I got to ride along in a friend’s RV-7A last Sunday, on an afternoon trip to Placerville.

They have diesel, water, food, and bullets.

Update: unfortunately, it’s no longer funny. Badgerbag’s reading his recent posts.

Really, just scp your customers’ data to new servers and get out of there. A rack full of 1U’s isn’t worth fighting over.

It’s where I learned about the fight over the Transbay Terminal and a developer (and supporter of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom) who’s managing to hold up the project for a hundred-million dollar buyout.

BATN’s anonymous editor unabashedly supports public transit, but regards all the players with a well-founded cynicism.

Last night he ran a reprint of an article on the culture of cost-overruns in large projects, and a pointer to an analysis of 50 years of blown estimates.

Hir also interlines snarky, but appropriate comments on the items. After a letter to the editor in which a Morgan Hill resident complains about his taxes going to pay for the replacement span for the Bay Bridge BATN writes:

[BATN wholeheartedly concurs in general, and volunteers in particular to help install the toll system to recoup the sales tax funds inappropriately and regressively used to widen Highway 101 in Morgan Hill.]

And, since it’s a Yahoo! Group, there’s an RSS feed.

Bay Area transit suffers from balkanization (and there’s a mountain range in the way.) You’ll take four segments on three systems to get from SFO to UC Santa Cruz.

There’s a BART link from SFO to the Caltrain station in Milbrae. Caltrain will take you to the Dirdion Train Station in San Jose. From there, you can take the Highway 17 Express to the transit center in Santa Cruz, then transfer to the #10 to the campus.

At the moment, I’m planning on commuting, but that’s at least 45 minutes each way (and I’m not a morning person.) Staying on-campus looks pretty good, and it’d give me an excuse to buy and bring along an Airport Express.

I grew up watching the Apollo flights to the Moon, but when I was able to read and haunt the school library, I learned about the X-15, the rocket-powered space plane NASA flew out of Edwards Air Force Base during the 1960′s.

The X-15 came straight out of science fiction (remember, the Shuttle didn’t fly until I started high school) a sleek black plane with a rocket motor that flew to the edge of space and glided back to earth instead of a scorched capsule splashing into the ocean with half a naval task force chasing it.

Flying to the Moon was a hell of a feat, and it’s no surprise NASA chose Neil Armstrong for the first landing, he’d already distinguished himself as a pilot flying the X-15 and Gemini. But to me, even if landing on the Moon was amazing, flying a space plane was cool.

The X-15 still holds the unofficial altitude record for aircraft: 108 kilometers. SpaceShipOne barely broached 100 kilometers when it flew Monday morning.

The black dart remains part of California culture and politics. Before the late state senator Pete Knight campaigned to write discrimination into the California Constitution, he became the fastest pilot on Earth, flying an X-15 to Mach 6.7.

In 1961 Richard Donner made a movie about the X-15 with Charles Bronson as the perfect pilot, Mary Tyler Moore as the perfect pilot’s wife, and Jimmy Stewart as the narrator (in USAF uniform.)

The Right Stuff, from 1983, remains the better movie about test pilots and astronauts, even it doesn’t have X-15′s.

Eleven years later, Shôji Kawamori, and Shinichirô Watanabe revisited the test pilot mythology in Macross Plus where the colony world of New Eden looked like California from the giant hangers at the “New Dryden Flight Test Center”, the ranks of wind turbines in the mountains, to a barely disguised Fisherman’s Wharf ‘ship’s wheel’ sign. They mixed the test pilot story with Top Gun. Two pilots compete over a military contract for a next generation mecha, and for the affections of their high school sweetheart.

And seeing that we’re back to thinking about our old crushes, I’ll finish.

Update: here’s a batch of photos from the trip.

Chad Orzel has some good comments on the snark coming from the Libertarians in the wake of the flight, which was not without gliches (though from the ground, it looked great) so political sneering by the Randoids shouldn’t reflect badly on the feat itself. More Libertarian deflation over on Live Journal.

If you search for it, look out for the guy in the area who uses a spear to hunt deer, and the paintball camp nearby. The wreck lies in the strange part of New Jersey, apparently.

I saw this in the window of the body shop around the corner from me when I was walking over to Dana Street Roasting this morning.

My friend Chad has one of them which he keeps garaged in Dearborn.

My feet burn to be free

listening to the hail jump ecstatic off the road.

Free from the rot leather and rubber gone bad

in the Oregon rain.

Hopefully they’ll get training for jobs that will pay enough for them to afford a home in Silicon Valley.

You’d think that you’d select out all the mice with a propensity to nest around the engine block pretty quickly.