December 2007

There were 64 posts published in December 2007 (this is page 6 of 7).

Cheap Thoughts: Taxiing and an airport’s image

Who needs multi-million dollar airport renovations? I’ve figured out a way to make the Raleigh-Durham airport seem much bigger, cheaply! Jaded air travelers know that landing at a large airport like Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is only half the battle. The other half is taxiing to the gate, which sometimes seems to take longer than the flight itself. Two-runway Raleigh-Durham Airport doesn’t have this problem. When jets land at RDU, they are frequently within sight of their gates. This ease of movement contributes to the image of Raleigh-Durham as a small-town airport. A “hick” airport, if you will.
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Tour de Force

I felt very safe at my Port St. Lucie hotel last night. There were at least a dozen of police cars in the parking lot, and believe it or not they weren’t dragging shirtless men from their rooms like you see on Cops. Judging by the many K-9 cars (and the sometimes enthusiastic barking I heard from nearby rooms) I take it some sort of training was going on.

This morning I rode the elevator down with a cop toting a sweet bicycle and we struck up a conversation. He works (or did work) as a school resource officer in the Miami-Dade School System and has family in Southport. In fact his cousin, Sandy Spencer, was just elected mayor of Southport.
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Stuart

I’m in Stuart, Florida today for a presentation, having flown in at 7:30 last night. The flight was routine except for an incident right after we got airborne from Atlanta. About a minute into our flight we were all startled when the pilot suddenly banked the plane hard left. As I was catching my breath, I swear I heard the sound of jet engines getting progressively farther away. Maybe flying through the world’s busiest airport wasn’t such a keen idea after all.

Its weird that the hotel pool is still open. At midnight last night I was wishing it wasn’t.

Time to get this show on the road.

Vista piracy way down – for good reason

Microsoft is doing away with the “kill switch” feature in Microsoft Vista, according to the Beeb. According to Microsoft, its anti-piracy features have served their purpose:

Microsoft said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system.

What doesn’t get mentioned is that perhaps more people prefer XP over Vista, hmm?

Anti-piracy tools have never, ever been a match for determined crackers. Pirates consider these measures to be mere speed bumps. In light of this, how bad does an operating system have to be to make even pirates not interested in it?

South Florida

I’m on my way to South Florida today for a meeting tomorrow. In spite of being born in Florida this will be my furthest venture south in the Sunshine State. Tomorrow’s high temperature is forecast to be 76 degrees. Any other time that might sound tempting but we really haven’t had a bad winter here (nor do I expect us to).

Great night of sleep

I don’t know what to attribute it to but I had a fantastic night of sleep last night. I woke up refreshed and happy. Kelly did, too, and mentioned only being somewhat awakened by the sound of a train horn in the distance. If we had a train go by last night, I certainly didn’t notice!

A few nights prior, I had a terrible night of sleep and thought to get that sleep study rescheduled that I’d canceled way back in January. I’m thinking I may need some surgery as my ENT told me then that my tonsils are larger than normal and that might be blocking my airway. Is 39 a few decades too old to get my tonsils taken out?

Don’t be fronting

Having fun looking at my weather stats right now. A mere two hours ago the relative humidity was 82%, winds were solidly from the south, the temperature was rising on its way to 65 degrees, and the barometer was dropping quickly. Thirty minutes ago the front passed by, as the temperature began to drop from 65, humidity is dropping below 38%, winds have shifted to the north and the barometer has bottomed out. I get a kick out of watching this stuff happen in real-time.

Compostin’

Hearing the city’s leaf-vacuum truck making its rounds this morning reminded me of a project we completed this weekend. Saturday’s weather was superb, so while Kelly and Hallie attended a birthday party, Travis and i spent the morning raking (and leafblowing) leaves. Travis really enjoyed aiming the leafblower as we cleaned the yard. He especially enjoyed jumping into the leaf piles we created!
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Focusing rain

I’ve found our rainwater tank seems to focus rain. A sprinkling of rain fell overnight. Though my wheelbarrow was out it only collected enough water to fill up a mug.

I didn’t expect much to have been added to the tank this morning but I was surprised. The tank showed 12 to 15 new gallons! That’s from just half the roof, too. It always amazes me just how much water can be collected just from the rainfall.