2012, in Ushuaia for a Cape Horn rounding trip. It took 40 hours traveling from door to hotel, and waiting for a third fellow to show up who missed his flight out of Buenos Aires. We watch his plane come in down the Beagle Channel from the hotel room, and drive over to the airport to pick him up. What to do?

Gary and Bill are both train enthusiasts, so I propose The Train At The End Of The World, narrow gauge, about 10 miles west of town, and we order box lunches. Total win.

Van Gogh not so much.

I saw that the great blue herons were back for the season, but they weren’t really active yesterday at 4:30. Instead, I saw that the neighborhood osprey are back.

Z7ii, 200-500@500.

(Download)

Bingo! Then all you need is a reference, something like a standard field of view on a 24 x 36 mm piece of film is 43 degrees (I made that up) using a 50 mm lens.

Great lessons in ‘seeing’ and framing.

The word is ‘velleity’, meaning concerned or interested, but not enough to actually do something.

A month after I retired, my employer sent me an unexpected bonus check that I used to buy the 200-500. I love this lens, but I need to drive even the half mile around the corner to lug the tripod and related gear.

Even then, many of my shots are tethered. I try to end the day with some handheld shots.

I’ll bring the beast to Maine for our annual trip, along with the other gear. The Z100-400 is on my short list.

Nice set. Really like the boobies and iguanas on the reef.

I was close to doing a trip there in June, but they were shy one berth on the boat.

What did you find to be your most useful gear?

Several months after this, one of my junior engineers wanted to know what happened. I’d read at most two articles on this, but never saw what should have been done to prevent this. They were top tier articles by people who should know, not crap articles by the new ‘experts’.

Way back, when Boeing proposed a semi-autonomous trim system, there should have been a line in a certification document called the Functional Hazard Analysis that said erroneous and undetected trim failure is potentially catastrophic.

That alone should have triggered a series of design discussions centered around ‘give me a system with sufficient detection, reporting, and robustness to keep this from happening’.

Hint #1: reliability requirement is less than 1 per billion flight hours; show me the analysis that demonstrates that

Hint #2: you can’t get there with a single AoA sensor, the primary sensor to drive the system

My experience is that the weak link in systems with potentially catastrophic results is the baseline electrical power system, but that’s another discussion. The MAX scenario is frighteningly similar to that little sub that imploded near the Titanic, but with people who really should have known better.

I’ve done a bit of aviation accident investigation in my past, and get a serious chuckle when I read the local paper reports of what happened.

Years ago, one of our investigators was playing volleyball on the beach one summer evening when one of our aircraft made an emergency landing nearby. We’d often joke that the man in the street answer was ‘it was like boom boom, then a fire, then it crashed’…because that’s how airplanes crash. We agreed that he missed the opportunity to say ‘I thought it was an atom bomb’.

Another time, we were at a farewell party for one of our coworkers and his phone rings. It was his mother telling him to check the news because there was a crash and it was televised. We walked into the bar to see the news on CNN. So the short answer to ‘how do investigators find out about a crash?’, is that their mother calls them.

https://www.apexpharm.com/lift-chairs

Apex Pharmacy is near me in Connecticut, but they have an amazing setup for pretty much everything you might want from a pharmacy, including a lift chair section. Take a look, make a call. The staff is knowledgeable and helpful.

It’s ok if you were going to spend that money anyway…and pay in full at the end of the month.

Looking through old stuff and I have my Kodak photo guide (vintage early 1970s) which includes a wheel to evaluate exposure value (EV). You can see how changing aperture, shutter, and film ISO (ASA in those days) affected exposure.

So yes…the triangle was around, just by a different name. It just wasn’t so easy to change your film mid-roll, so only the pros in the field did that.

Your key choices were to increase shutter speed and kill DOF, or decrease shutter speed and use a tripod.

😪😪😪

4 weeks per month. Should be 26 weeks, or 93+/- games per week.