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This week I had to renew my FAA 3rd Class Medical Certificate, an event that has to happen every two years once you get over 40, 40 being the official age from which everything goes downhill it seems. Everything was groovy until the vision test which I knew was going to be a toughie. I’ve had 20/20 vision all my life until the last couple of years. People told me that my eyesight would do downhill rapidly at 40 which I thought was kinda silly, everyone is different. But it seems not, my near vision has taken quite a hit in the last couple of years.

So I get to the eye machine and to my amazement I can read the bottom line each time, I’m doing great! But then the doc says “now for the near vision test”, first slide and I could feel my eyes go every which way but focussed. After my fail the doctor welcomed me to the “long arm club”. I got my certificate but it has been endorsed with “Must have available near vision correction lenses”. I think I am officially old.

Thought I’d share my latest, um, pastime – I’m going to try building my own plane, and so I’ve created a website for it:

Not sure if I have the skill, time or money to get it done but we’ll find out, click on the image to go to the site and subscribe for the day by day progress.

There’s also a Flickr collection that will carry photos as I take them. I’m currently about a third of the way through the rudder but the project is on hold while I go to the UK for some work and some vacation.

Today marks 41 years since Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon’s surface. Which made me think of this great bit from Eddie Izzard:

They went to the Moon and they brought back rock. Trouble is, we’ve got rock. That was the one thing we didn’t need, wasn’t it? “Rock, Neil? I don’t know whether you looked at the planet before you took off, but it’s made of fucking rock!” “But it’s Moon rock …” “Oh, fucking hell, this is Earth rock, Neil, come on! Have you heard, on the stock market, rock’s gone up three points? No, it hasn’t, has it? ‘Cause it’s fucking rock!”

Last weekend, as part of our 8th anniversary celebration, I took Teri for a balloon ride at the Temecula Balloon and Wine Festival. She had said for a long time that she’d love to take a balloon ride so I had been looking at all the options nearby and discovered that, for an extra fee, you could go up during the festival when 40-50 other balloons would be doing the same. Sounded like the way to do it so I went for it.

I thought I’d find the heights hard to deal with because I don’t do well near balconies on tall buildings but there was actually no sense of height from within the balloon at all. I was happily leaning over the side looking around and down. And the balloon moves effortlessly with very little sense of motion. It is cosy in the basket, and quite hot from the burners, but I’d highly recommend it.

I had my trusty Aiptek video camera with me and once again it took some awesome video for such a cheap camera. Here is a video from the balloon:

and some video of the pilot and crew taking the balloon down:

Finally, there are some pictures on my flickr account. Unfortunately neither of us had a proper stills camera with us to have taken more.

As already stated, I’ve ditched the iPhone for a Droid Incredible and now that I’ve had it for a week though I’d try to summarise my thoughts. Let’s get the big question out of the way: how does it compare to the One True Phone?

My first impression was that the Incredible feels every bit as nice to hold as the iPhone, though it’s probably a bit lighter and thinner. Turn them both on though and you’ll be blown away by the sharpness and clarity of the Incredible. It’s like one is 1080p and the other is watching a black and white TV set that’s using rabbit ears to watch a channel 100 miles away.

A lot of people seem to hate the Sense UI, preferring the native Android UI (which is a lot more like the iPhone) but I find it really engaging. Things swirl onto screen, widgets come alive when something alerts them, it’s an experience rather than just scrolling through pages of rows of look-alike buttons. Maybe it will become annoying over time, maybe not.

I hadn’t realised what a big difference multitasking makes and, if it works the same way, iPhone 4.0 users are in for a treat. Friday driving home I was using Google’s turn by turn nav program while listening to Pandora over my MINI’s stereo. At one point I got a new gmail alert, clicked on it and while reading the email (with eyes firmly on the road, of course officer!) Pandora was automatically muted so that the nav app could tell me I needed to take a right turn in half a mile. I deleted the email, clicked on the satnav task button and my map was back on the screen. More about this on my MINI blog later; the google nav app is a big winner.

People are complaining about the keyboard on the Incredible. I’m finding the keyboard easier to use than on the iPhone but I’m not as fast on it, I seem to not be able to use more than one thumb. I love the haptic feedback, feels very good on the tips. And it’s easier to type cuss words than on the iPhone :)

Some things I definitely miss: it’s impossible to turn the Incredible on one-handed. I’m used to using the thumb on the centre button to wake up the phone, you can’t do that on the Incredible and the placement of the switch at the top left makes it impossible for me so far to do it one handed. The Android Marketplace simply does not compare to the App Store and a few of the apps I used a lot on the iPhone are cut down versions on Android or just not available. This is a disappointment but also (as a developer) an opportunity. I don’t see the Incredible becoming my Electronic Flight Bag like I had with the iPhone, but perhaps there will be an iPad in my future for that.

I am having some battery life issues which I cannot decide if it’s just the phone (lots of apps means lots of drain) or a faulty battery. A co-worker who bought his the same time as me is getting twice the life that I am getting, though I suspect his usage is much less. But right now I’m finding I have to charge it every day and this is without making any calls, just data. I’m trying different schemes to turn off syncing, wifi etc and that is helping but ultimately I think I will buy an extended life battery so it will last longer. I’m used to having to charge my iPhone every two days so this isn’t that much of an issue, especially given that the Incredible is doing a lot more, but is far from great.

The big win, however, is with the device’s core purpose: telephony. No matter where I was with the iPhone, I could barely hear any call made on it. I think this is partly the device and partly AT&T’s dismal call quality in 90% of the land (yes, Luke Wilson I am calling you a liar). Calls on the Incredible have so far been crystal clear and so loud that I have to turn the volume down rather than up.

Verizon has 3G coverage where I live, AT&T only has Edge so my smart device can be smart almost everywhere I go. It’s embarrassing to whip out the iPhone to do a search for someone and then make them wait 5 minutes to download and render the result. Verizon 3G is fast, I am surprised by just how fast it is. Although I think this is also the phone, the CPU runs at twice the speed of my iPhone 3G and web page rendering is so much faster than on the iPhone 3G.

So am I happy? You betcha. I’ve managed to free myself from Steve Jobs’ tyranny and not had to compromise my experience to do so. I did not expect that, I really thought that I’d suffer through owning a different phone but so far I’m lovin’ it. I know most people who already have an iPhone can’t look at anything else but if you’re not completely wed to the Apple device I definitely recommend taking a look at the Incredible.