Sean Squawks on…

Well, it’s never been a particular challenge to the military to state the obvious, but I guess in the various “hoo-rah” circles it may be a new realization.  Hey, even I once was an AFROTC cadet and patriotic as all hell.  These days, as much as I love my country, it’s really hard to be.

And I’m not even a member of the generation that this presentation was concerning.  To them, I’m ancient.  I mean my God!  I’m 30 years old!

Since the neo-cons and war lovers have hijacked our politics, I honestly think these kids may be our only hope.  As mentioned in the presentation, they’re more connected to the outside word than our current crop of politicians could ever hope to be.  Seriously.  How many politicians can say that they REALLY have a Chinese guy as their friend.  I’m not talking about a Chinese American that moved here and got citizenship.  I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness Chinese person that lives and works there every day of their life.

I’d say not many.

That creation of the DOD so long ago called DARPANET may just be their downfall, because it’s globalizing the world in a way more important than global free trade or economics ever could.  It’s globalizing the world in a social way, and it will continue to do so more and more.  Tomorrow it will be much hard to begin a war on countries when we may well have friends that live there.

So in summary, it’s quite amusing that the Navy just realized that this horrible war has basically polarized all the kids to never even consider joining the military.  In executing this action, they’ve essentially destroyed their chances of staffing a competent military in the future.  They’ll have two choices - institute a draft or lower their standards.  A public that doesn’t support the war as it is will be quite unlikely to ever support the draft, that’d be political suicide.  So, they’ll have to take the second option, and we’ll end up with a military that will take decades to recover.  I just hope we don’t really need them in the meantime.

Thanks to our current government, we have a mess that we’ll be dealing with probably long after I’m dead and gone.  Hrmm, so the common citizenship and our kids distrust and hate our government.  That sure sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Steve Bridges as George Bush

Funniest stuff ever.

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus that started right after the blog started, I guess.  So much for the blog-a-thon.  Eh.  At any rate, I’m nearing completion of my IFR rating.  I almost have the required hours, but I need to finish the bookwork.  I have a lot of that to do.  With all the working I do, it’s hard to find time to read a textbook.  Granted, the Jeppeson Commercial/Instrument text is a little more exciting than CHEM 184 was.

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Well ladies and gentlemen, my girlfriend is on the prowl.  That’s right, she knows I have a blog now, and she’s looking for it.  Let’s see how long it takes her to find it, because I won’t tell her where it is…  Bwahahaha.

After planning for years, I started my IFR training. Fa’ real.

We were going to head out on a late flight, leaving at about 8:30 pm. No real clouds in sight (at least not within reach of my little ol’ Archer). That’s fine, I can always wear the sexy foggles. But, it’s a bit windy, gusting to 20 knots. That I could deal with, the Archer has a 17 knot demonstrated crosswind component. This isn’t a direct crosswind, so we’re good. However, the forecast is to make its way up to gusting 30 knots. I figured, even if the plane can handle it, we’re flying at night (something I’ve not done a lot) and this is my first official instrument training flight. Not a great combination. So, we did the sim instead.

Now, I know I can handle ANYTHING. Seriously. The sim is absolutely the most sensitive thing ever. I barely twitch the yoke back, I’m climbing at 1200 feet per minute. I push it forward, just a smidge, 1200 feet per minute down. But I’m supposed to maintain altitude within 100 fpm. But, I need to keep my heading within 10 degrees. If I watch my altitude, my heading goes awry. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but my instructor says I did well. I guess that’s all that matters. That and that I feel like a student pilot again, looking over at the all-knowing instructor.

We live in a gambling culture. There are state run lotteries, dog tracks, horse tracks, riverboat casinos and even reguarl brick and mortar casinos in some states. You’re allowd to put money on an NCAA basketball ladder, football pool or on your fantasy sports team. However, the US government claims that internet gambling is illegal, citing all sorts of claims, while also attempting to carve out exceptions for online sales of lottery tickets, dog and horse racing.
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By trade, I’m a software developer, but in school I was studying computer engineering. That’s a mish-mash of computer science (programming) and electrical engineering. Basically, it’s supposed to train you to both design and build the computer itself and write the code to run on it. I’ve gone the software path, but I have to admit that sometimes it gets pretty mundane. So, I’ve had a hankering for some time to do some hardware. Brainstorming for ideas I decided that I’m going to build a UAV, that’s unmanned aerial vehicle for you non-acronym types.

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I have had my Private Pilot’s license for about ten years.  But, I’ve yet to get my instrument ticket.  I’ve thought about it several times, even gone so far as to make the first training flight, but never followed through.  Well, I’ve now decided to go for it, and for the last 4 weeks, we’ve been waiting for some IMC, because of course the training is better if it’s in real IMC (right?).

At any rate, I’m actually excited about this.  I can’t wait to start my training, but I feel like I did back when I was getting my original pilot’s license but kept getting flights cancelled because it was cloudy, windy, the plane was under maintenance or there was a massive herd of puppies blocking the runway.  Damn puppies.

I’m chomping at the bit here.  But, the clouds won’t come, or if they do, they’re about 4 million feet up (okay, 8 or 9 thousand, but in a Cherokee, it may as well be 4 million feet up).  If the weather doesn’t get bad soon, I guess I’ll have to settle for night flights with the sexy glasses.  Before long, any moisture in the air is going to ground me for icing.  Note to self, talk FBO into installing weeping wings on the Archer, and figure out why they keep laughing at me when I say that.

It was the summer of 1996 and I was back home after my freshman year of college. I was 19, a freshly minted private pilot. My dad had been bragging to all his coworkers that his son was now a pilot, he thought that was just pretty cool. So, of course my first passenger as a newly minted pilot was going to be my dad.

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No. I don’t even really like birds. They wake me up at the crack of dawn, and I don’t like getting up at the crack of dawn. The dislike of birds is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have in common. Really, that’s it. Nothing else.
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