Second time launching Crestline. Not the most graceful launch as I was a tad nervous about Crestline winds, combined with wanting to spend the extra 15 seconds to double check the replacement brake line I put in after my last flight. (The sheething of one of my upper cascade brake line had caught on a rock on launch a while back and gotten torn, finally got it replaced). Worked the ridge at Crestline only briefly, then bailed to head out and get over regionals. Made regionals with about 200′ to spare, still not 100% comfortable with Crestline, need to get there so I can actually try to work the ridge there on good days.

After getting to Regionals, worked that a little bit, the air was pretty punchy, with thermals that seemed pretty broken up. Only really properly cored a few of them, the rest of the time was mostly boating around, hitting lift, then sink, then lift, with nothing really coreable. Fun none the less!

The KML File.

While sitting on launch waiting for the conditions to get good, I was chatting with Brian, and we got the idea of maybe shooting for hitting Pine (the mountain + ridges just to the west of Marshall) if the day suited it. I was excited at the idea, but wary. I was definitely trying my hardest to make sure I didn’t get too set on the idea, lest that lead me to pushing to hard for it when I shouldn’t. Little did I know what was in store!

I launched right at 5PM, steady wind with no complications. Worked the ridge a bit right at Marshall, and then decided to shoot out to Regionals, where folks seemed to be doing well. Got over regionals a little low, and scraped around until I caught one or two thermals that got me to about 4300. Brian was no where to be seen, but I figured I’d give Pine a shot. I now know that I definitely need more than 4300 if I want to try for Pine straight from Regionals! I got about 2/3 of the way to the lower Pine ridge and tucked tail, turning around and heading back for Regionals before I got stuck and had to hit the backup LZ.

I made it back to the lower ridges of Regionals (what are these called? anyone?) with little altitude to spare, and back to hunting I went. Things were looking pretty bleak, until I found a nice wide thermal that I managed to ride back up to 4100, directly above Cloud Peak. Regionals was now happening a little bit more, and several pilots were now getting up to about 4500 at times. Suddenly, I noticed Dusty’s wing heading over towards where Rob was circling, and I thought to myself, “If I want to follow anyone to look for good thermals, it’s them!” so off I went. Lo and behold, after searching a bit with Dusty, he and I latched onto a rocket of a thermal. It wasn’t necessarily pretty, and we both had to work to keep with it, but we both managed to ride it to 5100.

At that point, Dusty started heading “back.” I’d only ever even *launched* from Crestline once, and certainly never gotten high and flown back there. I had a moment of doubt, but then decided that since I had about 50-100 feet on Dusty, I could keep my eye on him the whole time, follow him, and worst case scenario bail and head out again. The glide was smooth, with not a single beep out of my vario the whole time we were headed back. We crossed the ridge leading down from The Billboard (Yes! I’d made it there!) at about 4600, and there were those lovely beeps of the vario again! We circled in the bowl there, and I got to have my first pass flying over the billboard! (for those that don’t know, the billboard is an old radio antenna that looks like a green billboard, thus the name).

Did a few passes there, before Dusty stared heading for Pine. Why not? Off I went. On the way there though, I hit some pretty big sink, and I’d fairly well used up my reserve of boldness in the glide back to Crestline, so I decided to play it safe, and aborted the glide to Pine to head back to Regionals. Made it back there with altitude to spare, but not a lot, and started working things there again. Folks were working the area by the 750, so I headed that way, and managed to hook a nice one that drifted me back towards Marshall and up to 4300. I noticed Brian over by Marshall, so headed that direction. Made a couple passes over the peak, and managed to nail my first top landing there! Brian later managed to scrape his way up enough to have a side hill landing, and we took a nice breather before both launching again and enjoying sled rides to the LZ. An eventful 1:30h flight, followed by a victory lap flight of 14 minutes! What a day!

And here is the KML file.

Got back to the LZ, and headed up the hill! The hike wasn’t so bad, a little bit of good exercise before getting to fly. Did some para-waiting for a while, and finally most folks got off the hill around 5 PM, give or take. It was a classic glass off, with butter smooth lift anywhere you went looking for it. Had a nice hour and a half flight, and managed not to screw up my first landing in a foreign LZ. Here’s a screenshot:

And here’s the IGC and (since they’re in high demand) KML files. The KML file could use some work, I haven’t yet figured out how to 1) actually see the individual track points or 2) see a path that includes the elevation so you can actually see the 3D path like the one rendered by GPLIGC.

Camped out that night, enjoyed a nice BBQ with everyone, then crashed in the shipping container at the bottom of the hill. Spent the next day hanging out, working a bit on some stuff by the shipping container, then headed home since we were grounded by rain.

Altogether, an awesome weekend, and a lot of fun flying for the first time at a new site. Big thanks to Darrel, Bob, Alan, Elvis (and his awesome dog Leeloo Dallas Multipass Lopez), Roger, Mike, Regina, and everyone else that was there and made it such a great time flying there!

EDIT: Thanks to some examples from my brother, 3ric, The KML file now has a path that includes all the altitude information. You can right click the path, click properties, go to the altitude tab, and click “Extend path to ground” if you want to help visualize the path that way. Here’s a screen grab of the path in google earth:

It was a nice hour long flight, beautiful conditions, etc. I actually only landed because I was starting to feel a bit queasy after the previous night’s festivities (if you look closely at the flight, you can see a spiral or two in there that I pulled to try to get down faster (and for practice as well).

You can grab the IGC file here. Fun stuff, I wish GPLIGC were anything *other* than Perl/Tk, but until I magically find time to hack on something myself (maybe leverage Turtle? Do something new myself?), it will definitely do. Fun stuff!

The R&D team is busy implementing all sorts of GUI components of the healthcare experience. We recently open sourced OpenVista CIS, which is the project I’ve been working on the past year and half, and we will be doing continued development on that, as well as working on several other components needed to flesh out the healthcare experience. The perks include:

• Working on a project that can have a huge impact on the health and welfare of thousands of individuals.
• Working in a fun, flexible environment using open source technologies. The UIs are written in gtk#, but we’re looking for anyone with UI design experience. You can pick up gtk+/gtk# easily if you’ve done UI development before.
• Enjoying beautiful, sunny southern California. If you need convincing, it’s a gorgeous 75F out right now. If you’re not out here already, we can certainly try to work something out to get you out here.

If you’re at all interested, please mail your resume to me at pete.johanson@medsphere.com

(In case the embedded flash doesn’t work, you can watch the the video on revver here.)

I’ve got the original version up here (beware, about a 12 MB file). Fun!

Obligatory screenshot:

There’s over 100K lines of code, some of it hairy, some of it beautiful. All of it lovingly wrought with years of tears and sweat. We will continue working on the project, as well as ancillary projects to manage other parts of the whole healthcare process moving forward, all based on gtk#. We are shooting for doing beta deployment(s) of CIS sometime this year (I won’t give exact dates, as that’s completely out of my hands), which is going to be the next huge breakthrough for our project.

Huge thanks to everyone involved, including our great team here, the folks at Novell that hack on Mono and gtk#, the gtk+ authors, and everyone else that makes this sort of thing possible.

Still lots of work left to do, so I’ve got to get back to it, but I needed to post about this, before my excitement makes me explode. Go Go Gadget Open Source!

PS - We’re pretty much constantly on the lookout for folks that want to hack on gtk#/healthcare software. We’re located in sunny southern California, in Orange County. If you’re interested (or if you’ve got any questions about the project, etc), please drop me a line.

The base unit which is epoxied to the helmet is a custom aluminum part whipped up on my brother’s CNC lathe:

The final result, just resting on the helmet, no epoxy:

The final result epoxied on, with 1/4 20 post, and a wing nut for tightening against a camera/DV camera/whatever:

And in action!

In generally, the paragliding the last few months has been *awesome*. Brad came out one weekend and took some photos from launch:

That day I had an awesome 2 1/2 hour flight, and got to *just* under 6000′ above sea level. Talk about fun! I’ve got over 23 hours of airtime logged now. Anyways, I’ll stop boring people now, but I’ll leave you with this wonderfully photo of the shavings left over from the lathe work:

Lo and behold, after lots of cygwin mucking, libtool massaging, etc. I give you, the sample poppler-sharp viewer!

win32:

Linux:

I will be writing up build instructions eventually so others can reproduce, but until then I’ve got a few other gifts.

Windows files:
poppler-0.5.4-cvs.zip - Runtime files for poppler.
poppler-0.5.4-cvs-devel.zip - Development files for poppler.
poppler-sharp-0.5.4-bzr.zip - Runtime files for poppler-sharp, including a sample viewer application.

Note, these all depend on gtk+ and gtk#, respectively, on win32. The necessary win32 build changes can be found on freedesktop bug #7107, and my bzr branch of poppler-sharp is at http://www.tenslashsix.com/bzr/poppler-sharp/

The poppler build is pretty much guaranteed to have issue with other character sets/fonts like Japanese, etc until I can get some path stuff fixed, and the poppler-data tarball properly installed for win32.

More to come later on this.

UPDATE: Miguel pointed out that not everyone has every SCM under the sun installed, so here’s a temporary tarball snapshot of things: poppler-sharp-0.5.4.tar.gz. The release version, etc is by no means meaningful/realistic, I just set the version to match the poppler version for now.

I finally have photos!:

I had a good hour+ flight, and am finally feeling comfortable flying in slight crowded air. Just requires paying a *lot* of attention to where everyone is, and strictly following the right-of-way rules. There was a spot landing contest (everyone puts in $5 to enter, whoever lands closest to the cone in the spot wins the pot), which I actually managed to win somehow:

Upon hearing of my victory, I performed a celebratory fist raising:

All of Jon’s photos can be found in this gallery. All in all… I still absolutely love this sport. Don’t count on me giving this up anytime soon…