Davy's Christmas Seasoning

Auto Club? Thing of the Past

It's quarter after 3 Friday morning, and I am sitting here livid. That stupid motorcycle of mine, same one that was stolen twice in the same summer and has cost nearly as much to repair as it cost new off the showroom floor broke down on me again. But that's not what I'm so pissed about.

 It's the AAA.

First off, I spent $168 buying their premium service so that I wouldn't end up stranded somewhere because of unreliable transportation.

So I call them and tell them I need a jump. They tell me they no longer jump start motorcycles even if you'd paid extra for motorcycle service (like I did). Okay, fine. Instead, I tell them I need it towed from the Universal Studios parking structure to my house a couple of miles down the road. This was at 12:30 a.m. when I got off work. They tell me they're sending out a driver, but it could take two hours. I'm not happy. But what can you do? So I wait.

Finally at around 2:03 a.m. the driver calls me.

He's Hispanic and can barely speak English.

He keeps asking if I have a flashlight. I say I do and ask him why he needs to know that. He doesn't answer. Finally he asks if I can see him. I say no and ask where he is. He says he's in the structure two sections down from me. I tell him to just follow the arrows. I hear a lot of radio chatter in Spanish, probably from a dispatcher. I ask him where he is, because I should be able to see him. He doesn't answer. I repeat my location. I hear nothing but radio chatter.

Finally, a pair of headlights catch my eye and I turn. There he is...in the other structure. I tell him I think I can see him and ask which section he's in. Sure enough, he left the structure I'm in and somehow went to other structure. I tell him he's in the wrong place and tell him once again where i am.

I see him on the down ramp leaving the structure.

He hangs up.

I try to call him back.

He doesn't answer.

I flag down some Universal security patrolling the parking structure. I tell them what happened. One of them tries to call the driver from the number retrieved from my IPhone.

They get voice mail.

So they dispatch cars trying to find him.

I call AAA and tell some woman what happened. She says she has to look up information.

Meanwhile the security officers come back while she's on the line. She hears what they tell me, that they can't find hide nor hair of him. She's apologetic and totally useless. I lose my temper and say, "look lady, I'm in a parking structure so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from the space station, and you sent me the world's biggest dumb fuck driver who can't find it. Since I bought your most expensive product, instead of apologies it would be swell if you'd find out WHERE THE FUCK HE IS cause I don't want to stay here all night."

I hang up.

The security officers, who had, of course, been listening, apologize. It isn't their fault. I ask them if I can leave my broken bike in the structure overnight. They tell me I can, adding that they are going to try and track the AAA driver down. "But even if we can't find them, we'll be back." They leave.

They don't come back.

Now it's 2:50 a.m. The yacht (I'm a boat captain, in case you didn't know) closing crew is going home. I wave them down. I had been convinced I'd have to walk home. One of my fellow captains, Aly, offers to take me home.

God bless him.

AAA left me stranded despite what I'd paid them. This is the worst service I've gotten anywhere from anyone. it's not just bad. It's stunningly bad. It's unbelievably bad.

This is intolerable.

Oh, Those Whacky Halloween Decorations Part Two

A Card Trick

This is a cool card trick I actually developed for print and then published in a column I was doing at the time for the Manhattan Beach Reporter call "Changing Tides." In the column I displayed 16 playing cards in four rows of four each and then instructed readers (or in the case of this video, viewers) how to "shuffle" the cards and then chose one. After than I would pick out their chosen card. It's a really nifty trick. Check it out!

Davy vs the Zombies

There's lots and lots of different attractions and diversities to be found along the International Drive corridor that winds through the Orlando Attractions all the way down to Kissemmee. There are museums, roller coasters, sling shots dinner theater shows, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, hotels and more gift shops than you can shake a tree-full of sticks at. Among all this is a new attraction out of Wisconsin, of all places, called Zombie Outbreak. It's sort of like a laser tag version of a live POV video game as you run down the corridors of a zombie-ridden former military installation clearing out roaming hordes of the living dead.



I first heard about it from some friends I'd performed with at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights last October who had been hired to play the live zombies at the new attraction. When I decided on making it an episode of the YouTube version of The Last Wanderer of Mars I wanted to experience the apocalyptic fight wearing a GoPro camera. But the powers that be at the attraction wouldn't allow that, so I settled for a DAVE-O-MATION version that's whimsically representative of the experience along with live footage from a couple of the players.



I think the episode which is called Davy vs the Zombies really fun. Not only is there facilities shots and an interview from the zombie that actually did chase me down, but I also go the chance to use the Ghost Hunt animated ghost-shooting game I got from Cracker Barrel last October. Sadly, though, this is the last video I made featuring a POV ride - compliments of a GoPro camera on a chest mount - on my Icebear Lancer motorcycle before it was stolen, stripped and dumped on a service road next to a retention pond. Orlando is brimming with some of the world's most innovative attractions. It's also overrun with thieves and criminals of all sorts. Sad, but that's what tourist towns attract.



Perhaps I should do an episode on that. 

Adventure in Key Largo

Here's the first video I've produced to include footage shot from my drone. This production is sort of like the romance of the rails meet the excitement of the deep. And the park rangers were even nice enough to allow me to fly my Syma Quadcopter even though drones aren't normally allowed in Florida state parks.

World's Smallest Flying Camera

Still droning on about this you might ask?

Well, yeah. Becoming a proficient pilot is a matter of droning on. It’s like learning magic or playing a musical instrument. It takes practice. Then it takes more practice. Then you have to practice. And practice. Over and over and over again.

As you’ve seen, not all of my practice sessions have been exactly golden. I crashed repeatedly into asphalt at the field near the Artegon Mall. I nearly lost the drone altogether while flying at Cypress Grove Park. And then there was that time I was flying in the back yard and crashed into a neighbors sliding glass window. Plus it’s not always easy to fly outside. The backyard gets seriously windy. And then there’s the rain…and believe me, lately there’s been lots of it.

Being able to practice using the controller indoors would be nice. The box says this model can be flown both indoors and outdoors. But so far flying it indoors has been a disaster. Since it’s not so much having the drone in the air as it is a matter of becoming comfortable with the controller, I thought about flying a model helicopter that a friend left with me when she moved to Oregon. The controller itself is a little smaller, but the actual controls are the same. Unfortunately, it is stuck in mode two, which makes all the controls different from what I’m using with my Syma XC5-1.

So what to do? I figured I needed some lessons. Once upon a time I would have gone to the library to look stuff up. But times change. So I turned to the Internet. Or in this case the Internet turned to me. Funny thing about buying stuff on line. Your computer remembers. Then, as if it’s doing you a favor, it clutters every site you view with a plethora of ads for similar stuff. Mostly it’s annoying. I bought a motorcycle helmet on line. So for the next a couple of weeks I was inundated with ads for helmets. After you‘ve bought one, how many more do you need? Same thing with a cat carrier I bought from Amazon. I only use the thing to take my cat to the vet. And he knows it too. If I brought another one into the house he‘d kill me. Or run away.

It wasn‘t surprising, then, that I started seeing ads for every type of quad copter that flys. Mostly I ignored them. But then I saw an ad for what they were calling the world’s smallest flying camera drone. It was called a Cheerson. It was tiny. And it had a tiny controller. And a relatively tiny price. It was only $28. What did I have to lose? Well, twenty-eight bucks, of course. But, sadly enough, that’s only the sacrifice of a movie with popcorn and a coke. Alone. And we’re not even talking an IMAX 3D movie either. If the controls of this Cheerson were similar to the Syma’s, what with it’s size and all, indoor flights didn’t seem like much of a destructive venture. And I certainly needed the practice. So after a glass of wine or two, I sent Amazon more of my money.

It didn’t take that long to arrive, and when it did, it actually fit in the mailbox. I

The Cheerson CX-10

opened the box. There it was, in the palm of my hand; the Cheerson CX-10 mini with a 0.2mp camera. Unlike the Syma, the camera wasn’t removable. Neither was the battery. There was a built-in SD card slot, though. And the instructions said the camera was good for both still photos and video. I couldn’t help but wonder how good the video could be on something this small. Then again, having taken an Iphone 4s apart, the camera it has is so small it’s nearly invisible and the quality of the pictures and videos it produces are stunning, relatively speaking. But there’s really only one proof for that pudding.

I plugged the charger cord into a USB slot and then plugged it directly into the little drone. I mean little, too. It’s only an inch and a half square. The propellersare tiny, only an inch long. I kept feeling like Will Smith in Men in Black when Tommy Lee Jones hands him the noisy cricket gun. In my mind I kept hearing a voice say, “I feel like I’m gonna break this damned thing.” Still, it was seemingly more of a toy than anything else, so I couldn’t imagine it was that fragile.

Good thing it wasn’t too.

First flight: Too much throttle. Straight up into the ceiling and then into the wall just to crash behind the television. Next flight: Over compensation on the rudder. Right into the right wall and down behind the couch. It’s a seven foot sofa with duel recliners. And it’s heavy. Getting the drone out from behind it wasn’t easy. But it was easier than retrieving it when I lost control, crashed into the kitchen wall where it actually fell behind the refrigerator. It’s a big refrigerator and it sets in an incredibly tight place in the kitchen making it really difficult to move back from the wall.

Before I could even do that, I had to take everything off the top first. This is an apartment, meaning that storage space is at a premium, so there was a lot of stuff up there. I couldn’t believe how much. There was an assortment of pitchers; the huge pickle jar I use in the summer to make sun tea; a ten-year supply of Rice Krispies we got to make crispy treats with but didn’t; a flask I’d forgotten I owned; some drink mixing cups my friend Bryan had left when he and Liz lit out for Oregon; a martini shaker I’d actually been looking for; a turkey roasting pan (which I was pretty sure I owned but couldn’t remember); two plastic trick or treat candy bowls; a couple of wine glasses with fall leaf patterns on them; several unfortunately empty liquor bottles; a half-full bottle of red Gatoraide, which was a total mystery since I don’t like red Gatoraide; two small thermos bottles; a bag of candy corn; a Christmas cookie jar with one stale and disparaging chocolate chip cookie inside; and half a bottle of Winking Owl Merlot, which I immediately dealt with since I did, after all, have a wine glass with a fall leaf pattern printed on it at hand.

With all this stuff now spread all over every counter in the kitchen, I pulled the refrigerator away from the wall a little. There was the Cheerson drone, it’s rim lights flashing happily as if it were saying “hi! Better come get me!” I hit the throttle on the miniature controller, hoping I could fly it out and not have to pull the refrigerator any further. It was a good idea, but the drone only hopped into the air and then immediately flipped over. It had lost one of its propellers. Bummer. At least I learned that the props slipped off their needle-like spindles rather than just simply break. And they easily slipped back on too. That was something.

After the refrigerator incident, fortunately, my flying style settled down and I

rapidly began gaining control, something I‘d seldom managed to do flying my larger, Syma drone. I found that my real problem had been coordination between my left and right thumbs. When I moved the right lever forward to fly straight away, I’d been moving my left thumb as well, which instantly shot the thing straight up, which was something I hadn’t wanted to happen. I had to learn to work the controls independently of each other. And a light touch on the throttle helped a lot. And turning the front of the drone, and therefore the camera, away from me instead of pointing at me helped more than that. Flying the drone toward me rather that away from me reverses the controls, making you have to think about every move rather that simply compensating automatically.

Before long I was flying the Cheerson around the room without crashing into anything for the duration of its battery life. Then I learned how to make it hover. Then I took it outside, flew it high enough that I could barely see its lights but maneuvered it anyway, and brought it into a landing into my extended hand. Then I learned how to make it fly in a circle, turn to point its tiny camera in various directions.

Well, I’m sure you get the point.

Finally, I was becoming a pilot.

 

The Drone Pilot Chronicles Part III

Obsession. The dictionary defines it as: “a persistent, disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling compelling motivation.”

But I like to think of it as a way of quickly turning something very simple into something extremely complex by getting caught up and entangled in the minutia and then not being able to let it go.

Case in point: I want to fly my quadcopter drone like a pro. I can’t. Yet. I keep trying. I still suck. Hence the obsession.

It wasn’t much of an obsession when I ordered the thing from Amazon on Black Monday a couple of months ago because it was only the camera I was thinking of. It and a GoPro were to be added to my inventory of cameras to enhance the shows I make for my YouTube channel with point-of-view and scenic aerial shots. I never gave flying the drone any thought. My good friend Bryan has a DJI Phantom II which I featured in a Last Wanderer of Mars episode called Drone last year. And he made it look easy.

Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that it is not. Starting from zero experience at the controls, I’ve used the instruction manual and YouTube tutorial videos to try to learn how to fly the drone. In other words, it’s been a frustrating series of trial and error -- sadly enough, mostly error.

Last time out I wrote about finding a nice size field behind the Artegon Mall that looked perfect for a flight test. But it quickly turned into a total crash-and-burn test since the controller had somehow gotten switched into mode two, a sort of Bizzaro-world partly-inverted version of default, which is mode one. So, next day, I went hunting for another good size field to take her up again.

This time I drove out to Cypress Grove Park, which is this huge, beautiful park on the shores of Lake Jessamine. This place is a total mystery to me. It features a majestic drive through the gate down a long cypress-covered driveway to the lake and some fine old historic buildings. It caters to weddings, and yet it’s in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous neighborhoods in Orlando. I know. I used to live there. Go figure. But between the lake and the entrance is a wide expanse of open grassy field separated here and there with short white fences that give it a vaguely equestrian feel, although I can’t imagine anybody in that part of town owning a horse. Nonetheless, it was a perfect place for me to send up my quadcopter.

I drove through the gate and pulled off into a parking lot that faced the open grassy space. I parked my bike at the side of the road where it would be out of the way, opened the boot and took out the drone. One of the reasons I picked this particular quad copter model in the first place is because it and the controller fits snuggly in the luggage boot on the back of my motorcycle. I took them both out and marched into the field, documenting my movements on video with one of my other cameras. Once I reached the middle of the field, I turned on the drone, turned on its camera, took a deep breath and then sent her up.

The drone rose beautifully into the blue Florida sky.  Using the right-hand controls I moved her to the left, stopped and then swung back to the right. She responded. So far so good. I pushed the right lever forward and she shot ahead, still rising. She was getting pretty far away from me, so I pulled the lever back, which should have put her into reverse. But something was wrong. She seemed to be slowing, but she was still drifting forward. I pushed the lever forward. She titled her front down and moved forward like she was supposed to. I pulled the lever back. Once again, she seemed to slow a little, but she didn’t fly back. Now she was so far away that she was barely a white dot. She was like a dog that had run off and refused to come back. She was flying away. I didn’t know what to do. So I panicked and cut the power. I watched her drop out of the sky and fall into a distant clump of trees.

I just stood there holding the controller with both hands, staring blankly into empty space. The experience at the Artegon Mall was infuriating. This was worse. It was like the final blow. I only had my craft in the air for a few seconds. Not even a full minute. Just a few seconds. And she’d simply flown away. Now she was gone. And there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. So I just stared.

When it finally became clear that wistful thinking was not going to bring my drone soaring back to me, I began slowly walking out of the field, back to my bike with the now useless controller hanging from one hand by my side. I felt like a fool. An idiot. An imbecile. A bumbling, incompetent moron. Stupid. No, worse. Inept. Ridiculous. And seriously Lame. But oddly enough, not angry. Maybe it was that I’d almost expected something like this. I figured the drone was a goner and I was wondering, in a disgusted sort of way, if I should even bother to buy another one and try again when something in the distance caught my eye.

It was a small white spot standing out against the bright green of the grass I could see through a stand of trees a good quarter mile away. Could it be that the drone wasn’t lost, I thought, staring at the spot, but had landed there instead? I didn’t know. That little white patch of something could be a discarded newspaper, a McDonalds bag or a rock or almost anything. I certainly didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I quickened my pace to the bike anyway. When I got there I casually put the controller back in the boot and put my helmet on. Every now and then I glanced back and the mysterious white spot, hoping it hadn’t walked away.

It didn’t. I drove all the way back to the park entrance. There, on the lawn by the side of the road, was my drone. She had come down inside a clump of Cypress trees to land upright on the grass in between them. I was beyond surprised. Had I cut the power a second sooner, she’d be snuggly in the branches at the top of a tree. Had I cut it a few seconds later, she’d have come down in the road. I put her back in the boot. There was no point in pressing my luck.

But I wasn’t done for the day. Just down the road on the corner of Holden Avenue and Orange Blossom Trail is a long defunct shopping center with a still-open Auto Zone store on one end and an Aldi Supermarket on the other. In between are a lot of empty stores and facing them is a huge empty parking lot. I used to like to ride skateboards there. So I nicknamed the area Ghetto Skateland.

I stopped there to buy a bottle of Winking Owl Merlot at Aldi. I’m still not sure what made me decide to take the drone out for one more flight at Ghetto Skateland. Maybe it was the good memories of the place. I remember one time when I was skating and pulled off a really nice maneuver of some kind and had two garishly dressed hookers (common on OBT) standing on the sidewalk give me a round of applause. You don’t soon forget something like that.

So I pulled the bike in the dead center of the empty field of parking lot and took out the drone. I realized that if I lost control she wouldn’t come down on a lawn. She’d come crashing down in the middle of the OBT, which is a merciless six-lane highway.  But somehow it felt good there. So I sent her up.

The flight was everything the flight at Cypress Grove Park wasn’t. I had decent control. She didn’t fly away from me. She responded to each command like an eager puppy. Even landing wasn’t bad. For the first time since I started learning to fly the thing, it was fun.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’d be able to get this right after all.







 

Truth and Everything

Beach Bum's Birthday

The Drone Pilot Chronicles, Part Two

Welcome to The Drone Pilot Chronicles, Part Two.

As you might have read last time, I am bound and determined to learn to fly my new quadcopter drone. I specifically bought it last November to enhance my Last Wanderer of Mars episodes with the addition of some aerial footage every now and then. At the time, I treated the purchase the same way I would the purchase of any other camera.

But this thing isn’t just any other camera. This is a flying camera. And that makes this a challenge.

The Syma X5C-1 Quadcopter Drone

What I have is a Syma X5C-1 quadcopter with a tiny HD camera attached to its belly. After tons of trial and error (admittedly mostly error) the badly converted-from-Chinese Instruction Manual is starting to make some sort of sense. But that’s only after watching a ton of on-line tutorials and as many crash-and-burn test flights. The guys in the tutorials say that this drone is so easy to fly that your grandmother could fly it. They put it into the air and it does exactly what they say it should do. They make it hover. They make it do flips in the air. Hell, they just toss it into the air and start it with the controller before it falls.

But I think somebody needs to send my grandmother over, cause I can’t fly the thing at all.

Determined to become a competent drone pilot, I decided that training in the common backyard of my apartment complex was a bad idea. There’s plenty of open area, but not enough for a speedy little flying thing that doesn’t like to follow commands - or at least it doesn’t like following mine. There are lots of pine trees and two story building for it to crash into, not to mention Beach Bum’s tree beside the house -- Beach Bum being my gray-striped cat. The drone has crashed into that twice, once while Beach Bum was in it. The other time it got tangled in the branches and just hung there with its lights blinking uselessly until I jumped up and pulled it free.

So it became quickly obvious that I needed to find someplace else for test flights. There was a parking lot down the street from my apartment that I first considered. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t any bigger than my backyard, and one of its boundaries is a street. All I’d need was to crash-land the drone on that and have a passing car run over it. So, no good.

Then I remembered Artegon Mall which houses my favorite movie theater. It has a huge parking lot surrounding it like most malls do. And since the only three real draws are Ron Jon’s Surf Shop (no shit, an actual surf shop in Orlando Florida - I bought my long board there last summer since I get a 15 percent discount), a Bass Pro Shop and the Cinemark Theater, most people park in the front lots. The lots on the back side are nearly always empty. Of course they are riddled with scrubby little trees in planters (I often used to skate around those while waiting for a movie to start, something mall security was always getting upset with me about) but it was still worth a look as a potential launch point, so I decided to check it out.

What I found was a piece of serendipity. There is a huge, wide, empty grassy field bordering the back lot. I figured that it couldn’t be more perfect. Crashing on grass, particularly the type of thick grass you find all over central Florida, isn’t really like crashing at all. So after a disappointing movie (The Fifth Wave, a badly done teenybopper Divergent/Hunger Games/Twilight clone) I drove over to the field for a test flight.

I was excited. I took out another camera to document the flight. I walked into that field, set the drone on the thick soft grass, paired it with the controller, took a breath and then took off. Like I said, crashing on the thick turf that covered that field would be like crash landing on piles of foam rubber. Only that’s not where it crashed. It crashed behind me on the asphalt parking lot. Three times. Every time I carried it into the field and sent it up, it flew right out of the field straight into the lot. It was driving me crazy until I looked at the LCD display on the controller and noticed that it said “mode 2”.

Forehead palm.

The Syma controller is pretty much the same as any controller for any model helicopter or quad copter you might buy except for one thing. It has two modes of operation; mode one and mode two. Mode one is default. Mode two reverses some - but not all - of the controls. Since Syma sells its products on a worldwide market, I’m just imagining that the mode two configuration must be standard someplace, like maybe the Middleofnowherevia. Obviously if I had any hope at all of getting this thing in the air and having it stay there, I needed to change modes on the controller. I just didn’t know how. Somewhere in China, a somewhat inept interpreter sitting in front of a computer was laughing his ass off.

Defeated, I slumped over to the Artegon Mall parking lot on the other side of the road and picked up my sad little quad copter which was lying upside down on its propellers with its underside lights blinking mournfully. At least nothing on it had broken. This is a tough little flying machine. The propellers were scuffed from their contact with the asphalt, but nothing was out of alignment or broken. For that at least, I was impressed.

When I got home I discovered, just to ad insult to injury, that the camera hadn’t deployed so there was no video of the failed flights to learn anything from. At first I wanted to panic. I mean, really, without the camera, there wasn’t much point to having the drone in the first place. Fortunately, it was just a loose wire.

Relieved, I turned to the Instruction Manual. Sure enough, there was a procedure for changing modes on the controller. It was simple -- just slide the proper switch to the right while turning the controller on -- but it wasn’t anything I could have figured out standing out there in that field unless I did it by mistake, which is probably how the controller got in mode two in the first place. I put the drone on the floor and raised it halfway to the ceiling. Forward and backward controls worked the way they were supposed to. I landed it and turned it off before I could take out another lamp.

Tomorrow was another day. I’d either return to that field or find another. One way or the other, I was going to master this. I will become a drone pilot. Just not today.

The Future of Wandering

This year, The Last Wanderer of Mars is going to look different.

Not that it’s ever looked bad. Last year I produced 23 episodes of Wanderer. I took viewers skateboarding, surfing and up in the air on a helium balloon. I

Episode 23

them what a high-speed motorcycle ride was like from behind the handlebars. I took them to Walt Disney World for a ride under the sea on the Little Mermaid and on a real underwater adventure at a mysterious island called Egmont Key where we explored a ghost fort both on land and under the

Episode 24

emerald green Atlantic. We went to Epcot to sample the cuisine at the International Food and Wine Festival and to Universal Studios to go face-to-face with a Velociraptor. I showed them what it was like to perform as a psychopath at the world’s biggest Halloween party, Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. I sampled the hottest hot sauce I could find; gave my viewers tips on

Episode 29

barbecuing, demonstrated how to hard boil an egg and showed them how to effectively peel it. I revived a beloved cult favorite television show from the 1960s using an audio track and some spare

parts and then gave everyone the formula for success: namely, one part Vermouth to two parts Gin.

All in all, it was quite a year. Most of these shows were shot on either a Canon Sure Shot (which sadly fell, irreparably broke and was given last rites at the bottom of a pond), a Nikon 12.0 mega pixel Coolpix, a Pentax 14 mega pixel waterproof WG-1 or the camera on my Iphone 4s. The video I produced was edited using Windows Moviemaker 2.6, which is the version that originally came with Window Vista. Serious videographers are shaking their heads about now. Moviemaker isn’t exactly Final Cuts, and I have to admit it seriously limits what I can do. The program only accepts AVI or WMV formats, so anything I shot on the Iphone had to be converted. And converting mp4 video to AVI results in a noticeable drop in video quality as well as an occasional loss in audio sync. Not only that, but that version of Moviemaker doesn’t produce finished product in wide screen.

In other words, it ain’t paradise. But it was what I could afford last year, namely free. So one makes do.

Well, for this year I’ve made a couple of technical additions. I’ve gotten a new editing program, Adobe Premiere, which includes a special effects generator called After Effects. That’ll take a while to learn, but it will be worth it. I’ve

added a GoPro Hero 3+ camera to my arsenal. You can see the test results of this marvelous little sports camera in two of last year’s episodes, It’s All About the Ride and Doing the Martian March.

And I’ve gotten another new video camera as well, one that I’m seriously excited about. It’s the little camera attached to the underbelly of a Syma X5C-1 quad copter drone. Once it’s up and flying, it’ll add a new dimension to the videos I produce. Think of the advantage of aerial photography. That will help to tell stories in a whole different way. Besides, I’ve always loved flying.In fact, it was the subject of three of my favorite episodes,   Wandering Through the Sky

from "Wandering Through the Sky"

from 2014, Airdance from 2015 and another 2015 show, Drone, which dealt directly with quad copters, in that case my friend Bryan’s Phantom II which chased me around a Lowe’s parking lot where I was skating. 

The video from one of these drones is awesome. And the camera on my Syma quadcopter is surprisingly good, especially given the price I paid for it. But there is one little hang up. Actually flying it. Becoming a drone pilot isn’t as easy as you might think. The drone is remote controlled, of course. The controller has duel joysticks. The right one controls lift, descent and rotation. The left stick controls forward, backward, left and right movement and all the subtle variations in between. Two sets of LED lights on the underside of the

Syma X5C-1 drone

drone designate front from rear so that you know which way to send it. Easy peesy, right? Wrong. All this is tricky and complicated, especially if you aren’t used to it. A kid growing up with an X Box would probably find this easier to sort out than me. Which reminds me of an old Groucho Marx line in which he said, “this is so simple a two year old could figure it out…send me a two year old cause I can’t make heads of tails of it.”

The fact that the owner’s manual, which comes in the box with the quad copter, is actually a translation of Chinese text doesn't make it any easier to figure out. Course, this isn’t much of a surprise since the Syma X5C-1 - like my motorcycle, my coffee maker, my microwave oven and just about everything else I own these days - comes from China. I’m sure that whoever actually did the translation was probably hired because - being bilingual and all - he was considered very clever by the company. However, being bilingual and actually being good at it are two entirely different things. That’s why the user’s manual is rife with practically indecipherable statements like “…when the quad copter battery is not enough, the rotors will be stopped power as the quad copter control system will protected battery automatically” or my favorite, “This product is not a toy but a precisive equipment that integrating mechanics and electronics with expertise of aerodynamics and high-frequency transmitting.” Oh yes, and don’t forget, “This R/C flying model is a high dangerous commodity. Please make sure that it should be flied away from the crowd.”

When I first took the manual out of the box and handed it to the two-year old, he took one look at it and shot himself.

Fortunately, the days when you would be at the mercy of a manual like this one are long in the past. If you need to find lessons in flying, all you have to do is Google it. Just type in the name of the drone and, like magic, up pops a number of sources where you can buy it, written versions of the instructions on how it works and a whole plethora of video tutorials about how to fly it.

 Woot!

Course, don’t put on your flying ace jacket just yet. Just because you can finally make sense of the controls doesn’t mean you can work them any better than that interpreter could translate Chinese into English first time out. That’s why I turned it on in the living room, lifted off and took out a lamp. Hovering isn’t easy. A micro inch one way or the other on the control and you’re into a frigging wall. That’s when I put the blade guards on. Okay, so this is a little like putting training wheels on a bike while you’re learning to ride it (damn good way to get beat up by your older brothers jeering friends) but it’s better than replacing the props. Good thing too. When I took it outside and took off, it veered right into Beach Bum’s tree, which would have been a helluva surprise to him had my kitty been sitting in it at the time. I guess the instruction manual should have read: “Please make sure that it should be flied away from the cat’s tree.“

However, anything worth doing is worth working at to do right. And until I get it down, the results can be comical. So my next episode of The Last Wanderer of Mars will be called Pilot, and not just because I decided to take the junk in one corner of the room and pile it in the other. This will be the chronicle of my journey to become a competent drone pilot.

And here’s a preview of what that will look like.

Like I said at the beginning, this year The Last Wanderer of Mars is going to look different.

Davy's Egg cellent Discovery

The End of Beetlejuice