OK, now that I’ve been playing with Leopard for a little while, I can make a couple of observations:

1. I got hit with one of the kinks right off the bat. I mentioned in the previous post that there’s a little bug with the Leopard installer that obviously didn’t effect only me — it causes the internal hard drive not to appear in the installer until you’ve had it open and pondering the meaning of life for a few minutes. Then it magically reappears. It was obviously worrisome that Leopard didn’t recognize my hard drive right away — was this a sign of things to come? But it appears not to have had any impact on my actual use of Leopard post-install.
2. No rounded corners on the sides of the menu bar! This is one of those Mac things that has made it feel more polished since the beginning; it was even part of the plot of David Pogue’s 1993 Mac techno-thriller, Hard Drive. Luckily, someone has already come up with a little app to restore the rounded corners, Displaperture. (Thanks to Brad Choate for the link.) I don’t know exactly what Displaperture is doing, but the rounded corners disappear when using Exposé.
3. I like the ending screen of the new Leopard Installer (both for OS X itself and for apps):

   

4. I’m not a huge fan of the new look of the title bar buttons. I’m no graphics expert, so I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s bothering me, but I think it might have something to do with that little bit of light gray just below the buttons:

   

   That bit of gray makes the buttons appear photoshopped into the title bar, in an amateur way, like the way I’d do it if it were my unfortunate job to make the title bar buttons.

5. I had been using UNO to create a unified interface in Tiger already, so I’m very happy with the look of the windows in Leopard. I especially like how Apple has made the active window stand out much better than in Tiger.
6. I don’t mind the translucent menu bar, but maybe that’s because I’ve got a desktop image with a pretty neutral gray background.
7. I like the new look of the Dock on the side, which is my normal preference. I tried it for a few minutes on the bottom, and I agree that it’s pretty ugly. Maybe it’s something I’d get used to if I liked the Dock on the bottom.
8. I like the “grid” view in Stacks, although I miss the nested-folders-in-submenus old way of navigating through folders in the Dock. Come to think of it, I haven’t even seen the “fan” view — and it doesn’t look like there’s an option to see it with the Dock on the side. That’s interesting, but not that disappointing, since the fan view didn’t look that useful.
9. I really like being able to set a hot corner for putting the displays to sleep.

Looks like I’m the unlikely recipient of an apparently wide-spread bug, if the number of views on this Apple forum discussion is any indication. It looks like sometimes, for an as-of-yet unknown reason, it takes the Leopard install CD a few minutes (3-4 in my case) to recognize the internal hard drive. So when you first start up the install, it doesn’t see the disk — either in the installer or in Disk Utility. (It boots up just fine in 10.4 and you can see it in the 10.4 Installer Disk Utility.)

So I rebooted a bunch of times, verified and repaired the disk in 10.4, and Leopard still didn’t see it. I read that Apple discussion, waited the few minutes in the Leopard Disk Utility, and the drive popped right up. So I’m starting the install now. Hopefully this doesn’t mean that it’ll take 5 minutes for Leopard to recognize my hard drive every time I boot.

Last night, after getting out of work, I decided to go do some night landings to maintain my 90-day currency. It was about half an hour after sunset, or half an hour before legal FAA darkness. If I have a choice, I like to do my pre-flight before it’s pitch-black out, because I figure I’m more likely to miss something with a flashlight.

It was a very nice night out at Newport State — about 58 degrees, and the winds were out of 300 @ 5 knots. I called flight services to check for any NOTAMs or TFRs that may have popped up lately, and there were none. The pre-flight was perfect, although my vacuum system light is still on, and has been since the annual was done in September. I’ll have to bring it back out to New Bedford to have that checked out before I fly IFR. (There doesn’t actually seem to be a problem with the vacuum system — the gyros are working perfectly. I assume it’s the light that’s messed up, maybe a wire crossed someplace.)

I taxied off the ramp onto Taxiway Bravo, listened to the automated weather observation, and did my run-up. It was almost dark, but there was still enough light that my pathetically dim taxi/landing light wasn’t yet a problem. There was no one else operating on the airport or in the pattern. I made the proper radio calls, and then back-taxied to the approach end of Runway 34. I turned around, did my pre-takeoff checklist, and off into the night.

I headed out towards New Bedford Regional Airport (EWB). I like doing my night proficiency flights out there, because the 5,000-foot runways allow me to make full-stop landings, followed by takeoffs, without having to taxi back to the head of the runway. (I’m sure I have enough room to pull it off at Newport, but without nearly as much margin for error.) I called the tower 10 miles out, and let them know I had information Foxtrot, which stated that the winds were calm and the active runway at New Bedford was 32.

The tower told me to report entering a left downwind for Runway 32. As I approached the airport, I heard the tower talking to other planes in the pattern about some radio interference; apparently, when the weather conditions are just right, faraway radio transmissions can interfere with our frequency from various locations in the New Bedford traffic pattern. Sure enough, on final for Runway 32, I heard a loud bunch of static from 500 feet MSL down to about 250. It was dark by then, and I made my first landing, a nice one, came to a full stop, and then powered back up and took off into the pattern again.

I made two more landings, each time making my turn from base to final over downtown New Bedford, and each time hearing the radio interference. My third landing was not as impressive as the previous two — it was really dark now, and because of the dimness of my landing light, I always have some amount of difficulty judging my distance over the runway when I flare. I prefer to err on the side of too high than to smash my nose wheel into the pavement, so I flared and then dropped to the runway a little harder than I would have preferred. I really need to work on using the flattening runway lights as my source of perspective, rather than trying to judge distance to the pavement by staring down into the darkness.

After the third takeoff, I headed southwest back towards Newport. The New Bedford tower controller asked me to do a radio check for him on the emergency frequency, 121.5, and I switched over to do the radio check. In a few minutes, I was back on the Newport traffic frequency, intending to enter the pattern and land on Runway 34 (the winds were about the same as before, 300 @ 4 knots). There was another aircraft, however, preparing to take off from Runway 4, so I switched gears and entered the downwind for Runway 4 instead. The other aircraft, an Arrow, had plenty of time to depart, and I landed on Runway 4, again a little bit bumpier than I’d like. (Certainly not enough to cause any damage to the plane, but enough that, had I had passengers, they wouldn’t have mistaken it for a good landing.)

I taxied back to my tie-down space, annoyed as usual that the bright lights at the fuel farm and the National Guard depot behind the airport blinded me as I taxied towards the ramp. I tied down the aircraft and entered the flight into my logbook:

4 landings, 0.9 ASEL, 0.9 night, 0.9 PIC, 0.9 total time.

Maybe I’ll have a chance today or tomorrow to go up while it’s still light and practice using the edges of the runway for perspective, and then try a few more night landings. I’d like them to be as smooth as my daytime landings.

The Terrafugia Transition, a light-sport aircraft that folds up its wings and converts into a street-legal car on the ground, is scheduled to be available in 2009. Currently being designed by a new startup, Terrafugia Inc., it’s scheduled to begin flight testing next year.

I want one! Not that I can imagine parking a $148K car, well, anywhere. Can you imagine if someone dinged it? Also, there’s nothing in the pretty limited specifications from the company on whether it’s IFR-capable. It does mention that it’ll have a Cirrus-type whole-aircraft parachute, though.

If you visit their web site, be sure to check out the “Landing” animation.  Very cool.

Thanks to Technology Review for the link

I went through the process of signing up to fly into the “Maryland 3″ this past week. The “Maryland 3″ (sometimes called the DC-3) are the three airports within the Washington flight restricted zone (FRZ) — College Park Airport, Potomac Airfield, and Hyde Executive Field. I travel to Washington, D.C. for business a fair amount, and it’d be nice to fly myself instead of US Airways (I’ve mentioned a couple of times how much I hate them). I’ll talk about the process in detail in a future post, but first I’d like to review how we’ve come to this point.

Before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the airspace around Washington, D.C. was unexceptional. There were small prohibited areas over the places you’d expect — the White House and Capitol, the Naval Observatory (home of the Vice President of the United States), et cetera — and the usual Class B airspace around the three large area commercial airports, Ronald Reagan Washington National, Baltimore-Washington International, and Dulles International. General aviation traffic over the nation’s capital was essentially as unrestricted as it was over any other major metropolitan area.

After September 11, the FAA imposed a temporary flight restriction on the area around Washington, forbidding any general aviation flights within 15 nautical miles of Reagan National Airport. (A similar flight restriction was put in place over New York City, but it was removed by mid-November.) By the end of February 2002, the FAA had implemented the precursor to the current policy, allowing pilots based at the 3 airports inside the TFR to undergo a Secret Service background check and file a special flight plan in order to fly in and out of their home airport.

For several months in early 2003, progress took a step backwards. On February 10, 2003, as a result of highly publicized airspace incursions (in other words, morons flying over Washington, D.C. without a clearance) and the national threat level being raised to “orange,” the FAA announced the implementation of the Washington ADIZ — which required that pilots entering an area roughly the shape of the Class B airspace of Reagan National, Baltimore-Washington International, and Dulles International airports from the ground to 18,000 feet acquire a discrete transponder code and maintain communications with air traffic control — and placed new restrictions on the Maryland 3, including the requirement to undergo security inspections before takeoff, and to land at a “gateway” airport in Annapolis for inspection before entering the flight restricted zone. The new Maryland 3 restrictions remained in place until the national threat level was lowered to “yellow,” but the ADIZ remained even afterwards.

Aside from the “gateway” airport restrictions coming and going depending on the national threat level, procedures at the Maryland 3 remained the same for two years. It wasn’t until February 2005 that the FAA transferred authority for the Maryland 3 procedures to the Transportation Security Administration, and the current procedures came into effect. These include driving to the airport you’d like to have clearance to fly into (such as College Park) and watching a TSA security video, driving to the Flight Standards District Office and having your documents reviewed, and being fingerprinted at Reagan National Airport.

Here’s a link to the government’s page on the Maryland 3 procedures.

Funny article in the Providence Journal about eight guys who built and lived in a small apartment within the Providence Place Mall parking garage for four years:

The apartment, which was relatively soundproof, contained a sectional sofa, a love seat, a coffee table, a breakfast table with four chairs, lamps, a throw rug, a hutch and paintings on the walls. Although the group had bold improvement plans, the apartment lacked running water, a refrigerator and a toilet.