Don't even, Dovetails.  You're smarter than that!

Sorry, I just checked in quickly before going to bed. I left home at 7:30am to go to a kite fly a couple hours away from here. I got back home at midnight. I could post some pics if you want.

I think I better stay out of that one altough Ahman Green was a Cornhusker so he can't be all bad.

Ok, here goes - lol

Saturday, I went to O'Neill NE to fly kites with a couple buddies. O'Neill is a small town of about 4,000 people. This weekend is their city's summer celebration. They are having sidewalk sales, a hot rod cruise night, etc. I could only be there Saturday although others will be coming Sunday too.



Kevin is the friend that lives there and this is his "Cody Box" kite. A long time ago, an even larger version of this kite was chained together to actually lift a soldier during war time to get a high vantage point to see where the enemy was. The "ring" is called a "Wind Wheel" and it is tied to the line just for decoration and spins.



To get a perspective of the size of that kite, here is Kevin standing by it after we brought it down.



These kites are much smaller. They are about 6' across the leading edge. They fly on four lines so they can be made to fly in any direction. They respond very fast and can be tricky to control. They are called "Revolution 2". I am on the left and Kevin is on the right. My kite is the red/black one.



Many times when we get together, there are 5-6 of us with this same kite flying side-by-side making formations, playing follow the leader, etc. This one we are holding them in a stall with the leding edges touching together.



This is me holding my big "Rok" kite. This shape is known to be a very high-flying stable kite. I designed and sewed this kite from scratch. This is the one I use to lift my camera for taking pictures from the air. I usually fly this one on all of a 500 foot spool of 500lb kite line.



This is my kite and another "Rok" that belongs to "Woody" flying near each other. He has a pair of boxer shorts hanging from his just for fun.



This is my camera rig that I attach to the kite line. The rig is suspended by a four pulley system to help keep it level even when it's swinging around. The AA bettery runs the two little gear motors. One motor slowly turns the camera 360 degrees while the other pulls down a piece of plastic that activates the shutter every 10 seconds or so.



Here's some pictures taken from the kite. Over all, I got about 40 good shots. This one is looking West. In the bottom of the pic is the roof of the JR. High school near the soccer fields where we were flying. On the right side, a little above 1/2 way up is a huge industrial looking building. That is a 10 acre indoor tomato farm. They grow tomatos year around inside that huge green house.



This is looking to the South-West. In the upper left corner, you can see the city water tower.



Looking to the South-East



This one is looking South but towards the left side, you can see the kite line. If you follow the line down to the ground, you can see Kevin and I in our white shirts standing by where the kite was tied to a fence post. We are just waiting for the camera to go around a few times and take some shots before we pull it back down.




And finally to the North is just a corn field. You can see the center pivot running and other farms in the distance. I would estimate that the visible horizon is about eight miles away.


If you're still awake, that was my Saturday. It was lots of fun. Due to the fairly strong winds, we all have quit a few kites that we didn't even get out because they are made to fly in lighter winds. The next scheduled area fly will be Labor Day weekend in Callaway NE. Then in October is "One Sky, One World" where we for sure try to fly for one hour from 1:00-2:00pm local time. If everyone in their time zone does that, there would ideally be kites in the air around the world for 24 hours.

Those are too cool!!!!!

that is too cool! thank you for showing us the camera contraption too! very very cool!!!

DT-
Very nice. I like the pics. Have you ever done any night flying? I would imagine that would be pretty tough to do. Maybe tie on some of those glow sticks.
Now you need to make an FFR kite and rig the camera mount to release flyers!

I can appreciate that. I put a new hard drive in my computer a couple of weeks ago. Good luck with that.

JR: It's never gone that far but we've sure had lots of people stop to check it out and see what's going on.

Ugh, I installed the new hard drive but it seems that Windows XP does not recognize my IBM Laptops network or modem hardware. I have the old drive back in so now so I can get on the net to go see if I can find all the drivers I need for it.

Even I hate this part of computers.

I hear you DT

I installed yet another hard drive this weekend and I just dread when I need to do anything on the inside of the computer.

I really have no idea how I always get the stuff to work, but I usually do figure it out.

I poured concrete this weekend.

 

I want to be Dovetails.

Nah, it's a concrete block which will be the base for a mail box.  Not enough room for hand prints.  Funny story, my youngest was all upset that I didn't call her so she could dig the hole.  She said, "How hard could it be?"  I was covered in grime, sweat, and cement dust and I said, "Look at me, how hard do you think it is?"  I told her to re-watch her copy of "Holes".

Making Progress . . . .

I've got the laptop back on the net and network. Now to start reinstalling ALL my applications and data.

It's midnight and I have the new drive set up enough that I can actually do work on it again. There are still quite a few lesser used applications and settings I need to work on but it's looking good. I wasted about two hours on one application that was actually working. I finally realized I was trying to get it to process an old incompatible file.

I am really surprised how much faster my laptop is running. The new hard drive is faster itself, but just starting from scratch seems to be helping a lot. My main reason for doing this was to increase space, but the clean out seems to be making a big difference. It is booting in about 1/4 of the time it was taking on the old drive. The old drive was 40 gigs and this one is 80. I was having to delete things to make room for new ones due mainly to mp3's, recorded wav files, and podcasts.

I'm off to bed.

Ray: If you are mainly doing "productivity" kinds of things, I doubt you would be able to notice much improvement by going to 1gig ram. Going from 256 to 512 will make much more difference than going from 512 to 1gig.

Adding another 512 will help, but for what you are doing, I doubt you would really notice it. I've got 768 in this laptop and most times when I look at memory usage, there's 250-300 megs free and unused.