The guy ahead of me in the security line had just placed all of his gear on the conveor belt but wanted to hand carry his Dunkin donut bag thru the metal detector. The TSA agent balked at this and ordered him to place it on the belt. He was loath to do this claiming that he’d never had to do this before ?! Further, he doesn’t microwave or x-ray his food (yeah like, dunkin d is healthful cooking) The security guys claim that they can’t see through the plastic bag and therefore must inspect the item and they begin to squint into the sack, finger the inner wrap and poke and prod. And this really caused the pax to squirm, to see his food being handled. I don’t begrudge security from wanting to make sure about carry on items but all of this ‘show’ had become a test of wills and rights and who’d have the last word and who’d could piss off who the worst. The government says that I can’t talk about this thing. To point out flaws and shortcomings undermines our excellent security and only helps the bad guys and is therefore un-amerikun but the story outcome was that the donuts were okay. I suggested that he bring some for everyone next time.
All posts by cs
throttle etiquette
Cab driver was a pumper. Is that the proper descriptive term? Have you riden with anyone that cannot hold their foot still on the accelerator? It was — on the gas — off — again. Is this a muscle control or mental defect thing? Has anyone else written about this gas pedal behavior phenomenon? Smooth operator Washington Flyer.
fashion
BabyDahl with her 60’s eye wear fashion statement. You didn’t hear she was singing a 5th Dimension song ( well actually several) while doing her Vogue. Note the silver ring add-on the frame. Style.
cartalk
I wasn’t 25 feet out of my NuBeetle when the bus driver ambles over in my general direction to start a conversation. He begins to query me about my car (in a handicap spot) and I’m bracing for a move-it lecture but he starts this old hippy nostalgia rap thing and how he was going to buy a yellow one too —- but got a new pickup instead —- Opps got to go move my car bye
His coach will motor S ‘man and his buds over to Beaufort, NC for a day field trip cruise aboard the 65ft, MYSTERY. See Bogue Sound. Say! do you need another chaperone volunteer for this trip?
Quick Draw
I bought this yesterday. I was tired of popping upward from a deep knee bend (Monte Python esg) and going looking for that pesky hammer or mis-laid tape measure. Besides, BabyDahl sez, ‘she likes a man with a tool belt’:-0 This one is basic but they did have a pro’ for each hip double bag with back support belt and full leather. It had an integral bike lock style mechanism which I suppose was so that untrustworthy co-horts wouldn’t be tempted when you left the job site for tacos. I haven’t figured out how to keep from getting jabbed when I dip my hands into the nail pouch.
boatshow
It was pretty funny at the Carolina Boat Show. There’s this bright yellow hull (a California influence the salesman sez) made by Centurion. The guy says they’re made in Merced, CA —- only he pronounces it ‘ Mer-ked ‘ and I wanted to grin at this. You gotta love it when the sales guy knows his product!
The fully tricked out wakeboard boats with tuna tower and rad sound system (a la Air Nautique) were 40 grand !?! This has gotta be the premium range for a 20-21′ runabout. There’s no such thing as a cheap sport.
Or cheap date. You know those high powered 27 foot day cruisers where the skipper might be wearing his many gold chains on his hairy chest intent on dinning his girl friend below… A floating double bed. The champagne and glasses are in view as you tour the fantasy.
There were some (Catalina) 25 foot keeless sailboats with a mere fin to keep it trailerable. No lead ballast either. The saleslady tells me these use water for ballast. I guess they have the ability to lighten up for the trailer that way. It seems like a terrible way to try and make a boat all things to all people. So you’re going to trailer a boat that size — what about steping the mast? It must take several big helpers. I’ll bet they thought of that too. It’s probably the lightest weakest most diminuative rig in it’s class.
Sticker shock?
Sunglasses@Night
My First Officer this month, Marshall B______, is from a generations old Maryland family that included a Supreme Court Justice. Marshall’s father was an officer in the Navy and Marshall came to the right seat of my airplane from an Air Force KC-135 aerial refueling tanker. He was the navigator and knows something about celestial navigation so it is fun to pick his brain on that subject. He was stationed for a time at Castle AFB in Atwater, California, which is not far from my family’s roots, and flying on B-52s. Anyhow. he’s a little green as a co-pilot and not too sure of himself yet. I have to reaffirm what they taught about aircraft systems in ground school and coach him a little bit sometimes. When approaching an airport at night he asks me things like: “Where is it?” and, “So there’s our runway over there, right?” “Call my turn for me, alright?” At first I thought it was just insecurity and thinking out loud. But then I realized that he doesn’t see so well at night. You soon formulate opinions about your crew especially from the confines of a cramped cockpit. You watch for strengths and weakness. After all, your career and not to mention safety depend on it. There were subtle hints like the CRT screens on his side of the instrument panel adjusted to full intensity and only dimmed slightly after it was pitch black outside. He boasted to me that his vision was better then best with acuity measured at 20/07. Wow. I’m impressed. (Didn’t I hear somewhere that people with perfect eyesight sometimes have difficulty with night vision?) Approaching the Dulles airport (~7 miles out) in the middle of the night and his leg he says, “Ah, could I get some landing lights on here please?” Sure. No prob.’. I reached to the overhead panel for the three rocker switches; left landing, right landing, taxi light. Click. Click. Click. (technical note: these lights are mounted to the nose gear strut ) He had forgotten that the lights would not be effective as the landing gear had not yet been lowered. I mockingly reminded him of this by saying, “There. Oh! That’s sure a lot better.” And then after he had realized his mistake and understood that all he had succeeded in doing was to bathe the closed nose gear wheel well with a zillion candlepower, I said laughing, “Boy! You really made those mice and cockroaches in there scramble for the crevices.”
On our way west (my leg), Marshall and I fly toward the brilliant sunset. He explains to me how the celestial charts call for a heavy duty correction for refractive error during sun sights at this shallow zenith. We squint into the bright orange glow, the lower circumference of which is beginning to distort and flatten. “You see? At the very last we are not seeing the true sun at all but merely a reflection in the earth’s thick atmosphere. A mirage`.” Hmmm. Cool! I leave my dark glasses on, even as the sky quickly darkens toward night during our approach for landing in Dayton, Ohio. I do this every once in a dull while just for grins and to relieve the cockpit tedium. I like to wait and see if my crew notices or says anything. Will they be assertive or questioning? It got a rise out of Marshall. “You’ve still got your sun glasses on.” That’s right. This is going to be a dark night approach, I said in my best mono-tone matter of fact voice. “Oh. Are those like the kind that lighten up automatically?”, he asked nervously. Two darkness challenged pilots at the controls. Look out below! Humming the Corey Hart lyrics
Bank Account Security
I was with 9 year old KLS at the bank. She was making a withdrawal from her savings account so that the two of us could go to the book store, er uh, record stand to buy a CD. She had meticulously filled out the withdrawal slip; it was her first. This was an exercise in financial training and part of her continuing education, as it were. Then she approached the teller, solo. I was watching proudly from 10 paces back. We were the only customers in the entire place so the teller made a big production out of it; checking references and consulting her monitor and walking over to the managers desk (ahem, excuse me, assistant bank vice president) and speaking in hushed tones. There was a problem. Being a minor, she needed the co-signers signature to withdraw the $20. “Sure, KLS” (I’ll help ya out here), I said cheerfully. “It’s alot easier to put money in then it is to get it back out. Isn’t it.”, I quipped but directed half sarcastically toward the teller. “I’m sorry sir but the little girl’s Mother has to sign it.” What? “I am her Father. I’ll sign it.” She informed me that my name did not appear upon the list of the approved. “What do you mean, I can’t sign?”, I asked. “I was in here not 6 months ago and the three of us sat face to face at this very desk and opened this account.” “I’m sorry sir. I’m only following bank rules. Here is a form which you can take home for Kiersten’s Mother to sign authorizing you to also sign.”
“Come on KLS. I’ll loan you the money.” We walked out. I wanted to tell them what they could do with the form. What ever happened to family value and trust. Would they really have gone out on a limb and jeopardized their position by giving her HER $20? A bank employee can go a little out of control in Singapore and loose BILLIONS of dollars. It’s comforting to know that there are adequate controls in place to prevent a roque Dad from raiding his daughter’s piggy bank.
A Close Shave
I was up until 0000 hrs. Friday night with a serious challenge. I was tinkering with my spreadsheet/database program Quattro Pro, which I use to keep track of jogging stats, IRAs, 401Ks, as well as pilot log book, when the system locked-up (crashed) and a little message appeared with the generic warning that “systems resources were low” or some such non-sense, and to “save your work to another file.”
These things happen infrequently but can be routinely handled, and are considered more of a nuisance then a disaster. Usually the remedy is to exit the offending program by rebooting the PC. You have to re-enter the data that you were working with since you last saved, which isn’t fun, so good practice is to save often. In my situation, and this was unusual, the error had erased the entire file! This would be disaster time. My running records lost; there is no hard copy. Trying to reconstruct 24 months of my pilot log book, for example, would have been… Oh! I don’t want to even think about it!
Okay. Don’t panic. Re-start Quattro Pro. Re-load the file. Nope. It’s empty allright. Lots of empty spaces and squares in blank columns. Not a pretty sight. Okay. No problem. I have backups. First though, let me try the Microsoft Undelete utility. This comes with windows and sometimes allows you to recover files that have been deleted but not yet overwritten. Ah! There it is. The erased file. But there’s a note. “File is destroyed” “Cannot be rebuilt” I had exhausted all of the simple possibilities. Go to Microsoft Backup. Select the recover function and insert the floppy into drive “A”. OOPS. Another message. “Backup file was created with Microsoft DOS 6.0 or 6.2 see the readme.txt in the MS-DOS 6.22 step-up disc.” Swell. It was true. The original full backup was made in January and I had since upgraded my operating system. Hey. It was free. Why not? This added complication I hadn’t figured on and I was now grumbling to myself. It was just further confirmation that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it… Okay. Dig out the backup diskettes of the MSDOS 6.22 step-up that I had made. All of these files are archived in a compressed state. There are two on a 5 1/2″ floppy and two more on a 3 1/2″. The first file is designed to run so as to expand automatically the other three. When I ran this the one file extracted just fine but it then prompted me to insert the other disc to work on the remaining two files. Another snag. The other floppy (3 1/2″) was on drive “B” and wouldn’t read as it was expecting to see it on “A”. This was getting comical. All I wanted to see was the &#$*!?% readme file so that I could root out my problem with the old backup. I would have to manually re-install the entire OS just to see the help message? My efforts were continually thwarted as the problem twisted and convoluted. I had a pile of floppy discs, 14 full backup plus 6 incremental backups, the two OS discs, in addition to the usual natural clutter on my desktop and on the floor. I half expected to see a message appear on the monitor which said, “Abandon all hope, Give up, Just forget it!”
Well, after some additional frowning and cursing, I got the idea to try and run MS backup from the DOS command line instead of from Windows. The reluctant machine bought it. The file was restored. The January version, that is. I still had a slew of incremental backups (the changes made since then to restore and bring the errant file completely up to date and back to life), to do. After a few dozen more mouse clicks and another 40 minutes I had merely succeeded in returning to the point were I was before I had turned on the machine in the first place. I love computers…
Computing, Time Sponge Even Then
A letter to my best friend – Mel. This was before social media. This was before email. This would have been printed and sent by, gasp, snail mail. Personal computing in 1995.
I haven’t been NET surfing or CorelDRAW!ing much lately. I’ve been absorbed in DOOM. I’m getting pretty good with a shotgun. Dede puts on the headphones and sits next to me and watches while I blast away. “Tell me if you hear any bad guys sneaking up on me, honey.” The beauty of this game is that it is so widely supported on the net. Kinda like a VW beetle. You will always be able to find parts for it. When I finish the episodes included with the original from ID, I can download more levels, sound fx, and music. These wads are made by hackers and are really quite good. Some are designed to run on fast 486s so they get a little jerky at times on my machine. Here are some that I played. Hurt me plenty. They must have taken some serious work. I have to replay some of the sections many times. Seems like I’m out numbered and low on ammo! Save often. You can run them from the DOS command line like so: Change to your DOOM directory and at the prompt exactly type–
doom -file serenity.wad sersound.wad -warp e3m1
Cool! I found a utility on-line to convert .au to .wav so you can listen to those sound files.
Really COOL! Using Window’s Object Packager, I embedded sound into those graphics you sent me. I hope this works on your PC. Open the .cdr in Corel and then double click on the little icon I put there. Multimedia!!!
I just got your Greetings From LaLa Land. I liked the font! What’s it called? How do I get it? Ah, Painter.zip, I was most curious as to what it was. Man. That sucker was huge, man. How do you get that whole file into Corel. Mine balks with insufficient memory dialog boxes. I’ll bet the pics from Greetings… used up some RAM. Can you set your scanner for lower resolution or definition to save bytes? Can you control the dithering? My impact printer got a new ribbon. It had more ink then any of the others; a quality control problem of sorts. I think it should be okay now. I use 360 x 360 dpi, its maximum, otherwise the graphics look like s___. I need colour. I was reading about the comparisons between the 560C, Epson Color, and the Cannon. It’ll be tough to decide when the time comes…
Wow! Glad to hear about your new office computer. How are you ever going to get any work done? That’s what I paid for my Zeos only a 18 months ago and it’s only a 25Mhz. Hah! I notice now in their advertisements that they don’t even offer a 25 or even a 33 anymore! I’m following the prices for the Intel Overdrive upgrade chip. Perhaps a 75DX4? Also I see hard drive prices are way down. Mine is 3/4 full. I’m having to be real selective now with what stays and what gets dumped. I have only 50 mb left.
On the floppy is a new release from 3d Realm. Terminal Velocity. Should play pretty well on a 486/66.
Boy! The web is changing. You may not recognize it when you go back on-line. Using the latest NETSCAPE browser you can see some pretty creative home pages. BTW here’s a URL for ya: http://www.corelnet.com/index.htm (this is a new CorelDRAW site worth checking out)