Cold Steam

Between work and some computer/network projects at home, not to mention the bitter cold and our slush- turned-ice bobsled tracks called roads, haven’t been out much shooting. Been pretty busy designing test support equipment for a new turboshaft engine for Sikorsky’s new CH53K heavy lift helicopter. What a machine that will be. Three 8,000 hp engines in a helicopter! That’s more power than on a C130! At the bottom of the engine link you can see the engine in it’s test stand. Unfortunately the real interesting stuff that the engine actually connects to is off to the right, not in the photo. Got two additional projects going with this engine, different places, and more travel in store, back to Singapore in a week and to Munich in February.

Also set up several new computers at home, one machine with Mandriva 10 for desktop use and another as a server using Centos 5. The server is replacing a couple of machines that were starting to fall apart, and is used primarily as a samba file server, and a mail server running postfix with amavis for virus and spamassassin for spam filtering, plus the usual dhcp and dns servers. That brings the computer count in my house down to nine when you include windoze, laptops, and Imac machines. It takes quite a bit of tweaking to get everything on the server working just right, but once it’s going it will run for years with little attention. The last one sure did, had been running on a now ancient version of Fedora. Linux has it’s benefits.

Not sure when I’ll post again. Hopefully not to long from now.