Flyin’ and Ridin’

Rant on.

When will YOU (FS) public relation people (do they really exist???) learn to write something more original to us news editors ? After more than 5 years at simFlight and 3 years at Avsim I am getting extremely and hopelessly bored by the continuous bloated texts that people submit us every day.

5 out of 10 PR’s start with the same wording…..

“XXX is proud to announce….” or “…. XXX released the long-awaited….”. Or even worse “XXX now released the eagerly awaited…”. Or how about this one: “… XXX published the much acclaimed….”.

Come on guys, how dumb do you think our readers are? THEY are getting bored too! And an only slightly critical reader may want to know ‘much acclaimed’ by whom !!?? Yourself, no doubt! And who decides if ‘we’ are ‘eagerly awaiting’ anything from you ? Sure, it may happen at times, but more often than not these sort of ‘hot air’ texts are being thrown on to us by the most obscure of ‘companies’ in the business… ones that often have only one or two products out.

Oh, and yes, WE are proud of our achievements too (although often getting them on the market causes more headaches than joy) but do we need to go around and tell the world that we’re so proud of ourselves? Nope. So why do you !?? There are enough ‘egos’ in this crummy world already!

So, to make life for us editors AND readers just a tad more enjoyable, why not change your publicity blurbs to something more original?? Here are a few examples for you:

“XXXX knows you have not been waiting for this, but we still thought to publish the new ‘product x’. See if it fits your stable, who knows? Available here…”

or

“We at XXX got so bored lately that we decided to make a new product after all, and since we can’t just use it for our own pleasure we’re offering it for sale here….”

Perhaps not brilliant, but more akin to the truth and it just MIGHT attract MORE ATTENTION than the boring and inflated ‘proud and eagerly’ bunch of bloated PR’s.

Rant off.

That’s my thought for the weekend for ya! Come to think of it, I’ll try some of my own medicine, too. After all, I’m a FS PR bloke (for hire!) myself.

Have a great one!

Yup, some Flightsim news at last.

I just put Joe Watson’s Florida GA Airport enhancements parts 3 and 4 up on the FSAddon.eu site, nicely wrapped in a Flight1 wrapper, so to speak.
Each title costs only $ 11.11 and adds a host of enhanced airfields in Central Florida again. For FSX, mind you!

I am also working on building a full collection of all of them and put them on a CD….. for those customers who rather get something in the snail mail as opposed to the electronic version.

Heck, we may even give a discount if buying all 4 together !

Not officially, but in all practicality it is ! Temps of 27 C in stead of the usual 16 C are definitely making it feel like Summer. I now dress in shorts, no socks and t-shirt, whereas I was typing this dressed in a fleece sweater and jeans only weeks earlier !

I now run outside to get the sun shades up to keep the house cool during the day ! And everything already smells different.

We also took the opportunity to make a long ride (10 hours to travel to the southernmost tip of the country and back: see our trip here !)

I haven’t been posting a lot, mainly because I don’t want to bore you with all the problems we’re currently having, especially with my parents. It is more fun to tell about ‘good things’, right?

Truth is, there aren’t many at this time. The Lysander still isn’t flying in FSX, and so the other aircraft projects are also on hold. Sales are the worst ever and that doesn’t really help in making any investments in new products. I wish our American friends would get their act together and their economy would pull out of the quagmire there. But that ‘ain’t gonna happen anytime soon’. So we’re stuck for now……. no sales, no money, not much hope of improvement anytime soon.

Sooooo…. we’d better start focusing on other means of survival, right? Hand me some ideas !

….. as opposed to commercial stuff is that at least you havent’ paid for it if it all goes wrong !

I am trying to install a new version of PostNuke on one of my servers, following advice of some experts, and it has been one big frustrating effort for two days already so far! Support is sketchy, depending on who’s around and what skills they have. Documentation is aimed at geeks (okay, so I am exaggerating slightly). And guessing what’s causing all the problems is not within reach.

So yes, it is free, and commercial software doesn’t always run either, but how much time can one lose on this stuff !!??

After two tiresome road trips, an as usual rather ’stressy’ stay with our relatives, and some good time with friends we hadn’t seen for some time, we’re back home.

We want to leave Holland because it has become too full, impossible to drive/ride in, and too ‘regulated’ for law-abiding citizens. Well, here’s some news: Germany is no alternative anymore !

Where it was the ONE country one could still enjoy fast travel on their much-hyped ‘Autobahns’, and the place where I did regular trips with speeds well in access of 150 mph, it has now degenerated to ‘just another’ full Western European country with too many cars and too many restrictions.

I tell you, driving was my main hobby for more than 50 years…… well, no more.

Riding still is, but preferably on roads less-traveled and with a different mindset than 20 years ago. No more ’sports’ riding, but just having fun seeing wonderful things, experiencing ‘places’ and taking pride in precise and controlled maneuvering.

Anyway… back to the grind, lots of things to do before our next trip

I won’t bore you with my angry tales just now…… some things never change apparently. Today is our last day here, so hopefully we’ll only have another MINOR ‘run-in’ with the authorities at the Romanian border and then be on our way…… HOME!

Meanwhile, I’ve posted two short photo stories on my travel site here.

In general the visit was good, Nina’s father is doing okay, annoying the rest of the family in his usual manner…. so all is good Romania is sowly making progress in a number of areas, but none of them really important….. like having a brand new ‘hypermarket’ with Western goods but at ‘western prices’ is not exactly what this country needs…. although most people believe differently. At first.

We’ll make a stop-over at friends near Vienna and spend a day with them, then make another stop to see an old friend in Frankfurt, and then back home to see how Mom is doing.

Can’t wait to get on the bike and make a long ride in some good weather, if only to get rid of all the problems for a day or so…..

Hope you’re all doing well. Will report back on Tuesday next week !

….. what do you do!? Keep smiling, as hard that may be sometimes.

Since last Wednesday a few things turned significantly ’south’. The MAIN one being my mon’s health. She’s almost 89 now and had been in hospital for three days the week before, for intestinal tests. Until now she’d NEVER been ill… can you imagine?

Wednesday I took her and my father to hospital again to talk to the doc and hear the results.
They were not good.
95% certainty of malignant tissue, i.e. cancer.

I could only sit there with them and stare at mom. How would you feel if someone told YOU that you have cancer….. now how would you feel if a doc tells you one of your loved ones has it!!?? What does one do at such a time? We all stayed upright, swallowed, asked ’sensible’ questions, and then went home and had some apple pie.
Mom says she’s not going away anytime soon and will continue to pester us a few more years.
I’ll have to call them today…. she’s been in for a scan, and another one tomorrow.

Next I drove up to fill up the tank of the Jeep, which I planned to ‘load up’ for our ‘voyage’ to Romania the next day. The Jeep had just been serviced 2 weeks ago, and gotten new brake pads and discs!
During the 20 mile drive it started making noises somewhere at the rear wheels. Sure sounded like one of the brakes were ’stuck’.
And sure enough, after the tank stop it would hardly move anymore !! Called the garage and the rest of the day was spent waiting for a tow truck, a trip on board for me and the Jeep to the garage, where it got fixed just before 5 p.m.

The entire day was shot to pieces!

We still managed to load it, get up at 3:30 the next morning and be on our way to Vienna at 5.
The next day took us through Hungary and into Romania, both now part of the European Union and for the first time in our 36 years of travel there we had a civilized border crossing…. just like the ‘real thing’.

The next thing that went wrong was my planned Internet access. I had investigated a solution, and planned a short term subscription to a wireless connection with help of our niece Camy.
But - not really surprising in hindsight - the girl at the local ISP’s sales office had no idea what I was talking about, the second shop was already closed when we got there, and my connectivity a non-fact!

I am typing this on a connection from another relative, after 5 days without Internet… an absolute record for me… and a major PITA!

Now I have to call my parents to see how Mom fared today….. counting the days till we leave for ‘the West’ again !

Love from Romania,
Nina and Francois

A while back I wrote about the ‘crack’ FSX has caused in our markets. Rupture would be a better word. We now more often than not have to choose to build stuff for FS9 OR for FSX… both is simply not possible for many kinds of add-on products.

On top of that ‘difficult’ market we now also have this thing called ‘recession’, sparked in the US and triggered (to a large part) by the invention of the credit card and the US culture of relentless lending, that set in after the 2nd World War or thereabouts. Add to that the now all too common unstable world and the fact that nowadays everything is ‘linked’ in some way or other, and we have the perfect cocktail for a disaster waiting to happen. Recession.

Sad thing is that it now also starts affecting countries and regions outside of the US…. BECAUSE everything is linked. So now WE cannot sell our house because the housing (mortgage) market in the US collapsed….. swell!

Anyway, we’ll survive, and so will most people I guess. Not entirely sure that all of the FS add-on makers will, though.

The above is meant as an intro to an interesting article that Arnie Lee of Abacus Publishing (one of the few larger FS add-on retailers) wrote. He’s still happily selling (as is simMarket), so apparently not all is lost. Read his article here. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Arnie!

Johnny Cash’s old song about his time in the US Army in Germany always gets into my head when sitting here at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, with the smell of coffee and fresh bread baking in the bread machine in my nose (although I don’t smell or hear anything much anymore these days).

Don’t you love Sunday mornings too? With the whole day still ahead of you, giving the chance of doing so many things…. Until the evening comes and time is running out fast… and the work week approaching!

For now, I’ll just hum the song and enjoy MY Sunday morning… hope you’re enjoying YOURS too!

On Thursday we’ll be loading up the Jeep with ‘goodies’ and head East to see Nina’s relatives in Romania. Our yearly ‘pilgrimage to Deva’, so to speak (the town she is from and where her family lives), triggered by the Orthodox Easter which for reasons unbeknown to me is 6 or so weeks AFTER the Easter we have here in the West.

Whatever… it means leaving our home, leaving my office, endless driving, many 100’s of liters of petrol and hopefully no adventure *seen enough of that these past 35 years).

On our way back we’ll visit friends near Vienna and friends near Frankfurt, making it a 4-day return trip.

We’ll be here again on May 5th…. now you’ll excuse me; have to make backups, store them in a safe place, copy mail to the notebook and do a gazillion other things before we turn the ignition key!

Yes, I am pretty quiet lately. One of the reasons is that we are really busy with a number of things (’we’ being me and FSAddon’s associated developers).

Here’s some of the ‘other things going on:

- Jürgen Lechleitner is building us a number of airfields from Austria and Germany. ‘Mountain fields’ I think we could call them. (FS2004)

- AJWeber has joined our ranks of scenery builders and is hard at work at modeling San Diego Naval Base in high resolution and detail (FSX) !

- Last but not least our Lysander and Cessna 180 are not the only aircraft projects: we have started research, data gathering, talks and planning on the Fleet Finch. This project will be aimed of not only bring in some much needed ‘bucks’ for its developers, but ALSO in helping ‘The Tiger Boys’, a group of people who keep these wonderful old aircraft flying! (The Tiger Boys website).

From Phil Taylors blog comes some good news for us simmers : “…..In an excellent piece of good news, Adam Szofran, late Terrain Dev lead of Aces, has returned to the fold. And we are glad to have him back!…”

So are we, guys, so are we !

Life sometimes has good surprises! A few weeks ago I received a ‘glossy’ in the mailbox called ‘Grafisch Weekblad’. It is about the printing industry in The Netherlands. I didn’t ask for it, I don’t even qualify for it (anymore), so I was curious and looked in the back to find the colophon.

To my surprise I recognized the names of the two Managing Editors! They are old class mates from my long forgotten time at school, more than 30 years ago !! So today I called Cees, and it really sounded as if time had stopped. He sounded just as I remembered him. Hi Cees !!

We plan to meet for real sometime in the next few weeks. That will be fun!

On another note…. I have started to build a new website (YES, I KNOW what I wrote on Monday ). I figure that to drive traffic to my EuropeRides site I need something more than what’s out there now. So the new site will be a NEWS SITE, focused on European Motor Touring, and harboring the many hundreds of interesting URL’s I have collected over the years. I’ll get it up and running sometime after we return from Romania. Stay tuned!

Actually, I’ve never had that habit. But I am doing it ‘virtually’ now. I have this ‘issue, if you like, of not knowing what to do next.

You probably know I am trying to build a new life, after having lost my job, now already 3 years ago (May 1st). I have sworn to only do things I really LIKE doing (or ‘love doing’ preferably), things I am GOOD at, and do them in MY OWN way, not somebody else’s.

That’s all very well, but the troubles are mounting. I love doing MANY things, for one. So I dabble in writing, I run flightsim websites, I run my own websites (flightsim and motorcycle related), I dabble in photography, design, build and maintain websites for others, try and set up a motor touring company, run a flightsim add-on design company…. you’ve seen me do it I suppose.

Basically there are two main threads here: flight simulator (related) activities and motorcycle (related) activities. And what I REALLY would like to do, i.e. writing books.

I am chewing my finger nails trying to decide if I should continue this chosen route, trying to make BOTH work over time and save our sorry (financial) asses within the next 3 years, or drop one….. or even both.

To make the matter more complex, I find new things to add almost every week……. need to slap my own wrist ever more often !

Difficult times, I can tell you. Fun, but difficult. Perhaps the trip to Romania will give me 10 days to contemplate and come up with a solution. Meanwhile, I still love writing the blog……. and the forums, and the emails, and the books …. :-)))

Wishing you all a good week !