so today i got in a few flights that started to actually resemble flight. i’ve realized that many of my previous balance and trim settings have been off, because when i take off, i drift hard to the left and that’s a result of rotor wash, not trim settings. so after hopping around a bit and making the correct trim adjustments today, i was able to take off and hover in place for about 20 seconds. i’m still having some yaw issues that i need to adjust on the gyro and need to find the perfect cg with the battery, but after that’s done, i’ll hopefully be able to hover indefinitely and move on to actually flying around.

with eric on the precipice of marriage, we went down to sandiego to eat more meat than a colon that would spend the next 12 hours at sea should. we had dinner at a brazillian all-you-can-eat place, where these people walk around offering 15 types of meat. definitely delicious, but definitely pricey and over-filling. it was a good experience.

what wasn’t a good experience was the hotel situation. we booked 2 rooms at the fancy vagabond hotel right next to the sportfishing place we were going to launch from in the morning, but somehow hotels.com, or the nairobian queen running the fagabond hotel, or maybe the fish that were expecting us the next morning, fucked up and we had 1 small ass hotel room for 5 guys. so we gayed it up and got a solid 3 hours of sleep and headed out for the fishing at 5am.

the fishing was decent, there weren’t any huge fish, but everyone was catching, having fun, and no one was puking which is a winning combo anyday. by the time the boat headed back we were all beat, but we had accomplished what we had set out to do.

here are all the pics in a nifty album that brian put together:
http://lemonchicken.com/eric

jen posted this on her blog, but i had to steal it. when we were walking around fukuoka at night, there were all kindsa kids hanging out, rolling in hydro’d impalas, and these guys c-walkin’:

james walked up to them and showed them his drivers license and was like “yeh, see that? long beach“… and they all went crazy, like james was snoop himself. it was fucking hilarious how quickly all these guys got into this thug pose.

how many of your favorite energy drinks would you need to consume before you die?

well for my weight, this site calculates that 123 redbulls, 41 rockstar juiced, or only 35 cans of cocaine energy drink before i’m a goner.

http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine/

in japan almost all of us bought this 9 gram helicopter called the “honey bee”. it’s only a 2 channel helicopter (rudder and throttle), but was all kindsa fun. mike and i even spent an entire afternoon flying them around his place. but since it was only 2 channels, the controls were obviously limited as was the fun ;) so the next step was to go to a full 4-channel helicopter (rudder, aileron, elevator and throttle). i looked around and read up on the affordable and dependable rtf kits and came up with the century hummingbird v4 helicopter. i ordered one, mike ordered one, and assuming i can learn to eventually fly the damn thing, my money is on eric and probably even following suit.

it came in the mail a couple days later and within an hour i was ready to fly it. turns out it’s difficult as hell =p i can fly rc planes, but keeping this thing hovering is pretty insane. my first day with it was pretty much just hopping all over my parking garage, and some hard crashes when i got bold enough to give it some good altitude. i spent an hour this morning trying to perfectly trim everything out, and it seems a bit more stable, but i got a long way to go. anyway, either i’m gonna stay dedicated and in a month be this sweet rc helicopter pilot, or in a month i’ll have gotten back 85% of my return by selling it on ebay.

AP) LOS ANGELES Heal the Bay’s annual end-of-summer beach report card is out and once again Los Angeles County has the state’s worst beach water quality.

And the county’s biggest loser is Long Beach. Heal the Bay executive director Mark Gold says Long Beach traditionally scores well during the summer months. But this year only 12 percent of the water samples taken in the area got high clean-water marks in comparison to 91 percent last year. City officials say part of the problem may have been a leaking pump station used by several boats.

and guess what the worst beach in long beach is? yep, mother’s beach, which is the beach for, yep… marine stadium. this morning on the local news they even showed footage of a boat going around marine stadium with a wakeboarder… i swear it was my boat =p anyway, looks like i’m done wakeboarding (at least there) for the year. hopefully they’ll’ve cleaned up by the time late spring rolls around.

so i called the collection agency to pay the past due balance, and they said that since they’ve only owned the debt for less than 30 days, that it doesn’t go to the credit bureau, or affect my credit score. i’ll still keep an eye on my credit score just in case, but it seems like all is resolved, and i only had to pay $1.78 late fee. so phew… disaster averted.

i know i was saying how i liked them a month or so ago, because they easily solved my simple problem, but they fucked me over good to make up for it. anyway, this is a pretty boring rant, so read on only if you feel like wasting 5 minutes of your time.

a few months ago, i ordered a second phone line for takako, and put it under my family plan. for some reason i had identified my home address as my mom’s home, so the initial bill went there. when i put her phone under my family plan, i assumed that the $50 would transfer into the new account. i also called them up and had my billing address changed to my apartment. well i guess that old account which got closed when the account went to the family plan, didn’t get transfered to the new account, and didn’t get updated with the new billing information. i check my mail every now and then at my mom’s, but i guess in only a month’s time, they sent a late notice, and then sent it straight to a collection agency :( they said that they had called several times on the line (taka’s phone), but since she has it in japan, of course she didn’t get any of the calls. meanwhile, i’ve been paying her phone on the new account, and no one had told me anything about the problem with this other account, because apparently their system didn’t keep them connected at all.

so i called cingular, and this time got the most ignorant kid from the south that i could’ve imagined. he kept calling me ’sir’ and i kept bitching at him to the point i felt like i was being racist even though that wasn’t my intention. anyway he said that it was out of their hands, now that it’s with the collection agency. apparently the collection agency adds an 18% fee, which i could care less about, but i’m pretty sure this will be a strike against my credit. after looking into it, it seems the best course of action is to pay the collection agency, and then file a complaint with the credit bureau to have it removed, but i can only imagine what kinda hassle that’s all going to be.

so anyway, fuck you cingular. unfortunately, they have the best call quality and prices, so i’ll continue to be your bitch.

a few of the pics from mike and i’s catalina excursion are still trickling in. half of them i don’t even remember. this was either the most, or at least second most drunk i’ve ever been, and trust me, i’ve had my fair share.

while i like to be a dick and wear my cap to the side, i have a feeling it wasn’t intentional in this pic and i have no idea why there’s straw and dirt all over it. ah memories… even if they are second hand.