Lovely golfing day today at Massey Park course in Concord. Sunny, light breeze 23 degrees. My golf was sort of average, but Norman Arnott played a blinder!
I got a few pars on the 18 holes but Stormin Normin was blasting the ball arrow-straight down the fairways to get seven pars and go round in a respectable 83, 18 over par. It’s not exactly Greg Norman scores, but pretty good for us occasional hackers.
Well done Norm. Of course, I’m much too polite to even mention the word luck.
I’ve had a busy couple of weeks involving exciting gliding and some fairly exciting work. The exciting gliding was on a trip to Lake Keepit Soaring Club, between Tamworth and Gunnedah on the North West Slopes and Plains of NSW. It’s lovely countryside and was nice and green after recent rains. It was warm (mid-20s) and humid.
I drove up (5+ hours) with Joe Veness, a friend from the gliding club at Camden. The soaring weather was reasonable, but it was a bit late in the year and the days are a bit short for very long flights. He was trying for his Silver C flight (5 hours and 50 kilometres). I was just looking for some fun cross-country flying – my next badge goal is 500 kilometres and that needs a good summer thermal day.
I was given a lovely glider – a Discus 2c. It’s manufacturer, Schempp-Hirth, describes it as “Der DISCUS-2c ist mit seiner Spannweite von 18 m eine interessante Alternative zum 15 m-Standardklasseflugzeug.”
It has interchangeable wingtips that give it a 15-metre or 18-metre wingspan. This is because there’s a racing class of glider restricted to 15-metre wingspan. I flew it as an 18-metre craft – my first experience with long wings. It was lovely to fly – it’s efficient at quite high speeds with a best glide angle of about 45 to 1. It is fitted with an Altair gliding computer – Altair ist ein moderner Segelflugcomputer der Extraklasse: mit seinem brillanten Farbbildschirm und der einfachen Bedienung ist Altair der ideale PDA-Ersatz!”
Keepit is a lovely spot – at dusk the kangaroos come out of the trees and graze on the edge of the grass runways. They have to be chased off if there are any gliders still flying then.
We left our shoes out on the veranda of our cabin (to stop tiny burrs getting into the carpet) and in the morning they were scattered on the grass and partly chewed. A local pet dog got the blame the first night, but he wasn’t there on the second night and the blame shifted to a fox or dingo. The dog’s owner had to apologise to him. Joe’s flipflops were badly mauled.
We managed a 10-minute flight in a vintage Bell 47 (as used in Mash) helicopter that was passing through. Exciting low-level buzzing around with a lovely sunset over the local mountain ridges.
We had three days flying. I managed a 3 1/2 – hour flight and covered about 160 kilometres, and some local soaring. Joe didn’t get his Silver 50k, but did manage the height gain of 1,000 metres. Our best day was still not an easy one, with lift to almost 6,000 feet but some blue holes with no lift at all. I nearly had to land at Gunnedah but was rescued by stretching my glide to a lone puffy white cloud.
It’s still very exciting to head away from the home airfield knowing that if the lift runs out you’ll have to land in a paddock somewhere.
There was an interesting bunch of people there. A French-Canadian couple in a campervan were stopping off during their Australian adventures to do some gliding, there was an American, and a guy up from Melbourne. The staff were all friendly and helpful. A pleasant autumn break.
Gliding computers are a handy GPS with a big screen and special software that tells you where you are, where to go, and if you have the height to make it back to the airfield. But they cost a lot – $800.
Because I’m mean, I hacked a Navman car GPS ($110) to run open source (free) gliding software called XCSoar. This has been good, but the colour screen is hard to read in bright sunlight and it needs an external battery to run more than an hour.
Enter the Kobo Mini, an e-ink screen (like the Kindle) that isn’t colour, but looks very clear in bright sunlight and costs just $49. The internal battery can run it for 10 hours or more. This can run XCSoar but has no GPS in it. Clever people have devised ways to install a $15 GPS chip and make it work as a gliding computer.
This involved some very delicate soldering of tiny contacts using several magnifying glasses, but has worked well. I’ve drilled the case to run the leads through and glued the chip to the front where it gets a good signal from the GPS satellites. Now to test it in the air!
More work! I’ve picked up some new research and writing work for Australian Associated Press on a project to document some Australian World War I experiences. Details are still secret, sorry.
The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1 is approaching and there will be a surge of interest in this subject. AAP is just up the road at Rhodes, but I’ll be working mostly from home.
At the moment I’m delving into the history of the Australian Flying Corps. It’s interesting stuff, right up my street. The only problem is that I get fascinated by the detail and dig deeper into the old documents rather than writing the reports! The Australian War Memorial has made a huge number of original documents available on the web including squadron diaries.
I’m also using Trove – a National Library of Australia project that has digitised newspapers from around the country from way back. You can search for individuals or events – a fascinating resource.
Long time no blog. My excuse is that I’ve been working at APRA AMCOS editing written guides to their complex licensing arrangements. They call them PEGs – Plain English Guides.
This has been good fun. I’ve not worked in an office for a few years now, so it was like stepping back from gentle retirement to a preceding more hectic pace of life. It’s only been two days a week, however, so I can’t complain!
APRA offices
The office is great – they gave me a new iMac to work on (with Windows) and they are a friendly bunch. The building is an old four-storey one with huge timber beams and pillars inside and a very stylish contemporary makeover. Check out the giant anglepoise lamps in the sitting area and the colour-coded lamps on the walls.
The only drawback has been commuting in by car. They’ve given me a parking space next to the office in Mountain Street, Ultimo, so the car seemed the obvious way. The first couple of times it was quicker than the combined train/walk would be, but then it turned bad! It can be a slow grind in traffic and take an hour to get there by 9am – but getting back home can be done sometimes in 25 minutes.
It’s interesting to be back into the pace of office life. Having meetings and making decisions. Chatting to strangers over the tea-making facilities in the kitchen, watching everyone wander about at lunchtime with their various foods.
