Month: June 2005

Shopping for the person I fantasize that I am…

…not the person I really am.

At a charity auction the other day, I got a $500 gift certificate to a custom bespoke tailor shop, and another $500 gift certificate to a clothing store known for high quality and high prices. No, I’m not going to tell you how much I paid for those together, but it was more than I’ve spent on clothing in my life, except for the time we went wild at Men’s Warehouse before the cruise.

Today I had an appointment at the tailor shop. Imagine my surprise when I found out that their cheapest suit is around $1,200, and they go up from there to over $3,000. I wear a suit about once a year, and a good pair of pants and a blazer maybe three or four times.

But I get into that mood when I’m sitting in a store like that, and think that maybe I could turn into a sophisticated person. I saw a show once where they claimed that every man who tries on a tux thinks he’s James Bond. Me, I started to look at fabric bolts and half made suits and started imaging myself as the chairman of the board.

I could just see myself standing at a fancy cocktail party saying “why certainly, we could host the charity gala at our house if you can’t get it in at the yacht club”. (Of course the new house has a lot to do with the fantasy.) The only problem with that is that I don’t get invited to those sorts of parties, I can’t stand at those sorts of parties because of my bad knees, so I end up being ignored in the corner, and also I don’t drink cocktails. Also, I’m a slob. I can barely get around to shaving every couple of weeks, and I don’t remember to get my hair cut until it’s getting in my eyes and annoying me.

We went to the Red Barn and spent the other gift certificate on a pair of pants and a shirt. Very nice. But I have a feeling I don’t have a bespoke suit in my future.

Oh Canada

You know, there are times when I really miss living in Canada. Two examples from today:

Calling for my weather briefing for the flight home: Most briefers at the Buffalo AFSS read you the text, exactly as you get it from the computer yourself using DUATS (Direct User Access Terminal System), and read at approximately broadband speeds. If you get a better than average one, he might summarize all the local forecasts like “four to six thousand scattered to broken”, which is fine and a good time saver and short hand. I rarely get any insight or analysis. But every single time I talk to the briefers at Gatineau Flight Service, I get advice, I get analysis, I get exactly what I need. Today, I’d seen the TAFs showing the possibility of thunderstorms during the period, but only as temporary (TEMPO) or widely scattered. I looked at the Intellicast Northeast Radar Loop, and didn’t see any signs of these thunderstorms so I breathed a sign of relief. When I called for my briefing, the briefer told me what to expect (marginal VFR conditions, high ceilings but very low visibility in haze), and then he explained that when the TAFs were issued the forecasters were unsure about where the atmospheric instability was going, but it seemed to have dissipated and moved off north of Montreal, and in his opinion I wouldn’t have to worry about anything developing along my route during my flight. He twice asked me if I had any more weather questions. I couldn’t have asked for a better briefing, and while I could see the far off lightning on the Lance’s Stormscope on the way home, there was no evidence of any activity anywhere near my route.

The other example was listening to Cross Country Checkup on CBC radio. They were discussing a pretty controversial topic, the post release restrictions on Karla Homulka. My favourite Canadian expatriate, Maddy, hated Rex Murphy, but to me he’s what a radio host on a call in show should be. He took calls from “law and order” types who lamented the fact that Canada doesn’t have the death penalty, people who expressed a fond hope that she’ll be murdered after her release, all the way to people who felt that while it’s unfortunate that the police botched the investigation so badly that they had to make a deal with devil, but they made a deal with her and so it isn’t fair to impose further penalties after she served her sentence, either because the restrictions are a slippery slope that could lead to life-time restrictions on lesser and lesser crimes, or just because it would make it harder to make these sorts of deals in cases where the police really do need some cooperation to save lives. And with all these callers expressing all these varied views, Rex was polite, he found something to agree with them and amplify, and sometime to challenge with probing further questions. He gently kept them on topic and got them to say their piece and get off. He never yelled at anybody, he never shouted anybody down or cut off their microphones, he never insulted them or made disparaging remarks about them after they were off the show. Such a huge difference to the Air America show I heard on the drive home from the airport, or any other call in show on either left wing or right wing radio in America.

A Wikipedia for Navigation Data

I was reading A blog entry about airport entries on Wikipedia and COPA (Canadian Owners and Pilots Association), and reflecting on how thousands of volunteers, people with too much time on their hands mostly, have made Wikipedia such a comprehensive resource. And it struck me that if we could harness the same sort of dedication and talent from pilots around the world, the vast number of us who rely on DAFIF (Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File) data for our flight planning, flight simulation, moving map navigators and other applications won’t be left out in the cold when DAFIF goes away.

I was envisioning something based on the Wikipedia source, but instead of a free form text entry you’d have a structured form for entering the data, and it would be pre-filled with the data already available from DAFIF, FAA and other databases. Then interested people could regularly check that against their local Aeronautical Information Publication and update it as necessary. The resultant database would be available free to any person or program who currently uses FAA and DAFIF data, such as my own waypoint database generators.

Since I posted a variation of this idea on Usenet last night, I have been informed that one DAFIF using program has already attempting the volunteer approach. The problem with that is that while they will only target users of their one individual program and only make the results available to the users of their one individual program. I think it would be better to make one system that draws volunteers from users of all programs that use DAFIF, and which makes its results available to all users of DAFIF.

My experience trying to recruit volunteers for entering data for my navaid.com systems is that people express interest, but there are very few people who follow through, and most of them lose interest after a few update cycles. The only solution is to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute, and to draw from the largest possible pool of volunteers.

Update: I contacted the people doing the volunteer project for their own product, and they have no interest in doing something for the benefit of the entire aviation community because they can’t make money off of it, and made disparaging remarks about the types of volunteers that this project would attract. Since they’re being assholes, I took the link to their site off this posting.

Good day flying

I flew one of the club’s Archers to Batavia for an oil change and to get the wheel pants put on. I volunteers because I hadn’t flown in over a month and I needed to knock some rust off. A free flight in a plane that’s easier to fly than the Lance seemed like a good way to do it. The weather wasn’t great – there was a broken to overcast layer at about 6000 feet, and shafts of rain scattered all over the place. And as typical for a June afternoon, it was pretty bumpy.

After the oil change, I came back to Rochester and got the Lance ready to fly to Ottawa. I filed IFR at 9000 feet, and the Lance took its own sweet time getting up that high. Man that plane is getting aenemic. I barely got 300 fpm before I retracted the gear, and about 800 fpm afterwards, and getting worse and worse as I got higher. I climbed through a bit of a layer at 6,000 feet, and was in solid IMC at 9,000 feet for about 20 minutes before it cleared off and left me in pretty decent visual conditions. Man, I’m never going to keep IFR current in actual, am I?

I really wish I was able to fly more often to become a “better stick”. I have no problem with the procedures and the thinking part of flying, but I am just not happy with how well I can hold a course or an altitude. I hand flew the whole way for the practice, but even when I briefly put on the autopilot in order to dig out a chart, the autopilot did an absolutely horrible job of holding a heading – the turn coordinator is very very slow to react, and I think that makes the autopilot slow to respond and prone to overcorrect.

This was my first flight to Canada since getting my CANPASS registration. That means that I called beforehand, and didn’t have to call on arrival. Big whup. But it also means that in the future I won’t have to stop off in St. Catherines on the way to Oshawa (because Oshawa customs isn’t available after 4pm) because I don’t have to arrive at an airport of entry while customs is available. If I could have, but I didn’t, choose to land at Rockcliffe, Carp or Gatineau instead of Ottawa, and maybe save a few bucks on ramp fees. I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure if it was going to be IFR conditions and I wasn’t sure of the arrival and departure procedures for those outlying airports. Maybe next time.

Picked up the keys last night.

Last night we picked up the keys for the new house. I drove down our driveway, and we walked around the now empty house and for the first time it really felt like ours. It was great. We poked and prodded and discussed what we were going to put where. I wish we could just magically transport everything there overnight and start living there full time.

Here’s the weird thing, though: Normally I’m the pessimistic one, and it’s Vicki’s natural optimism that gets me through the day. But as we were going through the house, and especially on the drive back to our soon-to-be-ex-house, I had to keep reassuring Vicki that this is the right thing and we’re going to be so happy here. I was bubbling with enthusiasm, but Vicki was crying. That’s not right.

Even stranger was that we were looking at some of the things that need fixing, and future projects, and I was even enthusiastic about them. Normally me and spending money on household projects, or even worse, working on household projects go together like pure sodium and water. Ok, bad analogy – I don’t explode, I wince at the expense and try everything I can to avoid the work. So maybe we go together like oil and water. But I found myself actually getting enthused at the prospect of taking this beautiful period house and making it more period and more beautiful, and maybe a little bit more comfortable at the same time.

I hope I can convince Vicki that this is going to be a good thing. I know I’m convinced. Except for moving out of the Rupert house when Shani kicked me out, I can’t think of a single move I’ve done that wasn’t an improvement in my life, and which I didn’t look forward to before hand and be glad of afterwards (at least until it was time to move again.)