Well, aside from crashing into a fire, crashing into a pond and sinking.

That's exactly what happened to my HDX-300 just now. It suffered a power glitch, and lost altitude, then the power suddenly came back on and the heli started going rather quickly where I didn't want it. Unfortunately, the power came back just before it landed, and it scooted off and hit the rocks at the edge of the pond before I can do anything about it.

Fortunately, this caused the battery to get ejected (and it remained lying on a rock) so it was unpowered, but the heli continued and went straight in the pond and sank. Some water lillies are the only thing that stopped it going all the way to the bottom, but it was still totally submerged.

Damage: both main rotor blades wrecked from hitting the rocks at the side of the pond, possible servo wrecked, broken main frame (but possibly repairable). Hopefully it'll still work when it dries out.

So, the motorcycle project.

I've tried to do a little bit every day - it now has new front forks, a shiny new front brake disc, and new front brake pads. I was very happy to find the brake caliper seems all in good order once cleaned up, all 4 pistons work and no sign of any sticking or any other bad things. Next, do the back end. I have also (at long last) found a worthy substitute for LPS-2, which I can't get locally. Don't mistake LPS-2 for WD40. LPS-2 actually has lubricant in it, and I've fixed many things just by drenching it in LPS-2. A local parts store had something called 'Kent Super Lube', at the great sum of 49p for a small can, and it seems pretty similar. That alone fixed the stuck steering lock pin and half-seized ignition lock.

I also discovered a tool shop tucked away on the industrial estate where I work. It's a very dangerous (to the wallet) place to be in. It just sells tools. I had been looking just for a 28mm socket, but the car parts place told me about this tool shop... and I found the 28mm socket there, alright. Along with what I call "The Equalizer" (a 600mm long 1/4in drive socket wrench - just show it to your seized wheel nuts that were tightened by a gorilla at the tyre fitters with about 400 ft lbs of torque, and they give up there and then and loosen themselves), a torque wrench, and various 1/3in drive adapters.

That didn't help me much with the brake disc bolts though, they are allen bolts, so I had to struggle with an allen key and an improvised way of making the tool longer (the allen key was bending alarmingly with the required force). The threads surprisingly looked alright when I took the bolts out, on closer inspection it was just the loctite being rather stronger than I expected. (The actual torque specification for those bolts is actually pretty low, only 11Nm).

So, onto other projects.

I've also become a bit addicted to learning Spanish too which is a complete surprise, given how much I hated doing French at school. I was considering buying the Rosetta Stone software, but I noticed they had subscriptions so I went for an online subscription instead. Rosetta Stone doesn't teach with translations from your own language, rather, the entire course is done in the language you are learning, through images. It's very effective - because it's entirely done in the language you are learning, you have to think in that language from the get go. However, I'm glad I've also learned some grammar in the traditional manner because there are a few things that would have been definitely "learning the hard way" without.

I'm also reading as much Spanish stuff as practical, mostly BBC Mundo (http://www.bbc.co.uk/spanish). I'm very pleased that after only 3 and a bit months of learning, I can already understand quite a bit of the news. However, reading is 10 times easier than writing it, which in turn is 10 times easier than trying to listen and understand... I've also been reading a Spanish ZX Spectrum site and its forum (the Speccy had a decent following in Spain also) and I was quite pleased when I could understand a fair bit of an off-topic political debate in the forum. But it all gets thrown into sharp relief when I struggle to construct a few simple sentences myself! Perhaps in a year's time I might be able to start even writing to threads on the forum...

Well, an action packed JE for today, I think:

The glider club - now the winch is back in action (on our third engine this year!) we were flying today. A lot of people are away at the moment so there wasn't many of us, so we didn't fly long. Of course, as soon as we pack up, the high overcast that had kept soaring extremely marginal disappeared, and fair weather cumulus (i.e. great markers that there's lots of lift around) appeared! Oh well. At least I did get a short soaring flight thanks to a sea breeze convergence. I also drove the winch for about 9 launches or so. The new winch engine (a 4.2 litre Jaguar engine) was running nicely, and we were getting good launch heights - one of my launches yielded a 1550 foot release. (I think if we had the Ka-8 out we'd have seen an 1800+ ft launch since that's a much lighter glider than the club's Blanik).

I got some new main shafts for my RC heli, so that's back flying again, and I'm still trying to get the tail set up right. Despite the high RPMs, it doesn't seem very effective, the rate of yaw when turning clockwise isn't all that great (but of course, the yaw rate achievable the other way, i.e. not going against the main rotor's torque is fast). I might try modifying a set of cambered CP2 tail blades to see if it helps things. I did have a tail servo fail in flight as well, it went intermittent. This lead to a hard (but damage free) landing. I took its gear set out and repaired another servo I have that had stripped gears as a replacement.

I also made a start on working on the motorcycle. First, I took the front brake caliper off, and took the old pads out (backings were rusted, and there was nearly no friction material left, anyway). I think I might replace the front disc too - because the bike has sat, there's some corrosion on the bits that allow the disc to 'float' - and in any case, they aren't all that expensive, and if there's anything I want to be perfect it's the brakes. The calipers themselves look fine and none of the pistons are stuck. I also took most of the fairings off, a job I thought would take five minutes, but because the hardware fastening the fairings together lives in dirty places, some bolts had seized. The main fairings themselves weren't bad, but the front wheel mudguard was a real pain in the arse - probably the dirtiest place for the ends of the bolts which had all rusted. They are held on by plastic clips and bolted together, and of course the plastic can't hold the nut against a rusty bolt being turned, and there's almost no room to get a set of mole grips in to hold the nut still. It made it very slow work. I think I'll also replace a lot of the nuts and bolts -- and when I reassemble, it will be with anti-seize compound liberally applied!

But most of the fairings are off, and the stuff under the fairings looks in pretty good shape, it just needs cleaning.

Oh. You can also tell I'm not married. If I was married, do you think I would be allowed to park a motorcycle in the dining room? :-)

(It's only a temporary condition, I don't have a garage, and I'd like to work on it somewhere reliably warm and dry and free of wind, with electricity and good lighting. Once I've done most of the work I'll buy some covers so I can park outside).

I also plucked up the courage to try my newbie Spanish in a Spanish Sinclair Spectrum forum. It was just to ask where some guy got hold of a TEA2114 (composite video switch) IC since he'd used one and I can't find a source for the chip (if it's even still made, hardly anyone uses composite video these days). I seemed to have formed something approaching syntactically correct Spanish since I got a reasonable answer!

I seem to be accumulating projects at an unsustainable rate lately. Not only do I have my retrocomputing projects, trying to learn a foreign language, radio control stuff, but now I have a motorcycle project:

http://www.alioth.net/tmp/cagiva.jpg

It's a Cagiva 125. I got it for £200, and it needs quite a lot of work (and besides, I have to actually learn to ride). Already, I have a set of new forks for it (£45, off an ebayer), but it also needs a new chain, possibly a new rear brake disc, new rear shock, and probably a few other parts once I strip it down. However, it's pretty much mandatory to have a motorcycle in the Isle of Man so finally I have fulfilled my obligation (although I'll feel a lot better once I get it road worthy!)

So in my continued attempts to learn a human language, rather than a computer language, I've continued with Spanish.

What I do on my breaks at work, is read articles on es.wikipedia.org, and read BBC Mundo (the Spanish BBC website), and browse through WordReference (usually I keep a browser tab open on WordReference, because I frequently need to look up words in the first two things).

I'm also re-reading "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". Early on in the book, Richard Feynman makes the observation that technical and scientific documents in Portugese were easy to read, while he was learning that language, but everyday speech was almost impossible. I've observed the same thing about Spanish, too - I have little trouble understanding an article on something technical on the Spanish Wikipedia. In order of difficulty when reading, I've found it goes like this - Spanish Wikipedia technical subjects - apart from the odd sentence, I can almost completely understand. So many of the words are similar to English. BBC Mundo - much harder, although I can get the gist of many stories, and understand a few of the sentences without having to translate them to English first. Every day speech - I find extremely difficult. Many things just don't have a good literal translation. Fortunately, WordReference contains many figures of speech and phrases when you look up a word.

I'm slowly getting to grips with all the grammatical glue of the language, but it's slow going. I think I'm probably best off doing a course at the college to learn the grammar properly.

Listening is by far the hardest, because if you don't grok most of the words, you're two or three sentences behind very quickly. However, tonight, I could pick out more words than ever when listening to the speech on the BBC Mundo videos that accompanied the news stories.

Anyway - some useful links:
WordReference - very useful for many languages! http://www.wordreference.com/
BBC Mundo - portada - http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/news/

Oh dear...

The HDX-300 heli is giving me a fit.

First, I find out that the supposedly hardened main shafts I had as spares weren't hardened at all. One self destructed in flight (fortunately only a few inches off the ground) - when it bent with the head turning at 2500 RPM, the heli seemed to explode, ejecting the battery and various other bits. Nothing damaged though apart from the banana-shaped main shaft.

So I did a test. The remains of the hardened shaft I broke while trying to set up the gyro and the new supposedly hardened spares I have were compared. I could put the proper hardened shaft in a vice, tonk it with a 3lb lump hammer and it wouldn't bend. If I hit it really hard it would snap. By contrast, my supposedly hardened spare shaft bent easily by hand, and in the hammer test would bend with a very light hammer tap.

Then after putting yet another supposedly hardened shaft in the heli this morning, I thought I'd fly it for 5 minutes before going to work to try to set up the tail better. I forgot how long my Tx antenna was, and clipped it with the main rotor. This chopped the last 3 inches off the end of my transmitter antenna, and ... bent another main shaft, and destroyed one of the main rotor blades.

So now I'm out of main shafts, rotor blades and patience. The week long wait for new bits to arrive from the USA will give me time to regain my patience, I hope!

RC helicopter flying is, well, basically a cycle of 'build fly crash build fly crash'. They are unruly beasts, and ... well, with any RC model sooner or later you'll crash, but with helicopters, sooner seems to be the general rule.

I managed to snag a new HDX-300 kit off an ebayer (the HDX-300 is 300 size like the CP2, main rotor diameter of 520 mm), which is a really nice all fibreglass and alloy model, with a belt driven tail rotor. Doing the performance calculations showed it would be a really hot performer. So, last week, I spent two hours building, and it looked great! Here's some pics of the frame before I got the electronics:

The whole thing:
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/hdx300-1.jpg

Tail detail:
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/hdx300-2.jpg

Main frame and drive detail:
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/hdx300-3.jpg

Today, I got the electronics from my local model shop - a receiver, ESC and heading hold gyro. I basically lashed everything on to do the setup - get the heli balanced correctly, and set up the gyro.

The maiden flight was a total disaster. I hadn't really intended to maiden flight it, just get it off the ground a few inches to get the gyro set up correctly. The gyro had way too much gain which made the tail wag like crazy (but was mixing in far too little input from the transmitter, so while the tail wagged like mad, my stick inputs didn't really do much). Unfortunately, on one of these little hops I decided to try and keep it in the air a little longer to see how my latest settings changes had improved matters, but with the tail wagging... a wall jumped out in front of the heli.

I've never broken a hardened steel main shaft - I've used the HDX-300 rotor head system on the CP2 for about 3 or 4 months and had some tremendous crashes with it... but this time, I snapped the main shaft in two, just below the swash plate. Naturally the main blades were totally destroyed - it was utter carnage. Now I can't get the remains of the main shaft out because I thread locked the grub screws on the main drive gear, and I can't get them out (at least in situ). So I'm going to have to completely disassemble the frame...it was too depressing to do that today, so I'll do it next week.

Just another day of RC heli flying!

Last week I had a (much needed) break, and went off to Palma de Mallorca with one person I knew, and about 20 that I didn't (the ones I didn't were all Germans, to add interest to the mix). So I got to practise the 6 weeks worth of Spanish I had learned (some on the Germans, too, since some of them spoke a bit of Spanish - but mostly on unsuspecting shop keepers, cafe owners and bar tenders). What probably helped force the issue was the hotel we were staying at was full of Germans only (Paul and myself were probably the only native English speakers there. The only other language I heard spoken by guests aside from German, was French). We were staying in S'Arenal, which the Germans call the "17th State", and it might well be true. I didn't hear much other than German being spoken out on the street.

This of course meant multiple trips to the Bierkoenig, a place of German hedonism where beer is drunk by the litre. And coctails. Yes, cocktails in litre glasses, with about a dozen metre-long straws as a 'communal drink' for your group.

There may have been a bit of inebriation here or there ...

Apart from the binge drinking, Paul and I got out and did some bike riding while the Germans lazed around on the beach. We did two days of riding, the first out to Cap Blanc (White Cape in Catalan), which involved a rather long and hot climb until we were on the road that runs along the cliffside. It wasn't helped by the chain coming off my bike. Then from Cap Blanc, we went to Llucmayor, a small market town of about 20,000 people. It rather reminded me of Castletown in the Isle of Man - dominated by a market square, fed by lots of narrow streets lined with old terraced houses (of course, Spanish style). Muy bonito!

That day's ride was about 40 miles worth. The next day we went into Palma, and up to Castillo de Bellver (which has a slightly dark past, having been used as a prison by Franco during the dictatorship). We had a bit of difficulty finding the castle though, it seemed to always be on top of the hill we were not on top of - eventually, we found a route. Naturally, it had commanding views of Palma Bay and the surroundings. About 30 miles of riding all in all that day (and quite intense some of it, the hills were steep).

I shall upload some photos tomorrow for my loyal readership!

Since then I've been trying to learn some more Spanish. It was very confidence boosting to say something *and* it have the expected result! I'm sure the people I spoke to could tell I was a beginner though, and accordingly spoke slower and more clearly (they were easier to understand than the 'full speed' speakers I've encountered in the BBC Languages material). The difficulty I'm now running into while trying to increase my vocabulary and grammar knowledge is that some Spanish words seem to have about 50 odd meanings. Consider the verb 'quedar' which can be used in phrases such '?Donde podemos quedar?' (Where can we meet?), where 'quedar' in this instance means 'to meet'. Contrast this with 'se quedó embarazada' - which means 'she became pregnant', 'quedo' in this case meaning 'became'. Or 'quedar varado' - to be left stranded (quedar meaning 'to be left' in this instance).

It's all very confusing.

Llevar is another verb that has many meanings - to take, to carry, to wear, to have (and about a dozen more!) Then, the verb 'dar' can mean to give or to have.

I suppose Spanish speakers learning English have the problem the other way around. They probably think we have this great verb 'llevar' that you work out from context, but in English you have to learn all these different verbs to say the same thing!

Still I've only been learning for 2 months. Perhaps it'll all become clear...in 2 years.

Occasionally, you can get a bargain on ebay.

I just won an auction for a 3dx HDX-300 RC heli kit (new) for about $100 below the price it's sold in normal internet shops. Yay me!

I had a really good time with the heli I have over the weekend, we had great weather with light winds, and I took it up to The Stacks (basically, an area of rugged terrain overlooking the sea over a 1000 foot cliff) and gave it a real good thrashing. I had to give up though, this time not because I crashed it, but because the midges were getting too much and I nearly had a midge-induced crash when one bit me particularly painfully. The leading edge of the rotor blades had caught a few of the bastards though.

Sunday I practised more nose in hovering and managed some hovers without pushing the stick the wrong way. Once I've got that down it's time to start doing aerobatics...although I want to use the 3dx-300 for that, I'm not sure the CP2 is really up to too much aerobatics (I'm sure it'll loop and roll, but the motor driven fixed pitch tail has a really hard time trying to keep up with rapid power changes).

So it's been a while since I've got around to writing anything here.

First off, we've had the first day of proper July weather today... on the 23rd July! A day like July should be, warm, a bit muggy, the smell of the Irish Sea drifting on a GENTLE sea breeze, not blowing a hoolie like it has been all month (it seems like it's the first day the wind has been under 20 knots. Last weekend it was virtually gale force).

RC:

So tonight was the first night since getting my Futaba Field force 9 transmitter that I've been able to fly my heli without being on the constant edge of wind-induced disaster. I'm not sure the bugs liked it - the leading edges of the rotor blades are covered in bug guts after flying 3 batteries worth! But it gave me a chance to practise flying slowly and smoothly (flying quickly and erratically is EASY) and practise things in like flying nose-in slowly (I'm still prone to pushing the cyclic the wrong way and nosediving into the ground, without the wind to complicate things, the only scary moment I had was trimming the forsythia bush with the tail rotor).

I also started building a glider, a 1.6 meter span plywood and balsa 'old skool' RC model. I bought the glider in 1985! The box says 'Easy to build, fuselage slots together in minutes!' (and as a 13 year old, I bought into that completely) Pull the other one, it's got bells on! 'Slots together' for certain values of slots together that involve power tools and liberal quantities of PVA glue. 'In minutes' for values of minutes stretching to at least 3 hours for just the fuselage, and probably a similar amount of time for the wings...and probably another two hours to do the covering. I never built it as a kid because I wasn't allowed tools of any kind since if I merely got hold of a screwdriver, usually some piece of electronics would get dismantled ('he's soooo destructive', my parents would lament. The thing is I wasn't intentionally trying to break stuff, I would take things apart out of curiosity to see how they worked, trouble is I could never put them back together again in a fashion where they worked). Considering I wasn't allowed a screwdriver, the chances of getting hold of a drill were zero. Let alone epoxy (one of the required adhesives). So the glider went in a cupboard when I discovered the real truth of what 'slots together in minutes' actually meant.

But anyway, 23 years later it's getting built. I will probably use a spare 4-in-1 heli receiver since it has a power receptacle and run the RX and servos off a heli Li-Poly battery. (The heli receiver is just a bog standard PPM receiver with a gyro and (brushed) motor controller built in). I sat outside enjoying the warm evening building the fuselage on the garden table. The remaining 90 minutes or so of work on that bit will be carving the bits made of blocks of wood then sanding them down to form the shape of the nose and fitting the electronics. I'll probably get 'standard size' servos for it rather than use the micro servos that are in the heli.

Music:

After not touching my Roland A90 keyboard since getting a real piano, the other night I thought I would play it. Now it's a great keyboard ... but after getting used to having a real piano, it's just not a tenth of what even an old 1920s baby grand piano sounds. The lack of vibration coming through the instrument, the far too rapid sound decay is evident and I can really hear the quantisization errors when the sound gets quiet as a note fades away. I never used to notice any of that! So now I'm spoiled. I don't think I can bring myself to selling the keyboard, after it is portable for 90 lbs worth of portability (it's got a weighted hammer action keyboard which is actually very nice). But you just can't beat a real instrument.

Retrocomputing:

I've pushed along further with the Spectrum ethernet project, and have started doing the more peripheral bits of the ROM software, such as extending the machine's BASIC interpreter. I'll probably build a couple more boards and get them out to people who want to develop stuff with it. Yes, people (other than me!) still do play with real Sinclair hardware! On the 'dark side' (i.e. 6502 based computers, the Spectrum uses a Z80), I was happy to find today that the 6502 (CMOS version) is still manufactured, which is great news. So getting both primary retrocomputing CPUs (Z80 and 6502) isn't a problem. The Z80 is more widely available, though - it's stocked by RS and Farnell, the two big generic electronics suppliers here in Rightpondia. I've not seen anywhere in the UK that sells the 6502, but with teh intarwebs it's not going to be an issue since I can just get them from the US.

Espanol:

(Sorry, I don't thing Slashdot lets you put in a 'n' with the tilde on top).
The more I try to learn the more confusing it gets! It seems for every day speech there's an awful lot that simply doesn't literally translate between Spanish and English. So it's not just learning grammar and words, it's also learning a completely different idiom. However, learning a language today is a lot more fun and a lot more accessable than when I was forced to learn French at school - it's easy to get hold of good, engaging learning material - I've really enjoyed the BBC's Learning Spanish website, going through their 'Mi Vida Loca' beginners course. It's so much better than the way we were taught French at school which was by and large, crushingly dull. So my trip (next week!) to Palma de Mallorca has changed purpose a little. I was trying to learn enough Spanish to get by (get food and drink, that sort of thing) for the trip, but now the trip is becoming a trip to learn Spanish better for now what's becoming an ongoing project.

Mi Vida Loca is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/mividaloca/ - it's still in production with about a dozen episodes still to come.

There was one very funny moment I thought. The main character invites you to stay at a friend's in a town a couple of hours away. The narrator is telling you 'You hardly know this girl, and she's..." (pause) - and I bet 80% of the men (probably a not insignificant proportion of women) filled that gap in with "damned HOT!" :-) The actual next words were 'a little crazy'!

"Mother sues over tale of 'drunken party' lifted from Bebo" - posted to the front page of Slashdot today (story in the 'Independent' is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mother-sues-over-tale-of-drunken-party-lifted-from-bebo-865039.html)

In case you don't know, Bebo is a UK based social networking site.

Since I'm learning Spanish right now (and this incident happened in Spain), it's amusing to note that in Spanish, "Bebo" means "I drink" :-)

I've been reading and posting to the usenet groups rec.aviation.* for over ten years now. But I feel like giving up.

Rec.aviation.piloting has turned into a troll fest of the likes I've never seen, only exacerbated by the forthcoming US presidential elections. I don't mind political discussion, and there's quite a bit of on-topic political discussion for a piloting group (from the the political overlords of the FAA, to the politics of fuel supply). However, in the run-up to the election it just turns into vitriol, trolling and flames. It never used to be like this - before the '96 and 2000 elections, there was none of this crap. In the run-up to the '04 election there was plenty, and now any mention of the presidential election is just a hate-filled thread with nothing useful contained within. Think of the worst troll/flame filled posting on Slashdot when someone mentions a presidential candidate, then magnify the hate and vitriol by a factor of 10 and you have what r.a.p is like if someone mentions McCain. Magnify it by 100 if they mention Obama. And it's all off topic, too.

Then there are a couple of persistent trolls who have taken over the group. One of the trolls is often quite informative, but in every thread he posts to, another troll must call him names, then the rest of the thread from that point on is useless as the trolls sling insults. While the 'informative' troll can be informative, he joins too many threads to tell someone he dislikes simply that they are a 'fjjjuckwit'. Sigh.

It seems like in the last 6 months the signal to noise ratio has gone from mostly signal and a little noise to nearly all noise and no signal. I might find 5 posts in 200 worth reading for all the mindless trolling and rants about the Presidential candidates, along with the conspiracy posts by kooks.

To be honest I may as well unsubscribe from rec.aviation.piloting.

I got a new transmitter for my radio controlled helicopter on the weekend, a really nice programmable one. It has completely transformed the helicopter's performance - it's like a different machine.

In fact, it was flying absolutely great.

I got the 'idle up' setup done last night, since the wind had calmed enough that I could assess whether the pitch, throttle and tail curves were correct. It climbs really fast if I punch the collective all the way now - from ground level to about the ridge of my house in not much more than a second!

After flying around the back yard, I thought I'd give it a thrash around the field behind my house. It was all going great until... ...I lost orientation with the heli. It was about 100 feet away and heading away at speed, but instead of just doing a fast turn, I brought it to a hover then turned it around, but then I couldn't easily tell which way it was pointing...and moved the cyclic the wrong way when attempting to make it point the way I thought I wanted it to point. It was about 30 feet in the air and it fell from the sky - I nose dived into the ground. 'Plummet' is the word. I tried to get the throttle hold to kill the power, but I missed the switch. The heli disappeared behind a hedge and I could hear it doing the funky chicken behind the hedge. Finally, I got it shut off.

I had the video camera on it (unfortunately, I discovered that turning it off doesn't stop the recording - it DELETES the recording so I don't even have what would have been superb video of the crash). The heli went in so hard the camera ended up 20 feet from the heli (I almost lost the camera in the long grass).

So I spent the rest of the evening rebuilding it. The damage report:

Main frame broken in half. (I have a spare).
One carbon fibre blade fatally cracked, a chordwise crack going from the leading to trailing edge.
Flybar wrapped around the hub, bent so badly I had trouble getting it out.
Feathering shaft - bent like a banana
One servo - gear stripped, a write off.
Main rotor shaft - it's made from hardened steel - 20 degree bend right at the top (it broke when I tried to remove it).

I rebuilt the rotor head last night, but really, I ought to replace the hub, the 'new' has definitely worn off it, so I have a new one on order (unfortunately HDX300 parts only seem to be sold in the USA so I have to wait a week for it to arrive). I'll get a new servo from the local hobby store.

I got that sinking feeling, when my phone beeped with a text message from Tina, simply saying 'I have bad news'.

On Tuesday evening, a friend of mine was killed in a road accident. Michael was riding his motorcycle home, when another driver ran a stop sign. Both Michael and the other driver were killed.

I hadn't seen Michael for a couple of years - he'd left Houston (where we had met), and so had I. We still bumped into each other on Usenet quite frequently, though. We had only been talking on usenet a couple of days earlier. When we both lived in Houston, we would often spend nights with friends, out at the hangar, drinking beer and telling tall stories about flying (he always said that the 'F' was silent in 'hangar flying').

When friends get killed, it always takes a couple of days before it sinks in; I just can't believe they are gone.

I'll miss Michael's insight - he was a very smart person and his posts on usenet were nearly always well worth reading. He was a generous person, too - putting in literally thousands of hours of flight time for Angel Flight in his Twin Comanche. I'll miss him as a friend. I still can't quite believe he's gone.

http://www.wndu.com/localnews/headlines/21433934.html

So, I've been doing more of the Spanish beginners courses on the BBC website, and (yay me) I seem to be making some progress - I'm now able to at least discern words if I hear something spoken in Spanish, even if I don't actually understand what most of them mean - as opposed to a stream of strange sounds.

For practise, during the day, I'm trying to think of the words I've learned for various things or situations as I encounter them, such as when I'm approaching a junction on the bike, I'll think "todo recto" when I'm about to go through Cross Four Ways, or "la derecha" as I'm about to turn right. Or after saying good morning to a co-worker, I'll think 'Buenos dias'. Then I'll go get my 'cafe con leche' or when Jaime's Kitchen arrives, 'Me da un bocadillo jamon con queso'.

The interactive drama the BBC have on the web site, 'Mi vida loco' is fun to do. It's these sort of things which make me realise what good value the BBC license fee really is.

The one thing I do wonder, though, is if I'm sort of doing the equivalent of a Spanish person learning English as spoken in London in preparation for a trip to Glasgow. After all, the Baeleric Islands also speak Mallorqui as well as Spanish, so I'm sure they have a much different accent when speaking Spanish compared to someone from Madrid. So far I've found out that the 'c' (in words like 'cerveza' and 'gracias') are pronounced 'th' in some parts of Spain, but like an English C in Southern Spain.