Flight Simulator Adventures

I spent a few hours flying around in my new Boeing F/A-18 Hornet in Flight Simulator X the other night and below are a few of the highlights. I started in Seattle and flew a course that weaved me around the terrain of Alaska on my way to Anchorage. The F/A-18 sucks gas like crazy so I had to make several stops to refuel. One of these stops was a little hair raising since my flight planning showed an airport in the area but I had to fly around longer than I wanted to in order to find it. At one point my fuel was so low that a message popped up asking me if I wanted to use the "auto-refuel" cheat since I was running out of gas. "Heck no!" That would totally take away the realism. So I finally found the airport only to discover that it was a tiny little dirt strip apparently put in place for bush pilots on fishing trips or something. So I trimmed the Hornet for very slow speed, applied full flaps and used my brilliant pilot skills to bring the plane down on a very short and icy runway without incident. It was so stressful that I even began to sweat! Man I love these flight simulators!

Halloween 2007

Here are some photos from the kids' harvest party on Saturday.

oh and this too

Oh, and here is a picture of my new fake eyelashes that I bought to go with my Halloween costume. Aren't they sooo cool?!

A taste of my work

Hey, here's a picture I took at work on the epifluorescence microscope. The glowing blue dots are the nuclei of each cell in the tissue, which in this case is the trachea of a fly larva that I dissected. The nuclei are glowing because I stained them with a fluorescent dye called DAPI. I wasn't even supposed to be looking at this tissue, but it looks a lot cooler than what I was supposed to be looking at :-)

Problems Continue in Falcon 4.0: Allied Force

I connected my pc to my camcorder to help provide better quality images of what is going on with my Falcon 4.0 game. None of my other games have problems. If you have any pointers for how to fix this I'd really appreciate it. I'm running the game on a Pentium 4 2.5GHz with 3GB of RAM and a BFG 8600 GT OC 256MB graphics card with the latest drivers. You'll notice in the video that the game starts to stutter at about 1:05 and then freezes up with strange artifacts and flashes at about 1:23 It's at this point that I was forced to do a hard boot.

Capturing Video from Call of Duty 2

As you can see from the video I figured out how to capture video without degrading my frames per second. It's done by using an s-video cable from my graphics card to an A/V Switch (thanks for the idea Joel) and then I connect my camcorder's native A/V cable into the output of the switch. Unfortunately, it isn't capturing any audio so either no audio is transmitted across the computer's s-video output or my 4-pin s-video cable is inadequate for both audio and video. I could simply plug a cable from my PC headphone jack into the camcorders mic jack for the audio... I'll try that next. Stay tuned.

Costume-clad

Here are some pictures of me in my costume(s) for the opera. Sadly, they were pretty boring. Maybe someday I'll get to be in a show where they do something really elaborate. Oh, and here is a picture of the Halloween costume I just put together today. Isn't the hat great? It was the only part of the costume that I had to buy, since I had everything else laying around. The only other stuff I want is some massive fake eyelashes and some cool spidery tights. I also bought decorations and hung up a bunch of cobwebs and things around the house. I can't wait to have my very own trick-or-treaters come to the house!! Any kid dressed as a witch gets extra candy :-)