My secret fantasy career

Air traffic controller. Yep. Kind of a high stress job, and yes, I'm already a stress case, but, well, it combines some of the things I love - aviation, communications, and helping get people from A to B.

After a fun day of flying, I stopped by the control tower at Addison, my home airport. It's a nice new tower, with plenty of room for three controllers (two on duty) and several visitors.

Of particular interest was the radar display. This is linked from the Dallas TRACON radar and shows the location of ADS (center), Dallas Love field (bottom), DFW (bottom left) and smaller airports. The rounded solid lines depict boundries of the DFW and Love Field "Class B" airspace.

Compare the radar picture to a chart, centered on ADS (thanks to SkyVector.com - google maps for aviation charts).

All in all, a very educational visit. Maybe I'll slip in an application.

Hookey

I should have been at work yesterday afternoon. I wasn't. As Peter says in Office Space "Well, Bob, I wouldn't say that I've been missing work..."

BBQ

You have the day off, an airplane at your disposal and you're hungry. What better to do than fly out to Hard Eight BBQ in Stehpenville, TX?

Hard 8 is ~ 1/4 mile from the airport (SEP, Stephenville - Clark Field) and they leave two golf carts for pilots to take over for lunch. Yes, there's that much traffic.

Brisket, jalapeno sasuage, pork chops (bet you can't finish just one), ribs .... it's all there, and it's all good. Worth the flight and maybe worth the drive, depending on how far and how hungry you are.

Severe clear sky, cool temps (65F at lunch time), very few bumps and, of course, a full and happy tummy. Doesn't get much better than that.

GhettoNet Grows Up

Well, our computing lab has finally grown into something we can call, well, a lab. We're now up to a total of 16 cores (8 dual core PCs) and 2TB of stroage. We have 6 more cores on order (Core Duo 2s) and will migrate the RAID to larger drives, increasing the storage to 4TB.

But it's still not enough. Is it ever enough?

Grounded

Hello everyone. Just a quick update.

Grounded today due to weather - rain and 1000 foot ceilings. So, I get to work on the airplane and processing photos. This means blog updates tomorrow!

Today's accomplushments include removing light rings on the engine instruments that were obstructing the color-coded ranges and getting the XM Weather link to the Garmin GPS working. It's truly amazing, displaying satellite uplinked radar, etc. to our little airplane.