Space flight, simulators, astronomy, books, flying, music, science, education: whatever the obsession of the moment might happen to be.
I was listening to a favorite symphony this morning, Mendelssohn’s Fourth, the Italian Symphony . The first movement is as sunny as I’ve ever known it to be in Italy, even in Tuscany. I started wondering about all the little details that make it sound that way, and I decided to have a look. Recently I have rediscovered a free music notation software called MuseScore . Version 4 was released late…
After I got back to North Weald Airfield from my “Castles & Coasts” flight down to Dover, my taxi friend Ali drove me back to Epping Station and I caught a train for Cambridge, stopping for the night at Duxford, the site of another Imperial War Museum at Duxford Airfield, the biggest air museum in Europe. My Tiger Moth lesson flight was set for 3 PM, but I entered the IWM at 11 AM on a beautiful,…
For the last two years, virtually all my travel has been… virtual. I’ve spent countless hours exploring the world in Microsoft Flight Simulator, either on my own or in online group flights with friends from California, Australia, Finland, and other places, each of us firmly anchored in his or her office or living room. While this has been great fun, it doesn’t quite match the thrill of real…
I've resuscitated this blog to write occasionally on my continuing infatuation with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. If you've read any of my earlier posts, you will know that I am a lifelong "airplane nut" and that MSFS does a very good job of simulating the experience of flying an airplane, as well as any simulator I have tried that doesn't move. It's actually better in most ways than the few…
Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) continues to provide a range of enjoyable distractions as I explore various corners of the world, usually in VR and often with online friends who share the virtual skies with me while sitting in Australia or Finland or wherever they may be. Recently I did some flying in Wales with my friend " MiGMan ." We tried out a new "low and slow" airplane on his flight plan…
One of the cool things about Microsoft Flight Simulator is the ability to do multiplayer flights with other players over the internet. I have done quite a few of these, most often group flights where we explore some interesting part of the world while we talk about flying or other things, over Discord or Skype. I've also done flights with my Australian friend Pete (a.k.a. " MiGMan "), often…
I've been virtually exploring many cool areas in Africa and Europe with the help of a new series of VFR flight plans for Microsoft Flight Simulator, MiGMan's World Tour . They include a large number of locations with richly illustrated guides to help you decide where to fly next. The flights are fairly short (depending on the aircraft you choose) with an emphasis on the scenic and the unusual in…
One of the great things about virtual stuff is that it doesn't take up much room. Take my fleet of airplanes, for example. Microsoft Flight Simulator starts you off with a pretty decent set of flyable airplanes, from the trusty Cessna 152 I used to learn to fly in real life to the Boeing 787. The "Premium Deluxe" edition includes 34 different planes, ranging from ultralights to general aviation…
Fans of flight simulators often talk about how “immersive” a sim is. It’s about how much the sim experience makes you feel like you’re flying a real airplane. Visuals are obviously a key component, and VR can take this to a higher level in terms of feeling truly surrounded by a 3D environment made up of the structures of your aircraft as well as all the natural and human-built objects in the…
I blame my main life obsessions on John Glenn and the Beatles: things that fly and making music. The flying bit started first, in 1962. In February of that year, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. I was nine years old and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the whole space thing was immediately very exciting to me. I must have watched the launches on TV and seen…
Is this thing on? This blog I mean. Since I haven’t written a post since 2018, I thought maybe the whole blog thing was over and nobody told me. We certainly seem to have passed the heyday of blogs if there ever was one. It was sort of cool back in 2005 when I was excited about Orbiter , a new space flight simulator I had discovered, and I decided to share my fascination with real and virtual…
Not very deep inside me is a still-space-obsessed Inner Child who thinks space flight is the coolest thing ever. As a kid in the sixties, I was super-excited to follow the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo missions as they happened, and I covered the walls of my bedroom with the space posters NASA would send me by the ton whenever I wrote to ask. Space was real then. Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968,…
I have a new album! Center Of It All is available for download on CD Baby , and actual CD's will also be available there within a couple of weeks. It is also available on Apple Music , Amazon Music , Spotify , YouTube and other download and streaming sites. I'm really pleased with how the album came out. I've been working on this project on and off for six years, since my last album Look At You in…
I read an interesting essay on The Space Review by Dwayne Day, titled “ Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids ,” quoting Bernie Taupin in Elton John's song “Rocketman.” That 2017 essay was inspired by the SF TV series The Expanse , which is now in its third season (I bought the first season and watched a couple of episodes on Amazon Video -- I liked it but never returned to it since it’s…
It's funny how things happen. A few months ago, I switched from Sonar to Studio One as my main music recording software. I got a special Black Friday deal from Presonus. I really like Studio One and I've been writing and recording songs with it, so I'm happy, right? Then in January Presonus sent me a special offer on another piece of music software for Windows, Notion 6. It's a music notation and…
Do you remember the children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ? Just substitute "year" and that pretty much sums up 2017. I don't want to talk about it. My readership (both of you) may have noticed that I haven't written a blog post since April 2017. Yeah, I have pretty much stopped blogging in favor of writing in my journal. I use an app called Day One , and if…
I really like the SF show Humans and its depiction of an alternate present-day UK where in addition to iPhones and super-fast internet service, humanoid “synths” have come into widespread use as servants, workers, caretakers, and companions. The basic premise is that while these robots are sufficiently human-like to engage in conversation and even sex (complete with body warmth and fluids,…
The word “unbelievable” is obsolete now that Trump is president. Any horrible thing you can imagine someone in government doing or saying is believable now. Trump's appointments and actions seem calculated to hurt the most people possible, especially if they are brown, female, or immigrants. Some of this is ideological but most of it seems more like mean-spirited bullying, a Trump specialty. It…
I’ve often thought that the whole “where are they?” question about SETI (i.e., the Fermi Paradox ) is bogus, both because the universe is just so BIG, and because we still understand so little about it, even though we have learned in recent years that planets and even “Earth-like” planets seem to be quite common throughout the Galaxy. As smart as some of us may be, it seems likely that we are…
I watched President Obama’s farewell speech last night with my wife. It was an incredibly hopeful and moving speech, and the part near the end when he spoke to and about his family and his VP and friend Joe Biden was hard to see without crying. The presidency is huge, an unimaginably high-pressure job in which you are pulled in a million different directions and challenged every day to keep…
As I wrote recently in this blog and in an article in The Space Review , Orbiter 2016 was released in September. This is the first major release of this freeware space flight simulator since Orbiter 2010, and as I mentioned, not all of the many third-party addons for the 2010 version are working in Orbiter 2016. If you are familiar with Orbiter, you know that it's quite easy to have multiple…
Orbiter 2016 is the latest version of a space flight simulator I have been playing with on and off since 2005. And while I'm now old enough to be a grandfather, I find that Orbiter still brings out the "space kid" in me. The sixties were a great time to be a space- and aviation-obsessed kid, and I was a NASA fan from Mercury to Gemini to the Apollo moon flights and beyond. Aside from TV coverage,…
One of the most encouraging things I looked at in the NY Times this morning was the interactive " Who Will Be President? " feature, part of their numbers-oriented Upshot section. It says that based on current polling, as of yesterday, Hillary Clinton has about a 69% chance of winning the presidency. With Donald Trump continuing to double down on his crazy statements and his traitorous flirting…
My heart goes out to the many people who have been injured or lost loved ones in terrorist actions around the world, most recently the horrific Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France. These actions are unconscionable and the people who perpetrate or support such acts must be brought to justice. Terrorism is obviously intended to terrorize, and these attacks are certainly scary, with the…
I love to write, though you might never guess this from my recent blog activity. While this is my first blog post of 2016, I used to blog a lot more -- some 1500 entries since I started this blog in 2005. Most of my writing these days is in a journal I keep on my iPhone and iPad using an app called Day One . I like keeping a journal, but recently I started to think about getting out of my comfort…