Thoughts from 30,000 feet….

Either I’m just a kid at heart or I haven’t flown enough, but there’s still something cool about looking out an airplane window and seeing the patterns, shapes, and other visuals below. Big cities look small. Small cities look miniscule. Outlying subdivisions look even more odd & out of place. Rivers are reduced to narrow lines. Interstates really are just lines on a green map. Add once a plane starts to descend, the Google Earth (or SimCity) views of industrial parks, schools, stadiums, and anything else you can think of becomes almost mystical.

Probably the best part of flying into Reagan airport in DC – OK, the only thing other than the namesake – is the view of Washington, DC. One can see the mall, the Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon without batting an eye. The Washington Monument and the Capitol can be seen from the terminal.

Weather phenomena is also a spectacle to observe above the ground. Most of our flight between DC and Charlotte was spent above the clouds, as apparently the threat of rain was everywhere in the Mid Atlantic. Every so often, the thundercap style clouds were visible in the distance. Those things look pretty impressive to a weather nerd like myself. On our approach to Charlotte-Douglas, a grey column of rain that typically indicates a downpour was visible below Uptown. I always liked watching those columns from the ground – a few thousand feet in the air makes them that much cooler.

I’m now in a Ford Focus – my third different rental car in three trips, and the first twenty-four hour impression is not good. I don’t see cruise, the vehicle controls are poorly laid out, and there’s only one power outlet. It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that I need to check about an out-of-pocket upgrade. The bank pays for a massive piece of the car; I kick in an extra $10 or $20 for something good. Makes sense to me.

It should suprise no one that when a Wal-Mart loses power, the only thing that is still useable is the cash register. Sure as hell can’t see what you’re buying, but you can pay for it. Good luck trying to get out of a powerless Wal-Mart when there is no juice to run the automatic doors. And to my surprise Wal-Mart doesn’t sell everything under the sun – an older Asian couple in front of me was trying to buy one of the display racks. Sad that it took the cashier five minutes to figure it out.

I probably could have had a stronger voice of opposition, but the truth is I don’t mind.  For my own selfish reasons I’m going along.  The changes that will most likely come are of benefit to me and things I’d like to see so I kept my mouth shut, went along with the plan, and sold out a fellow male in the process.

And so our puppy Max was dropped off at the vet today to become half the man he used to be.

Really sad, in a way, that part of being a “responsible pet owner” is to have two of the things that make Max who he is disappear before he matures.  On the other hand, it cuts down on a lot of undesirable behaviors, calms his energy & personality, and is healthier for him long-term.  Still, to see a poor little boy cut down in the prime of his life…


Amazing how in the span of a couple weeks airline prices at US Air nearly doubled.  My typical itinerary for my Charlotte trips runs about $250 roundtrip, with no connections.  Not so for my upcoming one – my usual flight combo was almost $500!!!  Therefore, my next trip will return to the $230 range and will include a side trip to Reagan National.  Never flown there before, but at least it has a good name.

I’m officially attempting to break my household addition to sodas starting today.  For the last month or so my wife has been buying green tea packets that are made to be poured into a bottle of water.  Since I’m not much of a tea drinker, my wife picked up the same thing for lemonade.  I’m on my second bottle today and it’s quite refreshing.  The packet is big enough to make the lemonade tangy and I don’t feel the need to finish off the 7-Up bottle still in the fridge.  The calories and sugar in each bottle are fractions of what I’ve been getting previously, and the caffeine that I’ve cut out continues to stay away.  Yes, this is the lazy man’s version – I could be making pitchers of lemonade and pouring glasses rather than buying bottles of water and canisters of powder.  Honestly, I don’t care.  I know that I’m not going to keep up with washing the pitcher & making a fresh one – I haven’t before.  This also makes it easier for me to do “on the go”.  If we’re taking a drive somewhere I can take 15 seconds and fix this bottle rather than going into the gas station after filling up to buy a Coke, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, or any of my other vices.

Only another week or so before the college kids come back into town and clog the roadways.

I seem to make my best vacation plans while I’m sitting at my desk pretending to work.  Caribbean cruises, Disney getaways, Niagara, Alaska, Europe…I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I most want to get away when I’m in a situation that doesn’t allow it.  I’m damn sure I can plan a great vacation.  Too bad I have no way to responsibly pay for any of them.

Any tech nerds who might be reading this will laugh their asses off at me, but I finally sat down and spent the 30 seconds necessary to configure my work laptop to work off a two monitor display.  (It actually took closer to five minutes, if you want to count untangling the bird’s nest of wires to my docking station, cleaning unidentified pieces of paper and food wrappers from the work area, and going to the bathroom.)  For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m referring to, XP Pro allows for the user’s workspace to be extended across two monitors.  In this case I use the laptop’s own display as monitor one and a 17” CRT as monitor two.  The bulk of my work is done on display one, but if I need extra space – such as comparing multiple spreadsheets, database tables, documents, or viewing a spreadsheet with disgustingly wide columns – I can drag an extra app window to monitor two or resize the window to span across both displays.  Again, this is nothing new, but it feels good to advance to the year 2002.

I’m within my month timeframe to call the digital satellite people and schedule an install.  I’m really in the mood for Sunday Ticket so I can watch the Carolina Panthers march to a Super Bowl this year (lol) and DirecTV looks to be running a kickass promotion.  Seventy bucks a month for four months includes Sunday Ticket and the full package of programming that normally costs a hundred bucks by itself, plus the “free” equipment, install, etc.  Of course, the catch will be once the four month period is over – how low can I drop my programming package?  I don’t watch everything that’s in the full package so there’s no need to pay for it when the normal cost kicks in.  That and I need to get off my procrastinating bum & start archiving our current cable DVR to DVD.

Non-participatory conference calls suck.  Thank goodness for the switch box on the network.

Football season – 25 days until the Mountaineers kick off!

Missing?  Yep, just a bit.  Here’s some quick tidbits to fill in the time gap.

The last couple of weeks have been hectic.  The last full week of July, a 24-hour bug struck each of us at slightly different times. Ethan got it on Tuesday.  Wednesday afternoon, while on an unscheduled trip to my in-laws, Garrett got laid out.  Wednesday night, abut a ½ hour apart, Jen and I got struck.  Everyone had the same general conditions – vomiting, diarrhea, and a general sense of blah.  As fate would have it, the adage of “bigger they are, harder they fall” rang true.  Ethan’s was generally mild and Garrett’s was a little stronger.  Both paled compared to Jen and myself.  There’s a big problem when both parents are struck down at the same time.  Fortunately, with the kids being laid low as well we didn’t have much of a hassle from them.

I then follow that up with a trip down to Charlotte for work.  Every time I fly I say the same thing – Pittsburgh’s airport to me is so much nicer.  It’s wider, brighter, has more shops, and is just generally a very non-unpleasant place to be for a flight.  I’m not sure why such a shitty city has a nice airport.  

My rental vehicle this week was a Nissan Sentra, which in the big picture was a lot nicer than the Chevy Cobalt I got the first time.  Better acceleration, better handling, better creature comforts (apparently Chevy doesn’t realize that in 2006 cars should come with power windows and door locks, no matter what class the vehicle comes in)….give me the Nissan any day.  There were only two deficiencies with the Nissan.  One, releasing the cruise control on my Sentra took a significant push of the brake rather than the love tap required by most other cars.  When traveling an interstate at more than the speed limit, my desire is not to make the car leap off the road when I want to reassume control of the accelerator.  Two, the stereo buttons are not very self-explanatory to the uninitiated and the speakers themselves suck.

My host made some of the best homemade barbecue I’ve ever had.  Better than some restaurants I’ve been to.

I used my U3-enabled jump drive for the first time in a real world setting and it worked pretty well, keeping me from over-cluttering my host’s cookies and history bar when browsing.  I was unprepared for one thing – Portable Firefox cannot co-exist with a local copy of Firefox when both are running.  First thing I did when loading it up today was to add Maxthon to the menu.  It’s a browser based off of the IE engine, and from what I’ve been told it runs much cleaner than IE.  I was looking first for Opera, but Maxthon came up first.

Great results as well for my Garmin iQue PDA/GPS.  An unfortunate case of oversleeping Monday morning left me extremely rushed to get to the Pittsburgh airport.  Luckily, I packed well the night before and programmed my destination into the iQue so that I wouldn’t have to before leaving.  Yes, I know how to get to the airport but I’m also interested in driving statistics that the GPS can provide.  As part of the trip window that shows upcoming turns, a counter exists that shows miles remaining to the turn, the approximate time left before reaching the turn, and the expected time of arrival at that turn.  The final destination gets it’s own static display at the bottom of the screen, so I was always able to see my expected arrival time.  For me, when I know I’m running late and am flying up the road at an unrecommended speed, it’s comforting to watch the time of arrival estimate steadily drop.  In fact, had I not hit the large construction on I-79 just south of the I-279 turnoff, I would have shaved at least ten minutes off my initial arrival time.  As it was, I still ended up saving five minutes off the trip, which is a pretty big deal considering I arrived at my date about five minutes before pre-boarding began.

Using the Garmin around Charlotte showed me how accurate it can be as well.  It recommended routes to my destinations that made map-sense, although I rarely followed them since I also have local sense to know which areas are safe to drive in.  Any GPS would have done the same thing.  Whenever I did decide to ignore its advice, route recalculation was performed quickly.  The only complaints I have on it at this time is that sometimes satellite lock is slow (which I read plenty of places prior to purchase) and the brightness display is impossible to adjust on the road.

Garrett just finished a week-long Tiny Tigers karate camp this week, learning to do exercises with traditional martial arts weapons.  (Don’t ask me to spell them here – I have no idea what their names are, and “wood staff” & “nun chucks” are not right.)  From all reports, he did quite well with the camp and will likely be disappointed when he doesn’t go back on Monday.  This is also a great sign for how he’ll do initially going to preschool next month.  This past week served as a bit of a trial run for him going someplace else for a few hours straight and learning stuff without his parents around for the first time.  Like any kid, school will get old, but for now he should do well with the transition.