Well, I wanted to say a public goodbye to my GPS... I forgot it in a C152 last week... and of course, none of the pilots flying after me had the decency to leave it at the front desk... I called to check it someone left it in the lost and found... but no luck and I couldn't get the phone numbers of the pilots who flew after me on that plane... Damn thiefs !!!

EDIT: I found the GPS today. Turns out it was in the Lost and Found. The woman at the front desk yesterday didn't check the bottom of the drawer! :-)

I'm now browsing the market for a new GPS device... because let's face it, I can't live with it and the Garmin96C is far from having as good a precision as the GPSlim236 I lost...

I found a couple of good devices but no real progress since last february when I bought my previous unit... I'll probably have to order one online as all the computer stores in the south bay only sell the worst bluetooth units ever...Not to mention that they are ridiculously overpriced...

Anyways, tomorrow will be an interesting day, I'll be flying to Castle Air Force Base again but this time I won't be alone, we'll be a squadron of 3 planes ! How cool is that!?

I won't be logging the flight track only with the Garmin. I'll probably borrow Julie's Bluetooth GPS for the day. I bought her a GPS too before we moved here as she has this tendency to get lost pretty much anywhere ;-)

Time to recharge the camera batteries!

Happy Landings!

I woke up at 6 yesterday... The sun was already starting to rise over the horizon at this time. We left the hotel at 8:30am and took the subway to the NVIDIA Office in Tokyo. The subway was a fun experience. Lots of young people with suits and ties.

We tried buying tickets but we had a hard time finding the tickets we needed. Not much of the things over here are translated in English, and you can't really guess the meaning of the Japanese characters :)

At lunch we ate in a restaurant near NVIDIA. I ate fried shrimps with beef. We had a difficult time explaining what we wanted to the waitress.
I find it really strange when they start talking to us like we understand what they are saying :) It's like they are speaking to a wall :) The only reply we can give them is: "uh?" or "We don't speak japanese, sorry, only english". We always managed to get something good though so I guess we don't really need to know Japanese to eat good food ;-)

We left work around 7 or 8, I don’t remember. I was really tired from the jetlag. After we dropped our stuff at the hotel, we walked in the streets near our huge hotel/tower. That was an amazing experience. Very different from what I’ve experienced anywhere before. Lots of noise, lights, flashing stuff, and so many people everywhere.

We stopped in a restaurant somewhere in a tower. We were asked to put our shoes in a box with a key in the entrance. The ordering system was surprising. We had some sort of Tablet PC on the table and we could order by pressing buttons. Problem is, none of the button captions were in English… The waitress explained us the basic stuff and we tried. Service was quick, as you would expect for raw meat. We had to cook our own stuff on a grill on the table. The beef was really tender, I really enjoyed it.

When came the moment to ask for the check, we had to guess what button would be  asking for it… I guessed the red, in the bottom since it was a red one to confirm orders before, but it was the one on the right!

Interesting experience!

Click here to view yesterday’s pictures and a video I made in Shibuya.

I'm posting this message from the 28th floor of the Cerrulean Tower Hotel in Tokyo!

We arrived yesterday evening, the flight was very long due to strong headwinds of about 300km/h on the way here...

777's economy class has very limited spacing between the seats so the entire trip was not very confortable for me. The hotel room makes up for it though ;-)

Tokyo is crazy! It's so dense compared to the US. It looks like every bit of space available is used for something. Restaurants in towers, play fields on top of the buildings, passages under the buildings, elevated train stations, and crazy highway that go up to 50+ meters over the city (check kml file)...

The japanese people are exactly as I expected them: fashion victims, neat, polite. The girl stereotype is quite different from the US stereotype. Here it seems that the default clothing is a skirt or shorts, with some kind of boots and high socks. No wonder Kitti wanted to come here hehe ;-)

We went for some sushi yesterday. They were delicious, soft, and melting in the mouth. There's only one type of nigiri I didn't quite like... I couldn't even bite the fish thingy on top. It was so elastiky!

Anyways, here is the KML track from the airport to the hotel. (Bus + Taxi),and the first pictures of the trip.

Last week, I flew to Tahoe with Bruno. It was his long IFR cross country, and I was a passenger in the back... I took lots of great pictures!

This last week, Julie and I went to San Francisco to see the Blue Angels and the Red Bull Air Race... Unfortunately, and thanks to the sucky public transportation in San Francisco, we arrived late and missed the air race... We still could watch the Blue Angels, and that was Awesone!!

Click here for the pics of the flight to South Lake Tahoe, and here for some other random pictures I took recently.

Happy Landings!

Tomorrow, I'll fly to Tokyo. I'm going over there for work, it should be fun! I'll take pics and hopefully find an internet connection in the hotel to upload the pics.

I'll have a chance to experience the japan crazyness that Kitti likes so much!

Of course, I'll try to stop by some place full of electronic gadgets to see if I can bring anything crazy-kewl back :-)
I won't have a lot of time for sightseeing but I should have at least one free morning, so we'll see!

I just read this news article from Phil Boyer of AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association)

It's about some slow witted policitians in the US that have something against general aviation... their rant came back following of the tragic crash of the SR-20 in New York a couple days ago...

Very interesting read! Let's hope all those idiots will give it a read...

Well, I'm getting used to watching TV shows here... Back in France, I used to get watch them by other means ;-)
If there's one thing that I don't like too much about watching the TV shows live, it's the commercial breaks.
They happen in the middle of the show and you're like: "Wait... what does this eagle diving on this surfboard on top of a car has to do with the story???"
It basically takes a few seconds to understand that it's a commercial for some car and not the show anymore...
Other than that, it's still very cool to watch the shows live!

Well, the good thing about that I can take these break to explain what just happened in the show to Julie who is struggling to read the subtitles :-)

It's funny that they still show Seinfeld episodes here. I watched the one in the chinese restaurant... So hilarious!

We have a cozy home now here. Eric, Julie and I went to IKEA on sunday to get some stuff for the living room, it looks a little more furnished than before. Kudo's to Julie for building most of the IKEA furniture while we were playing with the new TV :-P

I'm glad because I got a couple of big tables for our room, so now I have a big desk to put all kinds of computer crap on...

We also found a car for Julie... It's nicer than mine... I should be upset...
Oh well, my car is nice, so that's fine :)
Three downsides of my car though...

• The paint needs some work
• It has this tendency not to go straight :)
• It has anti theft bolts for the wheels for which I don't even have the key...
  (note to self: try not to drive over a nail)

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Now that everything is in place, I'll get back to business and blow the dust off Flight Simulator Project :-)