuuuuh??"

After half an hour search we managed to find a password for the dial-up connection….. so I can at least type this here. But we lost most of the day tinkering with the email settings, and there is the customary barbeque waiting for us, together with a bunch of people that I’ve never heard of before….. also as usual.

I think it is safe to say that I won’t be back to ‘work’ until we are back home and Carmen and Romi have taken off again on their way home to Florida.

Mork would say: "…. Shazba!…".

Here’s an interesting little movie by a fellow pilot landing at my ‘home’ airfield, Altiport de Méribel (LFKX).

He first flies over the runway to announce his arrival, then heads east towards Corchevel, turning north, west and then south again on final.
You’ll notice how difficult the short runway is to spot. Actually the fairway of the golf course running down from the runway isa good indicator to line up with the runway.
Notice also there is no ‘go-around’ option with the slanted runway and the dike (and mountain) behind it.

One of the curses of modern-day Internet and computers is that there is TOO much information and too many places to uphold it seems.

Or maybe the problem is simply that I am such a nosy guy and like to try everything and anything. *grin*.

Whatever the issue, fact is that I have been spending more and more of my time posting messages on Facebook than on the blog. I suppose the ‘ease’ of FB has something to do with it. I have it running in one of the Firfox browser tabs all day, and little notifications pop up all day too when ‘friends’ post their news, silly games, messages and photos.

So every morig I do ‘the rounds’; e-mail, various forums, news, Facebook, play a few minutes of Mafia Wars even, more forums, more e-mails, and my blogs and websites come last. They are MORE work and get less visitors (I think).
So in a way I am pretty jealous at things like Facebook. They attract many millions of users in no time, making at least somebody RICH, but above all being successful in linking people and their interests.

Having said that, I can post more lengthy thoughts on my blog(s) and maybe reach more focused people here too (??). So I’ll try and crank up my blog post frequency a bit again and provide you a reason to still visit here once in a while. For private news, flight simulator news AND motorcycling news.

Hmmmmm….. maybe that combination is what makes the blog less read? TELL ME !

…. from US Homeland Security paranoia, no less! Mr. Hendrickson, a US citizen and son of  Ret. USN Captain C.F. Hendrickson acquired one of the last flying Douglas AD-4N Skyraiders (in France, no less) and brought it home with the intention to keep the history of this aircraft alive and flying! Through increasing paranoia and bureaucracy the aircraft was confiscated by the Homeland Security Dept….. If you’re a US citizen and (military) aviation lover, you can help the Hendrickson’s to get their plane back and prepare it for sharing it with the public!!! Please check out his website here and support them !

After seeing more and more mail.ru, list.ru and other fake users registering at my blogs, I decided to change the registration process. So as of today you need my explicit approval to become a registered user at this (and other) blogs. More work for me, longer wait for users, but can’t be helped. Thank all the scum out there. My dream… living on an island with its own Internet infrastructure. Alright, call it Utopia.

Call it procrastinating, call it playing, call it whatever you like….. but I am having so much fun with this WORK of arranging out-of-the-way landing zones for the Lysander, that I have trouble getting work done. And still the ultralights to pack, Tongass Manual to finish, tons of work for MyTraffic, simMarket, simFlight and other FSAddon projects…. but hey… IT IS SO MUCH FUN!

Imagine a totally black plane….. you turn to ’spot view’ in FSX and the only thing you see is a black shadow blocking out the (too many!) lights on the ground.
Try it from the cockpit.. the red light fro the instruments is not very helpful and ‘blinds’ you when peering out over the radial engine and down the sides.

There’s a river that look likes the one on the map… but hey.. there’s another one! And isthat a railroad tracj down there, or a amotorway. Was that thing there in 1942?????
Now how the blazes am I going to find those three pesky little lights again on the field I set out earlier today…. in glorious sunshine, clearly showing me all the landmarks ??? Is there an NDB on the ‘field’? Nope. Any other electronic indication on where it is? Nope.
So how are the customers/pilots ever going to find this place?????

That’s for me to figure out now….. I’ve been flying around here for months and have problems relocating the field, now how about a first time visitor????

I have SUCH a tough JOB !!!

Latest news on the Avsim Hack is that their backups were on the two (owned) servers, which both got hacked and destroyed.
Maybe a specialized company can still salvage (some of) the data from them, but currently it doesn’t look good.

There is a temporary forum erected now to keep Avsim readers informed about what happened, what’s happening and what can be done. You can find the temporary Avsim Forum here: http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/index.php

Lets hope some of the years of work can still be recovered and restored.

Today I received an email from Tom Allensworth with a press release from him, stating that AVSIM has been thoroughly destroyed by a hacker. No matter if you like a site or not, doing something like that is really nothing less than criminal and in my opinion equal to braking into one’s house. Think of all the work that went into the site. And all the anxiety of those involved trying to get it back. And think of all the 10’s of thousands of visitors that ‘rely’ on it for their information, downloads of freeware stuff, product support and regular ’social contacts’.

I hope they find who did it, although I reckon chances are dim. And even if they do it probably won’t help much. Punishment for these sort of offenses are laughable in our current society.

It is really sad to see how many sick people are around these days, purposefully wanting to destroy innocent people’s pleasures, belongings and even lives in some cases. For no reason at all but a sick egoism.

Yuck!

Mom died last August, and although life has picked up again and continued, she is not going to be forgotten. Even recently we were still involved very much in giving her a last rest place in a nice sunny spot in the wall on the cemetary. August 2008. I started counting on my fingers. That is already more than 9 MONTHS ago… almost a year!

So in the end all the posts and messages on Twitter, Facebook and forums about ‘happy Mothers Day’ started to get to me after all. I guess we put things away in dark corners of our minds. And we think we have dealt with it.

Days like today prove that we have not, at least I haven’t. Not definite. So I am just happy fr all of you who can still give your Mom a call, or bring her a flower or something. Enjoy it while you can

Information overload and application glut…. causing the stress to hit the fan once again.

I am referring to my absence from this blog, casued by my presence in too many other places. Twitter (yes, even there), Facebook (daily), my own forums (daily), some other forums (daily), the simFlight news site (daily), and the list goes on. Yes, I’m a writer and not a talker… oh, I forgot to mention Skype – always on – so not somplaining there. But often it is hard to keep up and post everywhere.

It is even harder, for me at least, to make a choice. Or should I? Anyway, lets catch up with some of the latest developments at FSAddon, at Silver Cloud Publishing and, in general, in de Dumas household (yes we have that too!).

FSAddon first: I finally managed to put some products on CD… and soon in a BRAND NEW FSAddon SHOP ! More on that later.
Although the above is good news, the sales are abysmal, even if they have picked up over the past month. Not so good. Your guess is as good as mine; global economic crisis? Bad Dollar exchange rate? Bad economic situation in the US? Total saturation of the dwindling FS market? FS ‘collectors’ have gone blasé?
Fact is: I don’t know.

Other news.. Tongass X is almost ready….. we’re looking at several WEEKS for publication. Docs and Installer still to be done, rest is 99% finished.
AND we will have a NEW technology included, made by Jim Keir, allowing us to have things ‘happen’ according to seasons and other ‘triggers’. Very cool !

Before Tongass I still need to package Northern Microlights Airfields, a nice little scenery package made by an English Gentleman ‘up north’.

And…… the Lysander is nearing next beta phase too…. she flies, 80% done. She looks, 80% done. Beta testers are happy, for 80%.
We’re getting there !!

Silver Cloud Publishing:
finally have a working shop for the Chocolate Factory customer, and maybe I get it done this month !!!! I feel guilty about that project, it got between a rock and a hard place at some point.
Just like me.

A good spin-off of that is that I now also have a shop software for my FSAddon WP website…. cool !!!

Ah, yes, and we’ll have a major new release of MyTraffic X soon…. I’ll make sure you’ll read about that too!

On the personal front, the Dumas household, we have a ‘dynamic’ situation too.

Viv and Menno got married, left the country and are now living near the Bermuda Triangle. They took much of our furniture with them. I should have known the hidden agenda….. Nina now wants the house redecorated and refurbished. Yes, the one that’s for sale and the one I don’t care about anymore.
So I have seen a few million square feet of furniture outlets, shops and halls… sat at 3486 different dining tables, tried 23599 different chairs and guess what?
NO DECISION!

Oh well. We also have some good things. Like our new Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee machine that does Espresso AND Cappuccino ! I am HAPPY ! Never mind the price of the bloody cups compared to grinding the beans yourself

Hey, I ran out of time again… more news when I have more time to type it to ya. Have a great day all !!!

After all these weeks of private business, family visits, tourist tours and other distractions, today I managed to get a lot of work done finally. Put the Bobcat and the LHA products on a US$ installer AND made CD versions of both…. adapted the FSAddon.eu site for them and put the news in various places. Very stressful job, I can tell ya! So many things to think of and so many places to update. There MUST be  better way for this!

Also packaged the latest updates of the Lysander in a handy zip file and sent it off to the Beta Team !

And last but not least started working on the documentation for Tongass Fjords X, which is progressing real well now !

Also have a few goodies to ‘test’ in FSX, but I guess those will have to wait.. will make a few more Lizzie shots this weekend…..

Yesterday I was part of a meeting of publishers and other flight simulator parties, discussing what could or should, if anything, be done now that MS has pulled out of that segment of the hobby market. I will report more on the results in a later stage, but suffice to say now that a consortium was formed and will be further set up to promote the use of flight simulator and try and raise/keep awareness of our (potential) customers of the hobby and it’s products and suppliers.

An important ‘by-product’ of that meeting was my (first ever) meeting with Tom Allensworth of Avsim. We have lived in separate worlds ever since I left my volunteer job at Avsim and took up a paid position with simFlight. I guess Tom and I decided at the same time to put our differences aside and that now results in me being back in the Avsim Forums again. I am happy with that and didn’t like the hostile situation over the past 5 or 6 years (how time flies).

So if anything, THAT was a good outcome of the meeting already. Hopefully we’ll see more positive results when weeks pass….. I’ll keep you posted !

Meanwhile I’ve buitl up yet another backlog of work, mainly due to the wedding and subsequent move abroad of our daughter…. she and her husband leave on a plane for Aruba tomorrow morning and ince I’m back from the airport I can finally pick up WORK again……. Phew !!!

…… will be on Tuesday! I’m a bit B(l)ogged down at the moment…

Everybody had a fantastic day…….no more words needed ….

It is April 20th, and you haven’t seen me around a lot. Reason is : see title!

In between (FS) work and our own life, preparations and errands for the wedding and subsequent travel to The Antilles has taken a lot of our time and attention… not to mention money *gg*. So posting on the blog has taken a backseat I’m afraid, like a few other things as well.

Today is the big day! We’ll be leaving for Amsterdam soon and start the party this afternoon.

After that we’re not done yet. Menno has landed a 3 year government job on Aruba and emigrating there as expats is NOT as easy as one would think. LOTS of things to arrange, prepare and do….. like exporting the car, the furniture, OUR furniture (more on that later), arranging bank accounts, subscriptions, friends… you name it.They ultimately leave on Wednesday the 29th and until then I’ll still be busy and not posting much.

Thursday have to pick up a rental van, Friday take Lucian back to the airport AND our furniture to The Hague somewhere, Saturday I help my friends from the riding school on a Yamaha event, Sunday we have a BMW ride with 50 bikes, Monday I am in an all-day business meeting and Wednesday we will wave them off to a subtropical island…….

PHEW !!!!! 

There’s nothing I like better in Spring and Summer than the sweet smell of hay! I don’t know why. Maybe becasue I don’t smell anything all too well anymore, maybe because it reminds me of my childhood in Switzerland when I spent all Summers there.

Today I took a ride out to Amsterdam and due to the exceptionally warm weather recently the tulips had just started blossoming already, everything all around us trned green within a week….. and the cows were released as well…. in force ! Check for the ride tale here !

The reason I went to Amsterdam is to buy us a Wii and some additional controllers. Finally! Now I can maybe get Nina to play a computer game or two ….. she has resisted these past 35 years, but this one JUST might do it !