Category: Personal

Getting more serious about the idea of getting an actual pilot’s license. So I’ve been reading. I have a new respect for pilots. It’s a daunting amount of information to remember. For instance, METAR reports. What is a METAR report? Stands for Metrological Aerodrome Report. What does a METAR look like? Well, like this:

KPHL 201354Z 36005KT 10SM CLR 29/16 A2994 RMK AO2 SLP138 T02890156

In that is pretty much everything you need to know about the weather in Philly to fly out of there. Winds are due north at 5 knots, visibility is 10 statute miles (specified because aircraft use nautical miles by default), clear skies, 29C (84F) degrees, dew point at 16C (60F). Pressure 29.94″ Hg. The complexity is not merely to confuse pilots. It’s to save radio bandwidth and make the report easy to parse. Another sort of code is flight plans. For this example, we’ll use my friend Jason, who is on his way to Hilton Head currently in his dad’s Twin Comanche. For a flight that long, you would typically want to file and follow a flight plan with the FAA. The route is described thusly:

MXE V29 ENO V16 PXT V16 RIC V157 LVL

Believe it or not, all of that translates into this, some of which are radio beacons, and others of which are just imaginary points in the sky. Given this string, air traffic control knows how you plan to fly, because these numbers are essentially codes for predefined routes. MXE (Modena, PA), for instance, is a VORTAC where you will pick up the V29 path to the ENO (Smyrna, DE) VORTAC, which passes through the DQO (Dupont) VORTAC on the way. If you want to see what that looks like on the chart, here’s a low enroute map of that area:

Much to learn. But it’s my goal to achieve competence first, before going through the formal process. That way I will learn quickly, and spend less money (hopefully) getting the actual license.

Bitter is going to roll her eyes at this post, because she thinks I’m more down on my house than it deserves, but I have to agree with Dr. Helen on the issue of home ownership. It’s a big hassle, for sure. But renting isn’t exactly a panacea either, and in the case of renting, you’re paying for someone else to build value in a property, in exchange for them worrying about the day to day headaches of maintaining a property. You also have to follow terms of a lease, which can often be quite restrictive.

But I have learned quite a bit from buying a house, including what my needs are when it comes to housing. For one, the townhouse I rented had a basement, and I grew up with a basement. I bought a split level house with a partial finished basement. I’ve since discovered I was taking basements for granted. There was barely enough storage for all my junk, and adding Bitter’s on to it meant there was even less room, despite the fact that we both threw away quite a bit. The fact is that a basement is a convenient place to store junk you need some of the time, but not all of the time. My current house has a small attic, but things which go there are soon forgotten.

Every bit if work you think your house needs is a lot more of a pain to do yourself than you think, and finding honest contractors who won’t rip you off is difficult. I grew up in a house that was pretty consistently under construction, so I learned how to do even fairly radical home improvements myself. There’s some things that make sense to do yourself, but others it just makes sense to bring in professionals to do. Just because you know how to do them, doesn’t meant it’s worth your time. I am fairly happy doing plumbing an electrical work. Drywalling, painting, and carpeting are for the birds, and not much to have professionals do.

I wouldn’t suggest anyone buy a house thinking of it as an investment. It’s really a place to live. You can come out ahead financially over renting, but you also have to consider it’ll tie you down in ways you may not particularly like. Would I go back to renting? Doubtful. But home ownership certainly is no panacea. In some situations, you probably are better off just renting.

Maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a taciturn, but I really hate phones as a technology, and I get annoyed with vendors at work who prefer to handle things through phone calls rather than e-mail. I consider phones to be a total productivity killer in the workplace. Not that I have any particular love for e-mail — as technology goes, thanks in part to spammers, it’s fast becoming another obnoxious medium of communication, but it’s still better than a phone. These days my preferred method of communication is Instant Messaging, but it’s hard to get anyone over forty to use it.

Why pick on the phone though? Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent it, after all, with the sole purpose of annoying people in the future, so I should be grateful. But the phone is like a crying child. It demands attention. Most of the time I ignore it, but shortly after, the dreaded blinking light indicating a message. Nine times out of ten this is a sales goober trying to sell me something I don’t need, so a quick key to delete it fixes the problem. But to get there I have to pick up the phone, hit the voice mail button, enter my code, go through the menu, and delete the message. If it’s something I’m currently dealing with, call back. There’s a very high probability that person will not be at their desk or otherwise able to answer the phone. Leave a message on their end. Get a call back. Rinse. Repeat. It amazes me there are still people who are fine with wasting time and energy in this manner all to avoid sending an e-mail.

I suspect they do this because people often don’t respond to e-mail. I know I am guilty of this sometimes, often not intentional, just forgetting to get back to someone. Other times I think there are some people that just like talking to a person via voice, because e-mail seems impersonal. But I find e-mail easier and less stressful to deal with than a ringing phone, or blinking message light. And that’s not even counting the amount of time it took to write this blog post complaining about it.

What’s your office pet peeve?

One of the things I have planned to do out in Hawaii is to take a one hour lesson in a glider (warning, autoplay video). Hawaii is one of the best places to do this. I’ve spent precious little time with X-Plane flying gliders until I decided to do this, and I have to say, flying gliders is not easy. If you misjudge something, you don’t exactly have an engine to go around and have another go at it. I crashed a few times before I got it right, and crashed once by stalling the glider at an unwise altitude. I will be glad to have someone to do all the hard stuff when I go up.

But it’s quite a lot of fun, even in the simulator, and I’ve largely got the hang of it. I wanted to see if I could successfully get a plane from where the glider people operate out of in Hawaii, Dillingham Field, all the way across to the other side, down the eastern mountain ridge, and out over the ocean to land on Molokai. Creating pretty ideal conditions, the answer seems to be yes.

Lost trivia: Dillingham Field is where they filmed the scenes with Mr. Eko and Yemi, where Remey was shot and dragged into the plane. The “Others” houses were actually a YMCA camp a few miles from the field.

The good news is, the company I work for has managed to get itself into a better financial position and my job isn’t as as iffy as it was a few months ago. Thus much of my hard work over the past year has paid off. The bad news is, I don’t get to stop working hard, because now we’re being given the chance to prove ourselves, and we better deliver. The long days will continue. But damn if I don’t really need a vacation.

Having job security for at least a few more months would normally mean I could go to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous this year, but Bitter and I have wanted to go to Hawaii for several years now, but a variety of factors have frustrated the idea. Since her grandmother, who lives out there, has a free condo that’s currently unoccupied in downtown Honolulu, that sweetened the pot sufficiently for me to say, “Let’s go!” I haven’t had a real vacation since 2004, mostly due to job insecurity, so I’m looking forward to this. We’ll be going at the end of August, into the beginning of September. I will probably be looking for guest bloggers to help fill in while I’m away.

Before I go, however, I need a new digital camera, so I’m looking for some advice. I don’t think I want to step up to an SLR, but I’d like an SLR-like camera with a nice telephoto. I’ve been looking at the Canon PowerShot SX20IS. Of all the point-and-shoot digital cameras I’ve had, I’ve liked the Canons the most. But I’m not sure if this is suitable, or whether I’d be better off with another camera in a similar class. I have experience with Nikons, Kodaks, and Canons. I’m curious to hear about other brands, if anyone has experience with them.

If you read Consumerist, you know that Wal-Mart’s receipt checkers are known for getting a little out-of-control to the point of harassing shoppers. Fortunately, that had never been the case for me – at least until today.

Now, before anyone accuses me of getting my Wal-Mart hate on too early, I’m a big fan of the retail giant. I love their low prices and their decent selection. I have family members who have worked for them for decades, so I’m in no way opposed to their business model. At least until it crosses the line of chasing shoppers inappropriately.

I noticed the employee at the door as soon as I walked in. He wasn’t facing me, but he stood out because he’s not the type you normally see handling receipt duties at Wal-Mart. Normally it’s nice older folks who will accept my “no thanks” response when I turn down their request to check my receipt. This guy was older – probably early 50s – but he was reasonably built and even had a tattoo showing on his arm. He was not the usual face of Wal-Mart by any stretch.

When I was leaving, I know I had done nothing suspicious, and he knew it, too. I know he knew since I noticed him watching me as I put my receipt in my wallet before fully departing the register nearest him and the door. I had no purse, just my oversized wallet and a cart with a few cases of soda in it. If I had not been alert, I would have been freaked out when he popped up right beside me demanding my receipt.

In response to his demands, I did my polite smile with the “no, thanks” response. This guy apparently likes to get his way because he kept walking behind me. So, I stopped and turned saying, “Look, I am a member of Sam’s Club where I agree to wait in line to have my receipt checked. I’m not doing that here.” He started in with a rant along the lines of “I don’t care where you’re a member, I want to see your receipt.” But I didn’t let him finish because I told him that unless he planned to get the police involved and could provide hard evidence of suspicious behavior, I was leaving without showing him my receipt that I already put away. That made him back off of the argument, but not the attempt to intimidate. He tried following me, but he decided not to go past the doors.

I called his boss from the parking lot. I stayed out there an extra 10 minutes while they went to find her. She agreed that his behavior of following a 20-something woman in an attempt to intimidate was beyond over the line, especially for a couple of cases of soda. To her credit, she pledged to go have a chat with him immediately. But damn if it doesn’t make me want to avoid Wal-Mart for a while. I haven’t been chased around Target by their staff barking orders at me, and I find I prefer to shop that way.

But upon telling Sebastian the story, he pointed that a better carry form of pepper spray would probably be good for situations like that. If he had tried to grab me or come after me in the parking lot, it would have been a reasonable response. Without the police, they cannot detain you. Even with the police, they are going to have to show some kind of evidence that they believe you committed a crime. Their policy of checking receipts is completely unenforceable. Hopefully the next staffer at the door will accept the polite “no thanks” instead of trying intimidate & harass shoppers, leaving them to wonder if they need to pull out pepper spray.

My friend Jason’s dad has a plane, and since I’ve been scooting around in X-Plane for a few months now, he said any time I wanted to go up, his dad would be happy to take me. So today I took him up on it. While the physical model on a flight simulator might be the same or very similar to a real plane, the experience is completely different.

For one, while I’m confident enough in a simulator, even with fairly large jets, to think clearly and keep my shit together. I was scared timid in a real plane. In fact, my fingers were a little numb because of the death grip I had on the control yoke. We were up for about an hour. Jason’s dad handled takeoff and the final touchdown on the plane, and worked the throttle and prop pitch. I got to handle the controls most of the way. Took off from Trenton, NJ and flew down to the shore, I think around the Asbury Park down toward Avon area. Got a little nervous around there because I started noticing more air traffic.

I didn’t get any pictures after takeoff because I was too busy enjoying the experience. It’s making me think I ought to get a pilot’s license, but I’m going to have to figure out a way to overcome motion sickness. I did not get sick on the flight, but afterwards felt like I had been playing a first person shooter too long… that sort of mildly ill feeling you get. I’m fine as long as I am looking out of the cockpit, but I can feel sickness coming on when looking at instruments. Small planes seem to get kicked around in the weather a bit more than commercial planes, so you can feel it when you stare down. I’d be fine for VFR flying, but I think learning how to fly IFR would make me sick. But as with most motion sickness, habituation makes you more resistant to it.

But definitely a lot of fun, and gives me an idea of what real flying feels like. Many thanks to Jason’s dad John for taking me up.

… because I lost my multi-tool as well a few weeks ago. I’ve heard that Leatherman are dirty hippies. Anyone suggest a good multi-tool, or does Leatherman really do the best out there?

Since, like many of you, I’m off work today for the holiday, I’m catching up on some household stuff. Swapped out the light fixture in my office, and replaced it with one that could take CFL style bulbs. My old one took halogen spots, which I believe get a life extension until 2014, when you’ll have to replace them with LED lighting, but that is still tempting me to send the bill for the swap to Nancy Pelosi.

Either way, the reason I replaced is that the halogens throw off a lot of heat, and when the temperature is topping 100 degrees outside, and you don’t have central air, 150 watts is a tall order. Even if the room isn’t cooler, it feels cooler, and if it makes my room AC unit upstairs work that much less, it’s worth it.

I also had to get some files off Bitter’s old, dead Dell laptop, which I’ve been promising to do and not doing for a few months now. Since I got a new MacBook Pro from work a year or so ago I gave her my old one.

Now I need to go spray some RoundUp on grass I have growing in my side yard. It looks like I’ve planted wheat. I never go back there. More blogging later.