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