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I went to Kerrville, Texas in October for the annual convention of the Mooney Aircraft and PIlot's association. A lot of folks flew into the convention. The Kerrville airport closed one of the runways and used it for parking space.
On Saturday afternoon, a few people took a van out to the airport to drop off logguage and stuff. I tagged along. These pictures are fun; you don't usually get to shoot photos while standing on a runway.
A panorama:
And the panorama larger.
My wife and I went to DragonCon in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend this year. It is, if I'm remembering correctly the fourth time we've gone since we moved to the southeast in 2006.
We got into downtown Atlanta slightly after 4pm, and ended up getting snarled in traffic quite a bit. We probably got delayed for half an hour. Once we were there, it was fine.
The convention was fun; we got to see good stuff. One night there was a musical performance by Paul and Storm, Jonathan Coulton, Molly Lewis, among others, which from a seeing-stuff-on-stage was definitely my highlight.
One super-neat thing: I've been a fan of Wil Wheaton's work forever. I've been following his on-line writing for 10+ years at this point. I've been trying to arrange to go to a convnetion and say hello for a while. He was at DragonCon this year, and I got to do that. Turns out, he recognised my name from on-line interactions and posts I've made to his blog, so that was a neat surprise. You can read the whole story of me meeting Wil Wheaton on its own page.
One of the really fun things to see when going to DragonCon are the "cosplay" costumes that people make and wear to the convention. I took a lot of photos of costumes I saw and I posted some of the better ones on a separate page, so that they don't clutter up my blog page. My DragonCon photos from 2011.
A couple of notes about going to DragonCon. You can book admission (they call them "memberships") long in advance, or right at the door (for more money). However, the hard thing to get is a hotel room in one of the convention hotels. There are 5 now, and they usually all fill up very soon after their rooms are announced, which is usually October or November of the previous year. So if you want to go in 2012, you'll probably want to start keeping an eye on the DragonCon web site for announcements about hotel room availability for next year. (By the by, we will NOT be going next year (2012). We have an important out-of-town anniversary to go to that's also over Labor Day weekend.)
Speaking of Hotels, I would like to put in a plug for the Sheraton Downtown Atlanta (one of the con hotels). If you have the choice, I would highly recommend it as the place to stay. It's much quieter than the other hotels. There were never huge lines for the elevators. Their staff was pleasant; the people running the restaraunts were sort of in costume. It was really a lovely time there.
I mostly visited vendors I was interested in and stuff like that at
Oshkosh, and I didn't walk the flight line looking at pretty airplanes
hardly at all. But one thing I did do is take a look at "Fifi", the
only B-29 currently flying.
On the drive back from Oshkosh to Illinois, I got to see a tow
airplane towing a glider aloft. I got a great view of it, but this is
the only photograph of the event that I got. My phone camera (the only one
I could get to easily) kept focusing on the windshield.
The blog software is working (mostly). I don't have the sub-blogs linked from the main page I just realized; I'll have to take care of that soon.
I've made this goal before, but I'll make it again. Now that I have a basically-functional blog, I'm going to post every day here for a month. I won't always have photos, but at least every couple of days have something pretty to look at.
I went to the Airventure Oshkosh airshow Saturday and part of Sunday. It was cool, what I saw. I ended up not walking around and looking at planes very much because I had specific things to do and people to talk to. So I didn't take very many photos.
One I did was some sky writing that was going on. My mother once said that "skywriting" didn't actually write, they generally just did circles. This was probably in response to something in a children's book that had an airplane producing perfectly ligible writing. This writing isn't as good as if you printed it, but it's pretty good considering it's smoke suspended in the air and is at the mercy of wind.
Here the airplane is just finishing the "G" in "Oregon", which is a pretty long letter to write on a windy day, particularly when the "E" has 4 separate segements. Most of the time when I take pictures of stuff at Oshkosh, it tends to be of specks which are too far away to see clearly. Most of the time I want more zoom on my camera. This is one of the very very first times I've wanted a wider-angle lens at Oshkosh.
