Greg O'Sullivan

Glider is back

2009-09-15T00:09:47Z

My HP14 glider is back from being serviced and inspected.
It's assembled and waiting in the hangar.
Perhaps I will even get to fly it this coming weekend?

Work

2009-08-10T02:31:02Z

Back at work again.
The endless run of faulty tapes, faulty tape drive and faulty tape libraries resumes :(

Link for Azure

2009-04-23T04:24:54Z

Greg / Alister greatest hits here, Azure.

http://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~gjo/greg-al/

Gliding update

2008-11-18T22:56:17Z

Still alive. Flew 208km last weekend:

http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-1618905746

First XC of the Season

2008-10-06T01:52:35Z

Took the old tin can out on a short cross country flight:

http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-944342178

167km

Flying

2008-09-22T01:07:57Z

Managed to get some gliding in on the weekend. A two hour flight in interesting conditions.
Strong north westerly wind with a mix of thermal and wave lift.
The HP14 handled the strong cross wind okay on launch and landing.

A few dangerous incidents occurred.

A Super Arrow flew across the strip at low altitude and almost hit a tug and
glider combination as it was launching. He ended up out outlanding in a field
beside the airfield. I don't know what he was thinking, a modified right hand circuit
onto the active strip or a modified circuit onto the cross strip would have been safer.

A tug pilot taxied across the strip in front of landing aircraft.

A Janus B had a heavy landing, bouncing multiple times and pushing
the nose wheel up through the fuselage.

Book Meme

2008-08-05T01:14:23Z

awksome posted this. I fail. I've only read seven on this list. my excuse is I mainly read science fiction and
there isn't much on this list.

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Prince Caspian - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (!!!)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (!!!!!)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (!!!)

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Italicized for a pathetic attempt.)

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

HP-14 glider back in service

2008-05-30T01:07:46Z

I did the post form 2 inspection evaluation flight on my Schreder HP-14V glider last weekend.
I had to run it up to near the redline and do a stall etc just to check it was all working properly.
It didn't fall apart, which is a good thing.
I'm hoping to do a bit of pleasant late autumn local soaring this weekend.

http://www.soaridaho.com/Schreder/

Glider is back

2008-05-19T01:20:22Z

My HP-14V is back from it's annual inspection and is legal to fly again.
It's tucked away in a club hangar spot that I have leased for 12 months.
A pity the weather is bad now. We need the rain, but it's no good for soaring.

gjo @ 2008-04-25T14:28:00

2008-04-25T04:29:46Z

Still waiting for my glider to come back from the glider inspecting chappy.

Grounded.

2008-03-04T05:26:28Z

My glider is grounded, awaiting it's annual inspection, which has had to
be put off until the 29th March.

I went for one last flight in it last Saturday. Over two hours of local soaring.
I didn't think conditions were quite good enough to go cross country.

A couple of the local heroes thought they would give it a go anyway.
I ended up have to retrieve Olgy and the club LS4 from near Ballarat.
Another late night when I had so wanted to get home from the airfield a
bit early for a change.

Fortunately Rolf just made it back in his PIK 20B. He was on the radio saying
he might have to land at Fiskeville because he didn't quite have final glide.

The best of the season is over now, I'm slightly disappointed that I only
managed to make two decent length cross country flights.

300km Flight

2008-01-28T08:35:24Z

Finally managed to get away from the airfield again for a bit of
a cross country glider flight in my HP14.

Online Contest flight information:

http://www3.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-1238800356

It was a pretty strong day but pushing into a 20 knot wind slowed me down
a lot. It started raining on me near Ararat A/D so I decided to turn from
home, fearing general over development. The rain never became widespread and
I could have extended the flight, but better safe than sorry.

Scratching Around

2008-01-15T22:47:57Z

Only gliding news to report. Had a lot of flights recently but none of
significant distance. I outlanded near Ballan trying to do a 500km flight.
Ballan is only about 20km from the airfield. Ha Ha.

One flight I spent 3 hours flying around near the airfield unable to get above 2800ft
on a 38C day, due to a strong temperature inversion. Very uncomfortable
and pretty pointless. If it had got a little hotter the inversion would
have broken.

I'm really hoping for a decent cross country distance flight before I go
back to work next week.

gjo @ 2007-11-20T16:29:00

2007-11-20T05:34:44Z

Hmmm no post for 7 weeks. :(

Tried to do some gliding the other week, heavy rain on 2 out of 4
days I wanted to fly.
What happened to the drought?
I got in a 3 hour plus flight but couldn't go anywhere
because the thermals were topping out at 3500 foot.

Glider is back in the trailer again, I'm going to
do some more work on the trailer and fittings to
make rigging easier. New wheels for the wing jigs
and fuselage dolly etc. Still waiting on my
father-in-law to finalise the design of the one
person rigging wing dolly so I can finish it.

I bought a bucket load of US import PS2 games.
Currently playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.
as well as Tales of Legendia.

Glider in trailer

2007-10-01T05:28:01Z

I've had to de-rig the HP-14 and put it in the trailer. :(
The club hangar spot I was occupying is required by a club glider again.

My FLARM anti-collision device is playing up, seems like it's transmit/receive
range is too short for some reason. The antenna seems okay, and I tried a
different one with similar results. HMMMM.

I'm rostered on to help with the annual inspection on the
the club AS K-13 glider for the next few weekends, so no more
gliding for a while anyway. :(

167km flight in HP14 VH-GGB

2007-09-11T02:48:31Z

http://www3.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-419168605

There is a link on that page to get a google earth kml file of the flight.

Got a bit low a few times. It wasn't a relaxing flight but
I got a good workout. The final glide was a bit interesting The wind
calculation from my last thermal was a slight westerly tail wind for the
homebound leg, but lower down and closer to the airfield it an easterly
head wind, increasing in strength. Arrived back with only enough height
to do a modified circuit into runway 01. Gliders were still launching with
a tail wind off 27 so a straight in approach on 09 wasn't a good idea.

A Longer Flight

2007-08-21T01:04:38Z

I went for a bit of a flight in VH-GGB my HP-14 glider. 2 hours 28 minutes, not bad considering it
isn't officially spring here yet. Quite weak lift, most thermals were less than 1 knot average.
I hit one that was 2.7 knot by following an eagle!
A lot of flying in circles going nowhere. I need to alter my parachute/cushions/seating position because
I was getting very uncomfortable by the end of the flight.
"GeeBee" as the glider is now nicknamed, is pretty tiring to fly, heavy controls and slow roll.
I got a good workout, but I proved it can stay up on weak days.
Glides okay too, ran it up to 70+ knots for a while and the glide angle stayed quite
reasonable.

weekend gliding

2007-07-24T08:56:59Z

Not great soaring conditions but at least no rain (or snow).
Got the HP-14 rigged and was able to leave it in a club hangar
spot so it will be ready to go next weekend as well.
I finally managed a somewhat nicer landing in the HP-14.

Paul Bikle's HP-14T with 17.3m span got a measured 36.3:1 L/D ratio.
My flight logs from the weekend (fairly still air) seem to show
my HP-14V is getting a bit over 35:1. Not bad considering I didn't
tape it up and it is only the standard HP-14 16.7m span.

Gliding Chores

2007-07-09T04:34:14Z

It has been too wet to do any gliding recently.

I didn't manage to install the replacement vario in the Jantar,
JB decided we need to fit the FLARM into the panel while
we were about it, so I got to learn all the ins an outs of
bending sheet metal, dimpling rivets etc.

JB also worked out how to extract the medical oxygen
bottle fiting from my regulator without damaging it so I can
fit the regular 540 fitting.

Anime currently watching: Divergence Eve

hmmm, a strangely hard science SF story about watchers, who are tasked with stopping nasty inter-dimesional creatures
from intruding into our own universe. The female pilots all have large strangely shaped breasts that are
constantly giggling in physics defying ways. Being your average lecherous male, I'm not adverse to this kind of
thing, but this is a bit over the top. It detracts from what so far seems to be a serious, well told story.

DG300

2007-06-18T03:05:00Z

First flight in the club DG300. Had a very short flight, cloud base was around 2000 MSL.
I thumped it in pretty hard on the landing, right in front of everyone, oh the shame.
No damage done except to my pride.

Queens Birthday Holiday

2007-06-12T00:47:02Z

I didn't fly over the holiday weekend.

I went to the airfield and did a few more maintenance chores
on the glider and trailer. I installed a new oxygen bottle in the HP14 and worked on mounting a new
headrest which shares some of the oxygen bottle mounting hardware. The previous owner just tied a moldy
old pillow to the oxygen bottle as a headrest!

Helen installed some hooks to hold the wing root clamps out of the way while getting the wings
in and out of the trailer.

We installed some planks on the inside of the trailer rear door to stop people putting their feet through
the aluminum cladding.

I just finished drawing up some plans of the wing dolly, we can take parts to the welder
tomorrow.

We started watching another anime series with Mike, Shingu Secret of the Stellar Wars.
Which is directed by Tatsuo Sato, who directed Nadesico and Stellvia. So far it has been
very enjoyable.

Gliding

2007-06-03T03:42:22Z

Ha, finally got a decent flight in, though I resorted to using the
club Jantar Standard 2 because I was too lazy to rig my HP14.
1 hour 43 minute duration. I visited Pykes Creek Reservoir dam wall and the Fiskville
Country Fire Authority airstrip. Not bad going for this time of year,
winter is definitely here, with snow falling in the alpine areas.
Drat, I didn't win the daily competition for the longest duration or longest
cross country flight. No one else managed a valid duration flight
(has to be longer than 4 times your aerotow time) so it was a
no-contest :(.

Wing Dolly

2007-05-29T13:10:33Z

Construction started on a wing dolly to make rigging the HP14 glider
a bit less of a chore.

Playing Xenosaga 2 on PS/2.

Watching Stratos 4 Advance anime.

Got to get some flying in soon, too much working on things
to facilitate gliding and not enough actual gliding.

gjo @ 2007-04-23T11:15:00

2007-04-23T01:33:15Z

I've been a bit busy lately working on fixing up a few things on my glider and the trailer it is
stored in. I'm starting to get a bit fatigued with it all again. Too much work and
not enough flying. I'm hoping to get news soon on whether I can lease a club hangar spot
for the glider or not. The constant rigging and de-rigging is getting to me.
I've only managed four flights in my glider so far.
The weather is getting colder. Not much chance of long soaring flights now.

The last 48 minute flight I had felt like a real workout, the HP14 doesn't have any trim
and the stick forces are fairly high and you are constantly on the rudders.
It sure isn't as sweet to fly as the LS3 was.
The glide performance is good though, great value for such a cheap glider.

Currently playing the PSone game Grandia on my PS2.
I had the SEGA Saturn version of this game in my collection but
it was in Japanese, too hard to play.

I'll probably play Xenosaga 2 next.

My private PSO is up and running, so online PSO play is again possible to a limited extent.

I haven't really felt motivated to look at my novel again.

Last PSO night?

2007-03-30T05:30:49Z

Tonight (Friday) will probably be my last night on the SEGA PSO servers.
I've got all the stuff I need to make the "Striker of Chao".
I have a level 79 character who should make it to 80 tonight so I can use
it on ultimate level.

I might be able to play during the last few hours if I get back from the airfield in time
on Saturday night.

Last night I played with "Lustig". We did the Phantasmal World 2 quest.
We died a few times at the hand of some Gibbles.
We found a Partisan of Lightning, which I was allowed to keep because I had
given Lustig one of my spare Twin Chakrams earlier.