Christmas Dinner

Yum...Christmas dinner!

At the hotel in Oklahoma City.

No room service and no restaurants.

One of the many joys of being an airline pilot....

Multimedia message

Uh! I can barely see to taxi and we're supposed to go fly.

The Big Chicken

Where am I?

Regional airlines lower bar for pilots

Just thought you should know...the below clips are from the article posted at the link.

If you've flown on a regional airline like American Eagle or Atlantic Southeast Airlines with any regularity, you may have noticed that the pilots seem a bit younger.

It's not your imagination. Regional carriers, which operate flights for major airlines like American, Delta and United, have been slashing their minimum hiring requirements in recent years as they grapple with a growing shortage of pilots. The carriers have reduced required flight hours for job applicants by as much as two-thirds, and in a few cases have hired pilots with the minimum experience required by the Federal Aviation Administration for a pilot's license.

Airline executives say recruiting less experienced pilots is necessary because the pool of applicants is shrinking while demand for pilots grows. And many have increased training for new hires and assigned them more time flying with veteran co-pilots.

Traditionally, many pilots began their careers at lower-paying regional airlines with the hope of moving to a major carrier, and a bigger salary, in a few years. Most regional carriers used to require 1,500 total flight hours before an aspiring pilot could apply for a job. A portion of those hours -- usually about 500 -- had to be flown in a multiengine airplane; the rest could be in a single-engine aircraft like a small Cessna 172.

In just the past year, 14 of the 21 regional and commuter airlines tracked by the consulting firm Air Inc. have reduced the hours of experience a pilot must have at the controls of any type of airplane. Trans States briefly lowered its requirement to 250 total hours last summer before raising it to 500, said Kit Darby, the firm's president.

American Eagle has cut its minimum flight hours to 500.

"If you have just a few hundred hours and don't have any jet experience, you're looking at quite a learning hurdle," Rice said.

James Magee, an Eagle pilot and union spokesman, had 2,000 hours of flight time when he was hired in 1999.

"Our new pilots are exceptionally good pilots," Magee said. "But they're flying in very challenging environments, and there's really no replacement for experience."

Airlines are aggressively recruiting on college campuses and offering signing bonuses to new hires who complete their training.

Union leaders say improved compensation and benefits would help more than signing bonuses and lesser requirements for new hires.

"We have to offer them a career path, with pay and work rules, that is going to be attractive," Magee said.

A starting pilot at Trans States, a regional airline that flies for American under the name American Connection, earns $22 a flight hour, with 74 hours guaranteed a month, according to AirlinePilotCentral.com, which tracks pilot salaries. That translates to an annual starting salary of $19,500. A pilot flying 1,000 hours a year -- the most allowed under federal rules -- would earn about $22,000.

Bus Driver
Location: San Francisco, CA 94104
Base Salary $21,692
Bonuses $3,608
401k $1,569
also healthcare, pension, payed time off

Say again all after:

"We have to offer them a career path, with pay and work rules, that is going to be attractive."

Dusky Footed Wood Rat

A view from the new trail at Pulgas Ridge.

The dogs love it!

Home...hmmm, why do I live in San Fran?

I'm Dreaming...

...or, I'm in Indianapolis?

Mountain Lion

You know how they always
post these crazy signs like:

Mountain Lion Habitat

and you think,
yeah right,
someone may have thought
they saw a mountain lion,
or "evidence" of one,
once,
years ago.

But, I've been walking these trails
several times a week for years.

And I've never seen any mountain lion
or evidence of any such creature.

Well, on my way to work yesterday while driving up Edgewood Road,
just meters from the trails I walk with the dogs ALL THE TIME



I SAW
A FREAKIN' MOUNTAIN LION
STANDING THERE
ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!

I haven't been back yet.....

A Windmill for Guatemala

Wanna fund your own windmill? Got $100?

Social entrepreneurship is our unofficial theme this week. If $400 is too much to pay for a laptop, a Guatemalan wind turbine might be more your speed.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting the good folks at the San Francisco chapter of Engineers without Borders. Like other things-without-borders themed organizations, EWB is a non-profit professional association that donates its expertise to worthy projects in developing countries.

Phanny and Connor sitting in a tree....

Phanny found a boy friend.

Business Card

No Social Graces

So I'm just finishing up my training ride today...

after getting up at 0730 in Indianapolis (yes 0430
on the old body clock)

...so I'm a little tired and maybe running a little low
on the old tolerance meter
and as I am riding through MY neighborhood
this exchange takes place:

L: (observing young man with skateboard peeing on side of road)
"Nice...."

YM: "Blahdiddy blah unintelligible blah"

L: (sliding to a halt)
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand you...did you say something?"

YM: "What's your problem"

L: "You peeing on the side of the road. Didn't your parents teach you the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior?"

YM: "Huh?"

L: "Don't you have a house where you could go do that, or a friends house? I am sure you didn't ride your skateboard all the way to the top of this hill just to ride on this road and pee on the side of the street"

YM: "I had to go and it was easier...so what?"

L: "So what? It is inappropriate and illegal so what!"

YM: "It is?"

L: "It is against the law for starters, it's called public urination and indecent exposure. And, mother's drive their children on this road and shouldn't have to see that. And, that is someone's front yard."

YM: "I didn't know that."

L: "You have to be kidding me? How can any teenage boy not know it is wrong to pee on the side of the road in a neighborhood. We're not talking about out in the middle of no where. Didn't your parents teach you any manners? You don't know that pulling your crank out in public is wrong?"

YM: "You're the one that said 'Nice' "

(Lothar begins to ride off shaking his head in disgust when he sees a man getting out of the car in the garage across the street)

L: "Excuse me sir do you know either of these boys?"

M: "No, why" (with a slight look of "what's your problem spandex boy")

L: "Well, one of them decided to to relieve himself on the side of the road and then copped an attitude with me when I told him it was inappropriate. I thought maybe you might know him and be able to explain his misbehavior"

M: "You mean he urinated on the side of the road?"

YM: "Yeah, can you believe..." (boy has look of confusion) "...you mean that's wrong?"

M: (with look of disgust) "Wrong? Don't you have a house? Do you live around here? Are you friends with Kevin?"

YM: (nod in the affirmative)

M: "Couldn't you use his bathroom?........"

L: (rides away shaking his head....)

Friends?

Who needs enemies when you have friends like this?

Why one should always carefully plan nap time!

Multimedia message

Phanny @ HMB

Multimedia message

Half Moon Bay

Bathroom Mirror

Talk about screwing with folks!

Not During Dinner!

This is so gross.

Got there from a "horrible way to die" page focusing on digestive ailments:

1. Farting to Death

2. PICA

3. Roundworms

4. Celiac Sprue


Sorry I felt compelled to share this with you....

Don't Do It

5 Differences

Right/Left

Right brained or left brained ? I was mesmerized by the "detail" in the shadowed portrayal of the spinning dancer.

Tesla Roadster

There is always torque available, along with more torque, and with extra torque available for later. It’s an incredibly easy car to hustle around the corners, because the torque curve is so tall and flat, with power available at *all* times. My mind is free to wonder about other important things, like what the car would be like climbing all the way to redline – I’m only halfway up a gauge that “goes to eleven” – a whopping 13,500 rpm. The suspension and steering feel really nicely dialed in. The road textures are communicated nicely to the steering wheel, without any jarring sensations. The feel is neither plush nor harsh – but as expected the car grips the road and carves around with no body roll. I’m really impressed at the noise/vibration/harshness characteristics of the interior – being a prototype I’d expected a lot more rattling inside the cabin, but there were none.

Acceleration	0 to 60 in under 4 seconds
Top Speed	125 mph

Now the kicker...it's electric!




The Tesla Roadster offers double the efficiency of popular hybrid cars, while generating one-third of the carbon dioxide.

Plug it in at night when you pull into the garage, and you can drive more about 245 miles (based on EPA city/highway cycle) on that charge the next day.

With your electrical company's incentive pricing factored in, it will cost you roughly 1 cent per mile to drive the Tesla Roadster. But the incentives don't stop there. Depending on where you live, other bonuses may include:

• Single-occupancy access to all carpool lanes
• Income tax credit (awaiting new legislation)
• A luxury car that's fully exempt from the luxury car tax
• No parking meter fees in an increasing number of major metropolitan areas

base price: $98,000

Nothing

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Nothing

There's more there than you think.

And when you are stoned on caffeine (see previous post) nothing seems like something and seems more interesting than it might actually be!

1 There is vastly more nothing than something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe is “nothing,” or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter, particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call something.

2 And even something is mostly nothing. Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty space. Matter’s solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by subatomic particles.

3 There is more and more nothing every second. In 1998 astronomers measuring the expansion of the universe determined that dark energy is pushing apart the universe at an ever-accelerating speed. The discovery of nothing—and its ability to influence the fate of the cosmos—is considered the most important astronomical finding of the past decade.

4 But even nothing has a weight. The energy in dark matter is equivalent to a tiny mass; there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space 250,000 miles on each side.

5 In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.

6 So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing.

7 Light can travel through a vacuum, but there is nothing to refract it. Alas for extraterrestrial romantics, stars do not twinkle in outer space.

8 Black holes are not holes or voids; they are the exact opposite of nothing, being the densest concentration of mass known in the universe.

9 “Zero” was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360, for example). The concept of zero in its mathematical sense was developed in India in the fifth century.

10 Any number divided by zero is . . . nothing, not even zero. The equation is mathematically impossible.

11 It is said that Abdülhamid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s, had censors expunge references to H₂O from chemistry books because he was sure it stood for “Hamid the Second is nothing.”

12 Medieval art was mostly flat and two-dimensional until the 15th century, when the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conceived of the vanishing point, the place where parallel lines converge into nothingness. This allowed for the development of perspective in art.

13 Aristotle once wrote, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so did he. His complete rejection of vacuums and voids and his subsequent influence on centuries of learning prevented the adoption of the concept of zero in the Western world until around the 13th century, when Italian bankers found it to be extraordinarily useful in financial transactions.

14 Vacuums do not suck things. They create spaces into which the surrounding atmosphere pushes matter.

15 Creatio ex nihilo, the belief that the world was created out of nothing, is one of the most common themes in ancient myths and religions.

16 Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of a state of vacuum energy, that is, nothing.

17 But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other in about 10^-25 second.

18 So Aristotle was right all along.

19 These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn’t equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.

20 In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.

Caffeine

Recently I've been buying half-caf beans trying to cut back my intake.

I don't know why?

But, yesterday I was at Pete's, and had a hankering for some Major D's, I just couldn't see altering my favorite blend. So, this morning I brewed my first pot of full strength coffee in a while.

Wow...

Caffeine increases heartbeat, respiration, basal metabolic rate, and the production of stomach acid and urine; and it relaxes smooth muscles, notably the bronchial muscle. These symptoms start anywhere from fifteen to forty five minutes after caffeine is consumed, except the central nervous system which is hit between thirty and sixty minutes after ingestion.

The amount of caffeine in the blood reaching the brain determines the severity of its effects on the body.

For the average non-smoking adult the effects last about five to seven hours.

Doses of over 750 mg (7 cups of coffee) can produce a reaction similar to an anxiety attack, including delirium, ringing ears, and light flashes. These amounts of caffeine may come from a single dose or from many doses in a short period of time.

More Scary Things

This is poisonous...I'm sure of it!

But, it was tiny, only about 20" or so. I hear the little ones are the worst because they have no venom control. One bite, unload it all!

Ok...maybe it was a gopher snake...again.

But it looked mean! And I wasn't going to get close enough to see if it had round pupils or "cateyes".

And check this out! Gebhard and I were climbing Page Mill and I saw a big ass spider!

I think it was a Tarantula but I've never seen a Tarantula in the wild. Are they bad?

I flipped it off the road so it wouldn't get run over...dumb spider crossing a busy road.

Dog Logic

My Phanny thinks this way too....
I got a good laugh from this post
and thought you might also.

Happiness

"Last year, a team of researchers added a
novel twist to something known as a time-use
survey. Instead of simply asking people what
they had done over the course of their day,
as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s,
the researchers also asked how people felt
during each activity.

Were they happy?

Interested?

Tired?

Stressed?"

What they found was that:


Men

would rather visit/host friends or parents more than anything but drink.

Is that because hosting friends usually entails drinking?

And, visiting parents requires drinking?



Women

however, disliked visiting with parents
almost as much as working.
And, disliked spending time with parents more
than doing laundry or home repairs.

And, surprisingly
(at least to me)
women would rather
cook,
read,
use computer,
garden,
worship
or even exercise
than host friends?

Imagine how
happy
the world would be
if we spent more time in
cafes
and
bars!


The article was actually
about how much less happy
women are than men
while participating in the
same activities.

Work?

Been spending a little time in SoCal

Having some fun near the Salton Sea.

Time for a refill...or refuel.

Ahh...isn't the blue supposed to be on top and the brown on the bottom?

Through the Heads Up Display.

Snakes are Scary

I don't know much about snakes.

I am, however, fascinated by them.

But, I respect them also.


The one thing I do know is that all snakes are poisonous....well, maybe not all snakes.


This one is a Western Diamondback Rattler.

Deadly. Especially the little ones because they can't
control their venom as well as the adults.

When I leaned over it to take the picture, despite the obvious guts protruding from it, it lifted its head and tried to bite me.
Or maybe it just tried to ask for help...poor thing.

And, actually, I think it is a harmless gopher snake...but, rattler sounds much more ferocious! The first one is probably either a Glossy, a Leaf-nosed, or a Lyer...I don't know. And, for some reason the picture is not as good from the same phone?

I have my phone! I'll rant about that another time...maybe I'll get an iPhone!

Not a Joke

Just like the Marine Corps, don't take a minute to fix the problem and move the trip hazard, but contract to have a warning posted?

Where Have I Been?

Mt. Rainier

The Indians of the Pacific Northwest held in awe the snowcapped volcanoes of the Cascade Range. Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Hood, with their looming presence on the horizon, frequent cloud caps, rumbling avalanches, and terrifying eruptions, inspired numerous legends about the spirits that were thought to inhabit them. The Indians' legends told of fiery eruptions in the distant past, of vicious feuds when the mountains hurled rocks at one another, of a great flood when all the lowlands were inundated, killing all creatures except the pure ones which climbed to the mountain tops and ascended ropes of arrows into the sky. In the Indians' view, humans offended the mountain spirits at their peril.

Every time I fly out of Seattle I am awed by this huge rock poking out the top of the clouds.

One of these days I will have to visit it for fun!

Hotlanta

This weekend we have a couple big races.

It is important that I ride prior to big races (well, all races but especially big races!) otherwise I will be mostly worthless.

I am in Atlanta. It is hared to ride when I am in Atlanta cause I am supposed to be at work.

And, I have to be there early in the morning.

And, I am usually tired and hungry and in need of a beer
by the time work is over.

But, I have a team and I have to train so I can race well.

So I went to my handy Atlanta Group Rides web page and
found a group ride both yesterday and today.

I find it easier to push myself on group rides.

I think the groups no the safest roads to ride.

I like to be safe.

The group rides start at 6pm

6:00 PM

Partly Cloudy 99°F

100°F

7:00 PM

Partly Cloudy 97°F

99°F

99• feels like 100•
97• feels like 99•

It just felt HOT!

But I am thinking about how cool it is going to feel this weekend!

Weekend Forecast for Yolo, CA

Friday Aug 17 Sunny High 93°F Low 57°F Precip: 0% Wind: WSW at 8 mph UV Index: 9 Very High Humidity: 33% Sunrise: 6:22 AM Sunset: 7:59 PM Sunny skies. High 93F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.

Saturday 18 Sunny High 92°F Low 57°F Precip: 10% Wind: WSW at 10 mph UV Index: 9 Very High Humidity: 33% Sunrise: 6:23 AM Sunset: 7:58 PM close details Sunny. Highs in the low 90s and lows in the upper 50s.