I saw Avatar last night. Avatar is the kind of movie that I typically have not heard of and pay no attention to until friends invite me to go see it--which is what happened last night. After watching it for three hours, I understand what the big deal was supposed to be. In case you are interested in watching the movie, let me tell you exactly what it is:
Avatar is an expensive and lenthy remake of Fern Gully.
At first I thought only the first half was like Fern Gully because I hadn't seen that since I was little, but then I read the wikipedia page and the two movies are basically the same. I've heard that some people think Avatar is Teh BEST MOviE EVAR!!! But it is not. It does not compare to Star Wars: A New Hope, or Firefly, or The Lord of the Rings. If you think Avatar is awesome, you are ignorant, and will find all of your favorite movies in the next paragraph.
Avatar can be more compared to the Harry Potter movies, the Halo video games, fan fiction taking place in the Warhammer universe, and, most definitely, the animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest. One nice improvement over the animated version that Avatar makes is that it throws in a lot of military toys, including mechs. Mechs are like dumb toy versions of Gundams, so I enjoy them by association, the same way someone who loves tigers would appreciate house cats, or the way someone who likes enormous slimy fecal-generating monsters would like dogs.
My favorite thing about Avatar is that someone uses the phrase "Death from Above." I'm curious as to the origin of this phrase, if it is something anyone in a real military has ever said, or if it comes from video games, or what. I first heard the phrase playing Dawn of War, an excellent real time strategy game with a gripping story, decent writing and superb voice acting. It is something the Assault Marines say when you click on them or make them attack or something. Wikipedia says "Death from Above" is also a video game maneuver. I don't know what its talking about; the closest thing I can come up with is when you are playing classic UT and you jump on top of someone from high up, raining six rockets on their head. Someone did that to me when we were playing UT in physics class in high school, and the a girl watching me play actually shrieked out loud.
So, in summary, Avatar is not very original but I like it because it reminds me of better fiction that I enjoy.
[Edit]
Lego Gundams!!!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Welcome Home
Here are some highlights of my Christmas:
Snow: It snowed in philly. Not enough to impress a Subaru-bred Pennsylvanian such as myself, but enough to cause massive delays in air travel to KPHL, or Philly International for you non piloting civilians (I've found the one of the most arrogant things a person can do on the internet is to refer to other people as "civilians" in their blog, while themself having never been in a military). The second leg of my multi-plane journey that I had bought from Northwest airlines was repeatedly canceled. I was told I had to speak to an agent to rebook. I called Northwest well ahead of the time I needed to leave for the airport, but four hours later I was still listening to on-hold music while my first flight departed and while, more importantly, I really needed to use the bathroom. After giving up on my $400 I spent I booked a flight with U.S. Airways and sent Northwest a nastygram inquiring if I would be compensated. I received an automated reply, saying tickets would be credited or rebooked for this weather event, and directed to a webpage that did not mention the current weather at all but instead had lenghty H1N1 Swine Flu event information.
I arrived in Philly, though, after missing only a weekend of skiing that I'd been looking forward to. And with all of my stuff! I had checked a bag containing my super important work laptop. I have since learned that checking a laptop with a commercial airline is regarded by everyone else on the planet as one of the dumbest mistakes you can make. More on that later.
Fire: I did make it up to the cabin at Camelback. I missed Joe, my fellow accomplice of "thats what she said!" jokes, but I was in time to witness last few fireworks. Perhaps, ever. You see these fireworks were advertised as the kind that spin around and shoot up in the air. They were pretty cool even for a person normally desensitized to and unimpressed by pyrotechnic displays. This particular batch, though, seemed to be designed to shoot towards the nearest person. That was also interesting. Then one landed in a bush fragment. The first few seconds of fire were met with laughter. "Haha it started a little fire!" Then in the next few seconds, the fire increased in size, slightly. It was during these seconds that our laughter died off while we all tried to determine if this was going to be a problem. During a couple seconds after that, the fire jumped to the big bush and we began a mad dash to contain it. I grabbed a snow chunk on my way and dropped it onto the flame but that was ineffective.
We spent a lot of time with buckets of water and a dry chemical fire extinguisher. In fact you could call me a genuine bucketeer. The dry chemical part is relevant because Luke got it all over his hands, so we later had to look up the ingredients on wikipedia to see if they would make his hand fall off, or turn him into a zombie. The buckets of water is also relevant because we broke a faucet in the process. The bush may or may not make it. I'm pretty sure no one will ever be lighting fireworks at that cabin again.
Isabel the Impreza and the streets of Philadelphia: I stole my sister's (technically my mother's) car, a Subaru Impreza that I declared should be named Isabel. This Impreza is like an awesome, slightly slower version of my car. The all wheel drive kicked ass and granted me access to parking spots in philly that other people couldn't reach without a shovel. After parking it the first time, one girl asked from across the street what kind of car I had. That might have been simply because I had parked behind her, and she had been staring at my, worried I might hit her.
The entire time I was home I only saw 1 person that lived in philly. One out of like...more than twenty. An unfortunate habit that I'm unsure how to rectify. Perhaps Christmas isn't the best time to see all of your old buddies anyway, but it is frustrating to come 3000 miles and not even call people because you know you won't be able to see them.
Love Story: I performed my version of Taylor Swift's Love Story as best as I could with Kevin's guitar and a mangled, mutant, ginormous triangle guitar pick. Every time I am over at Kevin and Adam's place I harrass Kev for not owning any guitar picks for the guitar he never plays. Kev has repeatedly promised to buy some--this last time threatening to shower me with a hundred thousand of them. I doubt his sincerity, and so will be shipping a set of guitar picks to him. But I digress.
When I originally penned my version of Love Story, I thought it was hilarious. After hours of practicing it I have since realized that is it not funny at all but instead sad and depressing. However, when your audience actually believes that you are about to play the real version, and you start playing mine, it is hilarious. The key to the humor is explaining to your friends that you had to change a couple words because you are a guy, and the rest falls into place.
Sleeping under the stars: My mother has been dying to get me to stay at their place when I visit. I previously always stayed in the city and only made day trips out to visit them. This time, I stayed at home, in my old bed, under a bunch of glow in the dark stickers I slapped on the ceiling a very long time ago.
LEGOS!: Every year my family likes to do some kind of variation on the gifting giving thing. I think it is a mostly practical fix for the expensive and exhaustive task for buying stuff for each person -- what is that an n-squared minus n amount of gifts? I'm sure there is also a conceptual stand against commercialism as well. It kind of sucks when one group of people get all pissy about Christmas being a "Christian" holiday and make signs that say "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, while at the same time malls start promoting an entirely santa-centric, money spending religion the day after halloween. I think we should split the holiday into two: the celebration of mass materialism and spoiled children can stay on the winter solstice, and the politically incorrect "real" or "true" version of Christmas can be swept under the covers sometime in March. All of the lazy people still have their trees up then anyway. The only question is what to do with all of the lame ass tv specials with the inoffensive but fuzzy and warm Christmas morals to preach. I'll leave this decision to others, since I hate watching them anyway. But I digress.
So some years we pick names out of a hat, and you only buy a gift for the person whose name you pulled. Some years we did some kind of thing where you bring a gift, and people take gifts from under the tree and have the option to keep it or steal one from someone else. Some years we do an under $20 variation, but that kind of sucks because its like admitting everyone is going to hate their presents, and we're just trimming our losses. Every year we do the variation where my mom buys almost all of the gifts destined for her granddaughters (my nieces) and I don't even remember what I allegedly bought them until they open it. Its a fun surprise.
This year the theme was you had to make the gifts (excepting members of the family under 10, they still got showered with expensive toys). I did not like this. I was stumped. I have an uncanny lack of knowledge about the other members of my family, and its hard enough to buy something for them, let alone restrict those possibilities to things I'm capable of creating with my hands. Fortunately, the night before the day before Christmas eve, Betsy's friend (whose nickname sounds like a class video game handle) suggested I make ornaments. Ornaments are amazing: they need serve no actual purpose, and its ok if they are ugly, so long as they still look half decent buried in a Christmas tree somewhere. So I made some ornaments out of Legos.
I've never really been a fan of Legos as art. They are quite blocky, and trying to figure out which pieces from my collection to sacrifice for the formation of a replica of some boring inanimate object boggled my mind. I much preferred to build things on the minifig scale which could be brought to life in my imagination: planes, boats, castles, docks, cities and spaceships. And pirates. So this very idea of using Legos to build some kind of non-Lego abomination was new to me.
I stopped at the Lego(TM) Store and found an ornament sized kit plane for my Dad. He was a navigator in the Navy and did a lot of flying on P-3s. The kit plane I got was one of those cheesy you-can-build-three-different-ugly-models kind, and the plane looked terrible. I wouldn't be able to do much better, however, especially not with something ornament sized, so I bought some super glue and added handle piece from my personal collection, and snapped it up:
The airline pilot character did not come with my kit. That was the first valuable piece I chose to sacrifice from my collection. I was going to list exactly which of my Lego sets the little guy could have come from, but wikipedia doesn't list pictures with the town set names, which are often meaningless. That compass is also a valuable piece of mine--probably from the pirates--but I removed it before the final gluing because that plane is just too ugly to be worth it.
For my mom, who has been teaching beginner level piano lessons all of my life (giving me a considerable jumpstart into the world of music) I decided I would make a tiny baby grand piano. The biggest problem, I knew from the beginning, would be the keys. I sulked around the Lego store for quite a while trying to find a way to buy the pieces I needed, but the just weren't there, so I bought some other pieces I expected to need and spent hours late at night combing through the plastic bins containing my childhood lego collection for the elusive little black and white 1x2 tiles. The little bastards were so small they were mostly found at the bottom of the bins, which seemed to carry an inordinate amount of dirt, dist bunnies and decarying insect skeletons, as well as a few substances I didn't care to identify.
After hours of searching and then obsessively compuslively sorting just to enable further searching, I finally found enough tiles to use as keys. Then I figured out a way to arrange. This turned out to be an interesting excercise, because faithfully recreating the exact shape and arrangement of piano keys could not be done at my scale, so I instead opted to arrange the black and white keys in a symmetrical but uneven pattern, hoping it would simply look similar to piano pieces, and it actually worked. Why it worked is something I'm curious about, but I didn't stop to play around. I used a corder piece of an octogonal platform--the kind of thing normally used to construct space stations--as both the tilted lid thing and the base of the piano itself. An ancient looking fence made a music stand, and butchering some otherwise valuable hing pieces made for a good pedal effect, even though, as my father pointed out, I ended up with four pedals instead of the three that would be on a real piano. To which I retorted, I didn't get the keys right either. He may have been jealous that his ornament was ugly. I actually felt kind of bad, but I was really never good at making planes. Not sure why the piano turned out to well, but I certainly sacrificed to make it. If I ever elect to go back to my Lego collection and try to rebuild all of the sets I had, I'm going to be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the piano:
I finished it at six in the morning, which caused a little friction when I slept in through half of the next day. I think it was worth it though. My family seemed impressed. I really wanted to write instructions for it but I didn't have the time and, more importantly, I don't know how I made that. I didn't even put glue between all of the pieces because I didn't want to risk taking it apart and being unable to but it back together. Instead I just pulled things off and glued them back on until I was satisfied with its structural integrity.
For my older sister and brother in law, I made a Lego picture frame. It turned out pretty cool, because I found these cool magnet pieces at the Lego store. My younger sister and I (who helped with the construction of the frame) tested it on our parents fridge and it works. Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a picture about this one.
Before we leave the subject of Legos, I am furiously interested in coming up with some business startup idea that would involve me making a lot of money playing with Legos. I thought about maybe selling directions for Legos (could even have Kindle versions!) or creating a picture blog of creations I make like icanhascheezburger. I thought about creating a website similar to MrWong's Soup'Parments but as a Lego city and more similar to The Map of Springfield. I've actually already started such a project, but have been procrastinating ever since I came up against the task of multiplying quaternions against LDRAW's lame ass rotation matrix, which I can never remember its left-handed vs right-handed 'ness. Selling Lego parts by the individual piece crossed my mind--I remember the Lego company trying to do that but backing down because the brick-and-mortar stores threw a hissy fit and threatened to stop selling Legos. This was probably a story on slashdot, though, the very same place wherein theories once abounded regarding an Amazon.com conspiracy against gay authors suffering from a particular brand of melodramatic hubris. So maybe its not true. I've also considered making Lego video games; almost every game can become a Lego game simply by adding Legos to it. I want to aim higher. I want to make Lego Batman but a version with much more depth, and more like Turtles 3, with much larger maps, and cooler ways to interact with the world. Lego movies, Lego comic books, or maybe a Lego tv serious have also crossed my mind, but the tools to do these properly are scare and I would probably have to solve that quaternion problem I just mentioned. Oh, and I also want to invent a programming (or just a markup) language for creating virtual Lego models. Imagine if instead of exhaustively listing each brick in a wall, you simply called a function called Wall() which took two locations and fabricated a lego wall between them. The only practical use for such a language is would probably be a Lego version of Turtle (a.k.a. Logo).
Suffice to say, if you can think of any way a person can make money playing with Legos, I would love to hear it.
Actually, all I really want is infinite resources to create the largest lego world possible, starting with one model the size of the Earth. If your curious, it would take 510.072 trillion Lego baseplates model the Earth to a 6' minifig scale. I'm fairly certain that number of baseplates does not, has not, and never will, exist. Also, I have proven (to myself) using a ball of string, masking tape, and a sharpie marker, that it is impossible to create a decent approximation of a sphere using exact squares (which is what baseplates are) without introducing about 8 enormous triangles to the mix. So that will have to be done virtually. Also, I'm tempted to use a torus instead of a sphere; most people won't know the difference, and most video games that allow seamless wrapping on two axis (such as Zelda and Alien Legacy) are actually torus-like (torrodial? torrodian?) anyway.
ON CALL: Family time was interrupted because I was paged into an emergency during my one on call shift that week (which I was supposed to be using to make up a day of work). They needed someone from my team to sit around and listen to people fret about some misfit database that kept causing problems; I may have been called upon to comment on whether or not my team's software was still running. It was. This "on call" business was the whole reason I had to bring my big clunky Amazon laptop hope. For the record, I hate being responsible for something important that like. In my last job I sleep well at night secure in the fact that if the government projects we were working on "leaked" to the Russians, Chinese, Commists, Terrorists, or whatever enemy of the day it was, that the only thing that would happen is some poor operative would get a massive headache from looking at our disgusting java code. In contrast, that Amazon laptop has information that is actually sensitive, something I do not appreciate. Other people routinely take their laptops home. I normally leave mine in the office (unless I have to take it for on call fun) because if it gets stolen from the office, there's pretty much no way it will be my fault. But I digress.
I get a lot of questions about what I do at Amazon and why I have to go on call. I'd like to share with you some "cool" things a person might be on call for:
Uphill in the snow both ways: The people in charge of screwing up the belowed roads I used to zoom around on have continued their quest to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to drive an automobile among the towns I grew up in. Perhaps an engineer somewhere fell out of his chair laughing when he realized how many cars would stack up behind a slow driver if they removed all of the extra lanes and passing zones from the road. Perhaps not. All I know is that there is a section that drags on for miles that does not afford a chance to get around slow people--slow as in driving close to the speed limit. When I had my bike I used a suicide lane to pass slow people out of some strange sense of entitlement: "I lived here when this was a passing lane!"
Commercial Aviation: I spent a lot of time fretting about how and what to pack for this trip, and I am seriously getting bored with writing this post, so lets just skip to where I'm standing in the C terminal with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my suitcase. All carryons. Or so I thought. An announcement came repeatedly over the intercom explaining that according to Federal Aviation Regulations, passengers are only allowed one carryon and one personal item that had to fit under the seat. By the way: all aviation laws that actually matter are Federal Aviation Regulations. Contrast with laws made by the FCC, your local township, and things like seed patents, which are bullshit.
Anyway, I, technically, had three items. Being I good sport I say something to the U.S. Airways gatekeepers about checking my suitcase. I didn't want to check my sleeping bag because it was a bit small and odd shaped for something to be thrown into the cargo hold of an airplane. It would probably get lost. In case your curious, my sleeping bag cost about $120 at EMS, and replacing it is as simple as driving to EMS and buying another one. Or one like it. I'll skip the details, but I left my precious suitcase with my Amazon laptop inside just outside of the aircraft door, in full view of a stewardess. Distance between my "gate checked" bag with a hastily scribbled tag on it and the hull fo the airplane: less then 20 feet. There's no way this won't get to Philly right?
I was wrong. I slowly realized this as I stood resting one leg on the edge of the baggage belt watching the bags, and people collecting them, approach zero. In the process of filing a claim I learned that none of the gate checked bags made it, and it was a Good Thing I happened to know the exact number and color of American Apparel t-shirts in my suitcase, because a giant Dell laptop with a white stick in the corner that says "Amazon" is not a good enough identifier for them. Apparently the shirts were good enough--the guy stopped me before I could mention all of my dirty brown socks. I guess they don't want you to mention the electronics because the employee that finds your bag might happen to find it without the laptop inside. Like that joke "Did anyone lose a roll of money in a rubber band? We found the rubber band...."
Long story short, I got my laptop back the next day, but not before I had to tell my whole team that I had checked and lost my laptop with the airline, which, again, is apparrently the dumbest thing you can do.
This entire incident has further reinforced my desire to fly myself to Philly. Flying a small airplane coast to coast just to get somewhere is expensive and impractacle, however I've found a few factors that make it comparable to general aviation:
Writing: Oh, also, I was reading a lot of On Writing, by Stephen King. If you are serious about writing fiction, or interesting in being serious about writing fiction, or curious about getting interested in seriously writing fiction, I highly recommend reading the second half of that book. He presents an interesting approach to writing, which I have found solves a lot of the problems I've always experienced when I hit dead ends trying to invent a story. I actually spent most of the plane ride back to Seattle furiously scribbling a story into an expensive notebook from Borders that claimed to look just like the one used by some famous writer I don't plan on reading. I bought it because it was black. I didn't get to finish the story, thanks to the case of the missing luggage, but hopefully I will abstain from my computer, tv, guitar and video games to write the ending someday.
In Summary: I spent a lot of money and saw less than a quarter of the people I wanted to see and almost lost my work laptop. In short, I kind of suck at traveling. I get more vacation time next year though....
Snow: It snowed in philly. Not enough to impress a Subaru-bred Pennsylvanian such as myself, but enough to cause massive delays in air travel to KPHL, or Philly International for you non piloting civilians (I've found the one of the most arrogant things a person can do on the internet is to refer to other people as "civilians" in their blog, while themself having never been in a military). The second leg of my multi-plane journey that I had bought from Northwest airlines was repeatedly canceled. I was told I had to speak to an agent to rebook. I called Northwest well ahead of the time I needed to leave for the airport, but four hours later I was still listening to on-hold music while my first flight departed and while, more importantly, I really needed to use the bathroom. After giving up on my $400 I spent I booked a flight with U.S. Airways and sent Northwest a nastygram inquiring if I would be compensated. I received an automated reply, saying tickets would be credited or rebooked for this weather event, and directed to a webpage that did not mention the current weather at all but instead had lenghty H1N1 Swine Flu event information.
I arrived in Philly, though, after missing only a weekend of skiing that I'd been looking forward to. And with all of my stuff! I had checked a bag containing my super important work laptop. I have since learned that checking a laptop with a commercial airline is regarded by everyone else on the planet as one of the dumbest mistakes you can make. More on that later.
Fire: I did make it up to the cabin at Camelback. I missed Joe, my fellow accomplice of "thats what she said!" jokes, but I was in time to witness last few fireworks. Perhaps, ever. You see these fireworks were advertised as the kind that spin around and shoot up in the air. They were pretty cool even for a person normally desensitized to and unimpressed by pyrotechnic displays. This particular batch, though, seemed to be designed to shoot towards the nearest person. That was also interesting. Then one landed in a bush fragment. The first few seconds of fire were met with laughter. "Haha it started a little fire!" Then in the next few seconds, the fire increased in size, slightly. It was during these seconds that our laughter died off while we all tried to determine if this was going to be a problem. During a couple seconds after that, the fire jumped to the big bush and we began a mad dash to contain it. I grabbed a snow chunk on my way and dropped it onto the flame but that was ineffective.
We spent a lot of time with buckets of water and a dry chemical fire extinguisher. In fact you could call me a genuine bucketeer. The dry chemical part is relevant because Luke got it all over his hands, so we later had to look up the ingredients on wikipedia to see if they would make his hand fall off, or turn him into a zombie. The buckets of water is also relevant because we broke a faucet in the process. The bush may or may not make it. I'm pretty sure no one will ever be lighting fireworks at that cabin again.
Isabel the Impreza and the streets of Philadelphia: I stole my sister's (technically my mother's) car, a Subaru Impreza that I declared should be named Isabel. This Impreza is like an awesome, slightly slower version of my car. The all wheel drive kicked ass and granted me access to parking spots in philly that other people couldn't reach without a shovel. After parking it the first time, one girl asked from across the street what kind of car I had. That might have been simply because I had parked behind her, and she had been staring at my, worried I might hit her.
The entire time I was home I only saw 1 person that lived in philly. One out of like...more than twenty. An unfortunate habit that I'm unsure how to rectify. Perhaps Christmas isn't the best time to see all of your old buddies anyway, but it is frustrating to come 3000 miles and not even call people because you know you won't be able to see them.
Love Story: I performed my version of Taylor Swift's Love Story as best as I could with Kevin's guitar and a mangled, mutant, ginormous triangle guitar pick. Every time I am over at Kevin and Adam's place I harrass Kev for not owning any guitar picks for the guitar he never plays. Kev has repeatedly promised to buy some--this last time threatening to shower me with a hundred thousand of them. I doubt his sincerity, and so will be shipping a set of guitar picks to him. But I digress.
When I originally penned my version of Love Story, I thought it was hilarious. After hours of practicing it I have since realized that is it not funny at all but instead sad and depressing. However, when your audience actually believes that you are about to play the real version, and you start playing mine, it is hilarious. The key to the humor is explaining to your friends that you had to change a couple words because you are a guy, and the rest falls into place.
Sleeping under the stars: My mother has been dying to get me to stay at their place when I visit. I previously always stayed in the city and only made day trips out to visit them. This time, I stayed at home, in my old bed, under a bunch of glow in the dark stickers I slapped on the ceiling a very long time ago.
LEGOS!: Every year my family likes to do some kind of variation on the gifting giving thing. I think it is a mostly practical fix for the expensive and exhaustive task for buying stuff for each person -- what is that an n-squared minus n amount of gifts? I'm sure there is also a conceptual stand against commercialism as well. It kind of sucks when one group of people get all pissy about Christmas being a "Christian" holiday and make signs that say "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, while at the same time malls start promoting an entirely santa-centric, money spending religion the day after halloween. I think we should split the holiday into two: the celebration of mass materialism and spoiled children can stay on the winter solstice, and the politically incorrect "real" or "true" version of Christmas can be swept under the covers sometime in March. All of the lazy people still have their trees up then anyway. The only question is what to do with all of the lame ass tv specials with the inoffensive but fuzzy and warm Christmas morals to preach. I'll leave this decision to others, since I hate watching them anyway. But I digress.
So some years we pick names out of a hat, and you only buy a gift for the person whose name you pulled. Some years we did some kind of thing where you bring a gift, and people take gifts from under the tree and have the option to keep it or steal one from someone else. Some years we do an under $20 variation, but that kind of sucks because its like admitting everyone is going to hate their presents, and we're just trimming our losses. Every year we do the variation where my mom buys almost all of the gifts destined for her granddaughters (my nieces) and I don't even remember what I allegedly bought them until they open it. Its a fun surprise.
This year the theme was you had to make the gifts (excepting members of the family under 10, they still got showered with expensive toys). I did not like this. I was stumped. I have an uncanny lack of knowledge about the other members of my family, and its hard enough to buy something for them, let alone restrict those possibilities to things I'm capable of creating with my hands. Fortunately, the night before the day before Christmas eve, Betsy's friend (whose nickname sounds like a class video game handle) suggested I make ornaments. Ornaments are amazing: they need serve no actual purpose, and its ok if they are ugly, so long as they still look half decent buried in a Christmas tree somewhere. So I made some ornaments out of Legos.
I've never really been a fan of Legos as art. They are quite blocky, and trying to figure out which pieces from my collection to sacrifice for the formation of a replica of some boring inanimate object boggled my mind. I much preferred to build things on the minifig scale which could be brought to life in my imagination: planes, boats, castles, docks, cities and spaceships. And pirates. So this very idea of using Legos to build some kind of non-Lego abomination was new to me.
I stopped at the Lego(TM) Store and found an ornament sized kit plane for my Dad. He was a navigator in the Navy and did a lot of flying on P-3s. The kit plane I got was one of those cheesy you-can-build-three-different-ugly-models kind, and the plane looked terrible. I wouldn't be able to do much better, however, especially not with something ornament sized, so I bought some super glue and added handle piece from my personal collection, and snapped it up:
The airline pilot character did not come with my kit. That was the first valuable piece I chose to sacrifice from my collection. I was going to list exactly which of my Lego sets the little guy could have come from, but wikipedia doesn't list pictures with the town set names, which are often meaningless. That compass is also a valuable piece of mine--probably from the pirates--but I removed it before the final gluing because that plane is just too ugly to be worth it.For my mom, who has been teaching beginner level piano lessons all of my life (giving me a considerable jumpstart into the world of music) I decided I would make a tiny baby grand piano. The biggest problem, I knew from the beginning, would be the keys. I sulked around the Lego store for quite a while trying to find a way to buy the pieces I needed, but the just weren't there, so I bought some other pieces I expected to need and spent hours late at night combing through the plastic bins containing my childhood lego collection for the elusive little black and white 1x2 tiles. The little bastards were so small they were mostly found at the bottom of the bins, which seemed to carry an inordinate amount of dirt, dist bunnies and decarying insect skeletons, as well as a few substances I didn't care to identify.
After hours of searching and then obsessively compuslively sorting just to enable further searching, I finally found enough tiles to use as keys. Then I figured out a way to arrange. This turned out to be an interesting excercise, because faithfully recreating the exact shape and arrangement of piano keys could not be done at my scale, so I instead opted to arrange the black and white keys in a symmetrical but uneven pattern, hoping it would simply look similar to piano pieces, and it actually worked. Why it worked is something I'm curious about, but I didn't stop to play around. I used a corder piece of an octogonal platform--the kind of thing normally used to construct space stations--as both the tilted lid thing and the base of the piano itself. An ancient looking fence made a music stand, and butchering some otherwise valuable hing pieces made for a good pedal effect, even though, as my father pointed out, I ended up with four pedals instead of the three that would be on a real piano. To which I retorted, I didn't get the keys right either. He may have been jealous that his ornament was ugly. I actually felt kind of bad, but I was really never good at making planes. Not sure why the piano turned out to well, but I certainly sacrificed to make it. If I ever elect to go back to my Lego collection and try to rebuild all of the sets I had, I'm going to be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the piano:
I finished it at six in the morning, which caused a little friction when I slept in through half of the next day. I think it was worth it though. My family seemed impressed. I really wanted to write instructions for it but I didn't have the time and, more importantly, I don't know how I made that. I didn't even put glue between all of the pieces because I didn't want to risk taking it apart and being unable to but it back together. Instead I just pulled things off and glued them back on until I was satisfied with its structural integrity.For my older sister and brother in law, I made a Lego picture frame. It turned out pretty cool, because I found these cool magnet pieces at the Lego store. My younger sister and I (who helped with the construction of the frame) tested it on our parents fridge and it works. Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a picture about this one.
Before we leave the subject of Legos, I am furiously interested in coming up with some business startup idea that would involve me making a lot of money playing with Legos. I thought about maybe selling directions for Legos (could even have Kindle versions!) or creating a picture blog of creations I make like icanhascheezburger. I thought about creating a website similar to MrWong's Soup'Parments but as a Lego city and more similar to The Map of Springfield. I've actually already started such a project, but have been procrastinating ever since I came up against the task of multiplying quaternions against LDRAW's lame ass rotation matrix, which I can never remember its left-handed vs right-handed 'ness. Selling Lego parts by the individual piece crossed my mind--I remember the Lego company trying to do that but backing down because the brick-and-mortar stores threw a hissy fit and threatened to stop selling Legos. This was probably a story on slashdot, though, the very same place wherein theories once abounded regarding an Amazon.com conspiracy against gay authors suffering from a particular brand of melodramatic hubris. So maybe its not true. I've also considered making Lego video games; almost every game can become a Lego game simply by adding Legos to it. I want to aim higher. I want to make Lego Batman but a version with much more depth, and more like Turtles 3, with much larger maps, and cooler ways to interact with the world. Lego movies, Lego comic books, or maybe a Lego tv serious have also crossed my mind, but the tools to do these properly are scare and I would probably have to solve that quaternion problem I just mentioned. Oh, and I also want to invent a programming (or just a markup) language for creating virtual Lego models. Imagine if instead of exhaustively listing each brick in a wall, you simply called a function called Wall() which took two locations and fabricated a lego wall between them. The only practical use for such a language is would probably be a Lego version of Turtle (a.k.a. Logo).
Suffice to say, if you can think of any way a person can make money playing with Legos, I would love to hear it.
Actually, all I really want is infinite resources to create the largest lego world possible, starting with one model the size of the Earth. If your curious, it would take 510.072 trillion Lego baseplates model the Earth to a 6' minifig scale. I'm fairly certain that number of baseplates does not, has not, and never will, exist. Also, I have proven (to myself) using a ball of string, masking tape, and a sharpie marker, that it is impossible to create a decent approximation of a sphere using exact squares (which is what baseplates are) without introducing about 8 enormous triangles to the mix. So that will have to be done virtually. Also, I'm tempted to use a torus instead of a sphere; most people won't know the difference, and most video games that allow seamless wrapping on two axis (such as Zelda and Alien Legacy) are actually torus-like (torrodial? torrodian?) anyway.
ON CALL: Family time was interrupted because I was paged into an emergency during my one on call shift that week (which I was supposed to be using to make up a day of work). They needed someone from my team to sit around and listen to people fret about some misfit database that kept causing problems; I may have been called upon to comment on whether or not my team's software was still running. It was. This "on call" business was the whole reason I had to bring my big clunky Amazon laptop hope. For the record, I hate being responsible for something important that like. In my last job I sleep well at night secure in the fact that if the government projects we were working on "leaked" to the Russians, Chinese, Commists, Terrorists, or whatever enemy of the day it was, that the only thing that would happen is some poor operative would get a massive headache from looking at our disgusting java code. In contrast, that Amazon laptop has information that is actually sensitive, something I do not appreciate. Other people routinely take their laptops home. I normally leave mine in the office (unless I have to take it for on call fun) because if it gets stolen from the office, there's pretty much no way it will be my fault. But I digress.
I get a lot of questions about what I do at Amazon and why I have to go on call. I'd like to share with you some "cool" things a person might be on call for:
- Hospital Helicopter Pilots
- Search and Rescue Pilots (Coast Guard, Civil Air Patrol)
- In case of Zombie Attacks
- Reporters that need to race to a disaster so they can be first to announce they're standing right in front of it
- Gundam Pilots
- Snowplow drivers
- EMTs and Paramedics
- Guy with dog that looks for disaster survivors
- The President
- Firefighters. Have you noticed no one hates firefighters? No one calls them pigs, or shows up at riots looking to fight them like with cops and army people.
Maybe arsonists hate them. Or Fire Elementals.
Uphill in the snow both ways: The people in charge of screwing up the belowed roads I used to zoom around on have continued their quest to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to drive an automobile among the towns I grew up in. Perhaps an engineer somewhere fell out of his chair laughing when he realized how many cars would stack up behind a slow driver if they removed all of the extra lanes and passing zones from the road. Perhaps not. All I know is that there is a section that drags on for miles that does not afford a chance to get around slow people--slow as in driving close to the speed limit. When I had my bike I used a suicide lane to pass slow people out of some strange sense of entitlement: "I lived here when this was a passing lane!"
Commercial Aviation: I spent a lot of time fretting about how and what to pack for this trip, and I am seriously getting bored with writing this post, so lets just skip to where I'm standing in the C terminal with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my suitcase. All carryons. Or so I thought. An announcement came repeatedly over the intercom explaining that according to Federal Aviation Regulations, passengers are only allowed one carryon and one personal item that had to fit under the seat. By the way: all aviation laws that actually matter are Federal Aviation Regulations. Contrast with laws made by the FCC, your local township, and things like seed patents, which are bullshit.
Anyway, I, technically, had three items. Being I good sport I say something to the U.S. Airways gatekeepers about checking my suitcase. I didn't want to check my sleeping bag because it was a bit small and odd shaped for something to be thrown into the cargo hold of an airplane. It would probably get lost. In case your curious, my sleeping bag cost about $120 at EMS, and replacing it is as simple as driving to EMS and buying another one. Or one like it. I'll skip the details, but I left my precious suitcase with my Amazon laptop inside just outside of the aircraft door, in full view of a stewardess. Distance between my "gate checked" bag with a hastily scribbled tag on it and the hull fo the airplane: less then 20 feet. There's no way this won't get to Philly right?
I was wrong. I slowly realized this as I stood resting one leg on the edge of the baggage belt watching the bags, and people collecting them, approach zero. In the process of filing a claim I learned that none of the gate checked bags made it, and it was a Good Thing I happened to know the exact number and color of American Apparel t-shirts in my suitcase, because a giant Dell laptop with a white stick in the corner that says "Amazon" is not a good enough identifier for them. Apparently the shirts were good enough--the guy stopped me before I could mention all of my dirty brown socks. I guess they don't want you to mention the electronics because the employee that finds your bag might happen to find it without the laptop inside. Like that joke "Did anyone lose a roll of money in a rubber band? We found the rubber band...."
Long story short, I got my laptop back the next day, but not before I had to tell my whole team that I had checked and lost my laptop with the airline, which, again, is apparrently the dumbest thing you can do.
This entire incident has further reinforced my desire to fly myself to Philly. Flying a small airplane coast to coast just to get somewhere is expensive and impractacle, however I've found a few factors that make it comparable to general aviation:
- Around the holidays, tickets to Philly get up to $1000 ($1400 for business class), especially if you are lazy like me and wait until a week before your trip to book your tickets.
- Once you book your tickets with commercial aviation, it is difficult to reschedule your flight and impossible to switch airlines without loosing the money you paid, even if you buy that worthless trip insurance. If you fly yourself out, you can leave whenever you damn well please.
- The 1 - 2 hours you allocate for security theatre at the airport are unecessary when flying yourself around. Also subtract at least half an hour for baggage claim on longer trips.
- If you remember to put your suitcase in the airplane and then take it out of the airplane, you don't have to worry about it somehow getting lost between Seattle and Philly. And if you forget to take it out of the airplane, you can go back to where you parked and take your suitcase out of the airplane. Furthermore, you can use whatever combination of bags and packing materials you like without worrying about overhead bins and under the seats. You could really just pile your clothes in the back seat if you wanted. The only new constraint is the weight and balance issues, which I solve by kicking out all of the fat passengers (during taking ground lessons for weight and balance, most sample problems involve a 350 lb passenger in the back seat of a Cessna, which always gaurantees you will need to remove some of the fuel).
- If Philly International gets shut down because of a bit of snow on the ground, you can still fly near Philly, with the possible options of driving the rest of the way, etc, instead of waiting the storm out in some city. Similarly, and in good weather, if there are ATC delays resulting from too much traffic, a private pilot can just go behind their back and fly under Visual Flight Rules (go around all the clouds).
- You can avoid Philly International on purpose and fly directly towards a smaller airport closer to your actual destination. This could save you a long trip down highway 95 in Philly or 5 in Seattle.
Writing: Oh, also, I was reading a lot of On Writing, by Stephen King. If you are serious about writing fiction, or interesting in being serious about writing fiction, or curious about getting interested in seriously writing fiction, I highly recommend reading the second half of that book. He presents an interesting approach to writing, which I have found solves a lot of the problems I've always experienced when I hit dead ends trying to invent a story. I actually spent most of the plane ride back to Seattle furiously scribbling a story into an expensive notebook from Borders that claimed to look just like the one used by some famous writer I don't plan on reading. I bought it because it was black. I didn't get to finish the story, thanks to the case of the missing luggage, but hopefully I will abstain from my computer, tv, guitar and video games to write the ending someday.
In Summary: I spent a lot of money and saw less than a quarter of the people I wanted to see and almost lost my work laptop. In short, I kind of suck at traveling. I get more vacation time next year though....
Thursday, December 17, 2009
We "fixed the glitch"
Someone at work just discovered that a number of people, including me, are currently NOT getting paged for--let me back up. At work, here, we have a ticketing system. That's pretty bland; I'm sure I'm allowed to mention that. Anyway, tickets can be assigned directly to people. This is frowned upon, because tickets are supposed to go to the team, not some random person on the team. Also, if you do assign yourself a ticket, to let people know you're working on it, you start getting annoying emails about "SLA breach"es. Our ticketing system thinks its a problem that I have a bunch of tickets assigned to me and I haven't touched them in a month. Oh, also, some tickets, that are important, "escalate" to your manager if you don't work on them in time. I am nobody's manager. I have no underlings. Consequently, tickets don't escalate to me. Only from me, which makes my manager really happy.
Ok, now that we've gotten that all cleared up: someone, who...how do you say it...outranks me...discovered an error in our paging system that affects a number of people, including me. This error prevents us from getting paged about nonevents like "SLA breaches" and "escalations" and being directly assigned tickets, but still allows us to be paged for real problems. Unfortunately the content of the email was not so much focused on how lucky we were, but how we needed to log in and fix the glitch. I was about to Reply-All with a snarky comment, but after rewriting it ten times I realized there is no way I could say anything and not get in trouble, and since I plan on skipping some bullshit meeting about "intellectual property" tomorrow, I should probably pick my battles. Let me remind you, I work for the company that patented clicking on something to buy it.
I have to admit I was mostly scared, though, and I have this rule where I (often) have to do things I am afraid of, especially if those things include confronting people or talking to girls, however I was then presented with a better option--one that requires my silence on the matter: deliberately setting the wrong value. My paging "alias" for events I don't care about now reads something like "dont-page-dave@". The bonus here is that now I won't even have to delete those emails anymore! Its a perfectly good excuse to not send an insubordinate email, since if I said something, someone would be more likely to notice my awesome solution.
Oh s#!$ my boss just found out.
Ok, now that we've gotten that all cleared up: someone, who...how do you say it...outranks me...discovered an error in our paging system that affects a number of people, including me. This error prevents us from getting paged about nonevents like "SLA breaches" and "escalations" and being directly assigned tickets, but still allows us to be paged for real problems. Unfortunately the content of the email was not so much focused on how lucky we were, but how we needed to log in and fix the glitch. I was about to Reply-All with a snarky comment, but after rewriting it ten times I realized there is no way I could say anything and not get in trouble, and since I plan on skipping some bullshit meeting about "intellectual property" tomorrow, I should probably pick my battles. Let me remind you, I work for the company that patented clicking on something to buy it.
I have to admit I was mostly scared, though, and I have this rule where I (often) have to do things I am afraid of, especially if those things include confronting people or talking to girls, however I was then presented with a better option--one that requires my silence on the matter: deliberately setting the wrong value. My paging "alias" for events I don't care about now reads something like "dont-page-dave@". The bonus here is that now I won't even have to delete those emails anymore! Its a perfectly good excuse to not send an insubordinate email, since if I said something, someone would be more likely to notice my awesome solution.
Oh s#!$ my boss just found out.
Monday, December 14, 2009
House Arrest
I was on call this entire weekend. With the holiday schedule, it started at 5am friday monrning, and ends sometime tomorrow (monday). I only have fifteen minutes to repond to a page, so I pretty much set up my laptop and don't leave my apartment (and if I do, I stay within a 15 minute walking distance). Because of the holiday schedule, my shift lasted even longer this weekend, and after so many days of it I realized it is a lot like house arrest--I can't really go anywhere or do anything. And most people don't understand my reluctance. I think in their mind me being on call for work is like when a firefighter is on call for work--no one actually expects something to happen. But I do. I'm actually suprised when I make it through a shift and don't get paged. So when people tell me to just bring my laptop to a restaurant, or over to their house for a party, I try to imagine myself plopping my laptop onto a sushi counter and phoning in to the emergency call.
Kinda sucks though...I'm basically stuck at home all weekend with my friends thinking I'm blowing them off, doing nothing but cleaning my apartment and getting paged for other people's problems. On the bright side, Firefly Girl came over tonight to watch the next disc of Castle season 1. Castle is, in my mind, a completely unrelated continuation of the amazing Firefly series, the primary reason I will hold a grudge against Fox forever. I hope, very much, that all of the other Firefly characters become guest stars in various Castle episodes.
Kinda sucks though...I'm basically stuck at home all weekend with my friends thinking I'm blowing them off, doing nothing but cleaning my apartment and getting paged for other people's problems. On the bright side, Firefly Girl came over tonight to watch the next disc of Castle season 1. Castle is, in my mind, a completely unrelated continuation of the amazing Firefly series, the primary reason I will hold a grudge against Fox forever. I hope, very much, that all of the other Firefly characters become guest stars in various Castle episodes.
Friday, December 11, 2009
In my defense...
Half of them were there when I got here:
Also that laptop screen is practically worthless. When I was in high school, and regularly hauling my computer to scheduled events to play video games, I remember lusting after having as much desktop space as possible. Throughout college I spend a great amount of time (when I should have been out drinking or something) entertaining a dual monitor configuration. It wasn't until I got here, though, that my love affair with screen real estate realy blossomed. You see, the marginal value of adding a monitor decreases--every monitor you add is less of a benefit than the last one. One way to deal with this fact is to realize when enough is enough and stop adding monitors. Another way is to just add a lot more monitors. As you can see I'm a fan of that second school of thought. The tiny monitors on the left are held up by a quad monitor stand that I purchased from a certain online retail giant.
If you are wondering: yes, I have actually used all of them at once, with the exception of the laptop screen, which as I said earlier, is basically worthless. In the world of display devices, size does matter--unless you have a screwy display ratio that doesn't play nice with X.org....
Another question you might ask me, is how much did it cost? Well, the answer is about 2 to 2 and a half hours in a Cessna, or 25 lunches. I used to pretend this kind of thing was an investment; my parents can offer a basement full of obsolete computers and an attic full of ikea furniture as proof.
Who the hell is Sarah Woodson?
Some hot girl friended me on facebook. Her name is Sarah. I seriously have no idea who she is. I worry that I should know, that she is some close friend of mine, or a customer from Neoquest, or a girl I dated, or one of the colorguard girls in high school whose name I couldn't remember. Or one of madison's roomates, some girl I met salsa dancing, someone from Drexel cru. I mean, I don't know. The possibilities of me forgetting people are endless. I'm pretty sure she's not one of the cute girls that drove by that one time when my motorcycle broke down because I rode the rear tire down to the cord, and I'm pretty sure she's not one of Katie's friends. I met a sarah last night, but I'm pretty sure she never went to Drexel. I've heard that all you need to do to make a fake facebook account is slap on a picture of an attractive girl and friend a bunch of guys at some school. So maybe "Sarah" is just a front for some loser reporter/stalker/13 year old. Her picture does look really familiar though. If she is a fake, I'm pretty sure there is a girl out there to looks just like her that I did know at some point. The next time I feel like my life doesn't have enough mystery, I will log onto facebook and stare at her picture for a while.
Ironically, I did meet a Sarah last night, but with a different last name and a ring on her boyfriend finger. She stopped by with Bridget, which is the first time I've seen her since she moved here. Bridget told me that her friends here know about her blog--an extremely scary thought. How could I talk about people when I know they might read it? I would be constantly evaluating every sentence, judging whether or not it would hurt or improve my chances of hooking up with various ladies. I know, because I've done that. And I'd have to like watch how much ridicule my guy friends. Yeah...I'm pretty much keeping mine under wraps from western eyes. And if people around here find out about it, I'm going to have to have adventures elsewhere. Like Vegas. What happens in Vegas gets posted to the internet.
Last night also, like every night I have people over, reinforced my theory that having two stacks of tires sitting around your apartment, because of along story involving "summer" and "winter" tires and buying rims and tires, does not make a good conversation piece. Also I'm told that my living room smells like rubber, which is odd because I don't smell it anymore. By the time I get these winter tires on Jessica it will be summer again anyway and I'll have to switch them back.
AnthroPC
This one girl out here--we'll call her Firefly girl--got me interested in Questionable Content, which is one of my new favorite comics along with Penny Arcade, XKCD, Three Panel Soul and a whatever I'm forgetting right now. I don't know how I missed Questionable Content. There was a point in my life, when I didn't have a lot of friends, and Mac Hall and PBFComics were still being written, and PVPOnline was still funny sometimes, that I took it upon myself to scour the internet for all of the funny webcomics. I didn't find many. Most were either not funny, or had way too many words crowding out the panel. But I digress.
One of the characters in Questionable Content is apparently an anthropomorphic computer. It got me thinking: what would it take--actually, no. What it got me thinking was "I want one." Then I started wondering what it would take to make one. I think it would make a nice pet. It would have to be done right though; that's the kind of thing that either makes you super interesting or super nerdy. I suppose I could give it a cell phone interface, and just text it when I'm bringing girls over, and it would then hide in my closet. That would be pretty cool.
Possibly not so Expensive
I am going to re-evaluate my conclusion that flying myself to the East Coast would be too expensive. I never factored in the holiday prices. Some of the flights back home for Christmas are $1000. With commercial aviation that high, flying yourself there becomes a lot more affordable by comparison. I still have to find a plane that can to faster than 150 knots (172 mph). That may sound fast, but its not.
Also that laptop screen is practically worthless. When I was in high school, and regularly hauling my computer to scheduled events to play video games, I remember lusting after having as much desktop space as possible. Throughout college I spend a great amount of time (when I should have been out drinking or something) entertaining a dual monitor configuration. It wasn't until I got here, though, that my love affair with screen real estate realy blossomed. You see, the marginal value of adding a monitor decreases--every monitor you add is less of a benefit than the last one. One way to deal with this fact is to realize when enough is enough and stop adding monitors. Another way is to just add a lot more monitors. As you can see I'm a fan of that second school of thought. The tiny monitors on the left are held up by a quad monitor stand that I purchased from a certain online retail giant.If you are wondering: yes, I have actually used all of them at once, with the exception of the laptop screen, which as I said earlier, is basically worthless. In the world of display devices, size does matter--unless you have a screwy display ratio that doesn't play nice with X.org....
Another question you might ask me, is how much did it cost? Well, the answer is about 2 to 2 and a half hours in a Cessna, or 25 lunches. I used to pretend this kind of thing was an investment; my parents can offer a basement full of obsolete computers and an attic full of ikea furniture as proof.
Who the hell is Sarah Woodson?
Some hot girl friended me on facebook. Her name is Sarah. I seriously have no idea who she is. I worry that I should know, that she is some close friend of mine, or a customer from Neoquest, or a girl I dated, or one of the colorguard girls in high school whose name I couldn't remember. Or one of madison's roomates, some girl I met salsa dancing, someone from Drexel cru. I mean, I don't know. The possibilities of me forgetting people are endless. I'm pretty sure she's not one of the cute girls that drove by that one time when my motorcycle broke down because I rode the rear tire down to the cord, and I'm pretty sure she's not one of Katie's friends. I met a sarah last night, but I'm pretty sure she never went to Drexel. I've heard that all you need to do to make a fake facebook account is slap on a picture of an attractive girl and friend a bunch of guys at some school. So maybe "Sarah" is just a front for some loser reporter/stalker/13 year old. Her picture does look really familiar though. If she is a fake, I'm pretty sure there is a girl out there to looks just like her that I did know at some point. The next time I feel like my life doesn't have enough mystery, I will log onto facebook and stare at her picture for a while.
Ironically, I did meet a Sarah last night, but with a different last name and a ring on her boyfriend finger. She stopped by with Bridget, which is the first time I've seen her since she moved here. Bridget told me that her friends here know about her blog--an extremely scary thought. How could I talk about people when I know they might read it? I would be constantly evaluating every sentence, judging whether or not it would hurt or improve my chances of hooking up with various ladies. I know, because I've done that. And I'd have to like watch how much ridicule my guy friends. Yeah...I'm pretty much keeping mine under wraps from western eyes. And if people around here find out about it, I'm going to have to have adventures elsewhere. Like Vegas. What happens in Vegas gets posted to the internet.
Last night also, like every night I have people over, reinforced my theory that having two stacks of tires sitting around your apartment, because of along story involving "summer" and "winter" tires and buying rims and tires, does not make a good conversation piece. Also I'm told that my living room smells like rubber, which is odd because I don't smell it anymore. By the time I get these winter tires on Jessica it will be summer again anyway and I'll have to switch them back.
AnthroPC
This one girl out here--we'll call her Firefly girl--got me interested in Questionable Content, which is one of my new favorite comics along with Penny Arcade, XKCD, Three Panel Soul and a whatever I'm forgetting right now. I don't know how I missed Questionable Content. There was a point in my life, when I didn't have a lot of friends, and Mac Hall and PBFComics were still being written, and PVPOnline was still funny sometimes, that I took it upon myself to scour the internet for all of the funny webcomics. I didn't find many. Most were either not funny, or had way too many words crowding out the panel. But I digress.
One of the characters in Questionable Content is apparently an anthropomorphic computer. It got me thinking: what would it take--actually, no. What it got me thinking was "I want one." Then I started wondering what it would take to make one. I think it would make a nice pet. It would have to be done right though; that's the kind of thing that either makes you super interesting or super nerdy. I suppose I could give it a cell phone interface, and just text it when I'm bringing girls over, and it would then hide in my closet. That would be pretty cool.
Possibly not so Expensive
I am going to re-evaluate my conclusion that flying myself to the East Coast would be too expensive. I never factored in the holiday prices. Some of the flights back home for Christmas are $1000. With commercial aviation that high, flying yourself there becomes a lot more affordable by comparison. I still have to find a plane that can to faster than 150 knots (172 mph). That may sound fast, but its not.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Open for Business
"My instructor would be so mad if he saw that." I said that at least once, and thought it many times, as I took my first passenger since getting my pilot's license. After immersing myself into the training for so long, I had this irrational fear that I would forget how to fly after I shelved my textbooks and took all of my handwritten notes off the walls. Fortunately, it seems that I still remember all the important things. My skills did slip a bit. A few flights over the winter should be enough to maintain them though.
Then I got the rock band drumset for $20. I'm pretty excited. That's basically the cost of two lunches out here.
Then I got the rock band drumset for $20. I'm pretty excited. That's basically the cost of two lunches out here.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
I'd like to share a revelation I've had
If you get on the elevators here, at night, and press a button, the button will flash briefly instead of remaining lit until your floor is reached. Also you will never reach your floor. The elevator will go to the second floor, and remain there without opening the doors. All of the buttons will be nonresponsive, or flash briefly, like they are broken. You can hold a button, and it will flash a couple of times, but still nothing. Just about when you are beginning to think you are trapped, and you start examining the ceiling for a way out, the elevator will take you back down to the first floor and spit you out.
The first time this happened to me, I had failed to find an emergency exit and I had my phone unlocked, ready to dial either 911 or my boss (whichever involved talking to fewer people) when the elevator released me. Another few minutes and I probably would have walked away with some kind of elevator phobia.
The second and third time it happened, I began to realize that something was up. This took a long time, because I almost always take the stairs, and every time an elevator failed me I immediately reverted to taking the stairs. The stairs, by the way, have no access control mechanism. This will become important shortly.
I recently discovered that the reason the elevators do this is because they are "locked." They don't take you anywhere unless you scan the same badge that opens the building doors. Potential burglars are thwarted because they have no way to reach any floor of the building unless they just take the stairs. So I guess our physical security threat model is based on fat people. Idk.
Speaking of Fat People, I think we should change the security b.s. at airports by narrowing the width of the metal detectors, such that, if a person is too fat to fit through a metal detector, they are too fat to fit on an airplane seat. To board they must posses two adjacent tickets. Then they can use the double wide metal detector.
The first time this happened to me, I had failed to find an emergency exit and I had my phone unlocked, ready to dial either 911 or my boss (whichever involved talking to fewer people) when the elevator released me. Another few minutes and I probably would have walked away with some kind of elevator phobia.
The second and third time it happened, I began to realize that something was up. This took a long time, because I almost always take the stairs, and every time an elevator failed me I immediately reverted to taking the stairs. The stairs, by the way, have no access control mechanism. This will become important shortly.
I recently discovered that the reason the elevators do this is because they are "locked." They don't take you anywhere unless you scan the same badge that opens the building doors. Potential burglars are thwarted because they have no way to reach any floor of the building unless they just take the stairs. So I guess our physical security threat model is based on fat people. Idk.
Speaking of Fat People, I think we should change the security b.s. at airports by narrowing the width of the metal detectors, such that, if a person is too fat to fit through a metal detector, they are too fat to fit on an airplane seat. To board they must posses two adjacent tickets. Then they can use the double wide metal detector.
Friday, November 27, 2009
My Own Worst Enemy
Last night neither Luke nor I had plans, as we couldn't make it home for Thanksgiving. Instead we went to a cool upscale-looking bar in Belleveue. We had a cute waitress that slouched and said "whats up" every time she came to our table. I tried to see if she had a ring on a certain finger but that is difficult to tell without being obvious. Luke thought she was interested in me.
Neither of us wanted to just go home after dinner, and there were no good movie playing so--and this is where everything went downhill--we went to a coffee shop at 11pm. There was a cute girl there, too, and Luke thought she was interested in me. Unfortunately Luke thinks pretty much every girl is interested in me, and this girl looked 16.
Then I went home. Played a few video games. Took a shower. Went to bed. And couldn't fall asleep. My body was exhausted, but my mind could not shut down. Then I realized that I shouldn't have had a coffee at 11pm. I've been trying to minimize my caffeine intake lately, and between a mountain dew in the afternoon and the coffee I was wired. I tried to fantasize about living on a Sandcrawler, on a desert planet like Dune where it got really cold at night. That didn't work. Then I read a most of some book in the Bible called Ezra. Unfortunately that turned out to be unusually fascinating, so that didn't work either. Then I watched a new episode of House on Hulu. Then I fantasized about meeting people who believe in Flat Earth Theory, and asking if they were pilots, and what it would take to repeat Eratosthenes' Experiment. Then I looked up Nora Jones on wikipedia and read some of her lyrics, unsuccessfully trying to figure out why she is so popular. Then I tried to write a song about people that lived on the west coast, but in a world where there were big mountains between the west and east coasts, and the people thought that the world just ended on the other side of the mountains--except this one guy whose deceased father had a painting of a sunset between cliffs, except that the painting featured and island that didnt exist, and the stars lined up with the eastern sky. The song sucked but I saved it anyway. Then I watched some Nora Jones music video about chasing pirates, which largely resembled the opening scenes of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Then I paced around my apartment. Then I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. All during this time my anxiety over missing sleep grew with each hour I lost. Then I went back on Hulu and started watching Arrested Development. That show is awesome by the way; you can watch the episodes over and over again and they are still funny. I made it through three before I finally started to get sleepy. It was 6am. I think I feel asleep as soon as I laid down.
We have a meeting every day at 11am. If we don't make it to the office on time, or are "working from home" then we have to call into the meeting. I set my alarm for 11 am, woke up, cleared my voice, and dialed into the meeting. But there was no meeting. I listened to the crappy sounding wait music while I went back to sleep. Arriving at the office around 2pm, I discovered that there was an emergency (unless you are a business person, then its a "fire") going on. It had been going on since early in the morning. Fortunately, no one paged me. So now I'm sitting in my office with two coworkers, all tooling away on our computers. Well, I'm mostly just listening because I'm useless. But anyway, it reminds me of a lan party. Also I feel like crap, which is about right for the second day of our old parties.
[Update 8:10pm]
I just said "thats what she said" during a critical conference call with the heads of my department, not realizing my phone was unmuted.
Neither of us wanted to just go home after dinner, and there were no good movie playing so--and this is where everything went downhill--we went to a coffee shop at 11pm. There was a cute girl there, too, and Luke thought she was interested in me. Unfortunately Luke thinks pretty much every girl is interested in me, and this girl looked 16.
Then I went home. Played a few video games. Took a shower. Went to bed. And couldn't fall asleep. My body was exhausted, but my mind could not shut down. Then I realized that I shouldn't have had a coffee at 11pm. I've been trying to minimize my caffeine intake lately, and between a mountain dew in the afternoon and the coffee I was wired. I tried to fantasize about living on a Sandcrawler, on a desert planet like Dune where it got really cold at night. That didn't work. Then I read a most of some book in the Bible called Ezra. Unfortunately that turned out to be unusually fascinating, so that didn't work either. Then I watched a new episode of House on Hulu. Then I fantasized about meeting people who believe in Flat Earth Theory, and asking if they were pilots, and what it would take to repeat Eratosthenes' Experiment. Then I looked up Nora Jones on wikipedia and read some of her lyrics, unsuccessfully trying to figure out why she is so popular. Then I tried to write a song about people that lived on the west coast, but in a world where there were big mountains between the west and east coasts, and the people thought that the world just ended on the other side of the mountains--except this one guy whose deceased father had a painting of a sunset between cliffs, except that the painting featured and island that didnt exist, and the stars lined up with the eastern sky. The song sucked but I saved it anyway. Then I watched some Nora Jones music video about chasing pirates, which largely resembled the opening scenes of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Then I paced around my apartment. Then I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. All during this time my anxiety over missing sleep grew with each hour I lost. Then I went back on Hulu and started watching Arrested Development. That show is awesome by the way; you can watch the episodes over and over again and they are still funny. I made it through three before I finally started to get sleepy. It was 6am. I think I feel asleep as soon as I laid down.
We have a meeting every day at 11am. If we don't make it to the office on time, or are "working from home" then we have to call into the meeting. I set my alarm for 11 am, woke up, cleared my voice, and dialed into the meeting. But there was no meeting. I listened to the crappy sounding wait music while I went back to sleep. Arriving at the office around 2pm, I discovered that there was an emergency (unless you are a business person, then its a "fire") going on. It had been going on since early in the morning. Fortunately, no one paged me. So now I'm sitting in my office with two coworkers, all tooling away on our computers. Well, I'm mostly just listening because I'm useless. But anyway, it reminds me of a lan party. Also I feel like crap, which is about right for the second day of our old parties.
[Update 8:10pm]
I just said "thats what she said" during a critical conference call with the heads of my department, not realizing my phone was unmuted.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Dirty Balls
We went mini-golfing Sunday. I'm writing about this because it is an experience I will not forget, and because it represents what I think of half of Seattle. To begin, the place is called smashputt, and via its own advertising, and word of mouth, is advertised to be some incredible, extreme, and intense mini-golfing experience. There is a waiting list to get in. What that means is you have to buy tickets online, and if you don't, you may get stuck outside waiting in line (which is what happened to us). For a mini golf course.
As it turned out, it really wasn't that special of a place. The most notable part was the unfinished warehouse room, the extremely low quality holes, mismatched ugly (but probably artistic) furnature, and everything seemed homemade. Well, the wrong things. The hold marker stands (that have the name of the hole, and some rules that the author thought was funny) were handcrafted from two by fours, which clearly took a substantial amount of effort. But then, the lighting on the actual courses themselves was mostly table lamps. They could have just bought some nice stands for the course names, and spend all their do-it-yourself time implementing better lighting.
Speaking of the courses, they were fun. And interesting. And broken. Most were powered by a combination of air compressors and power, both of which went out multiple times. The most notable course was an air compressor gun that fired golf balls at targets made from painted sawblades in front of a pile of trash. You didn't even fire it yourself--you just pointed the gun while a staff person front-loaded a golf ball and pressed the trigger for you. Still, you could have some fun, because the pile of trash included a piano, and if you hit the piano just right the ball would come flying back at you. Of course, this "hole" really had nothing to do with minigolf, other than using golf balls as munition. If you hit a target on the first try, you get a "hole in one" and if not, you get a two. So the most prestigious hole also had the least effect on your score.
The next coolest hole was basically a catapult aimed at a castle. The amount of golfing skill required to load the catapult roughly resembles the skill needed to pour milk into a cup via a large funnel. You basicall hit the ball into these rails, and it slides up the length of the catapult arm. Actually, the catapult built to look like a trebuchet, but it was powered like a catapult, and I've already typed most of this paragraph using the work catapult, so we'll continue. The catapult didn't work very well, though. I spent my five shots unsuccessfully trying to find the correct arm necessary for the impotent catapult to launch my ball into the castle. Luke ignored the catapult completely, and bounced his ball of the ledge behind it and into the castle on the first shot.
The rest of the holes were amusing, but unremarkable. They all involve things that either spun or knocked your ball off of a narrow path, just like every other cheesy minigolf place. The only different here, was the courses were just some felt glued onto wood planks, and playing half of the holes involved little use of strategies one normally employs in a game of mini golf. The final hole featured a machine that, I think, it supposed to drill a hole in your ball, and then crush it, and then drop it into a bin. Unfortunately the machine wasn't working quite right. It did drill a hole--so long as you put two balls in at once to force the first one under the drill--but a sort of...error in the crushing step caused the ball to launch out the side of the contraption, piercing the poorly secured mesh wall and roll along the floor. So I guess half the people took home golf balls with a hole on the top.
Most of the time, I was more bored than I get even at work. However the other people were enjoying it, so I didn't say anything. Years of high school dances, awkward dates, business meetings, Army trade shows and tolerating hot girls' lame [boy]friends have given me lots of practice at feigning interest with minimal effort. Also, there was a girl there who loves Firefly.
So, in summary, Smash Putt is everything I perceive about the weird stuff that you can find in Seattle, or at least Capitol Hill: its weird, artistic, pretentious, and highly overrated. Like the bar I went to that was supposedly awesome because there was a ton of art on the walls that you could buy.
Oh, and golf balls were ugly, dirty, miscolored, and some (like mine) were chipped. And they didn't have any putters large enough for someone of my size.
One of the girls in that group told me that they had tried to go Salsa dancing, but people were mean because they didn't know enough (in my opinion, this would never happen to girls in Philly). I think I'm going to offer to teach them some basic moves and try to get some dancing going on. Last night I got the impression that the entire group thinks of me as the weird kid who says "thats what she said!" too often, which, while true, is an impression I'd like to change.
Some other future activities on my mind include flying to Bremerton for dinner, learning Texas Holdem, doing the super cool japanese private-room karaoke thing, and going to a comedy club.
In other news.
There is nothing more discouraging--no harsh comment or criticism more demoralizing to me--than hearing my own voice in a recording. I started recording myself playing my Love Story song. It sounds awful. Part of it is because my method of recording involves laying the mike infront of my guitar amp, or on the table in front of me, and just recording into the mic port of my computer. Part of it, though, it because I can't keep a steady beat and my voice is just...pathetic sounding. I really am not sure I'll ever record this--I can't imagine the amount of singing lessons I'll need. I might get someone else to sing it--I don't know.
Also, we watched the new Star Trek movie over the weekend. It inspired me to watch an Original Series episode last night before going to bed. It...was awful. The dialogue, the special effects, the acting, and the plot were all well below what I am comfortable watching. The only redeeming aspect was that it was Star Trek.
As it turned out, it really wasn't that special of a place. The most notable part was the unfinished warehouse room, the extremely low quality holes, mismatched ugly (but probably artistic) furnature, and everything seemed homemade. Well, the wrong things. The hold marker stands (that have the name of the hole, and some rules that the author thought was funny) were handcrafted from two by fours, which clearly took a substantial amount of effort. But then, the lighting on the actual courses themselves was mostly table lamps. They could have just bought some nice stands for the course names, and spend all their do-it-yourself time implementing better lighting.
Speaking of the courses, they were fun. And interesting. And broken. Most were powered by a combination of air compressors and power, both of which went out multiple times. The most notable course was an air compressor gun that fired golf balls at targets made from painted sawblades in front of a pile of trash. You didn't even fire it yourself--you just pointed the gun while a staff person front-loaded a golf ball and pressed the trigger for you. Still, you could have some fun, because the pile of trash included a piano, and if you hit the piano just right the ball would come flying back at you. Of course, this "hole" really had nothing to do with minigolf, other than using golf balls as munition. If you hit a target on the first try, you get a "hole in one" and if not, you get a two. So the most prestigious hole also had the least effect on your score.
The next coolest hole was basically a catapult aimed at a castle. The amount of golfing skill required to load the catapult roughly resembles the skill needed to pour milk into a cup via a large funnel. You basicall hit the ball into these rails, and it slides up the length of the catapult arm. Actually, the catapult built to look like a trebuchet, but it was powered like a catapult, and I've already typed most of this paragraph using the work catapult, so we'll continue. The catapult didn't work very well, though. I spent my five shots unsuccessfully trying to find the correct arm necessary for the impotent catapult to launch my ball into the castle. Luke ignored the catapult completely, and bounced his ball of the ledge behind it and into the castle on the first shot.
The rest of the holes were amusing, but unremarkable. They all involve things that either spun or knocked your ball off of a narrow path, just like every other cheesy minigolf place. The only different here, was the courses were just some felt glued onto wood planks, and playing half of the holes involved little use of strategies one normally employs in a game of mini golf. The final hole featured a machine that, I think, it supposed to drill a hole in your ball, and then crush it, and then drop it into a bin. Unfortunately the machine wasn't working quite right. It did drill a hole--so long as you put two balls in at once to force the first one under the drill--but a sort of...error in the crushing step caused the ball to launch out the side of the contraption, piercing the poorly secured mesh wall and roll along the floor. So I guess half the people took home golf balls with a hole on the top.
Most of the time, I was more bored than I get even at work. However the other people were enjoying it, so I didn't say anything. Years of high school dances, awkward dates, business meetings, Army trade shows and tolerating hot girls' lame [boy]friends have given me lots of practice at feigning interest with minimal effort. Also, there was a girl there who loves Firefly.
So, in summary, Smash Putt is everything I perceive about the weird stuff that you can find in Seattle, or at least Capitol Hill: its weird, artistic, pretentious, and highly overrated. Like the bar I went to that was supposedly awesome because there was a ton of art on the walls that you could buy.
Oh, and golf balls were ugly, dirty, miscolored, and some (like mine) were chipped. And they didn't have any putters large enough for someone of my size.
One of the girls in that group told me that they had tried to go Salsa dancing, but people were mean because they didn't know enough (in my opinion, this would never happen to girls in Philly). I think I'm going to offer to teach them some basic moves and try to get some dancing going on. Last night I got the impression that the entire group thinks of me as the weird kid who says "thats what she said!" too often, which, while true, is an impression I'd like to change.
Some other future activities on my mind include flying to Bremerton for dinner, learning Texas Holdem, doing the super cool japanese private-room karaoke thing, and going to a comedy club.
In other news.
There is nothing more discouraging--no harsh comment or criticism more demoralizing to me--than hearing my own voice in a recording. I started recording myself playing my Love Story song. It sounds awful. Part of it is because my method of recording involves laying the mike infront of my guitar amp, or on the table in front of me, and just recording into the mic port of my computer. Part of it, though, it because I can't keep a steady beat and my voice is just...pathetic sounding. I really am not sure I'll ever record this--I can't imagine the amount of singing lessons I'll need. I might get someone else to sing it--I don't know.
Also, we watched the new Star Trek movie over the weekend. It inspired me to watch an Original Series episode last night before going to bed. It...was awful. The dialogue, the special effects, the acting, and the plot were all well below what I am comfortable watching. The only redeeming aspect was that it was Star Trek.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Never a Dull Moment
Yeah, wine and cheese night, right? That sounds pretty tame. It started off pretty good. I had even sewn a button back onto an awesome shirt. I don't know how to sew, but the internet fixed that, and out of curiosity I even found out what a thimble is for--apparently its more than a monopoly piece. So I bought some wine called Snoqualmie. I did this because being a person whose knowledge of cheese consists entirely of the options at Subway I thought it would be safer to bring a bottle of wine, and Snoqualmie is the name of a skiing mountain out here. Made perfect sense in my head.
Anyway, I had a bit of a cough today. It became a serious problem at the wine and cheese party. As I sat on the couch in my awesome and recently repaired shirt, it became harder and harder to breathe without coughing. After all I didn't want people to think I had swine flu, and I really didn't want to gross people out because I'd only had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner and was helping myself to the ritz and cheddar plate quite frequently. It was becoming more and more difficult to avoid coughing, though, and my shirt seemed to get tighter and tighter. Eventually it became unbearable to the point where I was trying to hold my breath even as my chest convulsed, inadvertently making vocal sounds as air trespassed through my vocal chords. I excused myself and headed home, erupting into a fit of coughing as soon as I was out of earshot.
It was then, as I stumbled back to my car, that I realized that my "cough" was actually an asthma attack. That strange feeling of being unable to breathe was caused by actually not being able to breathe. That explained a lot. So then I had to race home to my over the counter inhaler and then recovered in front of the tv with some videogames, trying to not to think about how that played off to all the wine and cheesers back there. I rarely get asthma attacks, so there is a good chance that it was set off by the wine, which, if true, leads me to the devastating conclusion that there may be some wines out there that I'm allergic to. Its bad enough to be allergic to hard cider and half of the beer brands out there, but to also be allergic to wine...thats just lame. Now I have to buy another bottle of Snoqualmie and drink it just to find out.
This reminds me: if you've ever seen a character in a movie with "asthma" you've probably seen some geeky, nervous kid that always takes a little huff of his trusty inhaler whenever he gets a little upset. Well, thats bullshit. In the real world asthma is serious case of being unable to breathe. Its not the paper bag hyperventilation thing; its basically you getting choked by your own lungs. So those people in movies like Hitch that just sort of decide to move on from their asthma by tossing their inhaler would actually end up dead or in the ER. Ironically, the panic attack people with the hyperventilation...you can really just let them pass out and they'll be fine. Probably need a nap anyway.
I think I'm going to have to buy another inhaler and keep it in my car, like the emergency med kit in James Bond's car in Casino Royale. Then I can just run to my car next time. All I need is someone to call who has a British accent. Oh, and if you think my obsession with James Bond is retarded, or getting old, read this section of wikipedia.
Anyway, I had a bit of a cough today. It became a serious problem at the wine and cheese party. As I sat on the couch in my awesome and recently repaired shirt, it became harder and harder to breathe without coughing. After all I didn't want people to think I had swine flu, and I really didn't want to gross people out because I'd only had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner and was helping myself to the ritz and cheddar plate quite frequently. It was becoming more and more difficult to avoid coughing, though, and my shirt seemed to get tighter and tighter. Eventually it became unbearable to the point where I was trying to hold my breath even as my chest convulsed, inadvertently making vocal sounds as air trespassed through my vocal chords. I excused myself and headed home, erupting into a fit of coughing as soon as I was out of earshot.
It was then, as I stumbled back to my car, that I realized that my "cough" was actually an asthma attack. That strange feeling of being unable to breathe was caused by actually not being able to breathe. That explained a lot. So then I had to race home to my over the counter inhaler and then recovered in front of the tv with some videogames, trying to not to think about how that played off to all the wine and cheesers back there. I rarely get asthma attacks, so there is a good chance that it was set off by the wine, which, if true, leads me to the devastating conclusion that there may be some wines out there that I'm allergic to. Its bad enough to be allergic to hard cider and half of the beer brands out there, but to also be allergic to wine...thats just lame. Now I have to buy another bottle of Snoqualmie and drink it just to find out.
This reminds me: if you've ever seen a character in a movie with "asthma" you've probably seen some geeky, nervous kid that always takes a little huff of his trusty inhaler whenever he gets a little upset. Well, thats bullshit. In the real world asthma is serious case of being unable to breathe. Its not the paper bag hyperventilation thing; its basically you getting choked by your own lungs. So those people in movies like Hitch that just sort of decide to move on from their asthma by tossing their inhaler would actually end up dead or in the ER. Ironically, the panic attack people with the hyperventilation...you can really just let them pass out and they'll be fine. Probably need a nap anyway.
I think I'm going to have to buy another inhaler and keep it in my car, like the emergency med kit in James Bond's car in Casino Royale. Then I can just run to my car next time. All I need is someone to call who has a British accent. Oh, and if you think my obsession with James Bond is retarded, or getting old, read this section of wikipedia.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Wings are NOT on Fire
My checkride was set up last minute, there were problems with my paper work, and IFR weather (instrument weather--the kind I can't fly in) was closing in around where we planned to go. However, the checkride went on and I passed. I don't know how I passed. Somehow I did a steep turn to the left without making too many mistakes. We ended the checkride by testing my landings at Tacoma, an airport I'd never been to.
If you've ever played a first person videogame--such as Half-life--and gotten stuck where you are almost dead, but for some reason you've managed to just barely hang in there and keep going, and you're going farther than you thought you could but any moment you could slip up...just trying to make it to the next health, or the next weapon drop...thats what my checkride felt like. One screwed up maneuver and I would be going home without a license. But I passed. I kicked ass on the oral quizzing and my checkride examiner didn't mind too much that I almost flew into SeaTac's airspace accidentally. So...I have a license now. I can fly planes.
Good thing to...because my checkride started at Boeing Field, and it ended at Tacoma, because that is where the examiner was based out of. My first flight as a real pilot was basically commuting home from the test. I thought that was humorous. At the time it was a bit scary.
Then, as I'm coming back to Boeing, another small plane was near me and at the same altitude and also inbound for Boeing AND their callsign sounded just like mine. That made for a great five minutes on the radio. But I eventually spotted them, and they passed me, and then I made a little mistake with the flaps that we won't tell anybody about, and I was home.
Then I had a few hours to kill, and then it was off to teach a bunch of girls how to salsa dance. That went ok. I managed to teach them the basic step and the right turn. I couldn't do anything else, though, because they had a lot of trouble with the right turn. Its hard to teach 6 people at once, but I have to admit I enjoyed it.
Then, Sunday, I saw Pirate Radio, which was awesome. Afterwards we went to the Cheesecake Factory. In case you've never been to The Cheesesteak Factory, let me describe it for you. It is an odd mix of fancy and...the opposite of fancy. It is a place with multiple forks to each place setting, but also a ton of advertisements in the menu. The most remarkable thing is the size of the portions. For a restaurant that specializes in cheesecakes, they sure try hard to make you so stuffed you won't want any. Each entree could probably feed a small family for a week. I actually ate so much last night that I woke up after only four hours of sleep, feeling too nauseous to lie down again. I spent the next four hours semi-huddled in front of my tv with a glass of water, learning about the early Pilgrims and also the July 20 plot on the history channel and then went to work. I was still so full that I skipped breakfast and lunch. Somehow, with a ton of coffee that almost made me feel sick, I survived work with less than half my team observing me doze off. And now here I am staying up late again.
So...what to do now. I have a bunch of friends to hang out with, a car that needs maintenance, some skiis to buy, some pictures to hang, an apartment to furnish...oh and I should probably go flying some time. If we ever get another clear day. Some of you have asked me if I do a lot of cool twisty turny things. The short answer is no. This video actually shows the most exciting thing pilots like me ever do (and live). Its wierd...the shots of those planes landing really aren't all that exciting, but knowing what goes into it makes it really interesting to me. I'm probably young enough to still make it into the military or an airline, but you should be glad that I don't.
If you've ever played a first person videogame--such as Half-life--and gotten stuck where you are almost dead, but for some reason you've managed to just barely hang in there and keep going, and you're going farther than you thought you could but any moment you could slip up...just trying to make it to the next health, or the next weapon drop...thats what my checkride felt like. One screwed up maneuver and I would be going home without a license. But I passed. I kicked ass on the oral quizzing and my checkride examiner didn't mind too much that I almost flew into SeaTac's airspace accidentally. So...I have a license now. I can fly planes.
Good thing to...because my checkride started at Boeing Field, and it ended at Tacoma, because that is where the examiner was based out of. My first flight as a real pilot was basically commuting home from the test. I thought that was humorous. At the time it was a bit scary.
Then, as I'm coming back to Boeing, another small plane was near me and at the same altitude and also inbound for Boeing AND their callsign sounded just like mine. That made for a great five minutes on the radio. But I eventually spotted them, and they passed me, and then I made a little mistake with the flaps that we won't tell anybody about, and I was home.
Then I had a few hours to kill, and then it was off to teach a bunch of girls how to salsa dance. That went ok. I managed to teach them the basic step and the right turn. I couldn't do anything else, though, because they had a lot of trouble with the right turn. Its hard to teach 6 people at once, but I have to admit I enjoyed it.
Then, Sunday, I saw Pirate Radio, which was awesome. Afterwards we went to the Cheesecake Factory. In case you've never been to The Cheesesteak Factory, let me describe it for you. It is an odd mix of fancy and...the opposite of fancy. It is a place with multiple forks to each place setting, but also a ton of advertisements in the menu. The most remarkable thing is the size of the portions. For a restaurant that specializes in cheesecakes, they sure try hard to make you so stuffed you won't want any. Each entree could probably feed a small family for a week. I actually ate so much last night that I woke up after only four hours of sleep, feeling too nauseous to lie down again. I spent the next four hours semi-huddled in front of my tv with a glass of water, learning about the early Pilgrims and also the July 20 plot on the history channel and then went to work. I was still so full that I skipped breakfast and lunch. Somehow, with a ton of coffee that almost made me feel sick, I survived work with less than half my team observing me doze off. And now here I am staying up late again.
So...what to do now. I have a bunch of friends to hang out with, a car that needs maintenance, some skiis to buy, some pictures to hang, an apartment to furnish...oh and I should probably go flying some time. If we ever get another clear day. Some of you have asked me if I do a lot of cool twisty turny things. The short answer is no. This video actually shows the most exciting thing pilots like me ever do (and live). Its wierd...the shots of those planes landing really aren't all that exciting, but knowing what goes into it makes it really interesting to me. I'm probably young enough to still make it into the military or an airline, but you should be glad that I don't.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Heaven Holds a Sense of Wonder
I think it would be fun to imagine that we are all guests here on this planet, that if you drew a line segment from the sun, through the Earth's position when you were born, and off into the never ending distance, that would be where you are really from.
Around the Sun in 365 Days!
I turned 26 recently. Kev doesn't know it, but he won a bet with me, because last year I bet him that I would act normal about my birthday, and throw a big party. I was secretly planning to invite everybody but him out of spite. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about my birthday. I spent most of it on an Airbus next to a small child that liked playing a game where she handed me a large quantity of small strips of paper, one at a time. This game didn't appear to have any rules, but we played it at least three times. Her name was Samantha, and her constant attention (at least while she was awake) melted through the all of the antisocial tendencies I could muster.
Now that I am 26 I am, officially, older than I've ever wanted to be. I understand you have to be at least 35 to be President of the United States, but I'm pretty sure neither of our incumbent political parties would ever let that happen. If they are even separate parties. I wrote a big melodramatic bromide about being so old and something about regrets, but I wrote it in Notepad (best Microsoft program ever) on my laptop, which is all the way in the other room. So instead, here, I will simply reflect on what I've learned over the past year. Last year actually started pretty bad. I think I got dumped/rejected by three of the four girls I've ever fallen in love with, pretty much all in a row. So the year only got better. Highlights include Bailey's New Years Eve Party, Betsy, Nicole and Scott's wedding...and pretty much every other time I've been to Philly. I'm sure something good happened in Seattle too. Seattle is great. Oh yeah, the Halloween party. That was in Seattle, and that turned out WAY better than the previous Halloween.
As an introvert trying to be an extrovert, I have learned the following things in the past year:
something about looking people in the eye, and smiling. You can't really look people in the eye without smiling, because people think that's creepy. Kyle says people like hearing their name, and he is dead on, however I'm still forgetting everyone's name, so thats out
something about doing what your afraid of, at least when it comes to interacting with people. Whether its confronting someone about something, or asking someone to dance, or talking to a girl you've never met before, spending 90 hours one on one with a total strangers who intimidate you, taking baby steps to be the opposite of passive-aggressive, putting effort into conversations with strangers on planes, going to NYC and spending all day trying to talk to people, asking out that hot girl you met on the plane that blew you off, going to a party where you know exactly one person...it all helps. Every other week I do something that I realize I would have never done a couple years ago.
saying it out loud when you need to tell someone they're beautiful. I hate telling girls they are beautiful. I tend to avoid* girls that know they are beautiful, because they tend to be impossible to deal with. However the girls that don't know it often won't believe it when you tell them, which leads to a strange sort of argument, one that I know from experience you can't win. Nevertheless, in my opinion, saying it is better than silence. Also, fun fact: if I think you are beautiful, that puts you in the 7th or 93rd percentile or something. Ok I don't really understand the math anymore, but I ran the numbers (don't ask how) and out of every 100 girls I meet, I think about 7 are attractive. I'm not exaggerating.
*avoid...get rejected...very fine line
Usually around my birthday I identify about 20 things that are wrong with my life (with being single near the top of the list, except you can never say that out loud because all your friends start acting really annoying) and about 250 things to do to fix it. Learning to fly was a line item in such a list from about two years ago. So you can see just how efficient that system is. I think this year I'm going to limit myself to one change: do less things that will theoretically benefit me at some distance point in the future that I don't want to reach, and spend more effort trying to enjoy my life. As soon as I finish the flying lessons.
In other news
What else was I going to ramble about...my checkride is Sunday. I need to prepare a flight plan to a destination of the check airman's choosing. My check airman has decided not to call me back yet. Work is getting pretty lame...my schedule sucks and for a programmer I sure haven't done much programming lately. I watched an awesome movie called Primer because it was in an XKCD strip. It was amazing. Unfortunately, it was unecessarily confusing, which could have easily been remedied by spending more time on certain key pieces, but I can't complain since it was done on an indie budget, and despite the fact that it was about something as ridiculous as time travel it had more (real) science in it than...probably every mainstream movie I've ever seen, put together. I'm planning on watching it another 5 times to understand what happens.
I've continued work on my version of Taylor Swift's love story. I am considering taking Kyle's advice, and recording the guitar in one track and then sing in another track while I listen to the guitar part. I had really wanted to make a youtube video, with the secret hope that girls everywhere would fall in love with me, and Taylor Swift would see it and one thing would lead to another and we'd play a duet on a stage somewhere. However, instead of doing that, and beacuse Adam and I spent a lot of time perusing the Lego store in King of Prussia, I am considering making a music video with Lego bricks (<- thats how the Lego company actually expects people to refer to legos). It would certainly give me an excuse to have legos again...but it could easily be more detrimental to my social life than even the flying. So we'll see. If I end up dying cold and alone, reast assured they will have to dig my body out from under a mountain of legos.
[Update]...
I forgot to write about the karaoke bar I went to with Betsy, Kat and Natasha. It was awesome. I'd read about these places on the internet before; apparently its a big thing in Japan to like get all serious about Karaoke and have your own private room and stuff. There is a place in chinatown (Philly) that does it. They serve sushi and drinks and there's a big tv and two mikes you can pass around. And its a Japanese system so all the American songs are labeled "foreign." Its hilarious. Anyway, I want to go back.
Also, I got bored in a meeting once when I happened to have also gotten McDonald's food, and starting peeling off the monopoly pieces. I don't know if it is still going on, but if it is, I have Reading Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, and B & O Railroad. So please check your monopoly tags the next time you go to McDonald's. The set is worth $500...which ironically isn't worth much in this town. Also, if you could just tell me what the fourth railroad is, I'd appreciate that as well; I can't remember it. I haven't played monopoly since that game with Chris, Adam, Owen and Erin where Chris screwed me out of winning.
Around the Sun in 365 Days!
I turned 26 recently. Kev doesn't know it, but he won a bet with me, because last year I bet him that I would act normal about my birthday, and throw a big party. I was secretly planning to invite everybody but him out of spite. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about my birthday. I spent most of it on an Airbus next to a small child that liked playing a game where she handed me a large quantity of small strips of paper, one at a time. This game didn't appear to have any rules, but we played it at least three times. Her name was Samantha, and her constant attention (at least while she was awake) melted through the all of the antisocial tendencies I could muster.
Now that I am 26 I am, officially, older than I've ever wanted to be. I understand you have to be at least 35 to be President of the United States, but I'm pretty sure neither of our incumbent political parties would ever let that happen. If they are even separate parties. I wrote a big melodramatic bromide about being so old and something about regrets, but I wrote it in Notepad (best Microsoft program ever) on my laptop, which is all the way in the other room. So instead, here, I will simply reflect on what I've learned over the past year. Last year actually started pretty bad. I think I got dumped/rejected by three of the four girls I've ever fallen in love with, pretty much all in a row. So the year only got better. Highlights include Bailey's New Years Eve Party, Betsy, Nicole and Scott's wedding...and pretty much every other time I've been to Philly. I'm sure something good happened in Seattle too. Seattle is great. Oh yeah, the Halloween party. That was in Seattle, and that turned out WAY better than the previous Halloween.
As an introvert trying to be an extrovert, I have learned the following things in the past year:
something about looking people in the eye, and smiling. You can't really look people in the eye without smiling, because people think that's creepy. Kyle says people like hearing their name, and he is dead on, however I'm still forgetting everyone's name, so thats out
something about doing what your afraid of, at least when it comes to interacting with people. Whether its confronting someone about something, or asking someone to dance, or talking to a girl you've never met before, spending 90 hours one on one with a total strangers who intimidate you, taking baby steps to be the opposite of passive-aggressive, putting effort into conversations with strangers on planes, going to NYC and spending all day trying to talk to people, asking out that hot girl you met on the plane that blew you off, going to a party where you know exactly one person...it all helps. Every other week I do something that I realize I would have never done a couple years ago.
saying it out loud when you need to tell someone they're beautiful. I hate telling girls they are beautiful. I tend to avoid* girls that know they are beautiful, because they tend to be impossible to deal with. However the girls that don't know it often won't believe it when you tell them, which leads to a strange sort of argument, one that I know from experience you can't win. Nevertheless, in my opinion, saying it is better than silence. Also, fun fact: if I think you are beautiful, that puts you in the 7th or 93rd percentile or something. Ok I don't really understand the math anymore, but I ran the numbers (don't ask how) and out of every 100 girls I meet, I think about 7 are attractive. I'm not exaggerating.
*avoid...get rejected...very fine line
Usually around my birthday I identify about 20 things that are wrong with my life (with being single near the top of the list, except you can never say that out loud because all your friends start acting really annoying) and about 250 things to do to fix it. Learning to fly was a line item in such a list from about two years ago. So you can see just how efficient that system is. I think this year I'm going to limit myself to one change: do less things that will theoretically benefit me at some distance point in the future that I don't want to reach, and spend more effort trying to enjoy my life. As soon as I finish the flying lessons.
In other news
What else was I going to ramble about...my checkride is Sunday. I need to prepare a flight plan to a destination of the check airman's choosing. My check airman has decided not to call me back yet. Work is getting pretty lame...my schedule sucks and for a programmer I sure haven't done much programming lately. I watched an awesome movie called Primer because it was in an XKCD strip. It was amazing. Unfortunately, it was unecessarily confusing, which could have easily been remedied by spending more time on certain key pieces, but I can't complain since it was done on an indie budget, and despite the fact that it was about something as ridiculous as time travel it had more (real) science in it than...probably every mainstream movie I've ever seen, put together. I'm planning on watching it another 5 times to understand what happens.
I've continued work on my version of Taylor Swift's love story. I am considering taking Kyle's advice, and recording the guitar in one track and then sing in another track while I listen to the guitar part. I had really wanted to make a youtube video, with the secret hope that girls everywhere would fall in love with me, and Taylor Swift would see it and one thing would lead to another and we'd play a duet on a stage somewhere. However, instead of doing that, and beacuse Adam and I spent a lot of time perusing the Lego store in King of Prussia, I am considering making a music video with Lego bricks (<- thats how the Lego company actually expects people to refer to legos). It would certainly give me an excuse to have legos again...but it could easily be more detrimental to my social life than even the flying. So we'll see. If I end up dying cold and alone, reast assured they will have to dig my body out from under a mountain of legos.
[Update]...
I forgot to write about the karaoke bar I went to with Betsy, Kat and Natasha. It was awesome. I'd read about these places on the internet before; apparently its a big thing in Japan to like get all serious about Karaoke and have your own private room and stuff. There is a place in chinatown (Philly) that does it. They serve sushi and drinks and there's a big tv and two mikes you can pass around. And its a Japanese system so all the American songs are labeled "foreign." Its hilarious. Anyway, I want to go back.
Also, I got bored in a meeting once when I happened to have also gotten McDonald's food, and starting peeling off the monopoly pieces. I don't know if it is still going on, but if it is, I have Reading Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, and B & O Railroad. So please check your monopoly tags the next time you go to McDonald's. The set is worth $500...which ironically isn't worth much in this town. Also, if you could just tell me what the fourth railroad is, I'd appreciate that as well; I can't remember it. I haven't played monopoly since that game with Chris, Adam, Owen and Erin where Chris screwed me out of winning.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
In Philly Saturday
Hello. I will be in philly saturday night, drinking somewhere. If you wanna hang out, text me to find out where I'm at. I've decided to do it this way instead of making plans with everyone individually, because that never works and I only have one night anyway.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Not quite a haiku
Forever is over[1]
at the end of the internet
where P equals N P
[1] Love Drunk
Was at a party tonight. Had to pull out pieces of last years ninja costume. Used a mini tire pump as a pretend dart gun because I had thrown away my sword. I also used a chalk bag as my bag of ninja sand, which was awesome because I then found out who all of the climbers were. I also climbed a rock wall outside their house. Met some awesome people, and there were more girls than guys half the time. At some point in the night, I remember actually being happy that I moved here, and that I wanted to totally write about it on my blog. Seemed a bit ironic. Speaking of which, xkcd's surprising relevance to our lives was also a topic of conversation. Still sick though, so no making out :(
Also my checkride was supposed to be today, but I couldn't get off work. It was a beautiful day too. I'm not going to have a chance to do it for over a week, which means I'll probably need to go up with another instructor and practice beforehand. It's going to be a big hassle. However, I am done the course, and all I have to do is get past this checkride. My apartment is in total disarray, Jessica is overdue for a 15k mile checkup, I'm out of money and time and half my friends think I hate them, but I've made it. Except for the checkride.
I think I'm gonna make next years halloween costume now, while I'm thinking of it. I like halloween; its the one day of the year I can really be myself. I'm never prepared though. I kind of want to make an armor shrine of different costumes in my closet (like the way batman hangs is suite up). And not just for costumes. I could have one for flying stuff, and for skiing stuff, and motorcycle armor layed out. Maybe a set of real samurai armor too, just to make people wonder.
at the end of the internet
where P equals N P
[1] Love Drunk
Was at a party tonight. Had to pull out pieces of last years ninja costume. Used a mini tire pump as a pretend dart gun because I had thrown away my sword. I also used a chalk bag as my bag of ninja sand, which was awesome because I then found out who all of the climbers were. I also climbed a rock wall outside their house. Met some awesome people, and there were more girls than guys half the time. At some point in the night, I remember actually being happy that I moved here, and that I wanted to totally write about it on my blog. Seemed a bit ironic. Speaking of which, xkcd's surprising relevance to our lives was also a topic of conversation. Still sick though, so no making out :(
Also my checkride was supposed to be today, but I couldn't get off work. It was a beautiful day too. I'm not going to have a chance to do it for over a week, which means I'll probably need to go up with another instructor and practice beforehand. It's going to be a big hassle. However, I am done the course, and all I have to do is get past this checkride. My apartment is in total disarray, Jessica is overdue for a 15k mile checkup, I'm out of money and time and half my friends think I hate them, but I've made it. Except for the checkride.
I think I'm gonna make next years halloween costume now, while I'm thinking of it. I like halloween; its the one day of the year I can really be myself. I'm never prepared though. I kind of want to make an armor shrine of different costumes in my closet (like the way batman hangs is suite up). And not just for costumes. I could have one for flying stuff, and for skiing stuff, and motorcycle armor layed out. Maybe a set of real samurai armor too, just to make people wonder.
Friday, October 30, 2009
And now for something completely different
I have a lot of things I'd like to complain about, but instead I'm going to show you this picture:
I think we can all agree that was the better choice of content.
I think we can all agree that was the better choice of content.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Endgame
Russians
I visited Philly a week ago. I apologize for not telling many people; I was sick and only around for a couple of days. I did manage to see a few people, and it was good to see them. The rest of you...please buy me one of these and I will come home whenever you want (as long as whenever means weekends). I started writing this super long blog entry describing my whole weekend in agonizing detail, including a detailed log of who I saw, and whether or not I thought certain girls might still be interested, and how I got to the wedding super early (and awkwardly) and how it went, but it was boring.
Some highlights of the weekend included me actually watching a Phillies game with Owen and Erin. I mean, we were also talking about Batman, but I was looking at the screen, and I remember the score being 8-0 at one point. Considering I've always regarded baseball to be one of the most linear and therefore boring sports out there, I think this was a big step for me.
Natasha's wedding, the reason I endured a total of 8 takeoffs/landings in one weekend with a sore throat, was awesome. Even though I was almost too sick to go it was still awesome. The food was amazing--they had enormous plates all like layed out at each table, and people kept bringing more and more plates. It was delicious. Also two hot and single girls sat at the same table as me. And the one girls' mother gently chided me for not trying to get her daughter drunk. Honestly it was the best wedding reception I've ever been to. I was having such a good time I danced to hiphop. I mean, wow.
Unfortunately I was quite sick, and while I was no longer contagious under normal circumstances, making out was sadly out of the question, and I was staying at a friends house. However, Kat's boyfriend told me stories of Eastern Europe/Ukraine/Russia/Moscow/Kiev/St Petersburg, where...how did he put it...the ratio was in our favor? We both had a bit of cogniac so its hard to remember or describe the avalon he so eloquently described, and I don't even remember his name (it might be Alex? or is has the letter 'n' somewhere). But it was something about it being completely different, where girls were actually interested in meeting guys, where girls aren't at bitchy as they are here. And they're all Russian.
I bought a travel book the next day.
Endgame
I am at the end of my flight training. I have nothing new to learn, except for a bunch of stuff that I was supposed to have known already. My flight instructor has left for the East Coast. Saturday I passed the knowledge test--actually I didn't so much pass it as kicked its ass. I got one question wrong, but it was a stupid question, and I also found a mistake on the test, so I consider that even.
Now all I have to do is pass a final test at the flight school this week, and then schedule my "checkride" with an FAA examiner. If I pass the checkride, I will be a Private Pilot. Unfortunately it won't be easy; you have to do a lot of different maneuvers during these tests, and for some reason I'm not too good at turning to the left with 45 degrees of bank. Actually I think I'm great at it, but I always gain or lose a couple hundred feet of altitude by accident.
However, I am almost done. After more than six months I am actually going to have a life. I'll be able to sleep in saturday mornings, or walk to Pike's Place and buy fruit. I'll be able to watch House for four hours without the nagging feeling that I should be studying. I'll actually see my friends...maybe play Settlers again. I'll have time to buy a coffee table, and rims for Jessica's winter tires, and put something on my apartment walls, and go out dancing, and see a bunch of people that I haven't seen in a while. A social life! How exciting.
Oh, and I'll be able to hop in a Cessna and just go flying when I feel like it.
Hope
Something worked today, at work. I mean, I turned something on, and it worked. I was surprised in a good way for once. The rest of the day was frustrating like usual, but I think I could eventually enjoy the job I have now.
I visited Philly a week ago. I apologize for not telling many people; I was sick and only around for a couple of days. I did manage to see a few people, and it was good to see them. The rest of you...please buy me one of these and I will come home whenever you want (as long as whenever means weekends). I started writing this super long blog entry describing my whole weekend in agonizing detail, including a detailed log of who I saw, and whether or not I thought certain girls might still be interested, and how I got to the wedding super early (and awkwardly) and how it went, but it was boring.
Some highlights of the weekend included me actually watching a Phillies game with Owen and Erin. I mean, we were also talking about Batman, but I was looking at the screen, and I remember the score being 8-0 at one point. Considering I've always regarded baseball to be one of the most linear and therefore boring sports out there, I think this was a big step for me.
Natasha's wedding, the reason I endured a total of 8 takeoffs/landings in one weekend with a sore throat, was awesome. Even though I was almost too sick to go it was still awesome. The food was amazing--they had enormous plates all like layed out at each table, and people kept bringing more and more plates. It was delicious. Also two hot and single girls sat at the same table as me. And the one girls' mother gently chided me for not trying to get her daughter drunk. Honestly it was the best wedding reception I've ever been to. I was having such a good time I danced to hiphop. I mean, wow.
Unfortunately I was quite sick, and while I was no longer contagious under normal circumstances, making out was sadly out of the question, and I was staying at a friends house. However, Kat's boyfriend told me stories of Eastern Europe/Ukraine/Russia/Moscow/Kiev/St Petersburg, where...how did he put it...the ratio was in our favor? We both had a bit of cogniac so its hard to remember or describe the avalon he so eloquently described, and I don't even remember his name (it might be Alex? or is has the letter 'n' somewhere). But it was something about it being completely different, where girls were actually interested in meeting guys, where girls aren't at bitchy as they are here. And they're all Russian.
I bought a travel book the next day.
Endgame
I am at the end of my flight training. I have nothing new to learn, except for a bunch of stuff that I was supposed to have known already. My flight instructor has left for the East Coast. Saturday I passed the knowledge test--actually I didn't so much pass it as kicked its ass. I got one question wrong, but it was a stupid question, and I also found a mistake on the test, so I consider that even.
Now all I have to do is pass a final test at the flight school this week, and then schedule my "checkride" with an FAA examiner. If I pass the checkride, I will be a Private Pilot. Unfortunately it won't be easy; you have to do a lot of different maneuvers during these tests, and for some reason I'm not too good at turning to the left with 45 degrees of bank. Actually I think I'm great at it, but I always gain or lose a couple hundred feet of altitude by accident.
However, I am almost done. After more than six months I am actually going to have a life. I'll be able to sleep in saturday mornings, or walk to Pike's Place and buy fruit. I'll be able to watch House for four hours without the nagging feeling that I should be studying. I'll actually see my friends...maybe play Settlers again. I'll have time to buy a coffee table, and rims for Jessica's winter tires, and put something on my apartment walls, and go out dancing, and see a bunch of people that I haven't seen in a while. A social life! How exciting.
Oh, and I'll be able to hop in a Cessna and just go flying when I feel like it.
Hope
Something worked today, at work. I mean, I turned something on, and it worked. I was surprised in a good way for once. The rest of the day was frustrating like usual, but I think I could eventually enjoy the job I have now.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
"Your world is as big as you make it"
Rain hit the windshield, introducing the first unexpected condition to my trip. I was halfway between Seattle and a town on the coast called Hoqiuam, at 4,500 feet and in the middle of trying to end a conversation over the radio with a flight watch specialist who kept giving me bits of information I didn't want after calling them to ask about the cloud ceilings. The weather was good, but the clouds that were supposed to be at six thousand and higher seemed a bit low. And then the rain struck. Rain is yet another thing that is hazardous to pilots. When the air is cold enough, it accumulates as one of two or three different kinds of ice that I haven't memorized yet. This makes the wing unable to produce as much lift, which usually results in a depressing accident report.
The funny thing was, I couldn't see the rain except for what was slamming into the windshield. It sounded like I was getting shot with little pellets. I looked at the thermometer for the outside temp and started reducing my altitude. The air temperature was 2 degrees celsius, which is right above freezing. It was beginning to look like I would need to divert. Ostensibly, diverting means what you would think it means: landing somewhere you didn't plan to. To a student pilot, diverting means running through a tedious checklist and doing a lot of basic math involving time, distance, and fuel that makes your head hurt, even though, for safety reasons, your airplane usually has enough fuel to do your trip twice without refueling. In theory, all of this busywork will save your lafe later when you actually need to do it.
Diversion
I had a few options, including changing my altitude, deviating to the south to try to circumnavigate the rain, and just going back home ("diverting"). I was still unable to see the rain anywhere, and I was too inexperienced to really understand those options. The only absolutely safe answer I had was to go back to Boeing Field. During all of my quizes on the ground, I quickly deduced that "cancel the flight" and "divert" and "go back home" are usually the right answers anytime you are asked about clouds and weather and what should you do.
Going back home is exactly what I did. I found out later that I could have just lowered my altitude or gone around the rain and it would have been fine. Nonetheless, I arrived back at my flight school, Wings Aloft, around 4pm, having nearly wasted an entire day. I had originally planned to go all the way to Astoria, a process which actually started Friday night and continued Saturday morning. By 12:30 or 1pm, I was finally done my ridiculously tedious plan, just in time for my flight instructor to [figuratively] tear it apart, criticizing me for not making the plan tedious enough. Then I was on my way. Almost.
Saturday: Hoqium
I got in the aircraft I had planned to fly and started the engine. There were a problem with the alternator, and something called a suction gauge, which were just bad enough that I knew there was no way I could fly the plane. I ran through my emergency checklist for the problem, and then, already at least a half hour past my indended depature time, I towed the Cessna back into its spot and tied it down and walked back to the operations building for a different aircraft. The fact that I thought the one I had was broken turned out to be an issue, because that made the club short one plane the next day. I didn't my best to describe the problem to the mechanic, who I interrupted from a lively conversation with his friends.
The flight school has a bunch of rules--extra rules that go beyond the minimum Federal regulations for student pilots that make it extra difficult to successfully get your license. The only benefit to the student is that a student under these extra rules can, in theory, receive a pilots license after only 35 hours in the air, as opposed to 40. Those numbers could be wrong; its been a while since I studied that chapter. Anyway, one of these rules is that I had to get back by sunset. This one I am ok with, since I tend to have trouble finding Boeing Field in the dark. Unfortunately, that meant that since I was so late I would not be able to fly all the way to Astoria that day. I "ammended" my flight plan and set off for Hoqium, which, on my route, was on the way to Astoria anyway.
As I got in my alternate airplane and started going through my preflight checklists, I saw the mechanic inthe one that I thought was broken, playing with the engine and the lights. He later told me he couldn't find anything wrong with it. This further hurt my credibility for reporting problems with airplanes, because my instructor likes to report every little problem with the airplanes that we fly and he does it in my name. One time a mechanic actually called me for an explanation on why I thought the airspeed indicator was broken. But I digress.
After my rained out flight I went home and vegged out in front of the tv for a while. Then one of my friends texted me; I had blown off an outing involving corn mazes, pumpkins and campfires because I was flying. Apparently I could still meet up with them for a campfire at some park I'd never heard of. Just before I left, my flight instructor called me suggesting I do my Astoria flight the next day. I had promised myself that if I didn't quit flight training, I would at least have a life while doing it. So I went out to the park anyway. Then I came home, and planned my flight as fast as I could. My time was a mixture of planning, sleep, and preflighting, and then I was off to Astoria, for real this time.
Sunday: Astoria
My flight to Astoria was required to be at least a 4 hour ordeal, according to the curriculum, which seems to have been designed to force me to refuel at a different airport, which is something that I had been avoding. A few days prior my instructor took me to Bremerton and showed me how to use the self serfice fuel station, which looked humorously similar to a car gas station. I took a picture of it with my cell phone. I'd love to share it with you, but when I connect my phone to my [windows] computer, a subset of my phone numbers randomly disappear.
The flight went well. I requested flight following from Air Traffic Control, and they dropped me halfway through the flight because I went below their radar, which I was ecstatic about because I hate talking to them. You're not allowed to change frequencies when you're receiving "flight following," which means that, in order to announce your passage to airports along the way (so people don't run into you), you have to do this funky thing with your radio where you listen on two frequencies at once but only transmit on one. If you make a mistake with the radio switches, a number of bad things might occur. The two worst ones are: 1) your radio will not transmit or receive anything or 2) you will make an extremely long broadcast on an extremely busy air traffic control channel, disrupt time critical communications that the controller needs to make, and basically announce to everyone within ten to a hundred square miles that you are an idiot. Oh, and even if you manage to do the radio thing right, the controllers voice will probably be blaring in your ear while you try to talk, and you can't completely tune him or her out because if she says your callsign then you have to undo your crazy radio setup and respond. Yes, I am exaggerating the difficulty. A little.
Long story short, I was supper happy when the controller tossed me away like my last girlfriend did and I heard the words "frequency change approved" on the radio. It still stung a little, though, as if, being a simple non-instrument pilot I was the least interesting guest at a party. On the way back from Astoria, I...forgot to call ATC for flight following. And then I remembered, and made myself too busy by snapping a few pictures. The phrase "yeah I did request flight following but they dropped me so I didn't bother on the way back" usually appeases my instructor.
The coast was absolutely beautiful, including the mountains I trouble getting around because they looked a lot smaller on the chart. I landed at Astoria, and even got to hear someone with a British/Australian accent on the radio, which is like my favorite thing ever. Well, maybe not my favorite thing, but you could introduce an English accent to that also.
Pictures
This is what my table looks like when I am "flight planning." Flight planning involves things like basic math and mechanical computers, which work by the same principles as the mechanical computers from some ancient civilization on the History Channel. There are also paper charts, and pencils. I am not accustomed to ever drawing lines piece of paper that I may need to move or adjust at a future time; that's what computers are for. My way of dealing with this has been to buy a new sectional chart for almost every "cross country" flight I plan. They expire in a manner of months, forcing one to buy new ones. Someone in this century saw fit to put the charts on the internet, however for legal reasons we are forced to use the paper ones. That, and Cessnas don't get internet, and also the chart could significantly drain the color cartridges of most personal inkjets.
If you have trouble falling asleep, or you are a cute girl that wants to hook up with me and feels the need to feign interest in something, I would be happy to explain what all of those pieces of paper are. Like the AFD. That expires also.
This next pic has little to do with flying; it is just some fog in Seattle. I think it is advection fog, but I could be wrong. I should be studying for my three exams tomorrow, instead of writing this.
This is a picture of my flying club / flight school at Boeing Field. The building in the picture is actually just a hanger, but it does have the name on it. Behind it is where the Cessna's are kept, and beyond them, the runways, which are difficult to see from this angle seeing as how they are so flat.
This is the plane I flew in, shown on the ground at Astoria. The views of the flat lands, mountain ranges, hills and especially the coastline were absolutely gorgeous, but I was too busy navigating and adding up numbers on a piece of paper to remember about my camera.
This is Astoria, at an angle looking away from the Ocean. I don't think you could actually see the Ocean from the airport, but you could see the bay. Well, it was behind some trees.
That building in the distance is a Fixed Base Operator. I forget what an FBO is exactly, but they usually have planes, fuel, bathrooms and snack machines.
That thing with the big tanks in the middle is of this next pic is the self fueling station. There are people that will fuel your aircraft for you, but apparently the one fuel guy, Greg, wasn't around. The girl manning the desk at the Fixed Base Operator, who could not give me change when I later wanted to buy some candy, gave me two gate codes to use it: one for the pedestrian gate, and one for the vehicle gate. As you can see here, there are no gates, fences, or even walls surrounding the self-fuel station. I looked about for somewhere to enter the codes, but after a frustrating and obviously pointless search, I gave up and pumped my own gas.
The dirtbag politicians of states like New Jersey and Oregon ostensibly believe that I am not capable of putting gas in my car. Somehow, though, I managed to manually tow my aircraft up to the fuel station (engine can't be one when you approach), verify that I had the right kind of fuel (because adding jet fuel can make you crash just after takeoff), ground my aircraft to the station (because with planes the danger of exploding is actually not imaginary), pull the giant hose out and fuel both tanks without a ladder (that I didn't know was there until it was used by the guy filling up after me), all the while keeping the tip of the nozzle against the fuel tank collar (another grounding measure to prevent static electricity from blowing you up). Ironically, with planes I prefer to not self fuel. Maybe its something about the danger being real. Even more ironically, I am more likely to fly, than drive, to anywhere in Oregon, because if I drive, the minimum wage worker manning the pump might accidently put the wrong kind of gas in my car engine, which will break it.
On the way back, I again forgot to take any pictures of the coast, not even when I landed at Hoqium. To make up for it, when I was halfway back home from Hoqium, I snapped this pic looking back at the coast. I'm pretty sure if that if I sent you the original copy from the camera, and you zoomed in, you'd be able to see the coast.
Here is a shot of the olympic mountains.
I thought this picture would be really funny when I took it.
This is one of my navigation instruments. It's called a "V-O-R." Well, actually its probably called a VOR Receiver, but I call it a VOR. It I had been on the correct course, that yellow needle would have been in the middle.
Monday
After my successful flight to Astoria, I was exhausted. However, a storm was rolling in, and I was required to make one more flight to an airport at least 50 nautical miles away, by myself. Unfortunately I've already used more personal/vacation time than I had at work, so I didn't an entire flight plan to Skagit Regional (which is North of Seattle) that night. I finished at or around midnight, and then went to sleep, had a dream about making a space station level for an old game called Duke3d, and got up at 6 am to drive to the Flight Service Station, because my flight plan must be signed off my an instructor, and my instructor works at the Flight Service Station on weekdays. Flight Service are the people you call up to get briefed on the weather conditions, and open and close flight plans, which in this case are different than everything I've been complaining about so far. They are basically estimates of arrival that you file with the government. If you don't reach your destination and call them, they will begin search and rescue operations, which will cost you a lot of money if you simply forgot to call them at the end of your trip.
So I got a personal briefing from a flight service specialist. It was pretty awesome. It is actually what pilots used to do before the internet, or phones. I also got a tour of the place from his supervisor.
My flight plan wasn't quite tedious enough, but it was good enough for my instructor to endorse it, and off I went. This time I was somewhat forced to call Air Traffic Control, because Skagit was near a busy airfield (bigger than Boeing, smaller than SeaTac) called Whidbey, and anyone flying within twenty miles of these airfields are supposed to call ATC for flight following.
I had to call ATC immediately after departing as well, but I called Flight Service to close my flight plan first, so I wouldn't have to do that gay thing with the radios. Then I got handed off from controller to controller. It turned out to be pretty exciting. Some of the transmissions I heard were from planes so far away that their voices were garbled like they are in the TV show Battlestar, which I found exciting.
I returned to boeing, flew around the airport making 5 landings to satisfy curriculum requirements, and then I was done. And almost late for work.
Then just as I was recording the flight in my log book, a girl other than the girl I had a crush on from my apartment office called me tell me that the incredibly expensive winter tires I had ordered for my car had arrived. I raced back to my apartment to lug them up to my apartment, and then to the office, to start my work day.
Then...I was "on call" for work that night. I was woken from my slumber at 6 am for a problem that my team did not cause. I then elected to sleep in and "work from home" today, at which point I started feeling sick. Probably from stress, lack of sleep, dry air, and the fact that room had been getting super cold at night because I forgot to turn the heat on. According to my logbook I've been flying four days in a row.
Smaller World
Flying does an interesting thing to your perception. Imagine if you were in a football stadium, standing halfway up the bleachers in the end zone. In a Cessna, I've noticed that the area between the Cascades and Seattle has a similar scale in my mind. It is a little bigger, for lack of a better analogy. Kind of interesting though. Parking lots full of cars look like toys.
In Other News
I'm attempting to recreate the duke level from my dream. What took about one hour in my sleep is taking more then ten in real life.
The slimy bastards at the duck boat insurance company, it turns out, are refusing to pay my claim as well. Fortunately for me, I filed the claim with my own insurance company, so they are handling the fight. This is not the case for the girl who's car was also mauled by one of those boats. I can't really write more about it, because thinking about the incident channels a normally untapped torrent of rage, suffice to say that if you, the reader, gain knowledge of any legal measure or act I can take to secure the demise of that company, please bring it to my immediate attention, no matter the risk or cost. I believe in settling disputes with people without undue delay, or letting sleeping dogs lie. Grudges against businesses, however, can be held forever.
The funny thing was, I couldn't see the rain except for what was slamming into the windshield. It sounded like I was getting shot with little pellets. I looked at the thermometer for the outside temp and started reducing my altitude. The air temperature was 2 degrees celsius, which is right above freezing. It was beginning to look like I would need to divert. Ostensibly, diverting means what you would think it means: landing somewhere you didn't plan to. To a student pilot, diverting means running through a tedious checklist and doing a lot of basic math involving time, distance, and fuel that makes your head hurt, even though, for safety reasons, your airplane usually has enough fuel to do your trip twice without refueling. In theory, all of this busywork will save your lafe later when you actually need to do it.
Diversion
I had a few options, including changing my altitude, deviating to the south to try to circumnavigate the rain, and just going back home ("diverting"). I was still unable to see the rain anywhere, and I was too inexperienced to really understand those options. The only absolutely safe answer I had was to go back to Boeing Field. During all of my quizes on the ground, I quickly deduced that "cancel the flight" and "divert" and "go back home" are usually the right answers anytime you are asked about clouds and weather and what should you do.
Going back home is exactly what I did. I found out later that I could have just lowered my altitude or gone around the rain and it would have been fine. Nonetheless, I arrived back at my flight school, Wings Aloft, around 4pm, having nearly wasted an entire day. I had originally planned to go all the way to Astoria, a process which actually started Friday night and continued Saturday morning. By 12:30 or 1pm, I was finally done my ridiculously tedious plan, just in time for my flight instructor to [figuratively] tear it apart, criticizing me for not making the plan tedious enough. Then I was on my way. Almost.
Saturday: Hoqium
I got in the aircraft I had planned to fly and started the engine. There were a problem with the alternator, and something called a suction gauge, which were just bad enough that I knew there was no way I could fly the plane. I ran through my emergency checklist for the problem, and then, already at least a half hour past my indended depature time, I towed the Cessna back into its spot and tied it down and walked back to the operations building for a different aircraft. The fact that I thought the one I had was broken turned out to be an issue, because that made the club short one plane the next day. I didn't my best to describe the problem to the mechanic, who I interrupted from a lively conversation with his friends.
The flight school has a bunch of rules--extra rules that go beyond the minimum Federal regulations for student pilots that make it extra difficult to successfully get your license. The only benefit to the student is that a student under these extra rules can, in theory, receive a pilots license after only 35 hours in the air, as opposed to 40. Those numbers could be wrong; its been a while since I studied that chapter. Anyway, one of these rules is that I had to get back by sunset. This one I am ok with, since I tend to have trouble finding Boeing Field in the dark. Unfortunately, that meant that since I was so late I would not be able to fly all the way to Astoria that day. I "ammended" my flight plan and set off for Hoqium, which, on my route, was on the way to Astoria anyway.
As I got in my alternate airplane and started going through my preflight checklists, I saw the mechanic inthe one that I thought was broken, playing with the engine and the lights. He later told me he couldn't find anything wrong with it. This further hurt my credibility for reporting problems with airplanes, because my instructor likes to report every little problem with the airplanes that we fly and he does it in my name. One time a mechanic actually called me for an explanation on why I thought the airspeed indicator was broken. But I digress.
After my rained out flight I went home and vegged out in front of the tv for a while. Then one of my friends texted me; I had blown off an outing involving corn mazes, pumpkins and campfires because I was flying. Apparently I could still meet up with them for a campfire at some park I'd never heard of. Just before I left, my flight instructor called me suggesting I do my Astoria flight the next day. I had promised myself that if I didn't quit flight training, I would at least have a life while doing it. So I went out to the park anyway. Then I came home, and planned my flight as fast as I could. My time was a mixture of planning, sleep, and preflighting, and then I was off to Astoria, for real this time.
Sunday: Astoria
My flight to Astoria was required to be at least a 4 hour ordeal, according to the curriculum, which seems to have been designed to force me to refuel at a different airport, which is something that I had been avoding. A few days prior my instructor took me to Bremerton and showed me how to use the self serfice fuel station, which looked humorously similar to a car gas station. I took a picture of it with my cell phone. I'd love to share it with you, but when I connect my phone to my [windows] computer, a subset of my phone numbers randomly disappear.
The flight went well. I requested flight following from Air Traffic Control, and they dropped me halfway through the flight because I went below their radar, which I was ecstatic about because I hate talking to them. You're not allowed to change frequencies when you're receiving "flight following," which means that, in order to announce your passage to airports along the way (so people don't run into you), you have to do this funky thing with your radio where you listen on two frequencies at once but only transmit on one. If you make a mistake with the radio switches, a number of bad things might occur. The two worst ones are: 1) your radio will not transmit or receive anything or 2) you will make an extremely long broadcast on an extremely busy air traffic control channel, disrupt time critical communications that the controller needs to make, and basically announce to everyone within ten to a hundred square miles that you are an idiot. Oh, and even if you manage to do the radio thing right, the controllers voice will probably be blaring in your ear while you try to talk, and you can't completely tune him or her out because if she says your callsign then you have to undo your crazy radio setup and respond. Yes, I am exaggerating the difficulty. A little.
Long story short, I was supper happy when the controller tossed me away like my last girlfriend did and I heard the words "frequency change approved" on the radio. It still stung a little, though, as if, being a simple non-instrument pilot I was the least interesting guest at a party. On the way back from Astoria, I...forgot to call ATC for flight following. And then I remembered, and made myself too busy by snapping a few pictures. The phrase "yeah I did request flight following but they dropped me so I didn't bother on the way back" usually appeases my instructor.
The coast was absolutely beautiful, including the mountains I trouble getting around because they looked a lot smaller on the chart. I landed at Astoria, and even got to hear someone with a British/Australian accent on the radio, which is like my favorite thing ever. Well, maybe not my favorite thing, but you could introduce an English accent to that also.
Pictures
This is what my table looks like when I am "flight planning." Flight planning involves things like basic math and mechanical computers, which work by the same principles as the mechanical computers from some ancient civilization on the History Channel. There are also paper charts, and pencils. I am not accustomed to ever drawing lines piece of paper that I may need to move or adjust at a future time; that's what computers are for. My way of dealing with this has been to buy a new sectional chart for almost every "cross country" flight I plan. They expire in a manner of months, forcing one to buy new ones. Someone in this century saw fit to put the charts on the internet, however for legal reasons we are forced to use the paper ones. That, and Cessnas don't get internet, and also the chart could significantly drain the color cartridges of most personal inkjets.
If you have trouble falling asleep, or you are a cute girl that wants to hook up with me and feels the need to feign interest in something, I would be happy to explain what all of those pieces of paper are. Like the AFD. That expires also.This next pic has little to do with flying; it is just some fog in Seattle. I think it is advection fog, but I could be wrong. I should be studying for my three exams tomorrow, instead of writing this.
This is a picture of my flying club / flight school at Boeing Field. The building in the picture is actually just a hanger, but it does have the name on it. Behind it is where the Cessna's are kept, and beyond them, the runways, which are difficult to see from this angle seeing as how they are so flat.
This is the plane I flew in, shown on the ground at Astoria. The views of the flat lands, mountain ranges, hills and especially the coastline were absolutely gorgeous, but I was too busy navigating and adding up numbers on a piece of paper to remember about my camera.
This is Astoria, at an angle looking away from the Ocean. I don't think you could actually see the Ocean from the airport, but you could see the bay. Well, it was behind some trees.
That building in the distance is a Fixed Base Operator. I forget what an FBO is exactly, but they usually have planes, fuel, bathrooms and snack machines.
That thing with the big tanks in the middle is of this next pic is the self fueling station. There are people that will fuel your aircraft for you, but apparently the one fuel guy, Greg, wasn't around. The girl manning the desk at the Fixed Base Operator, who could not give me change when I later wanted to buy some candy, gave me two gate codes to use it: one for the pedestrian gate, and one for the vehicle gate. As you can see here, there are no gates, fences, or even walls surrounding the self-fuel station. I looked about for somewhere to enter the codes, but after a frustrating and obviously pointless search, I gave up and pumped my own gas.
The dirtbag politicians of states like New Jersey and Oregon ostensibly believe that I am not capable of putting gas in my car. Somehow, though, I managed to manually tow my aircraft up to the fuel station (engine can't be one when you approach), verify that I had the right kind of fuel (because adding jet fuel can make you crash just after takeoff), ground my aircraft to the station (because with planes the danger of exploding is actually not imaginary), pull the giant hose out and fuel both tanks without a ladder (that I didn't know was there until it was used by the guy filling up after me), all the while keeping the tip of the nozzle against the fuel tank collar (another grounding measure to prevent static electricity from blowing you up). Ironically, with planes I prefer to not self fuel. Maybe its something about the danger being real. Even more ironically, I am more likely to fly, than drive, to anywhere in Oregon, because if I drive, the minimum wage worker manning the pump might accidently put the wrong kind of gas in my car engine, which will break it.On the way back, I again forgot to take any pictures of the coast, not even when I landed at Hoqium. To make up for it, when I was halfway back home from Hoqium, I snapped this pic looking back at the coast. I'm pretty sure if that if I sent you the original copy from the camera, and you zoomed in, you'd be able to see the coast.
Here is a shot of the olympic mountains.
I thought this picture would be really funny when I took it.
This is one of my navigation instruments. It's called a "V-O-R." Well, actually its probably called a VOR Receiver, but I call it a VOR. It I had been on the correct course, that yellow needle would have been in the middle.
Monday
After my successful flight to Astoria, I was exhausted. However, a storm was rolling in, and I was required to make one more flight to an airport at least 50 nautical miles away, by myself. Unfortunately I've already used more personal/vacation time than I had at work, so I didn't an entire flight plan to Skagit Regional (which is North of Seattle) that night. I finished at or around midnight, and then went to sleep, had a dream about making a space station level for an old game called Duke3d, and got up at 6 am to drive to the Flight Service Station, because my flight plan must be signed off my an instructor, and my instructor works at the Flight Service Station on weekdays. Flight Service are the people you call up to get briefed on the weather conditions, and open and close flight plans, which in this case are different than everything I've been complaining about so far. They are basically estimates of arrival that you file with the government. If you don't reach your destination and call them, they will begin search and rescue operations, which will cost you a lot of money if you simply forgot to call them at the end of your trip.
So I got a personal briefing from a flight service specialist. It was pretty awesome. It is actually what pilots used to do before the internet, or phones. I also got a tour of the place from his supervisor.
My flight plan wasn't quite tedious enough, but it was good enough for my instructor to endorse it, and off I went. This time I was somewhat forced to call Air Traffic Control, because Skagit was near a busy airfield (bigger than Boeing, smaller than SeaTac) called Whidbey, and anyone flying within twenty miles of these airfields are supposed to call ATC for flight following.
I had to call ATC immediately after departing as well, but I called Flight Service to close my flight plan first, so I wouldn't have to do that gay thing with the radios. Then I got handed off from controller to controller. It turned out to be pretty exciting. Some of the transmissions I heard were from planes so far away that their voices were garbled like they are in the TV show Battlestar, which I found exciting.
I returned to boeing, flew around the airport making 5 landings to satisfy curriculum requirements, and then I was done. And almost late for work.
Then just as I was recording the flight in my log book, a girl other than the girl I had a crush on from my apartment office called me tell me that the incredibly expensive winter tires I had ordered for my car had arrived. I raced back to my apartment to lug them up to my apartment, and then to the office, to start my work day.
Then...I was "on call" for work that night. I was woken from my slumber at 6 am for a problem that my team did not cause. I then elected to sleep in and "work from home" today, at which point I started feeling sick. Probably from stress, lack of sleep, dry air, and the fact that room had been getting super cold at night because I forgot to turn the heat on. According to my logbook I've been flying four days in a row.
Smaller World
Flying does an interesting thing to your perception. Imagine if you were in a football stadium, standing halfway up the bleachers in the end zone. In a Cessna, I've noticed that the area between the Cascades and Seattle has a similar scale in my mind. It is a little bigger, for lack of a better analogy. Kind of interesting though. Parking lots full of cars look like toys.
In Other News
I'm attempting to recreate the duke level from my dream. What took about one hour in my sleep is taking more then ten in real life.
The slimy bastards at the duck boat insurance company, it turns out, are refusing to pay my claim as well. Fortunately for me, I filed the claim with my own insurance company, so they are handling the fight. This is not the case for the girl who's car was also mauled by one of those boats. I can't really write more about it, because thinking about the incident channels a normally untapped torrent of rage, suffice to say that if you, the reader, gain knowledge of any legal measure or act I can take to secure the demise of that company, please bring it to my immediate attention, no matter the risk or cost. I believe in settling disputes with people without undue delay, or letting sleeping dogs lie. Grudges against businesses, however, can be held forever.
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