Runner's High

This story starts about five years ago when I first realized that combining my fondness for running, maps, and cool watches in one technological device was possible and affordable, even if it did barely fit on my wrist. I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305. It's essentially a stopwatch integrated with a GPS, heart rate monitor, and computer, so I can know where I am, how fast I'm going, and how hard my body is working to achieve it, all at once. And then I can upload the resulting data to my laptop and stare at it in tables and graphs and maps to come to conclusions like "I get really tired when I run up mountains" and "I should run faster." I used to come to such conclusions without the technology, but now I have data to back it up. It's ludicrous how much more fun it is to go running when you get statistics at the end. I don't remember how I ever went running without a box on my wrist telling me if I was doing it right or not.

I took my GPS watch in my flight bag everywhere I went, so that if I had time to go running at the end of the day, I'd have the motivation of knowing how far and fast I was going, and also so I could activate the "Return to Start" feature. Return to Start gives turn-by-turn directions to get me back to the hotel, regardless of how identical the suburban streets, wooded trails, or gravel road turn-offs appear to be. I don't know that I would be still wandering around a highway truck stop somewhere without it, but there's more oxygen deprivation in my brain after fifteen kilometres of pushing my pace than after five hours of sucking supplemental oxygen through my nose at 17,000'. It's nice not to have to worry which forks I took in the trail network of an unfamiliar town.

I have my data all in Garmin's Training Center software: years of runs from Alaska to Florida and many where I have to zoom out on the little map several times before I figure out which little town with limited map information is traced by the record of my exertions. I like to review this data and use the Training Center "Compare" feature to virtually race the years-ago Aviatrix. (I'm pretty sure I can still take her). But while I've become sleeker, faster and more resilient with the years, the watch hasn't fared as well. It became harder to charge, and reluctant to connect to the computer to give up its data. The beeping sounds stopped working, and then it started shutting off in mid-workout. It's well out of warrantee, and the model is discontinued, so I had to choose a replacement. I could probably export the data in a standard format. Garmin is so prevalent in the GPS field that any manufacturer that couldn't convert or use their formats might be a little silly. But my first choice was just to stick with Garmin.

Their website is a mess of poor feature explanations. It doesn't suggest an upgrade path from the 305 to another product. I didn't find an overview on what the focus of the Forerunner, vivo-, or fēnix lines is, nor could I see any coherent logic to the Forerunner model numbers and suffixes.

I thought I'd had an e-mail conversation about this back when the Forerunner was still available and one could send it in to a Garmin-approved dealer for a flat-rate "repair" (obviously a replacement with a reconditioned model, but it was worth the $75 for me back then). Mining my e-mail archive for "GPS watch" found me all my old blog posts that mention "GPS" and "watch". The insane detail I included allowed me to relive some interesting flights and revisit all manner of places. No wonder people who weren't on the flights to begin with enjoyed reading them. This has somewhat inspired me to find a way to keep blogging about them. Perhaps I'll talk to the owner about the blog.

I tore myself away from my former adventures to google up second hand explanations and information on features and backwards compatibility of Garmin products. There are SO many models. Finally I decided to artificially limit my choices by going to a store and making my selection from only what they had. I took my flaky old Forerunner with me, and on the bus ride there, noticed that the crack between the layers of the case was quite wide. With no prying or wiggling, I lifted the face of the watch right off the back, revealing its electronic innards. Well no wonder it wasn't staying on, charging and connecting. I was lucky it hadn't fallen apart during a run. I feared I had killed it by carrying it with me everywhere, including into the flight levels in an unpressurized airplane.

The higher you go in the atmosphere, the less air there is on top of you, thus the less pressure you feel, so that instead of being all squished together to sea level pressure, the molecules are all spread out. One breath takes in less oxygen, unless I supplement it from a tank, which I do, through the aforementioned nose tubes. Anything with air sealed into it that I bring up from ground level retains the same pressure inside that it had on the ground. As it ascends, the differential between the inside pressure and the outside pressure increases, producing a force acting to expand the sealed container. The tank full of breathing oxygen is cylindrical, and its strong walls and robust valves are inspected weekly to ensure that as the pressure outside the tank decreases, the tank will not rupture, bulge or leak from the added force. Potato chips are deliberately packaged with trapped air, to protect the chips, and their bags will bulge out drum-tight, and sometimes burst, as we ascend. The gases in our intestines and ear canals expand and escape through the usual routes. I was afraid that the air sealed into my GPS watch damaged it. But then I realized that the Forerunner 305 isn't waterproof, and my Timex wristwatch, which works perfectly, is. (I'd tell you what model Timex, but it's so old that all the words have worn away, and the chunks of decorative plastic stuff have fallen off, leaving a bare case with buttons on it). A little more research showed me that plenty of people had their Forerunners come apart, sometimes falling off bike mounts and/or being run over by cars.

I got to the store and interrogated the clerk about the selection. I was almost ready to buy a Garmin Forerunner 225. It has the heart rate monitor integrated in the watch itself, with no need for a chest strap. It has a built-in accelerometer to give pace and distance information on indoor treadmill runs. "What about winter?" I asked. "Can I use it with a chest strap in the winter, when I wear the watch on the outside of long-sleeved garments?" To answer this question, the clerk went not to the Garmin website, but straight to the blog of DC Rainmaker, an obsessive sports technology reviewer. I'd encountered one of his reviews while googling for compatibility information earlier, and not noticed that everything I could ever want to know about pretty much any sports watch is on this guy's blog. The Forerunner 225 will pair with a chest strap, for people who mount it on bicycle handlebars, as well as winter runners, but it was missing a couple other features that I wanted. Indeed none of the watches they carried had the Back to Start feature, so I went home without buying any of them, and went back to DC Rainmaker's site.

Ray Maker (get it?) conveys the excitement of taking a new electronic toy out of the shipping box, gazing at its packaging, and then breaking the shrinkwrap. He includes photographs detailing the plastic bags and twist ties containing all the sub-components of the products. He does more running, biking, and swimming to test one device for a review than some buyers will log in the lifetime of their device. Every review is ridiculously detailed. Some people would say too detailed. So a little like many of my blog entries, if I did way more research. It parallels the way I'd like to blog if I had the diligence to drill down to the technological and legal root of everything I said, rather than speculating and drawing on knowledge already in my head. It made me cheer a little when I found a typo now and again, on his site, because it just goes to show that typo-free is not a requirement for an insanely awesome blog. He also displays a lot of integrity: he borrows and returns all reviewed gear despite the fact that his reviews are clearly enough work to deserve a lot of freebies. If you run or bike and like gear, you almost certainly already know his site, but if you don't you're in for a treat. If you never do anything more energetic than opening the refrigerator, but just like tech, especially GPS, you'll probably still want to read his site. The comparison tool there allowed me to quickly determine that the correct watch for my needs is the Forerunner 310XT. It wasn't at the store nor prominent on Garmin's website because it is ALSO being discontinued. I decided to get one now, through a site DC Rainmaker partners with, to compensate him for the work he does. I had some trouble with that site, so posted a comment on his blog, and as I was already thinking of blogging about the experience, I signed the comment "Aviatrix."

It turns out that DC Rainmaker is a long-time reader of Cockpit Conversation. It made me feel like a member of an elite when he asked if I was that Aviatrix. As I told him, some days I’m convinced that there are far fewer people on the Internet than is generally thought. Maybe it’s just you, me, the awesome people who comment on our blogs, and a lot of Chinese spambots.

Meanwhile I ordered a Forerunner 310XT somewhere else, bound my Forerunner 305 together with rubber bands, found it worked perfectly, glued it together with silicone sealant (as recommended by several people on the Internet), and am currently in high level discussions with my printer on why it should print the return mailing label for the 310XT. When the 305 gasps out its final beep I'll do this again, probably with a whole new set of features. I might get one of the "lifestyle" watches that track your every move, including sleeping.

All the Ones

It's 2011-01-01 or 1/1/11 as the Americans write it. New Year, new resolutions. No loopholes. Short and sweet. Ruthlessly and objectively assessable.

In 2011 I will:

• run or cross-country ski five hundred kilometres. Score out of 500, one point per kilometre.
• do strength and flexibility exercises at least three times a week. Score out of 200, one point per workout, minus one for each week without a single one.
• create, back up and maintain a contact information list of people in my life, and I will exchange communications with everyone on it at least once. Out of how ever many end up on the list.
• make a list of twelve things I don't do merely because I am afraid to, and I will do one every month. Out of 100: four points for making the list, one point for each attempt, and up to seven points each for how well I do them.
• make and keep a weekly flight sim date with myself, and I will learn to like it. Out of 100: one point for simming and up to one point per day for doing it well.
• convince City Hall to paint a crosswalk on my street, for people to get to the bus stop. I score a hundred points when the paint is dry.

On Condition

Aircraft engines must be maintained according to a manufacturer's published TBO (pronounced Tee-Bee-Owe) or Time Before Overhaul. An airplane engine is typically considered reliable for about the same duration as a car engine, perhaps two thousand hours of use, but when a car's engine wears out, most owners discard the car and engine.1 With an airplane, you overhaul the engine: returning it to factory specifications, replacing whatever parts are necessary to achieve that. It's expensive and time consuming, interrupting normal use for the airplane and , like any maintenance procedure, sometimes introducing new problems. Engine life is a bell curve, of course, so a few engines break down and require overhaul before their TBO and many are in fine condition after reaching TBO. For this reason, regulatory provisions are available to allow an operator to run an engine beyond the TBO, subject to various conditions.

I was amused by this line at the beginning of the Transport Canada description of the process: "The program was not being used as envisioned, for an extension to a useful life, but has been extended, beyond its intended purpose, to an overhaul avoidance program." Well duh! What would the purpose of extending an engine's useful life be if not avoiding overhauling it? It's not a humanitarian gesture to allow old engines to feel useful, or an environmental statement. Every decision made in an aviation environment is balancing safety against economics, and if you're cynical even the safety decisions are based on economic criteria: accidents are expensive.

As I read it, the on-condition program is a bet the operator makes that his pilots, AMEs and operating conditions are better than the manufacturer's assumptions and that therefore his engines don't have to be overhauled as soon as the manufacturer says. You have to make that bet for your whole fleet, and stick to it. There's nothing that specifically says you can't hedge your bets and decide to go on condition a few hundred hours from the end of the engine life, but once one aircraft is officially on condition, the others of the same type in the fleet must be too, regardless of the relative time on their engines. Once the "approved maintenance schedule" specifies that the fleet operates on condition, then all the relevant extra checks must be done.

The price of the bet the operator makes is:
a) the specified inspections, which I assume are slightly more thorough than the regular inspections of an engine, and
b) the risk that the engine fails an on condition inspection before TBO.
I think b) is not a great worry, because if an engine component were in a condition that it would fail such a check, then you'd be glad to have caught it in a routine inspection rather than through a catastrophic failure causing further damage and downtime.

The payoff of the bet is that you may be able to extend the engine life past the usual TBO. Experience with our fleet suggest that it's not necessarily a safe bet, because the engines seem to need major attention pretty close to TBO anyway. If the on condition inspections cost any appreciable time or money over the regular ones, it might not be a good bet for the long term. But it always seems like a good idea just as an overhaul is coming due on both engines of a reliable airplane that is needed online.

This afternoon I went out for a run with the new AME. He's fast. His pace quickly sends my heart rate out of my training zone, but just switch off my heart rate monitor and keep up. A fast run now and again is probably good for me. After that it's Pasta Tuesday at Boston Pizza, which we admit sadly has become the highlight of our week.

1. There are people who do overhaul automotive engines, and keep automobiles running rather than discarding them. This is much more common in the US than Canada, and evident as soon as you cross the border, because the mix of automobiles on the road immediately skews to older and more American makes. I'm guessing it's because the American cars manufactured twenty or thirty years ago were a lot more amenable to user-maintenance than the European and Japanese models that were already more common in Canada. American movies always show guys fixing up old cars, sometimes as a rite of passage. I think it's part of the culture.

Aaarrrrrr!

I have a text at 8:45 saying the first flight was delayed due to fog. It's still foggy. I think the Season of Fog has arrived. It will persist until the Season of Frost, from which I will flee before the snow gets too deep.

I consult the first aid kit list to confirm that we have everything, and then I realize we forgot one item, an eyepatch. Of course: "pailit" "pairit" -- what's the difference? I go out and acquire an eyepatch. Except I have remembered this wrong, because I was there with another pilot and we bought a lottery ticket at the same time. We only matched two numbers, so we can't retire yet, though.

At 10:05 I receive a text message (with a timestamp of 11:05 -- all my text messages here are like that. It must be something about being close to a time zone border) The message says they are taking off now. The hotel Internet is down, so I can't look at the forecast, but it's clear outside. I make a telephone call to get weather and NOTAM for my flight. I expect them to return around 4:40 pm, so I go for a meal at 2:30. On the way out I wait a long time for underclued clerk to deal with some people at the counter, and after all that he doesn't know where to put the postcards I ask him to add to outgoing mail.

The other pilot lands and texts back that the weather failed on them. They return after a detour to the airport terminal to pick up their e-mail using the free internet there. We discuss the fuel flow readings. After the fuel servo failure we're paranoid, I guess. Yeah, the right fuel flow shows lower when it's leaned out, but I never really worried about that. I guess I chalked it up to parallax. I'll check on it if I go flying later.

The lack of Internet really cuts into my entertainment and connection with the world. I watch TV instead, although the television doesn't work that well. The remote doesn't work and the controls on the TV only have channel up and channel down, so I have to scroll though all the channels (they have cable, so there are over fifty) to get to the one I want. And any time I turn it off it goes back tot he default one advertising the hotel and the pay movies. And every once in a while the top half of the picture disappears so I can only see the bottom. I call the front desk to complain about the TV, for repair or replacement, but the promised maintenance guy never arrives.

The internet starts working a little bit. My e-mail program polls for new mail ever seven minutes, and every two hours or so it manages to actually connect and download something. But surfing the web is almost impossible. You have to keep hitting the reload button and having it time out until finally you happen to hit it during one of its brief spurts of workingness. And most websites these days require you to load more than one page, for example log in or choose from a menu, so unless I'm willing to invest half an hour in seeing a web page, I'm not seeing it. I go back to watching TV. There's a show called Say Yes to the Dress, the moral of which is "brides are crazy." Or maybe this show just deals with that segment of the population that is already stark raving bonkers, and happens to be getting married. Oh also brides' mothers are insane. I really understand how some men come away with the idea that all women are crazy. You look at something like that from a human being and you have to attribute it to something, so you go with the most obvious difference.

With television like this, I might as well do something more productive. It's around nine p.m. and I get dressed for a run, but there's a knock on the door. It's our client at the door. "Ready to go flying?" he asks.

I wasn't expecting that, as we haven't usually been going out this late, so I say something like "oh," instead of the more appropriate, "Certainly, please give me five minutes."

Before I can translate he says "just kidding." He told his boss he didn't want to go out in the dark with this terrain. I explained that the door was propped open because I was expecting TV repair. He sympathized with my internet and TV woes. His remote works a little bit and he enumerates the pieces into which the remote will dissociate if you throw it hard enough. (six).

My run is good: up to the traffic light (yes, there's a traffic light in town), across the street to the post office, up the road that goes to the airport where I pass a guy sitting on a front porch playing a country western tune on a harmonica. I don't know what it was, but it sounded good. "Hey, that's good" I yelled. Musicians deserve recognition. I continue along the same road until it connects with the other road that goes to the airport, and I follow that one back to the highway to get to the hotel. The whole route is a couple of hundred metres short of ten kilometres. It's kind of dusty with the trucks, though. Next time maybe I'll pick out a hillier route through quieter roads in town.

Engine Fairies

I wake up and enjoy the hotel breakfast. (That's something I get to do for the first few days, before my reaction to do-it-yourself waffles and chilled apple juice subsides to "tolerate" or "endure.") There's a Far Side cartoon mocking dogs for getting excited every meal about "Dog food again!" I don't know how they do it.

Seeing as there is no one else here and no airplane, I can't be asked to work today, so I make sure I have my cellphone with me and go for a run. A fast one, not a long one. I just warm up for a kilometre, run a fast mile and then do a couple of kilometres of warm down. I'd do my whole run in kilometres, but the standards on the 5BX programme are for a mile run. I finish three seconds over today's target time. I should have pushed harder, but I could have pushed harder, so I'll get it next time.

In preparation for the airplane arriving, I sort out my flight bag. That means digging all the sharp and liquid stuff that I like to carry with me while I'm flying out of the suitcase and putting it in the flight bag, while taking all the heavy and fragile stuff that I didn't want to check out of the flight bag and putting it back in the suitcase. Plus I buy some apples to eat while I'm flying, and start an OFP for working out of here.

At dinner time I ask at the desk if anyone from my company or the expected customer's company has checked in. Nope, they aren't here. I walk across the parking lot to Boston Pizza and there is a group of people I have worked with enough to recognize. They didn't know I was here. Neat trick, seeing as I checked in on the strength of the reservation they made for me and are paying for. At first they are all excited that if the pilot is here the airplane must be too, but I have to disappoint them. The airplane is still down south finishing up an engine install. Company sent me here early to be prepared for the most optimistic possible scenario, which of course never happens in aviation. In this case that most optimistic scenario probably would have had to involve magical engine fairies and teleportation.

The customers are just finishing up, but one very kindly stays to chat while I eat my dinner.

Aviatrix MeetsThe Old West Meets the New

My flight isn't until almost noon, so I get up in the morning and go for a run. It's a nice temperature early in the morning. There aren't a lot of sidewalks here, so I run in the street. Fortunately there aren't a lot of cars, either. I don't immediately notice any altitude effect of running. I'm running at a comfortable warm up pace and my breathing is comfortable, but then I start running faster. At first it too seems normal. There's no "oh I can't breathe, the air is too thin," feeling. I just get tired faster. I have a GPS stopwatch (a Garmin Forerunner 305) to tell me how far and fast I'm going, and what should have been an eight minute segment of my workout took eleven minutes. And it was dead flat. I wish I'd run every day I was here. It probably would have been great to improve my cardio.

The person who has been designated to take me to the airport asks when I'll be ready to go. I don't have to go super early, seeing as it's such a small airport, and I'd like a chance to walk into town and and see the museum that was closing yesterday as we got there. I calculate on enough time to go and see it and come back, but he seems disappointed. "Couldn't you be ready earlier?" I tell him my museum plans, and it turns out that he wanted to go earlier so he could see the museum, and other things. So we load up my stuff and go together, and I don't have to walk. Isn't communication grand?

r

The main street of town is deliberately retro. I guess they turned around and realized that it was out of date and froze it that way before anyone could get one of those newfangled electric signs. The museum is there in an old armory--or for all I know there's a current armory in there somewhere too. I have a notebook with sketches and detailed notes on the museum but I filled it up and started a new notebook and forgot to keep the old one in my flight bag, so it's at home and I have to rely on memory. The main floor was mostly ordinary pioneer artifacts, of the sort that older people remember their grandmothers having one: odd kitchen appliances and farm implements and local ephemera like an invitation to the debutante ball and the dress someone wore there. They had some nicely restored horse-drawn vehicles and the town's second fire truck. When it arrived the town's first fire truck had been repurposed as something else, perhaps a municipal water hauling vehicle and then partly remanufactured into another thing. The story was probably more interesting than the first fire truck itself would have been on display. Upstairs was a gunfighter and cowboy display. I wished I knew more about guns and gun history to better appreciate the collection they had. With a better base I would have learned and retained more. I don't think they missed much in the way of types of action and ammunition used in the American West.

They catered to what people wanted to see and reality both. For example they had a set of pearl- handled revolvers and then pointed out that they were manufactured years apart and didn't have the provenance: people didn't carry two matched guns the same. If they were going to carry two guns they'd have two different sorts. They had a lot of guns and saddlery that had actually belonged to and been used by famous gunslingers and some fairly informative text about them. They told the chain of custody stories from the manufacturer through to the museum donor of many of the items, and did so in a way that made the items more interesting.

My second favourite piece was an elaboorately tooled saddle that was custom made for the donor's grandfather. The donor remembered going to the shop with his grandfather and that the saddlemaker had measured him not with a tape, but with string which he knotted to mark the measurements. The saddlemaker was blind, and apparently leatherwork was a standard trade for the blind in those days. The skirt of the saddle was all worked with little leaves and flowers and symetrical designs. I guess you can feel all that with your fingertips, and keep track of it in your mind.

My favourite piece was a painting called, I think, "The Old West Meets the New." It depicted a cowboy, on a horse, driving a few calves as an airplane flies overhead, and the cowboy is reaching up so that his fingers seem to almost touch the image of the airplane. Photography wasn't allowed in the museum, so I sat and sketched the painting, but that's in the notebook I don't have with me. I couldn't reproduce it again now.

In the giftshop, there was a basket labelled "penny postcards." Postcards usually cost 25 cents to a dollar, so I queried what a penny postcard was. They were a penny each. They had found them somewhere in their basement and they just wanted to get rid of them. They are the most boring postcards ever. I bought about a dollar's worth. I love postcards. Yes, Michael5000 , you will in time get a sample of each.

We browsed a few antique stores on the street and concluded that if you had a truck there were some good deals to be had, but there wasn't anything that would fit in my suitcase to go on four different airplanes.

I was dropped off at the airport with plenty of time. It was a little complicated with my multiple airlines and connecting to Canada, but I managed, and I got home, with my luggage. This little stegasaurus was on the floor of one of the airports. You know how I love both dinosaurs and decoration on airport floors.

Anchorage Tourists

The next day I check the METAR to determine the temperature, and then dress accordingly to go for a run. Anchorage in June (yeah that's how far behind I am in blogging!) is really comfortable. The whole city is more or less the temperature of an air conditioned gym. As I run through the streets around the hotel, I imagine someone coming here from somewhere down south where air conditioners run year round. It would be an amazing thing to such a person to have the outdoors be a comfortable temperature for physical exercise. Or perhaps they would think it was shivering cold; I'm sure they would be appalled by winter temperatures, even though Anchorage is right on the sea, so the winter lows aren't that bad. I'll bet the airframe icing is horrendous in the spring and fall, though.

The suburbs I'm running through are pretty much the same as suburbs in any other American city. Paved streets, sidewalks, painted crosswalks, wooden fences in good repair, landscaping, houses of various styles, tame dogs in yards, late model cars with windshields and glass windows all the way around, blue mailboxes, a school--I think it even had a sign proclaiming it to be a drug-free zone. Most of you are probably reading that wondering what sort of idiot I am expecting anything else. I wasn't really, but I was prepared for it to be a few steps towards Nunavut on the comfort and civilization continuum, not indistinguishable from Boise, Idaho. Alaska has stereotypes to uphold!

There's a park I could run through, and if I have my geography right it goes towards Hood Lake, but the trail is really rocky and I don't want to turn an ankle while I'm running, so I stay on the sidewalks and turn back to the hotel for breakfast. While I'm in the lobby eating my muffin and Cheerios, a tourist points out a moose in the bushes beside the parking lot. It's just hanging out there eating. I suppose there are moose in Boise, too, but this one is here, fulfilling the Alaska stereotype. Thanks, moose.

The client's head office wasn't prepared for us to be done this mission on a Sunday, so they haven't made all the necessary arrangements, giving us a couple of days opportunity for being tourists. We drive around and start checking out the tourist spots.

Downtown Anchorage is a tourist town, easy to walk around with lots of cafes, restaurants, art galleries and souvenir shops. We visit, for example, the Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers' Co-operative. It's part educational display, part store. Musk oxen live as far north as Cambridge Bay in Canada, but were hunted to extinction in Alaska, so their herds descend from domesticated animals brought from Greenland. I admit that I am baffled as to how such a large ungulate can derive sufficient calories from the sparse winter vegetation in the wild, but they do. They clearly need exceptionally warm wool. I imagine the Inuit, or Eskimos as they are still called here, have used musk ox wool for millennia but these aren't really traditional native crafts. They comb hair out of domestic musk oxen during the spring shedding season and then ship it to Asia to be carded and spun. The resulting yarn is sent out to knitters in the communities who make it into garments which the coop then sells. It's very soft and warm, like cashmere, and with prices to match.

We also go to the Ulu knife factory. It's in an industrial area across the canal and we drive there with me navigating. We have to turn left on Ship Creek, that's Ship Creek. I wonder if it was named that on purpose, for the double entendre. They don't sell paddles, just knives and cutting boards. An ulu knife has a semicircular blade with a handle on the top, and is a modern version of a native all-purpose stone tool. I bought one with a bone handle, after first making sure that it wasn't made from an endangered or protected species. They had some with handles made of petrified whale bone, and I wasn't sure if it would be legal to import into Canada. Whale products can't be imported, but does petrified bone count as being made out of whale or stone? I didn't chance getting arrested having it confiscated to find out. My favourite sculpture from the galleries we saw was made from a long-weathered whale vertebra. The bone demineralizes over time--or maybe the whale died with advanced osteoporosis--leaving a beatiful porous texture. I can't find a picture of the sort of sclupture I admired most, but here is someone else's work showing the texture. The ones I liked had less detail and were abstract, just playing with the existing shape and texture of the vertebrae. They even had petrified mammoth bone as an ulu handle choice, but cool as it is to think of having a part of an extinct arctic elephant, I didn't find it very attractive.

There are a lot of really fine restaurants in Anchorage, and we took advantage of the opportunity not to eat boring chain restaurant food. We had Pacific salmon, Alaska king crab, arctic char, and reindeer (it's illegal to sell caribou meat in Alaska, so they farm reindeer. They're the same species, just a different lineage). My favourite dish, however, wasn't local at all. It was a beef tips in coconut curry with basil at a restaurant named Ginger. It was so good I wanted to stick my face in the bowl to lick it clean.

One of our clients was in a store today buying supplies, and the clerk asked him where he was headed. He answered with the name of our next destination and two unrelated customers within earshot both groaned in sympathy, and the clerk said, "Oh, I'm sorry." It sounds as if Alaska may have places akin to Attiwapiskat, after all. Every time we check the weather there is is IFR or at best marginal VFR with low cloud or mist, and raining.

Also we will have to haul close to a thousand pounds of our clients' gear to the remote site. They usually drive it, but there are no roads that lead where we are going. I call around looking for cargo tiedown anchors to fit our seatrails, but no joy. I swear these things are migratory, and someday I will find where they all go and harvest them. Honestly, has anyone ever broken a cargo tiedown? No. They just wander off.

Scheduling versus Safety

The airplane is still away. The pilot who is with it tells me that they could have completed the minimum scheduled maintenance work and had it back today, but the weather here isn't appropriate for our clients' work, and is forecast to remain thus for days, so they are keeping the airplane in Edmonton, doing small fixes that will have to be done sooner or later, so might as well be done before the parts actually break and delay an important mission. It seems like a sensible thing to do, and I expect the client to be happy with it. We're being proactive. That's still a good buzzword, isn't it?

Information flows along various different routes in this operation. I'm happy that it almost always goes through the pilots, so we know what is going on, but this time somewhere between my boss, the mechanics who have the plane, the pilot who is with the plane, and the client's head office, a message has not reached the client field staff. The people in the same hotel as me. The project manager is not happy with the proposed situation, and wants to have the airplane back on site by tomorrow morning. They pay for the airplane, they get to choose these things. I make a few calls and then can go back to the project manager. "The airplane can be here by eight a.m." Now he's happy.

When it's not a safety issue, there's no harm in giving the choice to the client. The time can be now or later. There are a lot of fixes that can be done either preemptively or as after the part actually breaks. The cost of unexpected downtime usually outweighs the cost of replacing parts early, but when it's scheduling not safety we won't hold an airplane back unnecessarily. One of ours is down with a grounded engine right now, but demand hasn't been enough to spur replacing the engine.

I go out for a run. It's hillier than it looks from the air, always is. The sidewalks aren't very good, either. I'm not running consistently enough to see any improvement in my speed or fitness, but I guess as long as I'm staying fit and not getting injured it's good. I can't remember my New Year's Resolutions this year, and I'm afraid to look them up, because I know I must have blown my chances on all of them already.

When I get in, I learn two things. One is that thanks to the time difference between here and Edmonton, they're going to do some of the work and have the airplane here for eight, and the other is that we're going to Anchorage, Alaska in three days. Do we have charts? Hell no. We have three sets of Alaska charts from last year, but none in this airplane. It's too late to try and order any tonight, so I just play with routes to Anchorage in my Seattle Avionics navigation program. I add "find charts" to my to do list for tomorrow.

Happy New Year

I said I'd reveal New Year's resolutions, so I guess I'd better get something resolved before the new year arrives and it's time to enact them. I mostly know what I wish to achieve, and it's not really any different from what most people want to get out of themselves and their lives: physical fitness, good relations with friends and family, career success, life organization, and self-improvement. But wave those five around vaguely and nothing happens for me, though. I have to quantify my goals. New Year's resolutions are not like figure skating. So therefore:

In 2010:

1. I will follow a physical fitness program to maintain strength, flexibility, and endurance, plus I will run a six and a half minute mile and a 45 minute 10k.

2. I will contact someone I know in real life but don't work with or live with every day. That can be an e-mail, a postcard, a phone call or a visit and it has to be a hundred different people over the year.

3. Any day I don't fly IFR in real life, I will fly at least one approach on my flight simulator game, and I won't blog until that's done.

4. Whenever I get home on a break from work I will, in addition to the usual litany of perennial maintenance tasks, assign myself one new project to complete.

5. I will not let this list of responsibilities, nor other lesser pastimes, stand in the way of new adventures.

There, that's a pretty bold list, and I'll probably frequently let myself get away with fulfilling #2 by cc:ing an e-mailed lolcat to seven people on a Friday, and #3 by chugging down the same saved-at-g/s-intercept ILS while waiting for hotel internet to connect. I'm not even sure whether #5 constitutes a get-out-of-one-through-four-free card when I can find a good adventures. But it's probably better than resolving to watch all six seasons of Lost. I may expand on some of these in later blog posts.

Oh and to the person who was so negative about New Year's resolutions in a previous year "because if you want to do a thing you should do it, not wait until the end or beginning of the year," these are all things I already try to do. Only the accountability is added.

The Last Reason for Roman Numerals

That would be Super Bowl XLIII. It's like the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, for American football. I have to admit I've never watched an American football game before. But indications are that the Super Bowl isn't so much about the football as about the marketing and the hype. And seeing as I'm in the USA, the commercials would be the "real" $5-million Super Bowl commercials. (In Canada they are replaced by ordinary commercials, marketing to Canadians). Plus it won't hurt to know enough about the game to have something to talk to my customers about. Guys apparently have to watch a certain amount of football in order to maintain testicular size, and my customers are all guys.

I only saw a few commercials. I stop watching by habit when the commercials came on, and kept forgetting that I was supposed to be checking them out. What did I learn? Some beer makes it summer wherever you drink it. Some beer is more watery (they call it drinkability) than other beer. Other beer (or possibly the same beer) has nice talking horses. Trucks with aluminum transmissions can drive uphill through fiery tunnels (actual demonstration). Drive recklessly enough and maybe the mouth will fall off the woman who is nagging you to slow down. (I'm hoping that one wasn't a beer or a car commercial). If roadies flew aircraft the runway lights would explode during take-off. (I think that one was an ad for a telephone or an internet provider). Pepsi is now teaching the world to sing. I was completely baffled what one ad was for, and then visited the site. Headsnap! It's a "discreet dating service for married people." A domain reseller (which coincidentally my employer uses) will enhance your assets, or possibly cause women to flash their tits at you. There will be a special edition of The Office on later. Thank you for watching and congratulations to the winning team.

I didn't perceive a level far above regular commercials. The money is in the audience not the production. I suppose the boob flashing was a wink to the halftime "wardrobe malfunction" of a few years ago. I'm guessing the broadcasting standards haven't changed in XLIII years? Considering the audience, a topless halftime show ought to be a hit. I guess it's too early in the evening to show skin on network TV. But if they can digitally put markings and advertisements on the field, they can digitally put bikinis on the performers. I can't see anyone in the target audience being really offended, and I bet more people would watch.

It's too bad the athletes have to be so heavily padded so you can't see the shape of their bodies. I understand it's to prevent injury on the field, but how about if they take off their helmets and shirts at the end of the game. All that time in the weight room just for hitting each other and running around? C'mon, show some muscles. I think I like sports where everyone wears spandex better. Yes, that's right, she watches one football game and she's going to tell you how it should be done.

Except I tuned in to watch a cultural event, and a football game broke out. You don't need to know anything about a game to realize that when there's two minutes left and the score is really close, and the ball is right on the edge of where the team that is behind needs to put it to get ahead, it's exciting. The yellow team guy threw the ball and another yellow team guy caught it, and the red team guys jumped on him. And then they did it again but this time the yellow team guy ran a longer way and caught the ball before the red team guys jumped on him. (But not nearly as far as the guy who earlier ran all the way from one end of the field to the other without getting knocked down). Next they threw the ball to a yellow team guy who was in the goal area, but he missed it, but being American football they got a fourth try, and this time the guy caught it. He then got knocked out of bounds, but apparently that was alright. The red team guys got a try at throwing the ball then, but there were only about 30 seconds left and someone caught it wrong or something and they did not get any more goals so the yellow team won. It was very exciting, I assure you.

A behind-the-scenes quirk that amuses me, but that veteran Super Bowl watchers probably know, goes back to the theme of people without shirts on. In anticipation of one of the teams winning, the marketing people print up gazillions of shirts and other merchandise proclaiming each team the champions. As soon as they find out which team is the loser, they deliver all the correct merchandise to where it can be sold to fans, and then send all the stuff with the wrong team declared the champion off to destitute people in refugee camps and disaster zones, where they care even less than I do who won the game, but presumably can clothe a family of five with a couple of 3XL football shirts, a baseball cap and a foam #1 finger. I'm not certain the foam fingers go to the third world, but the hats and ball caps do.

Go team! And they're getting bigger already, I can tell. See?

For television coverage of a different event, you can see the 60 Minutes interview with Captain Sullenberger and his crew online.