Fun and Games Dept

Earl and I are on United flight 4583 from Syracuse to Dulles. This is the first leg of a two leg trip that will eventually find us in Kansas City later this morning. Our flight attendant’s name is Kyle. He is on Twitter. I’m good like that.

Our flight left at 0600L this morning and we were right on time. The captain advised the passengers that there could be a little choppy along the flight but it’s nothing thus far.

I am always like a kid when I’m flying, even as a passenger on a commercial flight. My head is plastered against the window and now that I’m allowed to, I take many photos. I don’t feel sorry for those that see flight as a form of transportation, but I consider myself quite lucky to experience awe, excitement, wonder and beauty every time I’m on an airplane. Sometimes I believe that the U.S. Security Measures are designed to make the flight experience as miserable as possible, but once you’re through that theatrical mess, they are left behind and quickly forgotten. I’m too overwhelmed by the amazing experience of flight, even as just a passenger, to be bothered by such things.

I just remarked to Earl that maybe I should be one of those old guys that becomes a pilot for a regional airline late in life. It doesn’t pay much and it’d probably cost more than I could ever earn, but flying everyday would be such an awesome thing. My current plan is to become a flight instructor and enjoy flying the two of us around in a Cherokee 180 or something similar. I want to see the land from the sky as often as possible and I want to share my passion with anyone that wants to share it with me.

I don’t know how people can sleep on flights. There is so much to see, so much to feel and so much to experience.

Life can be such a beautiful journey.

I was slated to fly the club airplane to KSCH, or Schenectady County Airport, this morning. The plan was to have me drop off the airplane at the maintenance facility on the field and another student and instructor would pick me up and fly me back home. As a student pilot that has soloed, I am allowed to do this sort of thing with the proper endorsements in my log book. I just can’t take passengers along with me.

I started planning the nearly 70 mile flight last night, with the intent of completing the flight plan this morning once I got the relevant weather information.

I’d show you a picture of my flight planning work here but for some reason Apple has decided to stop syncing my camera roll and photo stream on my iPad. It probably has something to do with iOS Vista iOS 8.

Edit: The picture just showed up on my iPad after turning my iPad on and off and then disabling photo stream and re-enabling it.  There was a message about “Photo Stream (beta)”, but the accompanying message with the suggestion was so dire that I decided not to risk it.

This morning I received an email from the club maintenance officer who decided that perhaps the airplane shouldn’t go to Schenectady, so my flight was canceled and I am sitting on the ground working like a good soldier today. While I understand the motivation for canceling the flight, I was a little bummed because it turned out to be a beautiful day to fly and now the club airplane is in for maintenance so I don’t have any airplane to fly. Well, it’s not actually maintenance, it’s an inspection.

Earl and I are traveling next week so the timing of the airplane inspection is almost on the money. I plan on flying a lot when we get back because it’ll be crunch time to ready myself for my checkride with an FAA examiner.

After I pass that I’ll be able to take passengers.

So apparently at 10:29 PM (2229 ET), Autumn will have officially arrived in these parts. ‘Tis my favorite time of year and I’m looking forward to the crispness of the air and the magic on the winds.

The leaves are just starting to change in these parts. Not only is it my favorite time of year, it’s also the most beautiful in these parts.

I am working in the office today. There was no dust on my desk as it has been only two weeks since the last time I sat in my cubicle. I must remember to make the intervals between office visits longer.

The last time I was in town I took a nap during my lunchtime in the closed Burger King parking lot. In that two weeks, the old building has been torn down, plowed over and the foundation for a brand new Taco Bell has replaced it. My napping spot is gone. I have found a new spot to hide in the mall parking lot across the street.  It seems very popular, as many cars are parked along the side, under the trees, much like the way I parked.  We are off the edge of the pavement and on the grass so that we can have maximum shade under the trees, and it’s not even that hot.

There’s a man parked in the truck next to me.  He is rather rough looking and he has a big sign that says he is a Lifetime Member of the Piss and Moan Club. I’d take a photo but I don’t want him to piss and moan.

I decided not last night that I am officially old when I had no comprehension as to the music Jamie was listening to nor did I understand why anyone would want watching the Video Awards that were on last night.  There is a radio blasting out of the rental center in mall; each song has that robotic sound of AutoTune. I am of the belief that if you need AutoTune to be on the radio then you shouldn’t be on the radio. I despise the many abuses of technology today, but AutoTune tops that list. I really despise AutoTune. It’s one of the reasons that my gay card was taken away after I refused to watch “Glee”, all I could hear was the AutoTune. 

I might be cranky about some things.

It is the last unofficial week of summer in these parts and I must say that I’m excited to be getting into my favorite time of the year.  Cooler nights, mystical winds and a “settled” scent in the air suits me just fine. I just wish we didn’t have to deal with winter after autumn.  I am going to take Earl somewhere special on a leaf-peeping trip this year. It is my hope to do it by air.

I have written in my blog in over a week because I haven’t felt motivated to do so. I’m happy that the change of view this afternoon provided sufficient motivation.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Earl and I went out for lunch this afternoon. This not out of the ordinary for us, especially during the weekend. The experience was enjoyable. Our restaurant of choice was a local diner that is open until only 2:00 p.m. on Sundays. Luckily, they still offer the lunch menu; many diners or family restaurants in the area serve only breakfast on Sundays. I find this disappointing as I’m not a big breakfast-food kind of guy.

Lately I have been making a conscious effort to not use my smartphone in anyway when sitting in a restaurant. Well, I should take that back. When seated for a meal, I will tell Earl that I’m checking in on social media and then I’ll set my phone on the table, face down. Outside of taking a photo or something, I consider the phone off limits until we are ready to leave.

This smartphone approach has afforded me the opportunity to enjoy the company of others at the table and to observe the activities in our immediate area of the restaurant. As an avid people watcher, I have to admit that I’m always curious to see others in their natural habitat.

The first woman I noticed was younger, I’d guess somewhere between high school and college graduation. She was dressed casually and had joined a table of seven others. I guessed they were family. The vibe from the table was that it was some sort of “catching up” scenario; the snippets of conversation that permeated the atmosphere of the diner included questions about travel and college.

The reason I noticed this woman was because when she was served her pancake breakfast, she busied herself by demonstratively cutting up the entire stack of pancakes into a small, bite sized portions. All three or four pancakes on her plate were chopped up in this manner. Her cutting motions were large, in fact, this is what originally caught my eye. I remarked to Earl that it had been a long while since I saw someone cut their food up in a restaurant in this manner; he asked if there was a toddler at the table as it sounded like she was cutting up the pancakes for a four year old or something. No, she was cutting up the pancakes for herself. This type of table habits run directly contrary to anything I was ever taught, read from Miss Manners or witnessed on “Downton Abbey”. Granted, at one time in my life I held my fork like a shovel (it was several decades ago), so I’m really not an authority on table manners, but her approach to eating, which was repeated with the sausage and other extraneous meats on her plate, struck me as quite odd. The baby approach to culinary manners did not match the air of young adult that she was trying to portray. I found this humorous.

I did notice that between her portion-controlled bites she would glance down at her lap. A shift in my gaze confirmed that she had an iPhone 5C (in mint green) sitting in her lap. Apparently, something in cyberspace was more important than the family gathering that I was observing.

Earl and I were chatting about how our waitress resembled Vera from “Alice”, Earl was happy she didn’t fling straws all over the place, when a couple a few tables over caught my gaze. Both were older; if I had to guess I’d peg them in their mid 60s. They appeared to be married, but for all I know they were having an affair that spanned decades, but my money is on married. The reason I’m thinking they were married is because they weren’t, at least to my knowledge, interacting with each other in any way. Before the food arrived, while they had food in front of them and after they had finished their meal, they were both engrossed in their smartphones. Casual observation confirmed that the man had an iPhone 4S or older and the woman had an iPhone 5 or newer. They were both so involved with their iPhones that they didn’t even look at each other. When the food was delivered, while they were perusing over the menu, their gazes barely ever averted from their smartphones and at each other. Earl suggested that perhaps they were texting each other, but I don’t think that was the case.

These observations were made by my casual glances and such. Earl and I continued a lovely discussion as we enjoyed the moment in that little diner together this morning. I’m happy to be in a place where I still enjoy the company of those I spend time with and putting my smartphone down on the table, upside down and outside of my peripheral vision, confirmed that the best moment is the moment enjoyed in the here and now.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

This entry originally appeared on my Google+ stream.

It was the mid part of last week that I decided that I was not enjoying the disjointed Foursquare / Swarm experience, so I deleted both apps off of my smartphone. This actually made me a little sad for a couple of reasons. I had been actively using Foursquare and contributing to that ecosystem since shortly after its inception and when my husband and I went on our road trips (which can be several thousand miles long once or twice a year), it was fun to check in places that we had been before and subsequently be reminded of this fact by Foursquare. We also liked playing “spot the mayor”, something that didn’t happen very often but happened time to time, nonetheless.

We embarked on our latest road trip this past Thursday, and it was the first time in nearly five years that we didn’t use Foursquare in any way to find local eateries and the like. He used Yelp to a certain degree, I opted to use the Google ecosystem.  My tools were the various Google apps that are available for iOS.

It was wonderful.

One of the things that I really, really like about using Google for location-aware services and discovery is that everything is integrated together. There’s not a lot of app hopping (like going from Swarm to Foursquare) and if there is some app hopping involved, it still feels quite integrated. And because I’m now using Google services for this type of location discovery, the Google Now experience is becoming even more predictive. Predictive is good. This type of prediction is where Google is jumping leaps and bounds beyond what Apple has to offer through iOS’s Siri.

So, in an ironic way, I have to thank Foursquare for kind of screwing up their ecosystem to the extent that it made this loyal user look elsewhere for information. Had Foursquare continued with their integrated experience, I would have never realized the value of Google and its contribution to the arena.

Let’s hope that Google continues to improve their offerings on all platforms. If they do, I shall continue to be a very happy user.

I’ve mentioned before that I make a living by writing software for one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States. I enjoy writing code, and the software that I work on the most is an application that I first inherited from my predecessor five years ago that has grown into an important part of the foundation of the company keeping track of what’s going on in the network. I’m not boasting but it’s good to know that I’m making an important contribution to the well-being of the millions of customers that the company has.

One of the best parts of this gig is the fact that I get to do my work from a MacBook Pro. Years ago, my at-the-time future supervisor asked what he could do to make my job more enjoyable and I told him, “let me work from a Mac.”
Within 48 hours I had a brand-new 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro and my productivity soared. It was a win, win for all involved. Unfortunately, my this particular MacBook Pro was part of a batch of machines that might have a video card glitch in them. I didn’t know that this possibility existed, so for years I put up with a rare, random freeze up or lock up that I attributed to a bad application. Apparently there was a warranty fix, but I didn’t realize this until after the opportunity time frame had expired.

Over the past couple of months my work MacBook Pro has been rebooting and freezing up more. This has made my normally most excellent, premium Apple experience a little more frustrating. We all know that work can be frustrating enough; having more frustration is something that we should avoid. The thing is, I wasn’t sure that I could get another Mac from work, because 99% of the employees have Windows computers and there was a rumor on the grapevine that stated that the company wasn’t buying any more Macs.

I put in a request for a new Mac, spouting my justification as to why I needed a Mac in lieu of a snappy new Windows machine, and my supervisor approved the request right away. Tech support responded within a couple of hours and asked me for the serial number of my current laptop; perhaps the company would get it fixed if it’s under warranty. I already knew that it wasn’t under warranty.

Imagine my surprise when I opened my email Monday morning and saw that I was getting a brand new MacBook to replacing my aging machine. On Thursday I will have a new brand-new, 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina for work. I have already designated Friday as the day for me to copy everything over from my old computer to my new one.

Now, I know it’s a little weird for a 46 year old man to get giddy over a new goody, especially a new work computer, but I’m a little beside myself with excitement.

It’s little things like this that make me realize that in the big scheme of things, I have a pretty good gig at work.