I normally try to keep to myself while I commute on my airline to and from Phoenix. I most always wear plain clothes and typically squirrel my identification badge away while I’m seated in the passenger cabin. I often busy myself with a book or sudoku puzzle on the iPad, or I simply shut my eyes and listen to music as I dose my way to or from work. But every now and again, a pleasant person sits down next to me and strikes up interesting conversation, which is what happened last week on my flight from LAX.
A young lady tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could help her find her seat. I explained that seating was “open,” and she asked if she could have the open seat by the window of the row in which I was sitting. A bit of small talk was exchanged (in which I found out that she was a fan of the Phoenix Coyotes hockey club…my Kings’ upcoming opponent in the Western Conference Finals, so…BOOO) before she mentioned how much she loved to fly.
The conversation continued with me saying, “Oh yeah?” and asking her if she flew often. Enthusiastically, she proceeded to tell me how she was actually taking flying lessons out of Long Beach, and that she’d just soloed for the first time two weeks prior. With one of the biggest grins I’ve ever seen across someone’s face, she described what it was like in just about every detail. Clearly, this was something that brought great happiness to her…something she truly loved to do. She asked if I’d had any experience actually flying, and my response was my usual (and purposeful) understatement: “I’ve got a little bit of time in small planes.”
We continued talking about her plans to continue her flying education beyond a basic private pilot’s license, and it was clear that she was at one of life’s many crossroads. With a degree in communications, she’d gone into public relations after college, and I don’t think she could’ve stated more emphatically how much she disliked her field of work. When I suggested that it might be a good time to change her career field (being that she was only in her early 20′s), I could tell by the look on her face that the thought had appeal.
By now her curiosity had gotten the best of her (or she’d caught a glimpse of the crew tag on the bag I had tucked under the seat in front of me), and she asked what I did for a living. I confessed. Instantly, I became (in her mind) a source of knowledge to her regarding the career field, and questions came at me rapid-fire style. What’s it like? What’s the best part about the job? What’s the worst? How long did you take to get to where you are now? How long would it take me to get there?
I did my best to answer the questions, of course, and offered to keep in touch should she have any questions. I’m a bit removed from the flight-training and ladder-climbing phases of the career choice, I’m afraid, so I don’t know how much help I can be to her in planning a potential career change. It was quite nice, however, to see that level of interest in flying in someone as young as she. It provided some perspective, actually, helping me to remember that I am indeed living my dream. That’s something that is remarkably easy to take for granted, especially after twenty years of flying and nearly fifteen years in the airline industry.
Our Los Angeles Kings completed a sweep of the St. Louis Blues on Sunday to advance to the Western Conference Finals for only the second time in franchise history! What an awesome game to see live! HISTORY was made, as it was the Kings’ first-ever post-season series sweep. It was INCREDIBLY loud in that arena!
And last night, the team to face the Kings was determined when the Phoenix Coyotes finished their series by beating the Nashville Predators four games to one.
Last December, the airline I fly for placed a rather LARGE order for Boeing’s newest iteration of their venerable and seemingly timeless 737, the 737 MAX. In fact, we will be the new aircraft’s launch customer, with deliveries starting in 2017 or sooner.
The 737 MAX is Boeing’s answer to airline’s demands for a more fuel-efficient airframe in the 120 to 175 seat category. Efficiency improvements will be realized through a combination of new bleedless engines (meaning that air is not sapped from the engines to run things like anti-ice and pressurization/environmental systems, instead relying on electrically powered systems for those things), and aerodynamic tweaks.
One of the latest aerodynamic tweaks will be a new drag-reducing winglet design.
Now here’s something hasn’t happened often over the last dozen years or so: The Los Angeles Kings have not only made the playoffs, but they’ve advanced past the first round!
At the end of the current season, the Kings were ranked 8th in the NHL’s Western Conference, earning them a spot in the playoffs and a matchup with the number 1 seeded and President’s Trophy-winning Vancouver Canucks. The Kings quite handily KICKED THEIR ASSES, upset-style, and sent the goofy-looking Sedin twins to the golf courses in only five games to advance to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2001.
Now, the Kings are embroiled in a battle with the St. Louis Blues. So far, so good…the Kings took the first two games from St. Louis and are coming home to Staples Center to play games four and five in the coming few days.
GO KINGS, GO!!
All credit to original photographers. I do not own these images.
At the end of January, I finished a day of flying just after noon in El Paso, TX. After checking into the hotel and changing into civvies, my partner (Captain Ray) and I walked Eastward along the road that runs along El Paso Airport’s southern boundary to see if we could get a closer look at an Aero Spacelines Super Guppy that we’d seen sitting on the airport for a while.
While we understood the Super Guppy to be owned and operated by NASA, what we didn’t know is that El Paso Airport is home to a forward operating location of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The center is responsible for several things, including the maintenance and operation of the Super Guppy and the Gulfstream 2 Shuttle Training Aircraft, as well as servicing and upgrades of NASA’s fleet of T-38 aircraft.
We basically walked up to the facility and knocked on the door, since there’s no “visitor’s entrance” or anything of the sort. Fortunately, we were greated by a friendly employee of the maintenance facility who was only too happy to give us a look around when we told him who we were and who we worked for. Had we been just a day earlier, we would have had a chance to meet the crew of STS-133, who were there doing some final training in the STA for their upcoming mission.
The tour included quite a few interesting things. We got to sit at a big wooden picnic table in the hangar on which all the shuttle astronauts had signed their names.
We had the opportunity to check out the inside of the STA’s cockpit, which is essentially split in half with one side being the Shuttle Commander’s station and the other being a standard G-2′s cockpit.
They let me take a real close look at the cockpit of an Astronaut’s T-38.
And, of course, they gave the two of us the grand tour of the Aero Spacelines B-337SGT Super Guppy. This was a really special deal, since there are so few of these in the world.
I won’t bore you with specifics about the Super Guppy (you can find those on the links above), but I will say that it is WAY bigger inside than it looks from the outside! Muse be cool to fly something where you not only have to worry about the center-of-gravity fore and aft, but the center-of-gravity up and down, too!
Thanks to Bob Coyne and everyone else at NASA JSC El Paso for taking the time to give me and Captain Ray the grand tour of your facility!
In case any of the seven readers of this blog were A) still readers of this blog, and B) wondering if I was still alive, the answer to B) is: Yes.
Life has been extra-hectic.
We moved Mom in with us last October. This involved a drastic pairing down of her own existence so that it would fit into one room in our small house. It also involved an only-somewhat-less-drastic pairing down of the existence of myself, my wife, and our daughter so that Mom would have a room to fit into. So after clearing all the crud out of her four bedroom house that she was occupying all by herself and moving all of our crud out of what used to be our office (and remodeling the bathroom and pouring a new driveway/slab in the backyard for a storage shed) she’s all moved in. Of course, that left the cleaning and prepping of her old house for sale. In the meantime, Mom went through a hip-replacement in December and is juuuuust about back to where she was before the operation, albeit with much less pain. The house is now in escrow (for quite a bit less than our original asking price), and soon the entire process will be over and done with. “Old Normal” will be gone, and “New Normal” will be complete and here to stay.
Yep. That’s a lot of stress.
And the rest of my family is well, too. My wonderful wife turns 40 in April, and as part of her 40th birthday present, I took her to Hawaii for a week. We spent four days on Kauai and three on The Big Island, and we had a fantastic time! It was a HUGE letoff of all the stress we’d built up over the previous eight months. The pictures can be found here. Hope you enjoy them!
Work is virtually unchanged, for now. Slightly more experienced in-type (I flew a bit over 850 hours last year). And I’m slightly more advanced in terms of longevity, I suppose. The economy has kept the actual seniority advancement to a minimum, but that’s completely beyond my control. There’s a merger on the horizon, and I’m not certain how that will work out. I’m optimistic that, in the long run, there’ll be a lot of money made by the combined companies, and that will mean a modicum of career security.
Other than that, I’m pretty much the same guy I was last time I posted. Though, I did hit my weight-loss goal of 220 lbs (115 lost) back in September of last year. So far, I’ve managed to keep active enough to keep it off, mostly (had a bit of a setback from the Hawaii trip; dark-chocolate-covered macadamia nuts by the bag-full didn’t help). I’m running a lot, lately, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can run six to eight miles without stopping or falling over dead. I guess falling over dead would count as stopping…
I’m here. Still plugging away at the good life I’ve created for myself with the people I love. That is, in case any of the seven of you that used to read this blog regularly are wondering.
I’m still working on the weight loss kick. As of today, I’ve lost 87.25 pounds since I started the program on August 10, 2009. That leaves me with 12.75 pounds to go until I’ve hit the 100 pounds-lost mark, and 21.75 pounds to go until I hit my initial target weight of 225 pounds. I feel great in both body and spirit, and I can only complain about one thing: the cost of new clothes.
In general, all is well!
I’ve been updating my Now Reading widget regularly, and my Flickr widget always updates itself whenever I add any new images to my flickr.com account. Feel free to check either of those widgets out to see what I’m reading and taking pictures of. Again, if any of the seven of you that used to read this blog regularly are still interested.
I’m also on facebook (ugh) now. Become a fan of Glenn Calvin Photography and get regular updates to my photographic portfolio!
Another 805 hours in the logbook during 2009. And I thought I slacked off in 2008! I’m down nearly 40 block hours year-over-year. A lot of that can be attributed to a great decrease in the airline’s schedule that began in February.
Last year’s flying brought my totals to 4,101 hours in the 737 and 9,433 total time. That means I’ll fly my 10,000th hour some time in September, 2010!
I’m an avid reader. As you can probably tell if you (care to) watch the sidebar of this blog (whether I’m posting regularly or not), I read between two and four books a month. I attribute this to a couple things: 1) the commute to and from my domicile for work, and 2) the fact that I am hopelessly addicted to science fiction and history. For the last ten years, I’ve been buying book after book after book. Hardcovers and paperbacks began to pile up (deep!) on my office floor to the point where they were starting to get in the way and become fire hazard. Being that I’m not a pack rat by nature, I decided a couple months ago to box them all up and take them over to the local “Friends of the Library” shop where they’ll be sold to benefit our local public libraries. There were 11 boxes and almost 240 books. The little old lady that runs the shop had no idea what to think when I showed up!
About a year ago, I began hearing about these so-called “e-readers.” These things are essentially the iPod of the book world – simple electronic devices that allow a person to carry many many book titles in the palm of their hand and effectively freeing up office shelf space for their sports-related bobble-head and vintage aircraft instrument collections. After gathering up all those books for donation (and after some hemming-and-hawing about the unsettling thoughts I had regarding tech replacing tome), I decided that one of those little devices might be just the ticket for a guy like me who’s short on space and long on reading time. I looked at what was immediately available last October and decided that it was best to wait for an e-reader that was to be released in mid-December called Nook. Everything I’d read said that the Nook would really give Amazon’s e-reader a run for its money, offering more titles, better connectivity, better handling of .pdf files, and a color touch-screen for menu navigation. When they became available for pre-order, I didn’t hesitate.
At this point I’d like to pause briefly to thank my wife for my Christmas gift! Thanks, hon! My Nook arrived on the 24th, and of course she wrapped it right up and put it under the tree. She made me wait until the next morning to play with it, even though I’d given her Christmas gift to her two weeks before. She can be a right pain in the – Anyhow, now that I’ve had a couple days to play around with it a bit, I figured I’d review it and give you all the pros and cons I’ve found.
Pros:
First, it really is a sleek-looking and compact device. It’s about 7″ long by 5″ wide and is only 1/2″ thick. The last book I read was about the same length and width, but exceeded the Nook’s thickness dimension by six-fold. It goes without saying that this little device will save me lots of space in my travel bag!
I found that (after a Christmas day of dealing with the Barnes & Noble e-book delivery system’s teething problems) the connectivity of this device is lightning-fast. I downloaded two very-lengthy e-books in two different ways. First, I bought Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead – a novel of massive physical proportions – and downloaded it via the device’s cell-phone connection. In less than a minute, I completed the order and had the entire novel safely stashed in my Nook’s memory. Then, with the Nook’s wireless LAN connection hooked into my home network, I downloaded Peter F. Hamilton‘s The Reality Dysfunction – another gargantuan novel, this one of the space opera variety. Again, lickity-split, I had the book downloaded to the device and my wallet lightened by a dollar amount significantly less than the physical copy would have cost me.
The E-Ink main display where books and other publications pages are viewed looks just like the printed page of your favorite novel. It is very easy to read and is flicker-free while displaying a page. I found that it handled pictures and diagrams just as well as text (though in black and white only, obviously), and it is of a nice-enough size. I have yet to try my luck at reading a copy of the Wall Street Journal on Nook’s display, but I imagine it’ll do just fine.
Navigation through the software menu and functions of the device (which are based on Google’s Android OS) I found to be very intuitive. Forward and backward “page turn” buttons are located on either side of the device under relatively stiff membrane buttons so that they are within easy reach without lending to accidental page-turns. The color touch screen is a nice feature, showing full-color images of book covers in your library as well as menu and sub-menu selections, which leaves the front of the device uncluttered by buttons.
Cons:
It looks and feels like a very delicate device. Two displays, hard plastic corners, and a fall from a tabletop probably won’t mix well. And does even a simple protective sleeve come with it? Not on your life! That’s $20 extra! And my case is on BACKORDER! Fortunately, Mom is a whiz with a sewing machine and agreed to stitch me up a protective drawstring sack made of random fabric remnants…probably with a Raggedy Andy or Holly Hobby motif. Of course, I’ll have to replace a couple light bulbs for her at her house. Fair trade, I think.
The main screen probably takes longer to refresh on a new page than it takes for me to turn a page in a physical book. It takes about a second-and-a-half to refresh its display with a new page of text. After hitting the “Next Page” button, there is a positive-negative flash on the screen that is a tad annoying, though it is probably inherent to all E-Ink displays.
Though a neat feature, the touchscreen itself leaves a lot to be desired for a fat-fingered fool like me. The accuracy of the touch-sensing I found to be a tad “off” sometimes, and selection of the menu item/letter/number you’re pressing is far from instantaneous. Because of that delay, entering information or using the built-in highlighting/note-taking or dictionary systems can be a tad frustrating.
There is no web-browser. For a device that has such good and varied connectivity, being limited to viewing Barnes & Noble’s e-book site is just a little bit frustrating. I can understand AT&T not wanting the GSM bandwidth it provides with the Nook to be wasted (especially when device owners aren’t paying monthly service fees for that method of connectivity), but there should be no reason to disallow web-browsing while connected via the Wi-Fi antenna.
Conclusion:
Being a big fan of physical books old and new, I wondered just how different an experience reading a novel on the Nook would be. In fact, several people (my wife, primarily) have stated that part of the lure of a real book over this device is the tactile feedback a book gives. Of course, the sense of accomplishment one feels as the right half of the book gets thinner in their right hand while reading through it’s pages is something that might be missed by someone who is a fan of traditional books. Picking up the Nook is just simply not the same as picking up a well-worn used book and smelling an untold number of owners’ perfumes or pipe tobaccos and wondering about the history of that volume. And being able to lend a book you’ve greatly enjoyed to a friend or coworker whom you know will enjoy it as much just isn’t doable (though there is a somewhat restrictive “sharing” feature built into the Nook).
Still, I like this device. Will it ever replace physical books in my collection? That is doubtful. It will, however, serve the primary purpose for which I intended it – keeping me from going crazy with stacks and stacks of books everywhere, and saving me weight and space in my travel bags.
*****
If any of you seven readers are interested in how my weight-loss and physical fitness program is going, the answer is: It’s still going. I’ve been on the program now for about four-and-a-half months and I’ve lost over 50 pounds (down to 282.5 from 334) simply by eating less and working out more. I feel better physically and mentally than I’ve felt in a long, long time! My wife is being very supportive and encouraging, and she’s also doing very well on the same program. I’ve got quite a way to go, and I’ve been hitting plateaus pretty regularly, but I really do believe I’ll get to my goal weight on this program!
Sorry for the lack of updates, recently. Most of my writing tends to come from what I’m thinking about most at the time I sit down at the computer. Lately, I’ve been thinking and worrying a whole lot about the direction in which my wonderful United States seems to been heading, and that doesn’t really make for good reading on a blog that I prefer to remain mostly politics-free. So because I don’t feel a need to bludgeon you over the head with my ideology, I’ve been sort of mute here for a bit. Besides, I’m sure you can gather my political leanings by some subtle (and not so subtle) entries in my “Interesting Passages” posts, of which more are to come shortly.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and holiday season!
