Desert Rat

I am the desert rat.

I'm living in the desert that they call Arizona... just South(?) of Phoenix. For the next month and a bit, I'll be living in a little trailer on the airport grounds of a run down little airstrip called Phoenix Regional. The main runway's pretty cracked, so we use the taxiway instead. It's owned by the local Indians. I guess there's issues with who fixes the pavement or who pays for it or whatever. At the end of the day, it's a nice mellow airport.

There's a guy here that's getting back into teaching GA in his old Cessna 120, which for those unfamiliar is a tail dragger. My kind of plane :)

So I'll be finishing up with him when he gets it all going this week.

Today, the wind blew. and blew and blew. It's supposed to back off tomorrow, which will be good cuz we've got a pretty busy day lined up.

Good stuff.

Jim

WARNING--- Geek Rant

Remember kids... when installing a new OS, remember to reset your BIOS to enable the hard drive that you've disabled to save power first.

Let me try to explain that.

The hard drive on my laptop died a bunch of months ago while I was in New Zealand.

I decided I'd just run things off the SD card until I got back to the States (yes, you can boot your computer off an SD card instead of using a hard drive). In the mean time, I told it to stop trying to fix the internal hard drive... I set it to "disable" the drive.

Well, now I'm back in the States.

I jumped on Ebay and picked up a new internal drive and installed it.

When I went to put the operating system on it... it would install, but I just couldn't make it boot off it.????

It wasn't until I realized that I'd still had it disabled in the BIOS that I was able to get things running. This is after much bashing away on it. There was a distinct "YOU IDIOT!" moment of course.

But now, it's ticking along quite nicely, and I've gotten really good at setting things up in the mean time, so this will have a bitching setup at the end of it all (rather than just the "functional" one I was going to go with).

Cest La Vie

Written

JK would be proud.
I passed my written with a 95%, but that's pretty easy to do as all the answers to the US test are published. There's 600 of them, but they're published.
What she'd be proud of is that I didn't study the published answers for the flight-planning questions, which also happen to be the hard questions. Now, I did buy an "electronic flight computer", which can do all the calculations for you. But the cool part in all this is that it's still in the box. I just busted out my old metal "wiz wheel" E6B fligth ruler and did it all by hand. It was easier than bothering with the electronic gizmo.

Off to Phoenix on Wed for a few months.
Got a gig lined up flying tandem and tow out there. Should be fun.
Then back here to Virginia.