Psychotic.

I wanted to try a little video FX. It’s been a while since I’ve played around with Final Cut Express.

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Still the Friendly Skies

I was going to get out the MacBook and type a blog entry on there, but the woman next to me is so comfy spread out that I don’t want to infringe on her space. She is very nice and I’ve made her laugh a few times with my observations of other passengers.

The two holy terrors and their young kids on the last flight followed me onto this one. They are screaming and kicking my seat everytime they see a cloud. I think one of them is trying to open the window for some fresh air.

The flight attendant on this flight is Mary. She is very charming and let me have two snacks. I enjoyed my biscotti and peanuts. Mary smiles and talks slowly on the intercom. She offered to top off my drink. I think it’s important to know the names of people that are helpful and/or here for my safety. It makes everyone involved feel more relaxed and we would have an easier time communicating in a time of crisis. I like her, she seems good at her job.

This is the second of three flights today. The next flight is short as it’s from Dallas to Oklahoma City. It also the biggest plane I’ll be on for this trip and on AA instead of Delta. I have a soft spot for AA. Delta was out of control with chaos at the ticket counter in Syracuse and that whole ghost terminal concourse C thing they have going on in Cincinnati is a bit spooky but other than that they’re doing ok. I still have a soft spot for AA though.

Here’s a random shot up the aisle.

The Friendly Skies.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve flown alone. Not since my radio days have I been without Earl on a commercial flight. I’m in bachelor mode in a different place.

Sitting I’m front of me are two young women. One of them has never flown before. She has a very appreciable innocence about her that is refreshing.

I’ve been flying for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is flying with my grandfather and father in a Cessna 172. It was way before kindergarten. I recall puking all over the place and my mother later yelling holy hell because my father had cleaned up the plane but not me. That was the last time I was sick in an airplane.

Most of my favourite memories from growing up are aviation related. Whether it was dropping sandbags from a Piper J5A at the local airport in an effort to hit a target or just flying to another airport for Sunday breakfast with my dad, I have always been a pretty happy guy in the sky.

I often follow the forums on airliners.net and contribute photos to the plane database. I enjoy looking up the tailnumbers of planes in the public knowledgebase. I think my next career will be aviation related. Probably waving the big glow sticks. I wouldn’t want to be a commercial pilot, I’m more
interested in sticking to a Cessna. I’m thinking a Cessna 182.

There is one woman who tried to use the bathroom during takeoff now roaming the cabin despite the lights that say the contrary. Meagan, the flight attendant, is giving her the evil eye. I’d just giver her a stern warning and offer her the chance to get outside and push if she didn’t do as she as told.

Below is a picture of one of the Finger Lakes. I’m not sure which one it is.

Murphy’s Irish Pub.

Saturday night whilst in Virginia Beach Earl and I were walking the resort area looking for a place to eat. The last time we were there we ate at the Abbey Road something or other so we decided not to try that again. I’m not a big seafood person and being on the ocean and all, Virginia Beach has a lot to offer in the way of seafood. I was about to cave in and eat some scrod or whatever when we found Murphy’s Irish Pub. They used that celtic looking font and everything on the sign. We decided to give it a try.

We went entered Murphy’s the first thing we noticed was that Virginia still allows smoking in restaurants. I chuckle at the idea of “smoking” and “non-smoking” areas of buildings because if you really think about it, it’s like trying to have a “piss” and “no piss” section of a swimming pool. We kindly asked the hostess for a seat in the non-smoking section where she promptly took us to a different room and seated us at a very nice booth.

In the corner.

Next to a birthday party.

Where there were 30 people gathered around a very long table.

Said people were drunk.

And loud.

The party was apparently for an older gentleman, I assuming grandfather or father, it was hard to gauge which due to the huge amount of makeup on the party attendees. I had the feeling that the guest of honour had no idea where he was, who he was or what was going on because he had a vacant, bewildered look on his face the entire time.

A little annoyed but somewhat amused by the activity around our table, (the hot waiter climbed over a woman to get to our table to ask us what we wanted to drink), I asked Earl if he saw anything good on the menu. He yelled “WHAT?” as he couldn’t hear a word I said. It was then that we just started talking really loudly. People didn’t care.

We finally got the dinner ordered and whatnot and were enjoying the loud atmosphere when a band came in. They announced that they were an Irish band and after a few announcements and a chorus of “Happy Birthday” for the bewildered man, they promptly started singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Now I don’t know if this is a requirement on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line or what, but this is where the entire restaurant took on this really weird vibe and everyone started singing along with the band with the same fervor, warmth and intensity that is usually reserved for “Ava Maria” or “God Bless America”. One of the smattering of drunk women at the table screamed out “I love the south” and started weeping.

I think I said “Sweet Jesus” and went back to eating my supper.

It was then that Earl and I decided to have a political discussion. As a child I was trained to NEVER discuss politics at the supper table so this was treading into some unfamiliar territory for me. I’m not the best debater in the room, mostly because my brain doesn’t properly communicate to my mouth the words I want to say and that’s why I usually resort to writing my feelings down. To have this political discussion amongst the yelling, squealing and weeping at the recognition of Country Roads, Earl and I had to yell at the top of our voice at each other. Even before we started disagreeing.

There seems to be a rumour that I am anti-American. This is not true. I am not anti-American. Not at all. I love the United States of America and I think it’s a beautiful place and I think that we have freedoms and liberties that I take for granted but would nonetheless find nowhere else. It’s the people that drive me insane lately as it seems the American People have gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over the past decade or so. Yes, I believe that the government has become entirely too intrusive in our lives, that there is an unreasonable amount of mingling of church and state in progress and that for the most part politicians can’t be trusted because they’re no longer in it for the greater good. However, I think the foundation of our country is solid and is a brilliant piece of fluid work. I don’t convey my arguments well, I’m the first to admit that, so when Earl and I were screaming at each other about gay rights, war prisoners, universal health care and the economy, the discussion got a little heated.

But the party around us never missed a beat. The bewildered man posed for pictures with a lot of floppy breasted women that were screaming and throwing beer and crawling over chairs to get to one another. Somewhere there is a MySpace page with a lot of photos of this event.

And one particular photo with a set of bunny ears being held up behind one of the women by the Yankee in the corner.

When all was said and done, it was an amusing, intense and somewhat enjoyable dinner.

Virginia Beach, Va.



Virginia Beach., originally uploaded by iMachias.

Earl knew that we were going somewhere after work last night but he didn’t know where. I gave him a basic idea of what types of clothes to pack and what he needed to bring. The cat was watered, fed and instructed not to have any wild parties over the weekend and before you know it we were in the Jeep and off on another “ride”.

I’ve been contemplating this trip all week. I had a few promises I made myself before embarking: the weather must be sunny and over 70 degrees at our destination and it had to be no more than a ten hour drive (one way).

As I type this blog entry, Earl is busy watching Family Guy on his MacBook Pro where someone was apparently injected with the “gay gene” and he sung the word “guilty” for a very long time.

But I digress.

Anyway, Earl and I are currently in Virginia Beach. We are only here for the afternoon and evening, as we need to leave tomorrow morning so we make it back home at a decent hour tomorrow night. We had no hotel reservations or plans on what we were doing, we let the Universe decide that for us.

We ended up at the Sheraton on the top floor with a “partial ocean view”. I didn’t think we would be able to see the entire ocean from the 11th floor of a hotel in Virginia Beach so we are not disappointed. We have a beautiful view up the beach and with windows on two sides of our suite I can also watch the airlines land at the nearby airport pretty up close and personal.

An Airbus A320 just flew over. I’m going to have to get a picture before it gets dark.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, last night Earl and I drove five hours and made it to Christiana, Del. (between Wilmington and Newark) where we left I-95 and headed down Route 1 towards “Beaches”. From there we jumped onto US 13 and headed down the Delmarva Peninsula and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel before getting into Virginia Beach a half an hour later.

It has been in the high 70s, sunny and quite pleasant this afternoon. Tonight we are going to do some more strolling and the tourist thing a bit. We might possibly go out for a drink but since I don’t drink anymore I’ll stick to bottled water.

By the way, tots at Sonic whilst quite unhealthy is an excellent breakfast food.

Christiana, Del.

Earl and I are on the road tonight. I’ve been hinting at a weekend-long road trip all week and right after work we packed up some bags and loaded up the Jeep and hit the road.

I think we’ll end up in Virginia Beach around lunchtime tomorrow. I’ll have more to write then.

For now, it’s time to sleep.

Photoshoot.

I recently did a photoshoot with my long time photographer friend Kevin and his studio partner Dale. Kevin uses a digital camera, Dale uses film. Kevin brought over a DVD of over 100 photos that he shot, I thought I would share a sample here on the blog. Click here to see a couple of the shots.

I like to indulge my vanity once in a while.

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Interaction.

The internet is a beautiful thing. When I was sitting at my desk at Digital Equipment Corporation back in 1988, I never dreamed that I would be discussing via electronic means the next Human League album (“Romantic?”) just two years later with a person living in the U.K. who wasn’t even on the same network I was. When I left that job I kept in touch with ex-co-workers via e-mail on AOL (my username was “JP”!). Then the whole web thing came around and the entire planet was connected, with a few clicks we were able to chat with anyone, anywhere. It that was just the beginning.

Luckily I learned very early on that anything you write via electronic means, anything at all, is stored somehow, somewhere and can turn up anywhere at any time. I have mentioned before that I can pull up Usenet discussions I participated in back in 1989 via a simple Google search. One such message barely contained my excitement that the series “Tabitha” was turning up on a new cable channel called “HA”. (It later became Comedy Central).

I love the fact that I can contact people with similar interests and maintain strong relationships with friends in Toronto and Connecticut electronically and with the same amount of ease and comfort level as enjoying a cup of tea together at the local coffee shop. It’s truly a brilliant thing. However, sometimes I think this new generation forgets that all this electronic interaction is permanent and relatively transparent. You find anything on anyone. For example, last night Earl and I had a few chores to do and ended up stopping at Applebee’s for supper. Because I have an eye for these things, I noticed right off that the server was a very good-looking man in a clean-shaven bearish sort of way. I’ve seen him around town before; he’s worked at other restaurants in the past and I’ve seen him at Saranac Thursday Nights. He’s really good at what he does and as I mentioned before, he is quite nice on the eyes. His name tag said “Scott”. The receipt added an “H” to his name.1

When I got home I pulled out my geek powers and did a quick search on Facebook. I now know that Scott is a few years shy of my age, lives not too far from me, is married (and I know his wife’s name too), was in a band in high school and college, has always had a unique thing going on with his hair, has always been a good looking man, has over 150 friends on Facebook from our area alone, including another waiter that I recognised because of his unique facial hair, who I now know to be named Alex (his profile didn’t have much more than that, though).

Far from malicious in my intent but armed with the right tools, I was able to easily find a relatively substantial amount of information on the person I don’t know. I always keep this availability of any information on the internet in the back of my mind whenever I post something somewhere. And I post a LOT of things. When I auditioning for Big Brother 4, one of the questions I was asked was if there was anything that would be considered “scandalous” available on the internet. I replied with an “absolutely”, which is true, which delighted them. They liked that sort of thing.

There are some reasons that I don’t engage in Facebook as much as one would expect. I mean let’s face it, there is a part of me that has always wanted to be famous and have some sort of notoriety, hence my previous career as a radio personality. Truth be known, Facebook itself is a little annoying to me. I’m not fan of those little applets thingees like snowballs flying around and something about green beer. Granted, I like to poke people to let them know I’m thinking of them. However, anyone can find anyone else on there with relative ease. I’ve browsed. I’ve looked up waiters. I have sought out old teachers and classmates. Aside from a select few from my high school years, there are not quite a lot of old classmates that I want to start chatting with again. I do things and say things that I never had the balls to do or say back in those days and quite frankly some would find me and what I’m about startling. This is not entirely a bad thing but a part of me wants to move on and embrace who I’ve become, not who I was.

Given a choice in this whole social networking thing I gravitate toward Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Flickr. I feel like I have more control with both of those services with careful use of groups and content filters, though Facebook does offer similar mechanisms. I really like the simplicity of Twitter (that’s what’s in the sidebar under ‘The Adventures of Machias’), though I tend not to get into the chat room atmosphere of the software (I liken that to having a conversation with a friend by screaming at each other to opposite sides of a restaurant). I state what I’m doing or thinking and leave it at that for the most part. And naturally, I have this blog that I write in with some regularity (without a prune assist). I think writing and sharing through this means (whether it’s words, photos, videos or whatever) is my favourite form of expression.

At age 40 I’m finding myself to be more confident, opinionated and expressive than ever before. I feel more comfortable discussing things that I used to just file away in my head. I think this is a good thing and it is because of the internet allows me to have a voice and a rather loud one at that. Though I’m loud, I’m also cautious. And all this freedom translates well to the old-fashioned human interaction I have in the “real world”.

1I think the inclusion of this “H” is generous in today’s climate (and rightfully so). Just think, before the year 2000 EVERY customer receipt from Ames Department Stores contained the Social Security Number of the cashier!