for christmas, taka bought me a radio control helicopter that i had been eying at the hobbyshop. i bought an rc helicopter a couple of years ago with mike (the fixed pitch century hummingbird) with poor results. for the life of me i couldn’t get the bird to hover, and forward flight was out of the question. i’m not sure if my success with this new helicopter (the axe cpv3) is a result of it being a better heli, it having collective pitch, or just me having more time and patience to learn to fly it. in either case i’m really enjoying it. i’m contemplating starting a blog dedicated to it, but i thought i’d post a comprehensive, keyword-heavy article here first and see what type of traffic it brings… god knows i have enough blogs.

the axe cpv3 is ready to fly out of the box, and through the end of the year it’s only $159 at hobby people (a store i loathe), normally $199. i think it’s still categorized as a “micro” heli, but in my opinion its closer to a “mini” size. for those not into rc helicopters, this heli isn’t like the air hogs or other rc helicopters that you can buy at a toy store and start flying right away. it takes constant input for the most basic hover, and forward flight takes lots of concentration and practice. it took me about 20 “flights” to get the basic hover down, and i can now keep it within a 2′ diameter circle pretty consistently.

in the very short time i’ve owned it, i’ve already put about as much if not more into upgrades and repairs than the damn thing originally cost, but i have it trimmed out and flying very nicely now. right after i got it, the lipo battery charger conked out and while hobbico is sending me a replacement, i didn’t feel like waiting so i bought a new charger and an extra battery. the other defect i experienced was after about 15 flights or so, the main 3-1 board and one of the servos died. while i sent these parts back to hobbico to hopefully be replaced under warranty, i couldn’t wait, so i upgraded the main esc to the electrifly c-25, and the tail motor with the c-12 coupled with the futaba gy240 heading hold gyro that makes it much easier to fly.

The electrifly c-25 and c-12 speed controllers. You can also see the venting on the heat sink:

Ping pong ball landing gear. You can also see the GY240 gyro in the back:

Hitec HS-55 servo

other small modifications include replacing the servos (after the one died, i figured i might as well upgrade the other two too) with hitec hs-55 servos that are a direct fit for the old ones and have a higher torque rating. these servos are also less noisy than the stock ones. I replaced the foam training gear with ping pong balls after they started to wear, and i dremeled out the cooling holes on the heat sink to line up with the motor (talk about bad design).

now that its setup the way i like it, there’s nothing to do but practice. i can hover tail-in pretty well, but my orientation gets kinda messed up when i hover side in and hovering nose in is completely confusing since the controls become completely reversed at that point. good thing i don’t have to go back to work until January 5th!

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and that everyone is enjoying the holidays. Fortunately I get the rest of the year off and don’t have to go back to work until January 5th, so I’ve just been hanging out, going to the gym and doing nothing important. I did see The Wrestler with ben and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Taka, both awesome movies.

A couple of days before Christmas I got a terrible case of food poisoning. For like 30 hours life was absolutely miserable. I couldn’t even keep a sip of water down and 6 pills of imodium wouldn’t stop me up. It sucked. Fortunately I just finally started to come around a few hours before my family Christmas party at my Uncle’s in West Covina. We only stayed for a while but it was good that we made it, since we had been planning to announce that we were pregnant. My mom flew in on Christmas day, so we had Christmas dinner at our apartment with just Taka, me, my mom and my dad. We ordered a honey baked ham, and taka cooked mashed potatoes and green been caserole. My dad cooked kiritampo nabe, this shabu-shabu-like rice stick thing that’s hard to explain but delicious. My mom actually got to spend Christmas with my sister too, since Cambodia is like 16 hours ahead or something, so that was kinda cool.

Anyway, thanks for making 2008 another great year for kentomatic.com. I’m not sure if this baby is going to make for more blogging or less, but I’m sure 2009 will be a great year either way. I hope you all have a happy and prosperous New Year.

it seems fitting that a sexist, chauvinist like me would have a daughter first. i just hope god doesn’t take the joke too far and also gives me a son at some point along the way. but i am excited to have a daughter and since we plan to have 2, i’ve heard from a few people that having the older daughter is helpful in taking care of the second child.

i had a funny conversation with this ~50 year old black guy that was in the waiting room with me, who’s dad was getting chest xrays or something. he was complaining about traffic this morning from south central and we were just chit chattin’ about the weather. he shook my right hand with his left hand and i wasn’t sure if he had a lame right arm or if thats just how it’s done. when i told him my wife was here getting the ultrasound he congratulated me and started talking about how he has 3 daughters in their late teens and early 20’s (this was before i had found out we were having a girl). unlike most that have the same boring advice about parenthood the guy was like “here’s my advice if you have a daughter…. do you own a gun?” :myeyebrowsraise: “whenever a guy comes over for your daughter, always answer the door with a gun in your hand. it keeps them inline” the funny thing is this guy wasn’t kidding.

it’s also funny how almost everyone has called that it would be a girl. the iphone app that taka was using to keep track of her ovulation said it would be a girl, some random lady that taka was talking to at work looked at her belly and said it was a girl, taka’s always thought it was a girl, and yeh my new sc homie was giving my advice for a girl. i guess it was meant to be.

so yep, this is week 18 for us, the due date got pushed back a day to may 21st, so we’re looking at just about 5 more months.

since the year is almost up, throughout the internets, you’re gonna see a lot of blogspam that starts with “the top 10 of 2008…” and this site will be no exception. these aren’t necessarily cars that came out in 2008, but they were at least still made in 2008 and shouldn’t've been. i’m not a design expert and if you asked me to make a car, i’m sure it’d look a lot like the car homer built when herbert let him design one at his plant (and subsequently ended in the company’s bankruptcy)… but i do know an ugly car when i see one. so in no particular order, here’s the top 10 cars that i wish they’d stop making and start crushing already.

i’m down with the xb, xa and tc, but the xd is hideous.

the new acura tl is no good, especially the rear. it looks like some kinda oldsmobile or something now.

i gotta admit, i thought the new beetle was kinda cool when it first came out, but i’m absolutely sick of seeing them now, especially in a cabriolet.

no wonder ford is in financial trouble. the ford flex looks like a crappy, longer xb.

dodge caliber.

the dodge nitro is really popular with the african american ladies around here.

like the beetle, i thought the pt crusier was kinda neat at first but i quickly became a hater.

definitely the priciest car on my list, the mercedes r350 is the ugliest station wagon i’ve ever seen.

jeep compass.

while the rest weren’t in any particular order, i did save the ugliest for last. the chevrolet hhr is the ugliest car i’ve seen this year.

i’ve got a lot of different hobbies and as long as there’s been internet forums dedicated to these hobbies, there’s been an outcry on them to support your local bike shop/hobby shop/electronic store/etc.

local hobby shops like hobby shack (now hobby people) used to be a place i could go and get answers to my questions. there were nice old guys in there that were happy to help and had a wealth of information and this type of service used to keep me from saving a few bucks online. but the guys that work there now (at least at the hawthorne store), are fucking idiots and they’re rude too. i had a question about a new type of battery and this fat, balding guy named aaron j. started spewing all kinds of nonsense that didn’t make any sense but he just assumed i knew nothing about the subject. after 5 minutes of going around confusing himself he was like “well i don’t have 2 hours to educate you on electronic science to completely explain it. you should read about it online.” well, i already had read all about lipo battery packs online and was hoping he could answer a few very specific questions, but he didn’t even have a general grasp on the subject — and he was giving me false information to boot! he wouldn’t really stop talking so i just started walking away and his parting words were “read the manual,” great. other than emergency purchases i’m going to stay away from hobby people, and be forewarned about false advice from aaron j.

and don’t get me started on radio shack! a place i used to be able to go and get answers to real electronics questions is now a place where i don’t dare talk to any of the ghetto kids that work there that only want to get me to sign up for a cell phone or a radio shack line of credit. i really don’t see how that place is still in businesses actually.

on the other hand, bike shops aren’t nearly as bad, as most of the people that work there are usually riders themselves and can answer my technical questions. i do my best to patronize them as often as possible, although it seems that high-dollar items are often much less expensive online and sometimes i find it hard to resist.

just as i started to calm down about my bathroom soap, i go to gnc and my receipt says that i bought 2.000 items. gaaaaah! at least this time it was accurate.

yesterday, taka got a letter from the uscis (new name for ins) and the conditional status of her residency has been removed. the first 2 years were on the condition that our marriage was legit and now that they’re satisfied that it is, her residency is permanent.

the entire process was straight forward. since we did all of the paperwork at the US embassy in Japan, we didn’t have to do an interview, and other than a few sets of documents and letters from our friends and an appointment to take fingerprints, it was pretty easy. taka and i did all the documents by ourselves (f expensive lawyers) and the fees for the whole process was under $1000.

a few weeks ago there was this 60 minutes episode about horror stories of people trying to become residents, like couples where the husband died during the 2 year conditional residency and the wife was being deported, so that freaked us out a little bit. but short of me dying, i never thought there’d be any problem in our application process, and it’s now one less thing to worry about.

if it just said 17oz, i wouldn’t care, but if you’re gonna take it out to the hundredths and be wrong, you’re gonna piss me off.

17fl oz = 502.75ml
500ml = 16.91fl oz

I finally decided to jailbreak my 3g 2.2 iPhone so that I could tether the data connection with my new netbook. The jailbreak process couldn’t've been any easier, but the tethering process is pretty complicated and not very practical. Anyway this morning I realized that none of my apple store apps work! When I get home, I’ll try to jailbreak again and if my regular apps are still broke, I’ll just restore the orginal firmware. Why can’t apple just allow a real tethering program in their store already?

edit: so my apps weren’t working, because i had synced the iphone with my netbook, and i guess that wasn’t properly setup or something. i re-sycned with my main computer and apple apps and hacked apps are playing nice with each other now.