Tag: rams

Flying, Week 2

Went back out to the RAMS field today; week two, first as a provisional member.

One of the leaders of the club helped me fly three times; I took a charged battery, but I only have one. They recharged it there. It took about fifteen to twenty minutes to recharge the battery each time, and it turns out that delay is actually pretty beneficial for learning; it gives you time to reflect on the flight you just made.

The flights themselves were awesome. Let’s be real here, I love flying. I especially love doing the actual flying itself; they’re used to be being at the airfield because I like to see things fly, and I only started actually flying my own plane really recently.

I do not fly well. I’m still trying to get a sense of how to read the line of the plane; I’m okay at level flight, I turn rather impatiently, and I struggle with perspective. They tell me this is all pretty good for a newbie. They’d know better than I would, but I’m gonna get better.

I landed the plane four times today! Once was a landing but was sort of accidental – I couldn’t see the plane when it touched down! But it was upright and in one piece.

The second was my best, a nice smooth landing. To suggest it made me happy was to completely misunderstand what joy is: I landed the plane!

The other two landings were acceptable but not good. I couldn’t quite get the approach angle right; I kept correcting the plane to take it away from the landing strip, then I’d overcorrect and aim it too close to the flight line! But they were “successful landings,” in that I did land the plane in one piece.

I’m learning, and I’m really enjoying it all.

Super Bowl, Commercials, Gutenberg Headings

Okay, I’m going to try the header format thing again, because it’s something new and different (for me) in WordPress’ Medium-style editor. But here are the things I’m thinking about:

The Super Bowl

I tried to think of a cute pun for the title, but “The Super Bah” was dumb. I came up with others, but that’s still the best of them, and it’s not any good.

The Super Bowl, Part II

You let us down, Jared. I kept thinking you were a University of Georgia graduate too (just like Todd Gurley, the stud running back who was underused during the game).

Why did I think you were a Georgia QB? Because you kinda sucked on the biggest stage football has. You killed your team, Jared. You killed your team.

The only saving grace for the Rams was that the refs rather clearly wanted the Patriots to win, with a runner being called “defenseless” after he caught the ball, to preserve a drive when the Rams’ impressive defense got a critical and impressive stop.

I enjoy defensive battles… but this was a battle of a good defense against a good offense (when New England had the ball) and a good defense against an overmatched toddler (when Los Angeles had the ball.)

I wish the refs hadn’t given the Rams the win against New Orleans.

(After rereading this section, I sound a lot angrier than I actually am – I was neutral about the game, and thought mostly that Jared Goff was outmatched, as he apparently was. I’m okay with the Patriots winning; they earned it. The Rams defense was stellar. The offense was… less than stellar.)

Best Commercial

The best commercial of the night was a local one, for Michael and Sons, an HVAC company local to the Virginia area.

It had two football players (kids, like pre-teens), with one “tackling” the other – pretty gently, it was like they told him to push the other one down – and, after the tackle, a thrown ball hits the tackler in the backside. The ref then waves “incomplete pass!” — just like the Saints/Rams refs, except with a parody.

We’re not normally Michael and Sons customers – not only was our home built with a different HVAC company, but we actually know the owner of yet another HVAC company – but dang, that commercial was so on point that we talked about switching.

Hopefully a video will show up online of that commercial (and hopefully I remember to look for it so I can link to it.)

The ASMR commercial was the other notable commercial. Apparently people were creeped out by it. I don’t know – I found it fascinating, mostly because I didn’t recognize the ASMR aspect of it until later. But it was for a … beer, I think, so maybe as a commercial it was intriguing but not all that effective, because I might switch HVAC companies but I am not drinking that beer.

Gutenberg

Now that I’ve used the heading stuff in WordPress’ editor, my first impression is that I do not like it. I’ve been trying to give this editor a spin for a while, to give it a fair shake… and while it has some nice features (pasting a URL over selected text converts it to a link!) it’s mostly annoying

Open Source Blog Software

I keep wanting to move away from WordPress, because I’ve been using it forever and I keep thinking there’s a Platonic ideal that isn’t WordPress.

However, most of them are in PHP – violating the Platonic ideal – and the ones that remain are either static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo) or node.js implementations (ghost), or things that are documented really inconsistently (typo/publify). I thought about roller, but…