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John_Cillis

The Dungeon
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About John_Cillis

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    Arizona

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  1. I am not sure where to place this post, since it covers all the sims I use, and some of them are not flight simulators. I have noticed with the latest series of Nvidia drivers some good improvements in my sim performance. When I run Windows update as recommended, I go thru a few steps to follow up with the update with my latest video drivers. A recent Windows update has really amped up my sim performance and the speed of my system in a big way. There have been posts about uninstalling such updates and I just want to caution others--do not be a beta tester for someone making such posts, because all of our systems are not mirror images of my system or your system. All computers are in a phrase I love 'Equally different" in that way because it applies to all my friends here too. Sometimes some really bad advice I have gotten here has yielded very positive results, because it wakes up something I was taught but might have forgotten, I call it Zen and the Art of Computer Maintenance. We in our hobby have to have a Zen attitude, even though I don't know what that means, to work with the challenges that crop up from time to time so we can enjoy our various computer hobbies--for instance if I need a break from flying, because I take every flight seriously, I do not believe in crash landings, so if I have gimped my sim airplane, (insert pregnant pause).... .......I take a break and go to either a Star Wars sim which is fictional reality anyway, or my fav sims, Road to Knoxville, F1 2019, No Limits Coaster 2, and Trainsim 2019, and finally Jack Nicklaus Golf, since my father and I learned how to Golf from Sam Snead's book and I learned navigation from the Star's, by HA Rey, which removed my fear of the signs of the Zodiac, when I saw the star Sirius, it gave me so much joy, as I really feel we will make it there someday and find intelligent life.
  2. I have always loved that Alabeo aircraft, it was the epitome of low wing LSA's, which handle better in ground effect than high wing LSA's. That's why the Piper Cub edged out the 172 at Iasco's training program in Napa. The head of that program was the judge of my last grammar school science project in the eighth grade. I had read a book on hang gliding and the Rogallo wing. I used toothpicks, Elmer's glue, and Paper to make strutted Rogallo wings, about two inches in circumference. I would go to the choir loft in my grammar church school and just drop them. They had the perfect 4-1 glide ratio of the full size Rogallo wing. Like Bats out of Hell, they would sail between 50 and 75 feet from the loft, but unlike the Falcon and the Snowman, they did not make it to the altar--thank goodness, the candles there would have lit them on fire. Those were the days of those of us raised in church schools, but our elders there were not bothered by us playing in Sunday School. I won first place in that grammar school science fair, back in '75 which automatically entered me in the California State Science fair. Like Billy Elliott, I had to be grilled by a team of judges, with my father present. I was sweating bullets. But out of all the entries in that science fair, I was among a handful of students in each subject of science that got third place. It is better to show or win rather than place, lol... That's why I love those who show off their screenshots in this forum, it is flying when I am not in the mood for simming, just reading and relaxing... John
  3. Sometimes single screenshots give meaning to the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words"....
  4. I have Bus Simulator 18, which is similar to Euro Truck Sim, such sims are quite fun, but my fav two road race games I have on Steam, one is "Road to Knoxville" which I love and F1 2019. I was first raised in Sauk Village, IL, then Tinley Park, IL, and between 1964-1966 my folks would take me to the Sprint Car races where our family friend and Indy Hero Gary Bettenhausen would race, and our local Tinley Park Hero, Bud Kohler. I had a badge Bud gave me and I did not attend stock car races until I saw them in the Calistoga County Fair, and I'd see the demolition derbys, but I'd feel as all little boys and girls did every dent, ever collision, on those figure eight tracks. I was a huge hot wheels fan and I also had a toy which had airplanes that hung from hooks, and they flew down suspended from a 15 foot wire, my first Flightsim, lol, around the early 70's I recall, right around the time of my appendectomy. My first toy robot wasn't the one from Lost in Space, it was a robot called "Zintar", wish I still had it, Zintar was "My friend Mr Nobody" from Lost in Space, LOL, everyone has a spirit they remember as holy, the spirit of playfulness and joy. I finally saw one last stock car race, when a semi-pro racer and friend invited me to be with his pit crew at a race in Franklin Virginia, near Roanoke, in 2014, right before I went to work with American Airlines here in Phoenix. They actually held up the start of one of the races so I could cross the track and get to my friend WJ Alitzer and his Dad Jay Alitzer in the pits. It was his best finish to that point that year, he won third place and won $500, I was there when he collected his winnings. I believe in the following year he went all the way to win the championship, but like many race car drivers, the G forces on their neck cause a lot of nerve pain, so he gave up his passion for race car driving and went to work for Toyota. But because one of his fans was a child with cancer, he created a cancer charity for the race car drivers on their circuit, which included races in the Carolinas as well. He is quite an inspiration to me, as they say, there is always a bigger fish! John
  5. It is good to see that those on the ground and in the air were not too seriously hurt. I had the heartbreak of sitting home while I was working from home more than a decade ago, and I saw a Microlight Crash on TV near Lake Pleasant in Peoria, in far N/NW Phoenix. I recognized it immediately as the aircraft owned by the CFI who signed off on my Light Sport license, Jim Blumer. It took five hours of calling before I found out he and his passenger survived unhurt, and the Dope/Fabric of his beloved Challenger II did its job. It would have been a perfect engine out landing on Lake Pleasant Highway, but he clipped a roadsign. https://planecrashmap.com/plane/az/N107BW/ John
  6. This flight was recorded using Prepar3D, Flight Control Replay, and audio recorded in real time from LiveATC,net including Napa Ground, Tower, and Oakland Center.
  7. Wow! I had no idea the numbers were that high on this site. Even my own business when I was a performance tester at an online education program we only had about 3000-3500 hits a day, and our infrastructure did not allow traffic to go higher, if it did it would shut our site down because our contract with our ISP provider did not allow more traffic. Because we were an educational site with a Religious affiliation we often had DOS attacks and I was hired to give our devs and network admins Analytics and how to thwart them. Avsim is better positioned on a small budget to handle such attacks, with experienced server admins working in the background, and of course volunteers to boot. I couldn't give attention to a web site like that anymore since my leisure time, such as what I spend with our hobby, is the mainstay of how I enjoy semi retirement these days. I no longer develop freeware for the hobby, not because it bothered me, I just ran out of ideas and my aircraft design product of choice was Abacus's AC Cad program. Really the only successful project I did with that was my trike hosted here at Avsim, which somewhat works in P3D4.x although some parts look like they are made with Star Trek IV's Transparent Aluminum. I live and breathe for product announcements at Avsim, especially those products kept so under wraps that they surprise me, like Flight Control Replay that works so well with P3D4.X, a product for a small price that gives great flight playback. John
  8. This is a good program, I will tell you why, you must be a Nostradamus for us, a badly needed one for me. I believe the conflict I have had with Windows update is a program from ASUS called GPU Tweak II. It is a good program, but it seems to conflict with any update to certain Windows settings that any update, like this slick program you recommended, might cause. I ran the program, accepted only the recommended settings, but on restart once again, my latest GEForce experience driver was blown away. I thought "That's odd--that only has happened when Windows update has run". So instead of panicking, first I tried to install the latest driver from Geforce experience, since my screen resolution reverted back to the next lowest resolution my card and monitor support. GeForce experience said I had the latest driver installed, but my screen res told me otherwise. So I went to device manager, and deleted my Nvidia "device" and the driver software. My computer shut down, but did not restart. I do not get alarmed by that because I have write back caching disabled on my boot drive, just in case a file gets stuck in limbo and cannot be restored. It is a dangerous option and many systems of friends that have gotten hosed and had to be restored from a system restore DVD have had this option enabled. So I looked at my HD light, my power light and HD light was blinking, but like a patient in need of Oxygen, after all I had nuked my driver on purpose, but I have had to do this many times--since installing GPU Tweak II, I realized which Jim Young recommended and I still have no prob with his suggestion, it has worked for me well despite my Windows update issues, I will install it again now that my system is baselined, because as soon as it restarted, it was in my wanted screen resolution but devoid of the latest GEForce experience driver, which I just installed yesterday. My system is back at its original baseline, and I will see if the program you recommended allows me to choose when to run Windows update rather than having it forced upon me. Plus the program you recommended created a previous baseline restore point, just in case. Once again that is why Jim's insight and members like you, whose suggestions I have not seen often, helped me big time in solving a Whodunit case. I my case, I dunnit, and I now have a "Get out of Jail Free pass" thanks to your program suggestion. Now for some odd reason, since I stay online until about three AM local time, because I have a help desk for my family's computer issues overseas, I feel like playing Monopoly, always loved that game because everyone wins, because someone always has to put the money back in the box so we can play the game again... After all, it has less value than Bitcoin, it is money to burn and much more colorful than most country's currencies, lol... John -- One happy camper after reading your post!
  9. Without wading thru the other replies, I'd say about seven months ago or so, every Windows update has wiped my latest Nvidia driver update. After yesterday's upgrade (and I was still groggy from a weekend visit to the hospital for a minor brain clot), my Nvidia driver was wiped, my screen resolution was, as usual dropped to the next lowest resolution after the update. On restart I received a message that I was missing vender.dll. I googled the issue, some websites offered a download of it but I do not willy nilly download a dll from a website I do not trust, since within it could be some virus exploit caused by someone who is forcing these windows updates to begin with, which are happening more often. So when I lose my screen resolution, I always make sure I have a backup of my last GeForce Experience executable. So I have had to follow these steps since windows update first caused these issues: 1: Go to Display properties, remove the video driver that windows has been substituting in my most current driver's stead. My system goes blank, pauses for some minutes, then restarts, with its former resolution but with the missing vender.dll message. 2. I try a sim, usually Aerofly FS2 because it loads quite fast. I always get a driver error message, but Aerofly starts anyway, I just use this as quick confirmation that the Windows update has hosed my video driver. 3. I try to launch the last GeForce executable again, if it launches, I am in fair shape, if it cannot because of a file lock issue, then I go to the GeForce Experience website or program, if still on my system, and grab their most current driver. That is my system as it stands today, everything runs well, I always do a run of all my sims and between ground, sea, air and space sims, I have quite a few. So once I have a stable system, I have a stable system I have written Microsoft on these issues, my relationship with them goes way back to when I met Bill Gates and had a followup PC group meeting I chaired and Steve Ballmer showed up. Microsoft's current folks do not know Joseph, so to speak because I haven't communicated to anyone with Microsoft since the FS9/FSX betas. But someone with lower friends in higher places than I have needs to express to Microsoft that their latest updates are causing issues, which vary depend on how we have configured our systems, which drivers we use and so on. Reason I say this is my original Nvidia driver came from MSI, not from the GEForce experience site. I switched to GEForce experience so I could have the free game video capture my multimedia system lacked, so I think this is why this issue has slowly cropped up for some of us, if our drivers differ from the original driver we had if our systems were store bought, or we loaded a driver from another source than what we have today. So I have cited the issue and how I skirt it, but it is not a miracle cure because all of our systems very in some way or another, because we baseline our own systems based on the programs we use on them. John
  10. John_Cillis

    Whoops

    I always loved that actor, because whenever something pranked me in some way, like a friend or family, I would kind of make the same movements he would. I used to curse when I stubbed my toe but my young daughter, and your children always replace your parents as your mentors as you grow older in life, scolded me. So instead, if I stub my toe, which is worst than my hardest student flight practice landing at Falcon Field, i would just jump up and down like a loon, screaming "Mommy" at the top of my lungs until the slight shock that settles in sends our natural endorphins to help us cope with the pain. I have never understood how drug companies have not replicated endorphins, because our natural ability to handle pain was put in us by our evolutionary relationship with the stars and galaxies created from the birth of what they now believe is a multiverse, many individual collections of galaxies in their own gravitational nexus, so even if the original creation of what we see today as a distant past goes away, we will still have an endless source of re-coalescing energy sustaining a certain eternity, because even if our sense of the past ends our own personal sense of our personal future comes more from what we have enjoyed, like Kramer or Seinfeld (Seinfeld, followed by Cheers, Family Ties, Charles In Charge, Head of the Class and Benson were my fav comedies). Whenever I take my mountain bike for a ride, since I cannot own a car anymore due to arthritis my lower leg (it's the getting in and out, not the driving which is why I can still fly, because you either walk in an aircraft or lift yourself up a bit so you can sit down in one). Of course I forgot Newheart, simply because it poked fun at my chosen career, hospitality/F&B/Retail/Aviation/Publishing and the information tech that I chose to work on afterwards for those industries. This is a fun thread to follow, so I thought I would add to it.
  11. Oh well, wishful thinking, I do not have quite that much space free on my Orbiter drive, but maybe with a little bit of shuffling between my two HD partitions and my SSD drive, I can get the scenery, it would be fun to hang out in Space with some tribbles, lol...
  12. Very nice video, I love the background music and the landing reminds me of the only grass takeoff and landing I ever did, in a Luscombe 8A while visiting a friend and CFI in Penn. Handling a taildragger on grass is such a wonderful feeling, so smooth on takeoff. John
  13. I have added LiveATC to this short video from Falcon where I trained as a student pilot into Sky Harbor. It is a nice route and with LiveATC as a backdrop a fun little flight to share.
  14. Your ground textures look a bit sharper than mine in Orbiter, Which version of Orbiter, and are they a ground texture add-on, and which one? Great shots, good to see Orbiter shots from time to time, such a wonderful sim!
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