Yesterday, I hovered above Subic Freeport for the first time. Subic is a really good place.
Among the bays I’ve hovered, Subic Bay was the best. No wonder people there love sea-planing. The bay had smaller lagoons which really looked good up there.
Subic also has a good rainforest. I bet Zoobic Safari is located on that area.
When I was about to land at Subic Bay International Airport, I remembered that I received a NOTAM (Notice to All Airmen) upon entering their airspace. Unfortunately, I had a hard time decoding the NOTAM. I was alone on the plane and had no one knowledgeable about NOTAM to help me.
It took me around 10 minutes to figure out what the NOTAM said. It was just notifying airmen that some of their navigation aids were inoperable. It had no much bearing to me as my Cessna 172F does not use those navaids (they are mostly used big commercial jets). I landed visually as the visibility was very good.
Upon landing, I promised to myself to review on how to read NOTAMs. Hahaha.
Just to give you an idea, here’s a sample NOTAM taken from Wikipedia:
A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06
Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005
A)EGLL
B)0609050500
C)0704300500
E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN CL AND BLUE EDGE LGT. ADZ CTN
I can’t believe that the fact that it’s over a month since I last flown my Cessna 172F. Gladly, I’ve thought my son how to fly the machine before my hell months. He was able to enjoy the flying the plane around our neighborhood.
Since I’m free until March, I think I’ll be spending most of my time joyriding with my plane. I’ve just got a clearance to go cross-country. I can now fly to the airspace of China, Taiwan and Japan.
Here are the local destinations I want to visit with my plane:
- Subic Freeport
- Taal Lake
- Puerto Princesa
- Boracay
- Cebu City
- Davao City
I’m very excited to fly again. 
It’s been two months since I last posted in this blog.
I’ve been very busy as my workload started to pile up like hell those past two months. Gladly, I’ve finished most of them already and since my work is off-peak during this time of the year (November to March), I’ll have more time to blog.
The most recent project I won was the Clark International Convention Center. The Clark International Convention Center will be situated adjacent to the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport. One of the biggest challenges I’ll be facing here is soundproofing the entire hall since it is very near to the airport.
A $1.2 billion budget was allocated for this project. All funds will be audited by three foreign agencies to secure the allocation and distribution of funds.
I’ve gathered the best people from their respective fields already. I made sure that everyone in the team was a Filipino. I am not allowed to disclose who he is but we have one member who is a National Artist. I assigned him for the building’s architecture.
The overall building design we submitted to the committee was already approved. Construction will start of April 2010. It is expected to be completed by September 2010.
I am very excited to see the outcome of our hard-work. Woot!
At last, I have implemented the edit distance.
It was not that hard after all. Thanks to some of my training mates for helping me out understand what was written in Steven Skiena’s book. I am really slow in comprehending things. 
I have to fully understand other dynamic programming algorithms.
Yesterday after a whole day of volunteering to a certain annual IT event, we had our lecture on dynamic programming. We specifically tackled the usual Fibonacci sequence and binomial coefficients. Those few topics were relatively easier than the next problems; edit distance, least common subsequence, least increasing subsequence among others.
Those topics blew my mind. I was lost at the first part of edit distance. Since it was sort of a laddered discussion in which knowledge of the previous topic is required to understand the next topic, I wasn’t able to follow the entire discussion.
I think I need to read and reread the book again and again.
Last March, I started playing Programming Challenges thru Universidad de Valladolid’s online judge to keep my brain lubricated at all times.
I highly recommend the website for Computer Science majors and even programming enthusiasts. All you need is basic Java or C and your brain. Knowledge on standard algorithms is also a good start but monstrous raw power of the brain is enough for super smart people.
For beginners, it is highly recommended to have someone who have tried it guide you. It is so case and whitespace sensitive that a single misplaced space or a new line may cause your answer to be judged as “Wrong Answer”.
Try it. If you need help, I can help you out. Just shoot me an email at i.am@[thisdomain].com. Don’t forget to replace [thisdomain] with vasteusen.
The other day, I attempted to plan an itinerary for my upcoming trip to London. Sadly, there were no direct flights to London from Cebu, Philippines.
As I was brainstorming on how to plan my flight such that I would incur the minimum cost, I remembered that I had access to the “secret” discounted airfare database of an Alliance of at least 30 airliners. I downloaded the entire database and made an adjacency matrix of destinations per airline and their corresponding costs.
The adjacency matrix was 913×913 big, but Java was good enough to handle it. I then coded the Floyd-Warshall algrorithm to find the shortest path slash minimum cost. I had to keep a predecessor list so that I can retrace the path.
Floyd-Warshall algorithm is a graph analysis algorithm for finding shortest paths in a weighted, directed graph. A single execution of the algorithm will find the shortest paths between all pairs of vertices. -Wikipedia
After retracing the path, I learned that it will take me at least 42 hours to finish the flight since most of them were not connecting flights. I tried to rerun the program in such a way it would make use of connecting flights and flight time was reduced to 17 hours.
In the end, I still preferred the 42 hours trip since it was 40% cheaper than the other.
Back in college, I thought that Floyd-Warshall algorithm wasn’t that useful. But it actually was.
As I checked the statistics of one of my blogs, I noticed a spike of traffic from Yahoo’s search engine on an old post (that they had just indexed). Curious how Yahoo looks like now, I tried to open Yahoo. It still looked BLOATED.
Compared to Google, Yahoo’s homepage contained a lot of unsolicited information. It sure displayed almost all of their services, but I think it’s bad to do so. With the advent of search engines, people search services that they need on the time they need it.
This makes me think and assert that Google is simply simple, yet elegant.
The last time I played Microsoft Flight Simulator X was just like three months ago.
Today, I am officially missing (I miss the game, did not lost the copy of it) it. I missed flying from Changi International Airport to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. I love the route since the NAIA in Manila is one of the few airports with scenery. Other airports are just airstrips and taxiways.
I haven’t played the game since I installed Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3. My SP3 is messing up with the game so I ended up removing my entire Windows installation on my laptop. I think I’ll just have to wait for me to gain some urge to reinstall Windows XP to play the game again.
Hello blogosphere.
I have been on the blogosphere for some time now but it’s only now that I decided to buy my own domain.
By the way, I am Kurt Vasteusen – an alter-ego of a Filipino residing in Singapore in his dreams. I am licensed Civil Engineer in at least five countries; Germany, Russia, Singapore, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. I also have a commercial pilot license but is not allowed yet to fly any Airbus fleet.
I own a second-hand Cessna 172F. The plane was 7 months old when I bought it half it’s original price from a garage sale. I am very glad that most of our neighbors in a posh subdivision in Germany own a plane.
I think that would be all for now. I hope you join me on my adventures.