xxmikexx

skylab, You've had a fascinating career. I interviewed you about it last year in the FS Open Components forum, but at my request that forum has been taken off line for a while. Can we do this ... Would you open a thread in your blog giving the highlights of your career, and then we can do another interview. Many forum members know you as a former airline pilot, but I doubt that very many understand that your 30-year career spanned from propliners through jetliners, and that you subsequently became a railroad locomotive engineer. Can we give it a go?

I have to add one more thing ... I said "Down tools at 4PM on Friday." The fact is, in NYC most people leave work at 4PM, and most people don't arrive at work till sometime around 10 AM. Were it not for the customary delayed start of the business day, many many more people would have died in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

A footnote ... Our first Manhattan apartment was on East 49th street. A neighbor in the 6-story brownstone was the actor Al Lewis, of "Grandpa Munster" fame. However, this having been NYC, in general you don't speak with your neighbors. So we knew Al to say hello to, but that was all. Up the block a few feet was a corner cafe, a place where we liked to eat breakfast. One day there I was telling my wife what was going on in Denver at the studio. I explained that I had just had an extended conversation with Aerosmith's keyboard player, and another with the person in charge of music publishing licenses at the congressionally-chartered Harry Fox Agency in NYC. Finally, I told her about the state of our negotiations with Warner Brothers Music regarding getting permission from various artists to cover their music, the permission not legally required but certainly required morally if one was to be a good citizen of the surprisingly small music business. A woman at the booth behind us broke in, an almost unheard of thing in The City. (There is only one.) "You know what?" she said. "This is what I love about New York. Only in this city can you overhear a conversation like the one you two are having." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It was an interesting remark but it's not true. If you go to Los Angeles you'll hear such conversations there too. However, it's the case that in the movie business, as in the music business, there are only maybe a thousand people who are the business movers and shakers. Not the performers, but the people who make the decisions, who supply the funding, who staff the projects in a technical and management sense. The producers. The agents. The directors. The special effects experts. The lighting experts. The editors. And so on. Maybe a thousand people in all. That's what I meant by the music business being a small world. Everybody either knows a given member of the club, or knows somebody who does. We had reached that point. I knew the head of WBM's legal department along with his chief deputy. I had direct telephone contact with the president of WBM, and of the Fox Office, and with the chief legal counsel of RIAA. I had direct telephone contact with Aerosmith, the Steve Miller band, Roland of America, Ray Kurzweil, Stevie Wonder's MIDI guy, Stormin' Norman, Eric Satie, on and on and on. By the time we closed our doors we had been accepted as members of the music industry scene. Weird quirky tiny members, but members nonetheless. And I must say that the people of the music business are very interesting -- and they all are into music too. Almost without exception they had been determined to find a way to work in the industry, and they succeeded.

Earlier I mentioned our high pressure consulting business ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx We didn't plan it. It was simply that an old boss of my wife's in a computer software consulting business in Colorado Springs had left that company and gone to work in NYC as a technical group manager at Integrated Resources in NYC and wanted some help, initially from just my wife but later from both of us. Integrated Resources later failed after an IRS crackdown on abusive limited partner tax shelter schemes. However, until the IRS got involved, Integrated did a high volume business forming, selling and managing partnerships in Oil & Gas, aircraft leasing, rolling stock leasing, blah blah blah. Each partnership had members counted in the dozens or hundreds, and memberships could be bought and sold. So it was an intensely computer based business and my wife and I both are/were programmers -- good ones. (I still am, and I still practice the art.) She specialized in mainframe banking and brokerage software, exactly the skill set that Integrated needed. I specialized in personal computer technical software, another thing they needed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx And so it came to pass that we were spending a lot of time in Manhattan. At first we lived part time in a run-down hotel on 45th street, a place where a lot of traveling bands from Europe stayed. (I still could not get away from the music business!) But we reached a point where renting an apartment would be more economical. So there we were with an apartment in Manhattan. And a house in the Springs. And the Golden Midi studio in an apartment in Denver, from which I was also doing occasional Denver-based software consulting. Our life became very complex very quickly and for almost 1.5 years we commuted between Manhattan and the Springs, spending Saturdays at home, Sundays in Denver and the rest of the week in NYC. (Our weekly rhythm of life became a ritual. At 4PM on Friday, down tools and take a cab to EWR. Take a particular scheduled Continental flight to DEN, saying hello to the gate people, and to those members of the cabin and flight deck crew that we happened to know to say hello to. Drive to the Springs. Then drive back to Denver on Sunday morning. Then at 4PM on Sunday, take a particular Continental flight to LGA followed by a cab to 49th Street. Then go to bed, getting up at 6AM to start another week of the cycle.) Or rather, it was my wife who made this trek every week. I did it on and off, basing myself at whichever end of the system placed the most demands me but spending as much as I could hands-on in our apartment/studio in downtown Denver. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx When our overhead hit $25,000 per month I said to my wife "So this is what success feels like", meaning that we were slaves to the obligations we had picked up along the way. I am not kidding, skylab, there was one month when we grossed $50,000 in NYC billings. We had been required by the needs of Integrated's business to work 18x7 that month -- both of us -- and the money simply came pouring in. It couldn't last. Integrated eventually got nailed by the IRS, the partnership marketing operation collapsed, the company went bankrupt, and most of the consultants were left holding the bag in terms of uncollected billings. Not us. I saw the end coming and put collections from Integrated on a very short leash. So when the company folded we only had to write off a few thousand dollars. We exited the NYC consulting scene with about $200,000 in the bank, proceeding to lose it all in the graphics/printing business we then started after closing Golden Midi. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It was a very interesting experience. It taught us exactly what Mae West meant when she said "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better." She didn't mean it as a joke, she meant that money doesn't really matter, and I came to learn that she was exactly right though it took a bankruptcy to really drive the lesson home. What I have come to realize is that material possessions are not important. The only important things are family, friends, pets and photos, in that order. In certain circumstances the courts can and will strip you of everything you thought you had "owned", but in the USA they can't take your family or your friends from you, and in this country you are allowed to make a fresh start. So the things that have no monetary value are the most important things of all. They cannot be replaced no matter how much money you have. I came to realize that life is like that -- truly a rat race -- for a lot of "successful" people. If all you care about is making and spending money, and if luck (it was luck) favors you as it did us, such an approach to making a living can be very nice. But for all too many "successful" professional people, the lifestyle is a living hell. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I don't want to name names but a cerain person I know had been slated to become a junior VP at a major corporation based here in Denver. Came the .com bust and the company went with it, taking away not only this person's JVP opportunity but also his very job -- his high paying job. Today that person is still bitter and angry because, at the top, he had come to believe that this was the way life was supposed to be. But through no fault of his own -- through the vagaries of the local economy -- through the luck of the draw -- he has not been able to recreate even a high paying job much less the formerly pending corporate officership. He has never been able to adjust to having been busted back to corporal, so to speak. He has never accepted that in spite of all his hard work, in the end it is all about luck. I have adjusted. Having been born into impoverished circumstances, and having spent 3.5 years at a boarding school that was really very primitive and underfunded, I didn't and still don't give a rodent's rear about luxury creature comforts. My wife has a similar though less economically stressful background and she didn't get used to the high lifestyle either. We're both okay with things. At one point we were high ranking officers, promoted on the battlefield. That's all it was. Today we are back in the rank and file where we started, and it's fine. Like Mae West I've been rich and I've been poor, but I'm not really sure rich is better. I live a stress-free life now and while we have very little financial headroom, I care little about the money situation. (Though I hope that FS Flight Training will ease some of the tightness.) On Wall Street they say "You can eat well or you can sleep well." For me, and for my wife, it's "Sleep well." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Dad Joiner, the Texas wildcatter who found and devloped Spindletop, died a pauper. But it was fine. As he remarked at one point, "I'm often broke. I've never been poor."

While my mother was born and raised in the Bronx, her parents were well to do for a while (till the crash of 29) and they split their time between their posh apartment on the Grand Concourse and their small villa outside San Juan. So my mother grew up in that second culture too, developing a deep interest in Latino music, the genes for which she passed on to me. :) She also taught my wife how to make a killer pallela, which we still eat today as often as I can persuade her to endure the lengthy preparation that this dish requires. (Rice, chicken, seafood, spices and beer seasoning are the principle ingredients.) The odd thing is, even though my mother played piano quite well, she never repeat never played the music of her childhood days in PR. I never asked why, in the way of kids simply accepting that this was the how the world -- her world -- worked. Perhaps she was incapable of improvisation. Perhaps she didn't really understand Afro-Cuban song structure. Perhaps she felt that without a real band with brasses the music would not sound right. I simply don't know. All I know is that when my father wasn't around she would tune the nice Grundig radio in the living room to one of the several stations in Manhattan that would play this kind of music at least part time. Sometimes I would get out my guitar and play along. Sometimes I would noodle on the piano. But mostly I just listened, tapping my fingers as percussion accompaniment while I did homework. (Shades of high school with my friend McFarlane Mackey and his love of African drumming.)

Your wrote of clear water. Get this, skylab ... Our learning scuba diving was to fulfill a childhood amition of my wife's. Part of her dream was to do it somewhere in the Caribbean, preferably in Barbados. Now ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My wife is a trouper, the hardest working and least complaining person I have ever known. (At age 64 she has just completed a difficult BSN college program, that on top of the MBA she earned ten years ago, all of this while working for a living.) Today a nurse after decades of high tech stuff, when a winter storm comes and other people start calling in "snow", she's the one who spends the night in the cafeteria so her patients, and the patients of the supposedly-snowbound nurses, will continue to get the right care from her. (She's done this a dozen times since starting her new career.) I mention these things because she's been working for a living since she was nine, when she started her own paid professional babysitting business. Such dedication is not a new thing for her. She lived in a fairly large building at the corner of 12th Street and 8th Avenue in NYC, one with perhaps 100 apartments. In fairly short order she had a thriving business going, at first mostly from that building but soon from others in the neighborhood as well ... And she saved every penny she earned, enough money that when her parents decided to take themselves and their three daughters to Barbados for a first-ever family vacation, my wife paid her own way. (Which was important to her because her parents were always on tight finances and she didn't want to be a burden on them.) To this day she talks excitedly about that trip, and about the long puddle jumper flight that must have been in one of your DC-6s. (I made this guess about the equipment after interviewing her about various aspects of the shape of the aircraft's wings and tail. I had to do this because my wife has zero knowledge of aviation and a below zero interest in it.) So when an opportunity arose for us to take a break from our lucrative but unbelievably high pressure consulting business she said "Let's go to Barbados and learn to scuba dive." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Well, she'd already been to Barbados, knew the place, loved it and wanted to go back. In contrast, my having traveled extensively in Europe every three months for two years, in spite of my speaking French, German and a little Dutch, and some Spanish, and a few words of Danish and Norwegian, so that I was able to integrate nicely with local cultures, I had come to appreciate our collective national lifestyle and amenities. (Folks outside the USA, I mean no offence. But as the Bruce Sprinsteen song goes, I was Born In The USA. If you come here to visit you will soon understand what that phrase means, and you just may not want to leave. Whenever spare time permitted, I spent as much time as I could on side trips, visiting places where tourists don't go. But Europe ain't home for me. So ...) "No", I said. "I don't want to go to Barbados. Let's go to Key West instead because it will have all the advantages of the Caribbean while still being part of the USA, with all that will mean in terms of facilities, sanitation, safety and the like". So that's what we did. We didn't fly to Key West, instead we did one of my famous non-stop long distance drives, this time from Colorado Springs to Key West by way of the Cherokee Strip, Anadarko, Arkansas, Texarkana, Baton Rouge, and on to Florida via the Gulf Coast. (If memory serves it only took us a day and a half, maybe two, to get to Key West. (I drive 20 hours per day.) We filled the time playing a Rhino Records huge set of oldies released on the then-new-fangled CDs.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx And so it was that we came to be in Key West. My wife confirmed that the beaches and the shallow drop of the ocean floor, and the coral reefs, and the brilliantly colored fish, were just like Barbados. So there we were vacationing in a tropical paradise, just ninety miles from Cuba, which reminds me of another story. (D**n. I love telling stories.) ...

I guess I'm lucky. Once I learned the trick I've been able to keep my ears clear without even having to swallow ... but if I forget and an ear plugs up then sometimes even swallowing doesn't fix the problem. I must have misunderstood you because you can't have been snorkeling at 20 feet, can you? (Unless you're a WW2 German submarine. :D) Surely you meant that you cant free dive (and therefore can't scuba) past 20 feet, ja mein kapitan?

The first time I was close to an operating jet aircraft engine was when my grandfather arranged for us to visit the F-86 production line in El Segundo in 1952 while the Korean war was still going on and there was still a need to crank out these fighters as fast as possible. (By the way, the site is today the southern part of LAX.) My grandfather knew one the F-86 project engineers, who gave us a guided tour of the production line himself. The compact and jammed final assembly line flowed from east to west, completed aircraft being towed out by handtruck through large hangar doors that faced the Pacific Ocean. As we were walking out of the hangar onto the apron where the completed aircraft were parked, I heard the magical sound of an F-86 to the south of us spooling up. After the engine was up to speed, and after a short wait, the aircraft moved out, turned north and taxiied right by us not fifty feet away. The noise was deafening but wonderful. I closed my ear flaps with my fingers, my eyes riveted to the bright red helmet of the test pilot. He taxiied the aircraft to the runways that North American shared with the civil airport, turned east, and I don't know what happened after that because we went back into the hangar and up into one of the production offices, where we couldn't hear much. Oh yes ... I forgot to mention the wonderful odor of burnt kerosone. It's interesting to me how we don't know at the time that certain images -- visual, tactile, aural -- are going to stay with us for life. This is one of the most vivid ones. I was ten at the time but I still think of this happy afternoon every time I look at the 1/144 scale model of an F-86H on the shelf of a bookcase behind me.

I like to praise vendors in public when they do the right thing, as I did with the FS Pilot Shop a couple of weeks ago ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx A few days ago my wife and I intended to eat breakfast at a local Denny's, a locally owned franchise where we spend roughly $1,000 per year, I estimate. When we walked in there was a young child in a high chair shrieking and crying very loudly. All the mother was doing was shush-ing the child. We sat down, placed our orders and waited for someone on the staff to ask the mother to step outside till the child had calmed down. Nobody did anything. So after we had been in the restaurant for about five minutes I took the law into my own hands, walked over to the mother and told her that she would have to leave the restaurant with the kid till the kid was behaving properly. The mother did as I asked, and as she was heading out the door I sat down again at my wife's and my booth table. Well now ... I heard one of the waitresses go over to the father and apologize for my "rude behavior". She did it several times. So when she returned to the coffee prep station I confronted her. "Did I just hear you telling the father that I had been rude?" "Yes" she said. "You were VERY rude." A second waitress chimed in with "That's OUR job, not yours." Whereupon I told them "But you weren't doing your job, somebody had to, and that somebody is me. You have just lost a customer". They probably thought that I meant we were walking out on this particular meal but I meant that we would not be back to the unit ever -- not as long as they are employed there. (These were weekend staff and we rarely eat there on weekends. I knew them but they didn't know me.) So we went to a nearby working man's cafe that I had been meaning to try and had a much better breakfast at a noticeably lower price. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mind you, I'm not a complainer and I'm not a cheapskate. I always tip 20% regardless of the quality of the service because waitstaff depend on it -- it's an essential part of their income. I wouldn't want my daily pay to depend on what some customer thought of how I happended to feel that day, and I'm not going to do that to anybody else. I've never complained about service before but in this case I sent an email to Denny's headquarters explaining both sides of what had happened, asking them to forward the information to the unit owners. In my email I made it clear that I would not return to the unit unless and until I had been assured that the two employees in question had been dismissed. I pointed out to them that while normal restaurant policy is to wait for a customer complaint, this particular case was a no-brainer, just as it would be a no brainer to ask a flasher to leave before a customer complained. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I have just received a letter from Denny's national headquarters agreeing with my position and stating that they had forwarded the information to the appropriate parties on the very day that I had written in (which was a Sunday). I don't know what the local franchisee is going to do. As with most franchise operations Corporate probably can't do much more than jawbone the owners. But I'm delighted to see that Corporate is not saying that the unit staff should have slavishly followed a reasonable policy to an unreasonable limit. So ... Yay Denny's. Regrettably for Corporate my wife and I really like the new cafe and we might not go back to the Denny's in question regardless of whether the offending employees are let go. But we certainly will not hesitate to patronize other Denny's units.

This is another post copied from elsewhere in the site, put here so I will be able to retrive it easily in the future. I'll edit the post tonight, it's in rough shape ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx If you read the Gauges&Panels Software Tools thread you will find the beginning of a discussion of coding techniques. In there I basically claimed that maintainability is more important than performance because with proper system design even loose code will perform acceptably. When it doesn't, the correct solution usually is a design change and not clever tight code. Now I want to turn to the subject of notation, which is one of the key aspects of maintainability. At first most of you are going to think that I'm crazy, but a few of you will come to understand what I'm driving at. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Let's begin with a code fragment taken directly from the AirBoss sources. You will have to forgive the use of xxxx's because without them the forum software would delete the multiple spaces that the xxx's represent ... GBS_Txt2BtnNdx ( xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // See if it's a xxxxxxxxxxxxxx kDevTyp_PovBtn, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // hatswitch"button". xxxxxxxxxxxxxx apszBtnNam, xxxxxxxxxxxxxx &iBtnNdx, xxxxxxxxxxxxxx &fHit xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ) ; if (fHit) xx { xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // We did get a match xx *apiDevTyp = kDevTyp_PovBtn; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // so report the xx *apiBtnNdx = iBtnNdx; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // device type and xx break; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // the position of the xx } xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // button in the array Even when you ignore the xxx stuff it looks like total gibberish, right? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The first thing to look at is the call to the GBS_Txt2BtnNdx function, which begins with a function name "header", GBS. The "GBS" part of the function name means that it is an GameBoss (GBS) function call. (GameBoss is the original name for the AirBoss/GameBoss product pair.) If I wanted to have a different "Txt2BtnNdx" function somewhere else in a different system, I would be able to have both functions coexist in the same program because their headers would be different, thereby guaranteeing function name uniqueness. (Yes, I do know C++ but so what.) If there are more than two arguments to a function call, and if the function is not something standard like a call to memcpy, I spread the arguments of the call over multiple source lines. This means that the eye can quickly see the various arguments. If you look closely at the code you will see that variable names generally take the form of a prefix such as "api" (discussed later below) followed by a stream of three-character name fragments. These three-character fragments have standard meanings: Txt -- text. Btn -- button. Ndx -- index. Thus, once you know the notation, the function name GBS_Txt2BtnNdx will be immediately understood to mean "The GameBoss function that translates a text string to a button index." The use of mixed upper and lower case makes the separate name fragments easy to read. Why three-character name fragments? Well, what better way to name this function. If the name were composed in the conventional way, to achieve the same clarity we would have to rename the function to be gameboss_translate_text_to_button_index which certainly is easy to read. However, it takes longer to read than the stylized GBS_Txt2BtnNdx, and it would force all the function arguments and comments way off to the right, probably off the right hand end of the source code editor screen, necessitating scrolling the window to the right just so the arguments and comments can be cleanly formatted. Furthermore, the name fragments approach allows a lot of logic to be expressed on a single source line instead of having that logic uselessly be spread over several source lines. (We make an exception for conditional expressions and function calls because in those cases we want the clarity that one-name-per-line provides.) Also, the eye can take the variable name in at a glance, and since each name fragment has a standard meaning, the overall meaning of the name can be understood at a glance. This may strike you as weird but electrical engineers have the same three-character convention for signal names, and nobody is bothered by this. In fact, they like it because it keeps schematics from being visually dominated by lengthy signal names. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So now let's consider some of the other standard name fragments. (There are about fifty, I've never counted.) Ndx - Index, as in the index into an array. Runs 0..N Cnt - Count. Unlike an Ndx, a Cnt runs 1..N Src - Source, the origin of a move of some kind. Dst - Destination, the destination of the move. Dev - Device. Rpt - Report. Typ - Type. Pov - Point of view. Str - String or structure. and so on. There is no need for me to list them all here because you get the idea, even if you don't like the idea. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now let's move on to the subject of name prefixes. Here I've generalized the concept of "Hungarian Notation". In the standard Hungarian Notation a standard string would have a name prefix of "sz" meaning "zero-terminated string", so a typical string name would be "szName_Of_The_String". In my notation this becomes "szStrNam". So I've kept "sz" as a prefix, and it retains its standard meaning. I also use the standard "i" to mean "integer", as in "iBtnNdx" which means "an integer that represents an index into the buttons array." The idea behind the Hungarian Notation prefixes is that it becomes unnecessary to look at the top of a function listing to see how variables were declared. The prefix says it all, and all that I've done is to expand the set of prefixes to include some conventions of my own. For example, in the code fragment above we find the name "apszBtnNam", which is not standard Hungarian. Well, the "sz" part of it is, but the "ap" part is not. In my extended notation the "a" of "ap" means "argument of the parent function", and the "p" of "ap" means pointer. Thus apszBtnNam means "the parent function argument that is a pointer to the zero-terminated string that designates the name of a button." This is a complicated idea, but apszBtnNam gets the idea across much faster than does the English translation. Not only that, its appearance in the call to GBS_Txt2BtnNdx trivially shows that this argument is being passed to the daughter function without modification. By the way, "Hungarian" is a reference to the prefix notation inventor, a Microsoftie named Charles Szymony. Since nobody can pronounce his last name (he is from Hungary originally), it was decided to call the idea simply the pronouncable "Hungarian Notation" instead of the unpronouceable "Szymony Notation". Presumably everyone at Microsoft knows who "The Hungarian" is. :) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now let's consider the variable name "kDevTyp_PovBtn". Here the prefix "k" means compile-time constant. This is just as informative and much less distracting than the industry-standard capital letters "DEVTYP_POVBTN" would be. Finally, here's the difference between an Ndx and a Cnt: for (iBtnNdx=0; iBtnNdx<iMaxBtnCnt; iBtnNdx++)

This is a continuation of some comments in the Fright Stimulator thread located here ... https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=44. That thread had been taken so far off-topic by me that I decided to start a new one. Here it is ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My wife and I did our PADI scuba diving training in Key West in 1987. (Skylab, you HAVE heard what follows, I'm simply parking the story where I can get at it more easily in the future.) We originally planned to stay a few days, maybe a week, the trip being for the specific purpose of getting our PADI certificates. Well, we loved Key West so much that we stayed a month. During that time we talked seriously about staying there permanently but we didn't do it because a) our family was rooted in Colorado, and because b) we had a consulting business that had us traveling between NYC, Denver and Colorado Springs, but that could not have been conducted out of Key West. Had I known that our consulting business was going to crash at about the same time that Golden Midi failed, and that our subsequent graphic arts and printing business would also fail, this time pushing us into bankruptcy, we definitely would have stayed in Key West and the h-word with the big money we thought would continue forever. (Even if you ignore inflation our income now is about 25% of what it was then. It would not have been difficult for us to manage staying on had we been willing to set our sights much lower the way we subsequently learned to do.) So while I don't regret Golden Midi, or consulting, or the graphics/print operation, the fact is that if I had known what was going to happen I'd have said "The heck with it all, let's go camp out on Mel Fisher till he gives low paying jobs doing exploratory diving in return for becoming investors". Or whatever. Had we really wanted to stay we'd have found a way ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Just as our daughter's best friend from high school later found a way. She went to Key West on vacation, reacted the same way we did, stayed, waited on tables till Fisher said "yes", and then worked for him for a year as a wreck diver. She left only because she's a road runner. Determinedly single, since leaving high school her life has followed a set bachelorette pattern. She moves someplace, starts an accounting business, makes a decent living from it for a year or two or three till she gets bored with the local scene, and then she moves on to some other place she's been curious about, opens a new accounting business, etc etc etc. So it wasn't unusual for her to decide to stay in Key West. The only difference was that for once she decided not to open an accounting business (too much local competition) and decided instead to become a wreck diver, supporting herself by waiting tables in the meantime. So, Lisa, hats off to you. In the best tradition of the USA you took charge of your own life and made things happen your way. Lisa got the entrepreneur genes from her father who, when laid off from a high tech management job in the Springs, became a dealer of sunglasses in the regional flea markets. Over the next couple of years he built the business to a point where it was providing far more income than his management ever had, with more job satisfaction, and with much less stress. I don't know what happened after that but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he discovered franchising and is a multimillionaire. Such is the USA, where many people become entrepreneurs by accident, not because they wanted to but because life circumstances FORCED them to. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But our diving instructor was the one who came and stayed. A highly paid advertising exec on Mad Ave in NYC, he had been working on an ulcer and decided to take an extended vacation in Key West. The vacation had lasted 17 years by the time we met him. :) So he came down on vacation, started diving lessons the next day, loved it and continued to dive till he had his instructor's certificate, living off savings from his job on Madison Avenue. Once he was certified as an instructor he started paid instructor work immediately and never stopped, for the same reasons that some CFIs choose to remain CFIs -- meeting people and seeing/helping their students to grow.

P.S. ... There's more to the scuba diving story but I've decided to continue it in a new thread located here ... https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=45

These days I have a different way of avoiding stress. First, I do very little flying online. Instead I make up my own departures and my own arrivals, and I pull my own route or arrival runway changes. Second, when I feel myself on the edge of overload I simply pause the sim, something that is a no-no on VATSIM and other online services. My goal is to have fun, and to try to increase the workload I can carry, but I really have no interest in learning to cope with stress per se because I'm no longer doing real world flying, I'm simply out to have fun. (And anyway most of the flying I do these days is product test flying.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But there was one facet of my life where I implemented your advice, and it was when my wife and I decided to get PADI scuba diving licenses. Early on I found that I was using air at an incredible rate. My instructor realized that I must have been breathing way too deeply and way too often -- because I was scared without realizing it. So he told me to do exactly what you have told me to do -- relax. And it worked. By relaxing I never had to suck hard for air, I used less of it, my dives were longer and much more enjoyable, and I never risked running out. In fact as part of our training we did a wreck dive at 90-120 feet, a mind-blowing experience. We didn't go inside the wreck (a sunken freighter), but encountering its big propeller, half-buried in the mud yet towering over us, and then gliding silently and effortlessly over the monster hull from stern to stem, was eerie and thrilling, almost an out of body experience ... And I wasn't bothered by the depth -- the knowledge that the now-much-less-visible surface was WAY above us -- nor was I bothered by having to stop twice? on the way up to decompress. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The only time I have been bothered underwater was during training. A group of us went down 30 feet to a sandy offshore bottom where we were to swap our scuba gear with a pre-selected neighbor. I found it extremely difficult to surrender my mouthpiece even though we had taken off the rigs first and would simply need to switch to our neighbors' mouthpieces before putting on that person's rig. But I did it. If you're going to dive you have to learn to be willing to get rid of your rig and start buddy-breathing with somebody else. It may be the only way to free yourself after you've gotten caught on something, or if you let yourself run out of air, or whatever.

As I was discussing with a friend yesterday, I sometimes refer to FS as "Fright Stimulator". This is because a bad weather instrument arrival and approach is quite capable of confusing me to the point of panic. You see, my headwork is very bad. It's why I gave up flying in the real world. I can keep up with the workload of hand flying my vintage 727-200 in IFR conditions as long as everything is going well, but if I'm flying on VATSIM, for example, and the controller pulls a last minute change of runway on me, my game plan goes out the window because my radio frequency setup has gone out the window. So I need to consult the charts in order to retune the vintage radios, all while maneuvering the aircraft per the controller's directions or, worse, while trying to execute a new arrival that the controller may very well have tasked me to execute on my own. So folks like my good friend skylab have my deepest respect. What is very difficult for me -- avoidance of overload while under stress -- comes easily to them. They remain calm even in complex situations whereas I will predictably panic when the workload passes a certain threshhold. A similar thing happens when I play games like ATC 2. I can manage a certain workload, but add just one more aircraft and I will saturate, go into panic mode, lose the picture and blow the scenario. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As my friend observed, it's amazing that a game can be so immersive as to incite actual fear in me.

Conclusion first, then the background ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx PPLs, If you're going to fly in the mountains, get some instruction first from an experienced mountain flyer, preferably a CFI. If you're not willing to pay for instruction, or to take time out for instruction, then at least read about the subject and talk to people who've done a lot of it. If you don't, the following story from a few days ago could easily happen to you. The accident details have not been reported in the daily press, and they won't be because the story is now yesterday's news. (If I want the details I'll have to wait for an NTSB general aviation synopsis report.) Here's the deal ... Texas businessman flies his immediate family -- wife and kids -- to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in a Cessna 172, in good weather. (Field elevation roughly 6900 feet MSL.) Presumably they had a good time in one of the great vacation spots in this state. (Or any other.) So they head for home ... 172 ... wife and kids, presumably they all have baggage ... presumably they fill the tanks, because they're going to Texas ... and it's bad weather ... and the man of the family doesn't even file a flight plan. Predictably the airplane failed to arrive at their home airport. A search revealed nothing. Then, three days ago, some hikers found the wreckage of the aircraft, with all aboard killed in the accident, remains not immediately unidentifiable. Don't let it happen to you. Flying at 6800 feet in a grossed out aircraft in bad weather over even (especially?) the summertime Rockies is simply asking for trouble ... And to put your whole family at risk the way this guy did is simply unconscionable. Maybe he had an instrument ticket, maybe he didn't. But mountain flying can be very unforgiving, and he came from Texas, which is not exactly the best place to learn about flying the Rockies in underpowered, overloaded SEL aircraft.

Korea ... My half brother is fifteen years older than me. Over my mother's strenuous objections he enlisted in the Air Force when the war started, wanting to be a pilot. Well, they trained him up to fly but then instead made him a navigator on A-26 night intruder missions into North Korea. After some large number of missions they let him actually fly, C-47s based in Japan somewhere. (Aside: Again I have a strong deja vu feeling. If I've told you this story before, please forgive -- my memory is flaky these days.) My brother reports that one bad weather night, intending to land at Airport A he instead landed by mistake at Airport B ten miles away! (And remember that he had been a navigator earlier for quite some time, on night missions no less. :))

Re pictures, it's the new album capability here at FlightSim.com. Uploads are hosted by the site but to my knowledge you can't have two sizes of image, small versus full-screen. You can only have small, to a maximum size of 600x600 pixels. Maybe this is a nit. Re the tractor, presumably it had to race itself ... which reminds me ... Another joke out of Russia from my high school years was, "Yesterday an international automobile race was held. The Russian car came in second while the American car came in next to last", the joke being that it was a two-car race, and that the American car had won. :)

OMG -- no, strike that -- I'll be hornswoggled, a steam tractor! Presumably it actually runs? Presumably it's authentic? But why do they (the Train-Sim members) get to have thumbnails plus full size while we (FlightSim members) are restricted to 600x600? (If that's what the numbers are.)

You got to see so many jazz greats. I got to see all the early heroes of rock (some other day) but the closest I came in person to big band music was Lloyd Price, who was really a pop guy. You mentioned Great Lakes. Okay, I'll bite. That will have been Great Lakes NAS, so you must have been a naval aviator at some point? Or did UAL have some kind of base there? EDIT: I remember now. You will not have been a naval aviator, and you came to flying relatively late in life.

And I forgot to tell you about Bill Lyons ... Bill had been -- are you ready for this? -- a Titan missile silo crew member up in Wyoming. Out of sheer boredom he got a synthesizer and taught himself to play. Nine (repeat nine) months later he was discharged from the Air Force ... ... And immediately landed a gig on the oldies circuit, after which he immediately transitioned to cruise ships, which can be Big Money because of passenger tips if you play well, like people and know how to schmooze. Anyway, Bill was between cruises when he dropped in on us the first time. He wanted to work with us in part because he had heard about us and wanted to learn more about what we were up to. He certainly didn't need what little money we were paying though he wanted it and was happy to have it. And I mis-spoke earlier. As I now remember clearly, it was the repeating two-bar tick-tack guitar part in "Owner Of A Lonely Heart". (Even Eric couldn't follow that part when I asked him later to double-check my work.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So Bill had the skills of a ten-year keyboards player even though he had been at it less than a year when he began to work professionally -- an astonishing accomplishment. It came as no surprise that he counted people like Eric among his musician friends.

I want to add a comment about jazz, Golden Midi and Duke Ellington ... We did several Ellington covers. As a result of having to analyze to death the pieces in question ("Satin Doll" and "Take The A-Train" come to mind), I gradually came to realize that Ellington was singlehandedly responsible for all the modern harmony jazz chords I had learned for guitar in the late 50s and early 60s. I don't even remember the correct name for it but one of my favorites of the pioneering chords is something like a major thirteenth with a flatted ninth. And of course ninth chords play a big role in funk scratch guitar parts. Ellington probably didn't invent the ninth (I wouldn't know, I'm largely ignorant of harmony theory) but he certainly popularized it, and many of his harmonies he DID invent because I can't recall hearing them before his recordings. So while we don't normally think of him that way, Ellington has had just as great an influence on music as Beethoven did. He was a great composer and his music will still be played centuries from now.

Unfortunately I do think that it's a dream. However, as you know, when musicians get together and play, especially jazz musicians, all consciousness of race, age, ethnicity, blah blah blah, disappears. So I agree with you. It ought to be the case that music can overcome all the national differences and situations that trigger the fighting ... ... But I don't think it will ever happen, certainly not in your and my lifetimes.

Just to make things easy, folks, a link to the news article Nels mentioned is in the second paragraph of my opening post of this thread. And Nels, speaking of news, I used to speak Russian and when I was in high school a current Russian joke was ... "There is no truth in The News < that's what Pravda means> and no news in The Truth <which is what Izvestia means>" :D

I've never done any uploads so I don't know what the two methods are. As regards what might be easier for Nels, write to him as nels@flightsim.com or ask him in Outer Marker. I'm sure he'll respond sometime during the USA day.

P.S. Fellow musician member skylab knows this stuff but other people might not ... In the nitty gritty world of working bands and session players, professional musicians don't play, they "blow". So at a certain point in "Funky Drummer" James Brown says "Let the funky drummer blow" meaning "drum solo now, please". Another way of saying the same thing: In "Rapp Payback", at one point JB says "Let's give the bassman some", meaning "Let the bass player blow". Also, musicians don't have instruments, they have "axes". Why? I've no idea. Neither does any other musician I've spoken with about this. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx By the way, the drum solo in "Funky Drummer" is the source of most of the drum samples that you hear in hip-hop and rap pieces. To give credit where credit is due, the funky drummer is Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer who does the catchy one-bar signature rhythm on so many James Brown recordings