Near miss, more on the xbox

On Monday on my last day off, I got inspired to put one of my planes up in the air. I hadn’t flown in a long time. It was windy and my initial launch attempt went bad. I threw it up and before I could get on the controls and correct it, the plane cut hard left, went through the bottle brush tree and hit the ground, snapping the propellor in the process. I was disappointed that it looked like my flying was over before it began.

I took the damaged plane inside and just for the hell of it, looked to see if I had any spare propellors. I was surprised to find one and I installed it on the plane and went back outside to try it again. This time I went farther out into the back yard and I gave it a little less throttle. I got it up in the air, but it was real squirelly in the air and shortly after I got it up, the radio receiver came unstuck from the plane and was dangling underneath it. If a cable unplugged it would be the end of the plane, so I carefully brought it in and landed it. I reattached the receiver and threw it back up. The plane still was all over the place. I brought it back down and noticed something. The connector that attaches to the aileron was hanging on by a thread. Holy S. If that would have let loose in the air the plane would have corkscrewed into the ground. I took the plane inside and reattached it with 2 little screws. The following flight was much more stable. It was still windy but I flew into the wind and used it to get the plane to a high elevation and then throttle back and just cruise. It was fun, a fun that I have pretty much forgotten about. I need to fly more.

My buddy at work is the one that opened me up to the xbox hacking stuff. I knew of it before but after reading that doing so required you to solder components to the board, I steered clear since my soldering skills are weak. I had a Sega Dreamcast that I used to run hacked stuff on. It was great, I had a library of several dozen games. Well after my buddy successfully “chipped” his xbox, and he told me of the wonders of copying and running games straight from the internal hdd, I was game for it. I bought the stuff and gave it to him to install. What I got back was a machine that has increased in leaps and bounds in it’s capabilities. I can copy games, run them from the hard drive, ftp to and from the xbox, run a media center application and still run conventional games as well. I literally have enough games to keep me occupied for endless days of video gaming madness.