Alright.. this is my last week of internship here at NVIDIA... The great news is that it's not over.
In the middle of the internship, I got an offer for a full time position that I could just not turn down... So if everything goes as planned, Ill be back here by the end of September.

I'll move to a new place with a co-worker/roommate. Still in Santa Clara so that's great !

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This week end, I went flying with Bruno for a little training on the C152, some manoeuvers over the San Pablo Bay. The class B transition was just beautiful ! Low overcast clouds over San Francisco of course, and for the first time I didn't even see the golden gate bridge ! It was burried under the clouds ! Just too cool...

Take a look at this picture of the Sutro Tower from above the clouds...

The other day, I was chatting with a friend and he was asking me how was San Francisco... Actually, during the past 6 months here, I only went there 5 or 6 times... In fact, I flew above San Francisco way more times than I drove there... Which is quite amusing :-)

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People say you can't do much in the US without a car... that's right... And I've found out, here, a lot of people are proud of their cars, putting stickers, special license plate frames and such... So I had to do it... okay, my car is far from being ubber shiny, but I'm proud to represent my people :-) Click on the picture on the left to find out how !

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These six months have been intensive on the aviation side... I have flown a lot, and more importantly, learned a LOT... compared to the poor ratio I had when I was studying in paris, that's a big change !

I've uploaded a dump of random pictures I had in my pics directory.

You can find the pictures here (they include pics of the Mount Hamilton for those who care ;-))

Next is formation flying... That was something I rarely had the occasion of doing in France for some reason...

I found a good pal, Bruno, an french nvidian as well. He introduced me to Lou Fields, a navy veteran who I could listen to for hours... I flew to Oakland in July to get a course with him on formation flying and a quick introduction flight... It was something I enjoyed so much...

I have some pictures of these flights here.

Oh FYI, I'll be back in France for a little more than two weeks from the 10th to the 27th of september.

Happy Landings !

If there's one thing that the Garmin 96c sucks at, it's receiving on a high wing airplane... 
I've been checked out on a Cessna 152 and I noticed that the GPS reception was poor... Like no satellite reception when the unit was on my laps... Even worse last week when I flew IFR with a friend of mine in the back seat of a 172... The GPS was worthless... I guess unless I get one of these ridiculously expensive antennas, it won't get any better...

About 4 months ago a coded a little application for my pocket PC that used my bluetooth GPS. It was based on a sample from the Pocket PC SDK and even though it was doing its job, outputing Google Earth Tracks, it was still kind of rough on the edges... I took a photograph during the IFR flight so you can have a look at the poor design :) (the one on the right)

This week end, I flew with that friend again, but this time I was at the controls... pretty good flight... of course, my fellow GPS was recording our tracks... At the end of the flight my friends, Bruno, expressed interest in using this tracking software...

I'm trying to book flight tickets for September... but I'm facing fares madness...
Let’s take a simple example, which is the oddest of all... Direct flight from Paris to San Francisco on Air France: $4400... of course, it’s coach, not business... kinda steep don’t you think ?

Alright, Julie got a round trip for a little more than 500 bucks last month... so why is this one way ticket so expensive...
To try and figure it out, I tried changing my request to a round trip, with a return flight sometimes later, say December for Christmas and stuff.
Guess what, it went down to $700 !

Where’s the logic in that ???
They probably mixed up the idea of money with something else, but I can’t figure out what it is...

Try playing with Air France’s or any company’s website... changing start and end dates... there’s just no way to get the best flight unless you spend a month checking each possible combination... and even then, those you already tested would have changed price about a million times in between...

I Googled a bit to see if anyone had written something about it...
I found an article from Keith Devlin entitled “The crazy math of airline ticket pricing”.

Here are a few quotes I like about the article :

• “it’s like chasing the end of a rainbow...”
• “it could take the fastest computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to find the solution”
• “You can get a sense of just how complicated the real situation is when you consider that with airlines offering thousands of different fares, with different sets of rules governing the different legs on each trip, if two people take a round trip together, with three flights in each direction, there can be as many as 1,000^12, or around 10^36, fare combinations. If you printed out a ticket for each possible fare, the pile would stretch all the way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four light years way.”

Alright, I give up... next time I’ll just search for half an hour and book the cheapest I can find in this time frame... no point in wasting time...

I'm in the middle of writing my internship report... It's due August 25th... Taking into account the time it'll take for me to send it to France... I'd rather be finished by this week end...

Anyways... when I started writing it, I remembered a post on digg.com about how serif fonts were apparently the magical key to good grades in papers...

A quick search on the site lead me to this page where the writer makes a comparative analysis of the average grades he got based on the font he used.

Turns out, sans serifs fonts like Arial, Trebuchet MS or Verdana are probably not the best picks :)
They would not look academically enough...

On the other end, Georgia appears to be the bad-grades-free font...

This is the reason why my report is now being written in Georgia font... just like this very piece of the post...
Don't I appear smarter now that I'm writing with Georgia ??

We'll see in a couple of months ;-)

Great news for all of the flight sim fans out there !

Microsoft Game Studios just released a demo version of FSX ! It's the first ever demo in the history of FSX.

It's downloadable on GameSpot and on Clubic.fr

Have fun !

Here's an overview of all the GPS tracks I have recorded since I've been here... I find that pretty cool !
Guess where my home base is ?

This other one on the right is a close up of Palo Alto Airport. I'll keep recording all my flights, I just love to review these at home...