Author: matthew

So I upgraded my venerable Raptor 30 v1 to a Raptor 46 (approximately a six-pound helicopter with a five-foot rotor span). It has some issues with the engine when I tried to fly it recently at the field, so I took it home and fixed a few things here and there. It turns out I’d lost the two screws holding in the carburetor on my OS .46FX-H; I pillaged another set from my similar aircraft motor. I bought a brand-new high-performance muffler, got it attached, and started running it up and checking things out.

I was out in my back yard doing a few test hops, getting the mix just right so that I had good head speed, pitch-pumping to listen to the engine and hear where it bogged, you know the drill. I had it just about dialed in. Second tank of fuel, I landed, adjust my throttle curve to get my new motor running at the right RPM, stood back, and applied a little collective. It got about two feet above the ground, right where I wanted it, so I backed off just a tad… and it kept rising.

I jammed throttle hold. No response. Total radio lockout. Zero control. The helicopter looked for all intents like it was going to fly to the moon. It described a gentle arc at probably forty to fifty miles an hour, sailed right over my house, then slammed upside-down into my front yard, ricocheted into the air on a bounce that went for fifty-four horizontal feet, landed on its skids, and proceeded to spin madly on until the motor quit.

Well, all in a day’s work, right? Expensive lesson in radio lockout, but it could have been worse.

Much worse.

There were eight children playing near my front yard. Four of them were mine. This helicopter, luckily, missed all the kids and the four adults doing yard work to slam into my yard and flip end-over-end out into the cul-de-sac.

If it had struck any person on its way toward beating itself to death, I’d have been devastated. I really like my neighbors. I really love my children and my wife. This big beast could have killed any one of them a few minutes ago.

Yet I was following AMA safety guidelines. I was over 100 feet from my house, and over 200 feet from the eventual point of impact. I had kicked my kids out of the acreage behind my house, counting on distance and objects to limit the possibility of damage to anybody other than me. I’d counted on a lot of things… but not a radio lockout sending the heli sailing in a rainbow arc toward family members and neighbors.

Upon further investigation, I think I found the cause of the lockout. I have a bad cell in my NiCD Rx pack, which seemed to hold a good surface charge, but dropped voltage under load. I believe the voltage hit the magic “don’t run below 4.5v” mark for my Spektrum receiver, rendering the receiver and all servos inoperable while it spent five seconds reconnecting.

I should have cycled the pack.

I almost hit someone because I didn’t cycle my pack.

I feel like crap.

Ran across a blog entry discussing the experiences of one geek’s girlfriend trying Linux for the first time. Verdict?

The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.

I’d love to see a welcome screen for the first time you open up your desktop, with little videos explaining a few key concepts to how Linux and Ubuntu work. Maybe it could ask “What do you want to do?” and then explain how they could do this.

Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do. Erin’s intelligent, quick to learn and is reasonably well-acquainted with modern technology. If she had as much trouble as she did, what chance to the elderly or at least the middle-aged stand?

I have to say, I basically agree with his assessment. If you want to make it really usable, you have to make it really simple — like the Author matthewPosted on April 28, 2008February 1, 2026

OK, yeah, I know, I’m talking about the weather. But this is the first beautiful weekend of the year in Salt Lake. Mid fifties, light winds, few clouds… and lots of smog.

You can’t have everything, I guess.

A lot of people will make a (virtual) fortune in Stock and Forex “demo” trading accounts, then wonder why it doesn’t pan out in their real-life accounts. Well, here are a few reasons why (from a ForEx perspective)

1. Spreads don’t mirror real-life spreads in demo accounts. Often, they’ll give you exactly what they advertise in a demo account. This ignores the fact that during news-heavy days or heavy trading the spreads increase, possibly stop-lossing or margin-calling your position right before the expected long/short run.
2. “Slippage”. This refers to the fact that in very fast-moving markets, automated trading platforms can’t actually find a buyer or seller in time to divest you of your position. This can — and will — mess up your money-management calculations.
3. Of the few who back-test their trading strategies, many don’t trade their backtest platform during the same times or from data provided by the same market-maker.

These are just a few reasons that I see for nice-performing demo accounts to fall apart in live trading. I’m still playing in the demo-world at the moment, gaining and losing thousands of virtual dollars until I get a better handle on what it is I’m doing. Even with my brief exposure to the market, though, I’m seeing how the players at the table get cleaned out again and again despite their best bullet-proof “systems”.

It pays to bet small when you’re the newbie.

My brother Jay posted a brief tutorial on the Rule of 72 on his new blog, Getting Richer Today. It’s a travelogue of sorts, with blog entries as indicators along the way for his path from middle-class to upper-class. I don’t know if he’ll make it or not — neither does he, really — but it’s fun learning new things along the way toward gaining complete control over your finances.

Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with a free foreign exchange trading account with OANDA. You might wonder about my silence on the blog lately… between several jobs, learning about financial markets, flying model airplanes, and keeping up on my reading, I just haven’t been really interested in the blog.

You know how it goes. By this fall when the weather cools off, I’ll resume my normal 5-days-a-week blogging. But in the interim, I thought I’d provide this useful link for those wishing a free, never-expiring paper-trading account for ForEx:

https://fxtrade.oanda.com/your_account/login.shtml?account=fxgame&type=trading_platform

Five reasons I like Oanda:

1. You can specify arbitrary sizes for your trades. So rather than specifying, say, 7 lots of 10,000, you can leverage one trade to 70,000 shares, or even pick an arbitrary lot size like 35,768. This is HUGE, because it means there’s really no distinction between a “mini” account or standard. You set your thresholds exactly where you want them.
2. FXGame never expires, even if you don’t put money into your OANDA account. I now want to put real money into my OANDA account, because they’ve been so friendly about letting me have a free paper-trading account for as long as I want to practice.
3. Lowest spread on EUR/USD that I’ve seen.
4. The Java client is compatible across Linux, Windows, and Mac. I had real problems with the Java client for Thinkorswim.com on Linux, which is my main comparison point. On the plus side, Thinkorswim works great on Mac as well as Windows.
5. Better implementation of Ichimoku Kinko Hyo, the main trading indicator I’m working with. It lets you specify values for trading windows A, B, and C, rather than only A and B like some other trading platforms.

Too bad it doesn’t let me set my trailing stop loss automagically. Then it would be just about perfect. As it is, if I want to adjust a trailing stop loss on FXGame, I have to do it manually. No biggie, but my co-workers might wonder what I’m doing a couple of times a day 🙂

Heard on the news today:

Your average outpatient today would have been hospitalized in the 1970s. Today’s average inpatient would have been in ICU. Today’s ICU patient in the 1970s would have been dead.

The discussion centered around the current nursing shortage in the USA. According to this woman in her sixties — I don’t remember her name — the current ratio is something like 7 or 8 patients per nurse, varying a little better during the day and a bit worse at night. California controversial law, apparently, mandates a minimum 1:5 ratio for nurses to patients in medical/surgical, and 1:2 in ICU.

Is it really true that your average ICU patient from, say, 1975 is in regular inpatient care, while those in today’s ICU would have been dead then? Is this ostensible increase in survival rates due to nurse staff increases, technology advancements, medical inventions, or something else? Or a combination of the three?

I’m interested in knowing just how true this quote is. Mortality statistics from hospitals, however, are a little difficult to quantify for your Joe-Average blogger.

For those interested in how a high-end lithium polymer pack is constructed, I ran across this video disassembly of a Kong Power Lithium Polymer battery pack.

Yeah, I know, not really interesting to a lot of us, but the useful thing is that it dispels rumors about the pack that it had cardboard to disguise puffing batteries, among other issues. I prefer packs that use PCBs rather than just soldering the poles together, as it’s easier to repair or modify the pack if necessary. I also think that I prefer packs with spacers inside, because the few batteries I’ve run to over 300 cycles all had spacers, while among those which didn’t last as long, none did.

How do they get away with this scam?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2279347,00.asp

It’s supposed to be illegal to make autodialer calls to mobile phones. In addition, it’s illegal to call a telephone number with a recording unless you have a prior business relationship with the caller, or else if it’s a non-profit or a political candidate. Yet I have received no less than forty recorded messages over the past two months telling me “your warranty is about to expire or has already expired”. If I try to ask questions, I get hung up on. If I try to say “put me on your do not call list”, I get hung up on. In fact, if I do anything other than roll over and give them my VIN number and personal information, I get hung up on.

This is illegal and unethical. I am finding myself wishing I were with Verizon so that I might have someone on my side tracking down these abusive telemarketers.

And I have a sneaking suspicion this is not just any old telemarketing scheme. From reading various forums online, they ask several innocuous questions before getting to the meat of the matter: your credit card number, security code on the back of the number, last four digits of your social security number, etc.

It just makes me so angry that I’m paying for their damn telephone calls every time! I don’t know what to do except rant here. Thanks for putting up with me.

EDIT: Seems similar to this report on ripoffreport.com: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/317/RipOff0317034.htm

In my inbox this morning, I ran across an article relating the sad economic truth regarding stay-at-home parents in What’s a Homemaker Worth? The Shocking Truth.” on MSN.com.

The email chain says a homemaker is worth $500,000 a year.

The actuarial tables say $30,000.

Now, I agree that having a wife and mother stay at home with the children is wonderful. The kids get more love and more treats, more hugs and more kisses, and who can deny the value of raising great kids with a parent at home rather than out in the workplace? But those values are personal and intangible… not financial.

But the article ended with some helpful hints that, despite the gloomy reality of the financial value of a stay-at-home parent, there are a few options to mitigate it:

Go forth and get your ducks in order You should understand just what youre giving up, though, in order to make a rational decision about whether to stay at home and for how long. You also should do what you can to make sure your finances, both short- and long-term, remain sound:

# Disaster-proof your finances. Pay off debt, contribute as much as possible to retirement funds and keep a hefty emergency fund. Single-income families typically should have at least six months living expenses in a safe, liquid account.

# Get insured. You almost certainly wont be able to buy disability insurance for a stay-at-home spouse, but you should be able to get life insurance coverage — and if you have children, you almost certainly need some. The younger your children are, says former insurance agent Catherine Gretta, corporate vice president for New York Life Insurance, the more insurance you need to cover their care. To determine how much insurance you should have, you can talk to an agent or use MSN Moneys Life Insurance Needs Estimator; increase the estimate of your current living expenses by the amount your family would need to pay for child care and housekeeping services.

# Make sure you have retirement savings in your own name. Your spouse can contribute up to $3,000 a year to an Individual Retirement Account for you. (You also can claim half your spouses Social Security benefit if youre married for at least 10 years, and may be able claim a portion of his or her workplace retirement plans as well.)

# Consider working at least part-time once your children reach school age. You may lose much of your wages to the costs of working — taxes, child care, commuting costs. (For more views on this subject, read ” Second incomes: twice the work, half the return,” and “Cost of being a stay-at-home mom: $1 million,” on MSN Money. And try MSN Money’s Second Income Calculator. ) Those losses, however, could be offset by other benefits, such as keeping your job skills current and being able to contribute to a retirement fund or earn pension credits.