Operation Butt Freeze

[denverpilot]

Which tracking app do you prefer?

Right now? None. Been doing RF location tracking in Ham Radio since the 90s and it's kinda boring now. Website APRS.fi seems to fulfill any latent tendencies toward playing with that system these days.

I have a little $30 "puck" GPS that also does data logging that you can toss on the glareshield and then download the data later to Google Earth (or whatever else will read NMEA data) to plot it. I think I've bothered doing it maybe twice.

You can borrow it if you want. I think it's in the center console of the Yukon somewhere... I'll look. It probably needs a charge, which it does off of USB. It'll run about a day without a charge.

 

[murphey]

Right now? None. Been doing RF location tracking in Ham Radio since the 90s and it's kinda boring now. Website APRS.fi seems to fulfill any latent tendencies toward playing with that system these days.

I have a little $30 "puck" GPS that also does data logging that you can toss on the glareshield and then download the data later to Google Earth (or whatever else will read NMEA data) to plot it. I think I've bothered doing it maybe twice.

You can borrow it if you want. I think it's in the center console of the Yukon somewhere... I'll look. It probably needs a charge, which it does off of USB. It'll run about a day without a charge.

I meant which iPad app for tracking. I've got a perfectly good GPS that I can download onto the computer.

 

[denverpilot]

I meant which iPad app for tracking. I've got a perfectly good GPS that I can download onto the computer.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying -- I don't use the iPad for stuff like this.

I know there are Apps to do it, but websites usually work better... and I don't like uploading my whereabouts to websites, so ... Google Earth on the laptop works for me.

This guy was using a website. Sending GPS data from his Droid-phone to the website, and then *displaying* it via the web browser on his iPad. He seemed to think it was iPad specific... or something...? Pretty sure there was an App to send the GPS data from an iOS device too, but I forget which website he was using.

So... sorry -- no (good) recommendations from here. A quick Google search turned up a bejillion Apps for doing stuff with GPS data on iPad, but I don't know which one would be the "killer App" for it. My iPad's usually "busy" running Foreflight, so it'd take an App that could gather Location Services data and shove it off the device to a website for display -- to even be of interest to me, really.

One friend, Adam Fast in KS is big on APRS while airborne... he's tried out a bunch of stuff and has his preferences. I could get ya in touch with him if you're wanting to go the Ham Radio route to doing it.

These look interesting, but no personal experience with 'em...

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gpx-logger/id390746731
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trails-gps-tracker/id289190494
http://www.dmsoftwaresolutions.com/gpstrackshd.html

Would be nifty if Foreflight could add GPS logging of tracks to their app with e-mail off of the device in KML or GPX format... but certainly not worth de-focusing the App from aviation to tracking.

 

[denverpilot]

Another 1.5 with one of the co-owners as Safety Pilot.

4 approaches. ILS 35R x2 at KAPA with one at 120 knots for following traffic just as practice. That one was a little shakey. Not used to flying them fast. Something to practice later.

ILS 29R at KBJC and then the VOR/DME up there.

Okay have a real question...

What's up with the two ILS approaches published right now up there?

I see the minimums are wildly different between Y and Z, and I haven't studied the plates yet carefully.

We were "cleared VFR practice approach no separation services" and they weren't being specific about the approaches used, so we were on our own to decide anyway.

(Sending this note from the truck shoving a late dinner in my face.)

ILS or LOC 29R Y and ILS or LOC 29R Z -- Y shows amended 15 Dec, Z says its original date is 15 Dec.

The VOR/DME up there is interesting. Long time low over the city at night as the terrain to the West rises (including the airport) to meet you. And then the missed is a big climb to a funky intersection off of FQF after a right turn away from the mountains. Also two ways to hold at HYGEN. Pretty cluttered plate.

We tried to get the published missed on ANY of the approaches and were turned down for every one. Bummer.

Denver thought maybe they could do the published missed the first lap around BJC but the Tower nixed it for inbound traffic. Ohhhhh well. Had to ask.

Have to go up to KFNL or KGXY to fly a real published missed around here. Too busy. Oh well...

Lots of radar vectors too. Not much "own nav" possible around town here other than out at KFTG.

Kinda missing wide open Nebraska.

Only 1.1 under the hood because it was *gorgeous* out tonight and I *had* to fly back to KAPA lookin' outside. Just way too nice out. Beautiful night for flying.

During the VFR portion we chatted about where the heck you'd set down if you trashed an engine over the city at night. Not a ton of options.

Knowing where the golf courses are helps (trees though), and there's always a few very cold lakes with a little ice over them that'd never hold the weight of the airplane but might at least give a controlled arrival, before a very cold swim.

Roads are way too many obstacles and traffic. The dark areas of Cherry Creek are a definite no-go even though they look "inviting" if you're unfamiliar with the area.

Well, with all the flying in December, we just went over our usual oil change time so I'll be picking up the stuff and working on that this weekend.

Co-owners will help with the cowl and if they gotta run and do weekend stuff, I'll finish up and we'll put it back on later. I did all the December flying anyway, so it's only fair that I do the oil change.

We usually don't see one month oil changes. Bird got a workout!

 

[murphey]

Have to go up to KFNL or KGXY to fly a real published missed around here. Too busy. Oh well...

Lots of radar vectors too. Not much "own nav" possible around town here other than out at KFTG.

And what's wrong with FTG other than the tower shuts down at 9 pm? Easy to do the missed on either 26 or 17 (the 35 missed is a real blast if DIA Tower agrees to it). No problems if you need to put down someplace, either. Plus you can practice ILS, VOR and NDB - all on the same runway, at the same time, too!

 

[denverpilot]

KFTG tower wouldn't give Clark and I the published missed procedures for anything we shot out there when they were open. It was always, "Missed approach, VFR southeast." We only got the ILS/LOC 26. They wouldn't entertain 17 or 35. (Well not that we really asked, but DEN was way too busy.)

We translated that into "Climbing right turn to a heading of 120 and climb to 6800", for something to actually fly.

The Bravo shelf overhead is kinda low, and if DIA is landing northbound, good luck getting DEN TRACON to let you pop up into it.

With those two 6144' towers south-southeast you're kinda wedged in there pretty good.

At night though when traffic is low and if they're not landing northbound it's probably a different story.

 

[denverpilot]

Sigh. Not much to update this week. Work went nuts on Thursday night and all day Friday. Wasn't bad the rest of the week but certainly no time for flying other than the aforementioned Wednesday night flight.

Didn't make it over to our usual place to pick up oil or a filter for the oil change that day. Called and they were closed on Saturday which I seem to recall is normal for them. Definitely closed on Sunday.

So... Try to pick up the stuff sometime this week and see if we can get the oil change done.

Thursday was supposed to be a CAP meeting night. That got squashed by an LDAP server replication failure caused by the senior architect guy messing with config files by accident on the Production machines.

(He meant to take a backup and overwrote them which had a very strange and hard to troubleshoot effect on replication. Jesse, it made your change-control software look like a good idea once again. Sigh.)

Was poking through aircraft logs this week trying to figure out how to organize the ADs into something reasonable to show a DE, eventually. Why not be organized and have some sticky tabs on the right entries?

Not as easy as it sounds. May give the mechanic a ring to see if his fancy software can give me a better printout/starting point to work from.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery on how to prep a good organized document to take with that references the appropriate pages in the aircraft docs for a checkride since there probably hasn't been a checkride done with anyone poking and prodding at the logs in this airplane, ever... since it left the Cessna factory in 1975?

Probably need to get aloft again soon. I know the thread name, but I'm definitely getting tired of firing up a cold airplane...

I can't even remember who's on-call this coming week at work. It doesn't seem to matter much what the "official" schedule is, since last week since we traded off night maintenance, a software release, a hard drive failure that confused a hardware RAID controller so bad it dropped the machine offline, and racking two new machines Friday night which ended up taking until midnight... Two admins, four or five nights of crap to do. Kinda normal. It's why I always have to leave town completely to get anything real done.

Real life sucks -- compared to flying all morning and night with Jesse.

If this sysadmin stuff didn't pay well enough to do all this flying, I'd definitely go get a 9-5 job. Heck even a job with a wacky schedule where when you're OFF work, you're truly OFF would be amazing...

 

[denverpilot]

Sigh. No good news to report. Work and weather conspired to no flying and no oil change done yet.

Yesterday turned from a scheduled 12 or 13 hour work day with a "knock off early, but we're all in for a 9PM-3AM maintenance window", into a brutal "I got home just after 6AM and fell into bed" morning, this morning, after either a mistake or a deliberately stupid act by someone who should have known better, which hammered a database into Recovery mode sometime around 2AM.

Not my DB, no involvement... EXCEPT... that all my machines talk to those DBs to do their jobs, so I was stuck waiting for the DBAs to get it back online so I could start my systems back up and test them and run batch stuff that was missed during the night.

(By the way, because I like to prep properly for system upgrades I went to the datacenter prior to 9PM, so the whole "knock off early" thing just got me time to sit in the McD's parking lot, post to PoA and eat some junk prior to three cups of coffee to prep for the night ahead and running cables and doing last minute extra backups and what-not. Somehow I managed to forklift upgrade half of the company's authentication servers after building and testing them with only minimal assistance from our system architect, while the DB stuff was a team... and my upgrades went fine other than one configuration item outside of my control. A feature was deprecated by the vendor and neither the architect nor I noticed it. A simple fix today to switch it to the newer feature.)

So... I slept from about 7:30AM to 1PM today with a phone call around 9AM explaining the feature problem and me saying it would probably be better handled by the well-rested architect but if you need me to head to the datacenter and execute the roll-back plan to let me know ASAP. Then after getting online around 2PM to see how things were going I found the entire IT staff in another tizzy that another DB had gone down. I listened to the conference call for a bit and was relieved when my phone battery died. Talked to architect who said "nothing you can do, go get more sleep or whatever" and the "day" that started Wednesday was officially over.

Ugh. I'll be screwed up the entire weekend, sleep-wise.

So... let's see, what else?

Two CFIIs that came "highly recommended" haven't even returned phone calls. That's a bit disheartening. And speaks volumes about their motivation and professionalism -- hey maybe they'll call next week with a death in the family or something so I won't be too quick to judge, but it's still telling... for now anyway.

I've dropped back into "let me just see if I can even get ONE darn thing done" mode which is a bad sign. The oil change. I'm picking up the stuff tomorrow while the place is open come hell or high water. Then I'll see if I can get some help with the cowl and at least get that done. Oh, it snowed again so that'll be an "opportunity" (ha!) to shovel out the hangar again.

Have a few more folks willing to Safety Pilot to keep skills moving. If I get the oil done I'll probably spend equal amounts of time hunting down a local CFII who'll actually return phone calls, and trying to get a flight in this weekend.

The scoresheet for the week...
Work/Life balance: F
Still having a Paycheck: B+
Personal goals: C
Flying this week: F

Oh and Oshkosh planning so far: D
Gaston's: F
Snow shoveling and cold weather: F-

Patching a pile of Windows boxes manually because the Windows guys still don't have it automated: A-Freakin-Plus!

At least I did something right this week. Hahaha. Sad.

 

[jesse]

Sounds like you need a new job, probably be easier at this point to just move to Lincoln.

 

[gkainz]

Sigh. ...

snip

either a mistake or a deliberately stupid act by someone who should have known better, which hammered a database into Recovery mode sometime around 2AM.

Not my DB, no involvement... EXCEPT... that all my machines talk to those DBs to do their jobs, so I was stuck waiting for the DBAs to get it back online so I could start my systems back up and test them and run batch stuff that was missed during the night.

snip

...

something in the air? I'm in a similar but reversed situation here - S/A ran redhat patches on 12/17 and one box didn't come back up. Mother board and SAS controller board bad. Tech support replaced both and machine would boot just far enough to detect i/o errors and put my database volumes in read only mode.

More hardware errors, disk block corruptions, MBR missing, sys files corrupted, RAID array unstable, another sas controller - either the replacement board was bad or something in the chassis is killing them... today I "may" be able to reinstall oracle, restore and recover the databases...

 

[Sam D]

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery on how to prep a good organized document to take with that references the appropriate pages in the aircraft docs for a checkride since there probably hasn't been a checkride done with anyone poking and prodding at the logs in this airplane, ever... since it left the Cessna factory in 1975?

Funny you should bring this up. I was recently thinking that this would be a great magazine article. For our plane, we have a binder with tabs and a clear pocket. The pocket has the airframe and prop logs. The binder has tabs for:
-- 337's
-- weight and balance
-- ad's
-- (and some others! sorry, not in front of me)
This binder is kept up by us (the owners) and our A&P. Each time he does and annual or 50 hour change, he prints out a new AD listing to show that we've complied with all of them (and compies with the ones requiring it). On the back of the binder is a single page the A&P has created with all the key information (engine TT, prop TT, next oil change, annual, etc, etc).

For my checkride, I was able to quickly show that the plane was legal to fly:
-- annual (flip to the right page in the log showing the annual)
-- static test (in the log)
-- transponder (in the log)
-- ELT (in the log)
-- AD's (in the AD section with the most recent printout). I'll admit that I have not independently verified the list. My control there is selecting the right mechanic!

(VOR and GPS database updates are each on a page that we keep with our 'who's flown the plane and squawkls' sheet in the cockpit)

 

[murphey]

something in the air? I'm in a similar but reversed situation here - S/A ran redhat patches on 12/17 and one box didn't come back up. Mother board and SAS controller board bad. Tech support replaced both and machine would boot just far enough to detect i/o errors and put my database volumes in read only mode.

More hardware errors, disk block corruptions, MBR missing, sys files corrupted, RAID array unstable, another sas controller - either the replacement board was bad or something in the chassis is killing them... today I "may" be able to reinstall oracle, restore and recover the databases...

There are times I'm glad I'm out of work.

I remember the first time I took the Oracle DBA class. I asked where the installation directions were. The instructor remarked that every system was different, so the specific install guide was sent along with the license.

Did not go over well with this *nix geek.

 

[gil_mor]

Nate, I feel your pain.

I hate computers almost as much as I hate Users.

I went flying today and ended up not flying, trying to help to the A&P with fixing the plane, took longer then my planed flight, and the plane is probably grounded for 2 weeks.
I guess I/You/People should try and "take it easy" and don't kill yourself for goals that might are not life or death. Such as IR in 2011.

Good job on the upgrades by the way.

 

[gkainz]

There are times I'm glad I'm out of work.

I remember the first time I took the Oracle DBA class. I asked where the installation directions were. The instructor remarked that every system was different, so the specific install guide was sent along with the license.

Did not go over well with this *nix geek.

and every included installation instruction is usually "close" ...

 

[denverpilot]

I guess I/You/People should try and "take it easy" and don't kill yourself for goals that might are not life or death. Such as IR in 2011.

Ah, it's okay... it was never a "2011" goal anyway. It came up as a possibility to go visit Jesse and see what we could get done, and we got a lot done. It's all good...

I didn't make it to the shop to get the oil/filter. Sigh. I should call them and see if they're open tomorrow since they probably close in 11 minutes.

 

[denverpilot]

Sounds like you need a new job, probably be easier at this point to just move to Lincoln.

Heh. Lincoln was a pretty nice town, all things considered.

I'd have already moved out of an Urban environment long ago if my wife didn't like it more than I do. She likes the trappings of the rat colony far more than I.

As far as the job goes, well... Glad to be back in 100% Linux. Oh and dropping the hour+ commute has been great.

If the former place hadn't killed the product line that used Solaris and ... cough... real server hardware... cough... I'd still be doing that.

PCs suck as servers, I'd soooo forgotten. What kind of lame multiprocessor boxes can't survive a CPU failure and keep right on going?

A PC.

Sun box? It shrugs and logs it, reschedules the tasks on the other CPUs, oh... and turns on an orange LED. Yawn. Pretty much the same story for anything failing in the box.

PCs are so frail they shut off if a fan fails. That's not a 100% uptime server. That's a toy.

Oh well. The rest I'll bite my tongue on for now...

Didn't make it to to oil filter place today. Crud. Called to check. They're not open on weekends. Maybe try to hunt down an "alternate" vendor tomorrow.

 

[jason]

Heh. Lincoln was a pretty nice town, all things considered.

I'd have already moved out of an Urban environment long ago if my wife didn't like it more than I do. She likes the trappings of the rat colony far more than I.

As far as the job goes, well... Glad to be back in 100% Linux. Oh and dropping the hour+ commute has been great.

If the former place hadn't killed the product line that used Solaris and ... cough... real server hardware... cough... I'd still be doing that.

PCs suck as servers, I'd soooo forgotten. What kind of lame multiprocessor boxes can't survive a CPU failure and keep right on going?

A PC.

Sun box? It shrugs and logs it, reschedules the tasks on the other CPUs, oh... and turns on an orange LED. Yawn. Pretty much the same story for anything failing in the box.

PCs are so frail they shut off if a fan fails. That's not a 100% uptime server. That's a toy.

Oh well. The rest I'll bite my tongue on for now...

Didn't make it to to oil filter place today. Crud. Called to check. They're not open on weekends. Maybe try to hunt down an "alternate" vendor tomorrow.

That's why you don't have a single server. You buy three of them for half of what you paid for that Solaris box.

Then when one of them goes offline you get paged and you deal with it when it's convenient. (because you still have two others doing the work)

 

[denverpilot]

Heh. Yeah. That's what we do too. I'd take an E 10K over this garbage any day of the week, though.

It's "System logged a hardware fault. Tell Sun to send a widget."

Versus...

"I think it's a hardware problem but the stupid Dell tools won't run under this distro so I'll have to down it and run the DOS based crap from a USB stick."



My fave is Dell 1850s logging ECC RAM errors because of cheap RAM. Machine is fine but the stupid buffer fills over runtimes over a year or more, the hardware error lights come on, and you can't clear the darn things without downtime.

We've gotten really good at ignoring the blinking orange lights in that rack.

 

[jason]

Heh. Yeah. That's what we do too. I'd take an E 10K over this garbage any day of the week, though.

It's "System logged a hardware fault. Tell Sun to send a widget."

Versus...

"I think it's a hardware problem but the stupid Dell tools won't run under this distro so I'll have to down it and run the DOS based crap from a USB stick."



My fave is Dell 1850s logging ECC RAM errors because of cheap RAM. Machine is fine but the stupid buffer fills over runtimes over a year or more, the hardware error lights come on, and you can't clear the darn things without downtime.

We've gotten really good at ignoring the blinking orange lights in that rack.

Hmm. Maybe an IP-KVM and a netboot image of the DOS tools would work.

 

[murphey]

That's why you don't have a single server. You buy three of them for half of what you paid for that Solaris box.

Then when one of them goes offline you get paged and you deal with it when it's convenient. (because you still have two others doing the work)

I ran an entire city & county library on a single SUNSolaris box with a 16 box RAID. When it crashed (power failure back in '96) it came back up by itself, ran it's own diagnostics, emailed the report to me and I decided there was no need for any further action on my part.

Now, consider the N big Dell/WInNT servers (but not responsible for, I just spec'd out what I needed) at a BIG Aerospace company that shall remain nameless 5 years later. Actually, two BIG Aerospace companies that shall remain nameless. Each place needed a 50% dedicated sysadmin to keep software current, manage the logs, and so on, for one relatively small program. (Well, small for Govt-type of aerospace work. Anything under a $B is small)

More important, they were subject to repeated (and sometimes successful) virus attacks, unlike the SUNs even with firewalls 9 ft thick. The decision was money, not technical, and they paid dearly for it.

 

[denverpilot]

Hmm. Maybe an IP-KVM and a netboot image of the DOS tools would work.

Even simpler, set up GRUB to boot a local image of the stupid tool. Haha.

It never finds anything wrong anyway. The hardware isn't built to test itself properly.

Ha. This place's idea of "remote management" is... "You're driving over to the data center, then?"

Remote management would require more switch ports and they think every Ethernet cable should home run to the core switches.

A management LAN hanging off of a cheap switch would be "fancy" and "difficult to implement", since they're in love with internal firewall rules between all the sites.

iLO ports?! What are those?! The servers have that?!

My boss just starts yelling whenever we bring it up. He thinks it's retarded too.

Heck, I could buy a $200 Cisco terminal server off eBay, set up console and BIOS serial port redirection and make serial cables by hand -- if they were interested in doing it cheap... (Yup. These machines are so old they have real serial ports.)

Okay I said I'd bite my tongue. Don't get me started.

I was jealous when Jesse mentioned you guys have PDUs. We have some but no one is allowed to hook up their Ethernet ports!

Security threat and that whole "not enough Ethernet ports" thing, you know... And those pesky firewall rules, too.

ROFLMAO!

Most expensive power strip, Evahhhh!

Thank God Linux is stable. I feel bad for the Windows/Citrix guys. They spend a lot of time driving around.

 

[jesse]

I was jealous when Jesse mentioned you guys have PDUs. We have some but no one is allowed to hook up their Ethernet ports!

We have whatever we need - if we don't it's my fault for having not thought about it. *No red tape involved.

We don't really have much for brand name severs. *At this point I either default to a 2U super micro. *Or a 1U tyan which includes two servers in 1U both capable of dual processors, raid, and 4 hard drives. *A lot of punch in 1U. *No worries about trying to maintain complicated expensive service contracts. *Just have spare hardware on hand, *way faster, and you don't have to ever deal with stupid things like 800 numbers, *telephones, *or level 1 support.

You don't need reliable hardware with smart software.

For file storage, *best thing we've done is moved away from Netapp towards commodity hardware running MogileFS. *No single points of failure and wayyy cheaper and more redundant.

For configuration management just use Puppet.

For high availability on crappy software, *like database servers, *use DRBD and heartbeatd.

Personally I'd rather spend my spare time flying airplanes then driving to data centers to fix busted systems. *If I ever find myself responding to a bunch of pages off hours it's because I did a ****ty job architecting things and I fix it.

Own your work and if you aren't allowed to do so - find somewhere you can. *Why would anyone want to build or maintain systems they're not proud of? *The moment I find myself going down that road I pause and do something about it. *Life is too short to not love what you do.

If you don't feel good about something you need to stop. *Continuing in whatever bad direction that was may bring short term profits but the long term technical burden from **** work can be devastating to a company, *from the inability to meet customer demands to the inability to retain talented employees.

I have no idea why my post is sprayed with asterisks. Must have been a weird iPhone glitch.

 

[denverpilot]

I have a meeting with someone appropriately high in the food chain this week per his request. It'll be interesting. I think he knows things are whacked. We shall see.

 

[denverpilot]

Back to aviation stuff. Murphy to the rescue!

You gotta love it when a pilot friend says they have five oil filters in their hangar. (Gee, what a smart idea? Haha.)

Co-owner wants landings to stay current and KFTG has these things called "runways", so we may have to go try them out!

Thanks Murph! See ya at FTG in a bit!

 

[gkainz]

Atta girl, Muprh! Good karma to you!

 

[denverpilot]

Yep thanks much! Oil change done and I'm headed for WalMart with the recycling container. The silly cowl went back on the easiest it ever has too.

 

[azure]

Getting the cowl back on, ugh! On the Cardinal it's a real PITA and it's why I've yet to do my own oil change. That, plus getting the old filter off without making a mess is a challenge even my mechanic doesn't have a good solution for yet.

Hope you can get that IR finished up soon, Nate!

 

[denverpilot]

Update for anyone who cares:

Grounded myself with "flu-like symptoms" on Sunday night. Spent half of Monday and all of Tuesday in bed. Wednesday dragged myself into the office much better but not fully "over it". Today, almost there.

I believe the clinical term is "gastrointestinal distress". Enough said.

(Since I'm reading a book on the Civil War right now, it certainly demonstrated how awful marching 25 miles with dysentery must have been while eating green corn, green apples, and chewing on coffee grounds. The Confederate Army were a bunch of tough SOBs, I'll say.)

Of course the "to-do" list that fell behind in December hasn't gotten any shorter and regular calendar items didn't go away, plus the usual new things that pop up.

Sure puts your personal priorities list to the test, getting behind on stuff.

I think there's four boards blown out of the back fence right now. They'll probably get fixed sometime around March or April.

No flying Saturday, I'm teaching the Communications portion of a Civil Air Patrol Observer course and attending the rest as a student for the second time (or fourth time if you count my time in the early 90s - Ahh paperwork screwups...). Maybe Sunday. Haven't looked at weather or anything lately.

Still no callbacks from the two "highly recommended" CFIIs but I gave up on them returning calls last week. Just haven't made any other calls yet.

I'd say I'm getting cranky about it all but that won't fix it. "Do or do not, there is no try."

 

[saracelica]

I'm still interested. Was glad there was finally an update to this posting. Keep them coming Nate!!

 

[murphey]

Update for anyone who cares:

Grounded myself with "flu-like symptoms" on Sunday night. Spent half of Monday and all of Tuesday in bed. Wednesday dragged myself into the office much better but not fully "over it". Today, almost there.

I believe the clinical term is "gastrointestinal distress". Enough said.

"bad sushi day"

Still no callbacks from the two "highly recommended" CFIIs but I gave up on them returning calls last week. Just haven't made any other calls yet.

I'd say I'm getting cranky about it all but that won't fix it. "Do or do not, there is no try."

 

[gil_mor]

I'm still interested. Was glad there was finally an update to this posting. Keep them coming Nate!!

Yea, that.

I kinda know how you feel.

When I started to study for the IR - around April, I wanted to be done by September-October.
Ended up taking the written mid November, needing about 2-3 hours to finish up.

Fast forward to now - STILL THE SAME PLACE, which checkride canceling due to plane and DPE.

So yea, I'm right there with you.

The thing about good CFIIs or anyone really - the good ones are sometime hard to get. Be it money or availability.

I just hate when that means they can feel its ok to not return calls etc.

 

[Everskyward]

Grounded myself with "flu-like symptoms" on Sunday night. Spent half of Monday and all of Tuesday in bed. Wednesday dragged myself into the office much better but not fully "over it". Today, almost there.

I believe the clinical term is "gastrointestinal distress". Enough said.

I'm glad I didn't eat any of your popcorn at the theater...

 

[BrianNC]

Yea, that.

I kinda know how you feel.

When I started to study for the IR - around April, I wanted to be done by September-October.
Ended up taking the written mid November, needing about 2-3 hours to finish up.

Fast forward to now - STILL THE SAME PLACE, which checkride canceling due to plane and DPE.

So yea, I'm right there with you.

The thing about good CFIIs or anyone really - the good ones are sometime hard to get. Be it money or availability.

I just hate when that means they can feel its ok to not return calls etc.

After taking many years to finally get my PPL, that's why I swore my IR would be accelerated. I had my IR within a year of finally getting my PPL with a 2 week accelerated course.

 

[gil_mor]

After taking many years to finally get my PPL, that's why I swore my IR would be accelerated. I had my IR within a year of finally getting my PPL with a 2 week accelerated course.

Ouch, I don't know if I could do that, but the commercial is going to be quick. I hope.

 

[jesse]

Ouch, I don't know if I could do that, but the commercial is going to be quick. I hope.

I did my commercial, cfi, and cfii at the rate of about two weeks each. All in a roll.

 

[BrianNC]

I did my commercial, cfi, and cfii at the rate of about two weeks each. All in a roll.

That's the way to do it. I'll do the same with my commercial when/if I ever get around to it.

 

[gil_mor]

I did my commercial, cfi, and cfii at the rate of about two weeks each. All in a roll.

Nate, sorry about hijacking, but Jesse - Can you elaborate?
I might try and do the same. If its humanly possible.
I assume you had all the writtens done.

 

[TangoWhiskey]

Nate, sorry about hijacking, but Jesse - Can you elaborate?
I might try and do the same. If its humanly possible.
I assume you had all the writtens done.

Nate, I'm interested in your posts about getting your IR, so keep it up.

Jesse, bumping this request to the top, would like to know more about how you did it, too... did you use an advertised accelerated program, or roll your own local?

 

[CMTowner]

Yes, it would be nice to hear the details.

Nate, keep up the good work and the posts coming. It is motivation to get mine going.

 

[denverpilot]

Nothing to post, sadly.

Work went nuts, was sick with flu-like symptoms one week, then sprained right wrist pretty good a couple weekends ago.

It's still a little sore when someone gives a hearty handshake or I lift something heavy. Annoying how long stupid stuff takes to heal up as you get older. Heh.

Got one VFR flight in on Wednesday, just before out 20" snowstorm that started Thursday, just to remember how to fly.

Spent the weekend running the snowblower mostly.

So...

Probably going to suck getting back up to speed. Will see.

Kinda completely derailed at the moment.