For those that haven’t found these elsewhere, here’s a few videos I’ve posted over the last several weeks.

First, a clip called “Welcome to Cornell”, showing my first crack at a PT-26, the appetizer before an amazing ham dinner at a nearby airstrip. Generously shot by a friend I'll call "Bruce" on my new toy, a MinoHD:

Next, a series of three videos showing the magnificent and wonderfully rare Pitcairn PA-18 autogiro that’s been visiting here in Oshkosh lately. The first shows it’s arrival, the next two show some clips of it flying in the circuit at Pioneer airport:

Pictures are worth a thousand words; moving pictures, doubly so.

It worked for Batman.

It worked for Apollo and Starbuck.

James Bond did it, and so did Kirk, Spock, and Optimus Prime.

Even G.I. Joe and the fascist space lizards of V are going to give it a shot.

And now that all the cool kids are doing it, I figure it's my turn, time to reboot my personal franchise, as it were.

Time for a new career ... in a new place.

After a few months as a paradoxically busy layabout, I'm proud and exceptionally pleased to report that I have returned, with a distinct lack of kicking and no real screaming, to the ranks of the gainfully employed. Continuing my extraordinary run of good luck at building new jobs from the best bits of the old ones, I have accepted an extremely generous offer from the Experimental Aircraft Association as their new Online Community Manager.  Thus, my wife and I will soon be heading to America's heartland, more importantly known as the Mecca of sport aviation - Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Relocation will be bittersweet, naturally, though the Microsoft layoffs last January certainly have scattered some of my close friends and colleagues to the four winds already. Thankfully, things like email, Skype, Facebook, and my retired-United-pilot dad's giveaway "companion passes" make the world a lot smaller than it used to be. I've been a proud EAA member for many years, and the opportunity to actually work for them is extremely exciting to say the least. I'll be working alongside a number of friends I've made over the years, so immersed in the aviation world that I'll go to work each day inside a building that's actually located on two airports. (It's tough to explain if you've never been.)

I'm eating a lot of cheese to try to build up an immunity, and honing my pronunciation of the phrase "Go, Packers!" even though I have absolutely no idea what it actually means.

I'm also dreaming of great big skies and the rolling green hills of the countryside I've fallen in love with over my last dozen or so trips to the area. Not to mention enjoying four distinct seasons instead of the local two (grey and gorgeous), and the sheer number of aircraft I'm going to try to weasel myself into flying because that's just who I am.

I'm expecting to have an EAA-specific blog up and running at some point, but I plan to keep this one around as well for the more personal bits of esoterica that need to find their way out to the Internet.

And should Microsoft decide to reboot that other franchise, the one that deserves it more than Knight Rider and The Bionic Woman combined, I'll be first in line at GameStop. And happily reminding them that they've got friends at the EAA.

See you at EAA AirVenture — July 27 – August 2, 2009!

Note: rumors that the part of Hal Bryan will be played by Katee Sackhoff, Dick Sargent or Barry Van Dyke are total fabrications.

I just received this stunning, disturbing press release from the CEO and Publisher of AVSIM.com. I'm publishing it here not only to reach my direct audience, but to ensure that it is picked up on MSDN as well. My thoughts are with Tom and my many other friends on the AVSIM staff as they regroup and consider their options.

PRESS RELEASE:

AVSIM Hacked

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

Or, why I love the Internet, Vol. MCXXI ...

A few months ago, I found myself completely entranced by a video of a young woman on the Internet.

While this sort of thing is not  uncommon amongst broadband-connected men of my age or any other, her talents most certainly were, and are. Her name is Julia Nunes, and, you'll be pleased to know, my interest in her is decidedly non-creepy.

Julia is a twenty-year-old musician who sings and plays the ukulele just like I do. Except she's way better than me. And I don't sing unless there's some kind of a cappella emergency and somebody needs a bass for a "bom buh-buh-bom duh-dang-di-dang-dang" sort of thing. Anyway, I was free-associating my way through YouTube and found her cover of one of my favorite songs of all time, the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows. " That was followed quickly by a another favorite, the Beatles' "All My Loving", done slower, like the first part of the version in the film "Across the Universe."

After watching these two, I was hooked. Her singing, her playing, her choice of songs, the tricky chord and tempo changes, the multitracked harmonies, her writing (on her originals), and the video editing captured my attention immediately, but there was something else. There's a charm to her style, something that makes me happy and glad to have ears. Something the French elegantly fail to define by calling it je ne sais quoi. She's engaging and witty (some of her "answers" videos where she responds to viewer comments are brilliant), but that's not all of it. It's that she projects a rare sort of fearlessness, as if it never occurred to her not to record her music and put it online for the world to see.

Something in our culture, something ugly, says that talent should be hidden and that success demands apology. It says that only those people who are A) willing to suffer indefinitely and 2) extraordinarily lucky will be allowed to enrich the lives of the rest of us. And then, only after a staggering army of faceless middlemen has stepped in to tell the talented what to do ... and to tell the audience what to like.

Conventional wisdom says that we'd describe her as unselfconscious, which dictionaries define as "...natural or genuine." This is completely backwards and upside down to me - people who are literally "not conscious of self" are hollow, timid shells, there's nothing natural or genuine about them. Julia, clearly, has a profound sense of self that's brightly displayed as one watches her doing what she loves to do.

Julia clearly works hard for her success now, but twenty years ago, even as little as ten, her story would have been dramatically different, if not simply impossible. In the days before the Internet (which, it kills me to realize, she might not even remember), her very ability to make and share music and video would have been entirely dependent on the impenetrable whims of giant corporations. In the heyday of record labels (a record is like a giant CD made of black vinyl) less than 1% of those artists who tried were actually signed. She's become something of a phenomenon, a meme (a word that itself was invented not long before the Internet), and for the right reasons; she's talented, and people enjoy hearing her music and watching her perform. She sells CDs published on a label she co-owns with her parents, does shows on her own, and has even toured with Ben Folds.

The tools, technology, and reach of the Internet have made it possible for artists like her to interact and trade directly with their audience. By creating and publishing her work online as she does, Julia is asking to be judged not by the cleverness of her marketing or the salaciousness of her scandals. She's simply willing and able to succeed or fail on her own merits.  And she's succeeding, as she should.

By way of a postscript, I recently ordered a CD by another singer-songwriter called Wade Johnston. I found Wade's music because he'd done a duet with Julia that I'd spotted on her YouTube page, and from there I made with the clicking and the linking and the listening and the buying. Wade's CD showed up promptly, and with it, in the envelope, was a receipt. I would suggest, with characteristic lack of hyperbole, that this was probably the best receipt in the entire history of people receiving things. It was, literally, a scrap of paper, torn edges and all, entirely handwritten. At the top, in block caps, it reads "OFFICIAL RECEIPT." Below that, it says "Dear Hal, you gave me $6 for my CD. THANKS! enjoy," then it's signed.

Yes, I gave him six dollars and he gave me a CD. Other than the costs of duplication and printing of the CD and the sleeve, and the postage to mail it to me, Wade got most of the six dollars, orders of magnitude more than he'd have gotten in the "old days."  While I'd suggest that I got the better end of the deal (it's good music), it really was a win-win, the best kind of business. And in these ridiculously turbulent times, it's only the very best kinds of businesses that will survive (unless they're so dreadfully bad at it that they qualify for a government bailout.)

Just knowing that there's talented, smart, and enterprising young people out there like Wade and Julia actually makes me optimistic; it's more than just the music that puts this smile on my face.  It's amazing that, thanks to the Internet, it's not amazing that a couple of kids armed with ukuleles and computers (and, of course, talent) manage to reach out three thousand miles to their left and brighten my days.

Plus I get to watch videos of a college girl in her dorm without going to jail!

My business cards, both my last cards from Microsoft and my current "between jobs" variant, read "Hal P. Bryan, Super Genius." When presented with one of these, most people get a good laugh out of my particular brand of mildly ironic self-aggrandizement, while a few actually get the specific reference. For any that don't, it's a nod to the cherished Warner Brothers cartoons from my childhood (when they were already more than 30 years old, thank you), as the terribly bright but hapless Wile E. Coyote identified himself the same way.  I grew up thinking not about how great it would be to actually be a super genius, but how funny it would be to put that on a business card. Such are the choices one makes.

The first time I added it to my Microsoft cards, I assumed they'd be denied and I'd get some sort of a talking to - I crave attention, after all. That faulty assumption was based on another one - the idea that, in a company the size of Microsoft, my humble request for a thousand business cards would actually be attended to personally by a human being, instead of just being fed through an automated and ridiculously efficient process. Suffice it to say that my official business cards identified me as a Super Genius, not to mention a Notary Public - but that last bit is another story.

Regardless, the reactions have always been positive, and good for starting conversations. Most recently, I gave one to a potential colleague while doing some work for the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, OH. This gentleman, Paul, gave it a long look, frowned a little, making me wonder if I'd finally found someone willing to be somehow offended by it. Then, he lowered the card, slowly, and, still frowning, looked me in the eye and said "So I'm assuming that you have close ties to the ACME Corporation?"

And that's how I make friends.

Anyway, just last week, I actually found myself deciding not to give out a couple of my cards. This was unprecedented, and I regret it now, as I suspected I would. Here's what happened:

My friend Scott, an Airbus driver temporarily between gigs, posted on Facebook that he was spending some of his days at the University of Washington's  Aeronautical Laboratory, specifically in the Kirsten Wind Tunnel. This sounded interesting to me, and, being a fan of interesting things, I wrote him and invited myself to come visit. As it happened, Scott was working with a friend of his, Mike, who was also a long-lost childhood friend of mine. Thankfully, Mike had forgotten enough to think that it might be good to see me. Anyway, Mike works for a company that had built a wind tunnel model for another company that's working on what could be a spectacularly cool new business jet. This jet is not pictured, to the right. (I think the names and such are public knowledge, but I'm erring on the side of circumspection here.)

Mike was kind enough to give me an in-depth tour of the facility, which was fascinating to me. Construction began in 1936, and the place has been operational since 1939. You can't take a step without tripping over or ducking under history, given the designs that have been tested there. You can check out the link above for a detailed list, but my favorite had to be the the Taylor Aerocar model I saw hanging from the ceiling. You'll also find models of cars, skiing helmets, boats, and even a Commerson's Dolphin.

The tunnel itself is about what you'd expect - a big tube with windows, holes on both ends for the wind, and a sticky-uppy bit on which to mount a model for testing. But the rest of the place is overwhelming in its largely analog complexity. Every few steps there's a half-flight of stairs that leads to a door beyond which there's an impossibly giant room that's filled with impossibly giant-er generators, electric motors, and giant metal boxes with levers and gauges calibrated in things like kilo-pascals-per-furlong. Between rooms, there are mazes of pipes and valves and the like that make the whole place look as if you took a submarine and turned it inside out in the Batcave.

There's even a giant-scale working model of the facility itself that they use to plan tests, experiment with different airflow patterns, etc. I abruptly stopped looking at the model when I realized that I was afraid I'd see a tiny me looking back.

The single most fascinating part of the place for me was the fact that so much of the analog technology is still in use. And it's not only viable, it's extremely effective - their 6-degree "balance" (the thing underneath the aforementioned sticky-uppy bit) measures "moments" at resolutions in tiny fractions of inch-pounds, to offer an example that even a Super Genius can understand. In these mazes of elegant industrial complexity, it's an overstatement, but not much of one, to say that computers are nearly an afterthought - the thing you plug in at the end so that you can use Excel instead of graph paper for making charts. This idea of history being used to build the future really resonated with me.

What also resonated with me was the fact that the facility is run by students. I say again, students.

Now, I don't know how many of you have actually seen a college student lately, but be warned: these days, they're less than half my age. And they're smart, too. Granted, I can talk aerodynamics a bit better than the average lay person plucked at random from, say, the stands of a tractor-pull. I can nod sagely and pepper the talk with phrases like "pitching moment" and "Reynolds number" without being entirely disingenuous. But these people, these ...fine, I'll say it ... these kids that are younger than the Internet and have no idea that Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, and the Bionic Woman are remakes ... these kids are brilliant. And they not only understand the magnificent melange of technologies at their fingertips, unlike what I might expect from some of their peers, they genuinely respect it.

While that gives me all manner of hope for the future and all that, it was undeniably, and uncharacteristically humbling. Somehow, being a laid off 40-year-old who spent the last ten years of his career "sitting on his *** playing vidya games" seemed the tiniest bit less Super Genius-y in that company. So the cards, cards I've given blithely to test pilots, movie stars, authors and astronauts, they stayed in my pocket.

I got over it, and quickly, and now, as I said, I regret it. It would have been fun to keep in touch with some of these rising stars, and I'd guess that they'd appreciate the fact that even an old man of 40 can have a sense of humor. But I suppose it didn't kill me to be humbled like that, however briefly.

Just don't expect me to make a habit of it.

After all, "Hal P. Bryan, Genius" just doesn't have the same ring to it.