Last night I passed my private pilots test. I am now a pilot. I can take passengers. I overshot a couple of the questions on the oral exam, but I got through it. My flying skills were great. The only difficulty i had was the short field landing. I finally got it enough to pass the 3rd time I tried. Now I’m just waiting for my plastic license to come in the mail from the FAA. Next, I’m going to get checked out in the other planes the club has. I want to open up my options.
Tomorrow I shall be doing my long cross country flight. I will be going from KOSU to KMFD then to KFDY and back again. This will be the longest solo to date. I did one leg of it with my instructor. The flight was uneventful, which is a good thing. Surprises are generally not welcome during flights. Once I land, I intend to spend some pouring over my log book and determining what hours and requirements I have left to be eligible for my check ride. This is an exciting time indeed. The end is in sight.
After many trips to many different stores, and asking many people their varying opinions, I have finally pulled the trigger on new furniture for my media room. This is after having new carpet installed and putting a fresh coat of paint on the walls after I spackled and removed the old faux cedar beams. This is what the room looks like now: 
I also got new ceiling fans.
The room is all fresh and clean and perfect. The furniture I ordered is a couch and 2 recliners for seating from FrontRoom Furnishings. The couch and chairs are leather, and look like this: 
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I also ordered 4 tables from Ashley Furniture. They are nice. They have very clean lines and slate stone for tops. Here is the coffee table:
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The rest of the set can be viewed here. The next decision to be made for the room will be how to do the home theater setup. Im leaning towards getting nice cable channel to mount the speaker wire along the ceiling. Thus allowing me to put the 4 satellite speakers in the 4 corners of the room. I am going to try to run a cable for the sub under the carpet (i shoulda thought of that before the carpet) so i can put it behind the couch. The tables and couch are coming in about a week and 2 weeks. By the end of the month I should have everything in order. The tables cost me $830. The seating cost me 2800. Now that I have it all ordered and paid for, I want it now! Stupid “custom order” nonsense. Give me mah stuff!
So it has been over a week since I got my new Palm Pre from the Sprint store. Overall I am very happy with it. The keyboard took a little getting used to. I find im about the same speed with texting as I was with my old Sanyo MM-9000. The qwerty vs. T9 offsets the loss of speed. The phone has not crashed or failed to perform basic functions. In terms of things that would be nice to have is the ability to save an image from a web page without having to screenshot it. Also, I find the email settings are not working the way I expect them to. I have both my email accounts set to only receive manually, but the phone still seems to poll the servers for mail by itself. The screen is bright and the graphics are fantastic. I have played with nearly every single app in the app store so far. I love the accuweather app – It looks amazing. The built-in music is a little slow, but after all this is a phone, not an mp3 player. I am very happy with the calendar synching. Very handy indeed.
My main wish right now is that Palm releases the SDK so I can get to work on the apps I want to write for this platform. I’m gonna be all over that!
Bob and I were up semi-late last night playing with Sketchup. We downloaded it on to his new laptop. We then noticed that google had like 30 videos for demonstrating how to use it. We were both surprised that there were so many. But after watching like 10 or so, we realized why there are so many. This program is WAY powerful. Bob started sketching up his desk. We are going to build it use galvanized fence posts and a sheet of MDF. The problem we seemed to experience the most was moving something along the Z plane. Sketchup didnt seems to want to move it “up” and “down”. And component snapping seems to not work as expected. I also thing they they need to allow snapping of a circular object based on its central point. It is something that I want to play with and experiment more with. The tool set is very easy to use tho. I recommend using a real mouse with it tho. Bob seems to have some difficulty using only the touch pad on his new laptop.
Last night while out with R, we stopped by for dinner at Panera across the way from Lowe’s at Mill Run. While in line we were staring at the menu deciding on our evening fare. The live moved and the couple of guys in front of us gave their order to the cashier. Then added, “and whatever they are having.” indicating R and myself. I took this for a joke, smiled and looked back up at the menu. The guy who made the comment was dressed in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops. His companion was dressed in business casual. His companion said, “He’s serious. He’s not kidding. He really wants to buy you dinner.” Being the skeptical New Yorker, I was… skeptical. What’s the gag? do i have to buy a magazine subscription? Paint your fence? Are you going to give me a sales pitch for something? I was silent. R said, “You really don’t have to do that.” He said, “I know I don’t have to. But I want to.” At this point he pulled out what looked like business cards and introduced himself as being part of LifePoint Church. I KNEW it! There had to be a scam. Now he’s going to sit with us and harangue into his church. I was all set to tell Brad and Nick to buzz off. But he said two things that gave me pause. (I might paraphrase here a bit) He said Churches do a lot of “talking” about doing good – but not a lot of “doing”. I had to agree with him there. He also said, “No string attached”. This slogan was repeated in the little cards he gave us. The card was plain blue with the words “This is our simple way of saying God loves you. No strings attached.” On the back was contact information for the church. Feeling a little more comfortable R and I agreed. We shook hands and thanked him. We then gave our order to the cashier. Brad reminded us that our order was under another womans name. It appears he had bought not only our dinner (we were behind him) but also the dinner of the group of women in front of him. So all the food was under her name. I went off to get our drinks from the fountain while R stayed behind and chatted a bit. It seems there really WERE no strings attached. We ate our food at our own table, as did the group of women that also got free meals. It also gave us some topics for discussion during our meal. On our way out R made a point of going back over to Brad (who is the leader of the church) and thanking him again. We were then on our way. Without any requests to join him for services or any literature in hand that was forced upon us. Just a simple, “God Bless You”. I wished him a pleasant evening.
Now, I’m not going to start going to services or anything like that, I am not a religious person. I believe that just being nice to other people in general is all that one should do. I think perhaps though, as a result, I might smile to an extra stranger or two. I should also confess that I did go to the churches website and read for a minute or 4. I believe that shall be the extent of my involvement with the church. But, perhaps I will find a way to pay it forward so to speak. Help a stranger change a tire, drive someone walking along a highway exit ramp with a gas can to the station, wave to a random person. And maybe, just maybe, buy someone lunch.
I was just curious as to the weather outside. Instead of turning my head 180 degrees to look out the 6′ window behind me. I hit F12 to bring up my dashboard with my weather widget. It says its raining. Only THEN do i turn my head. I mutter, “hot damn, it IS raining…”
I’m amazed at myself.
And disappointed.
I spent 5 hours last night creating a wordpress widget last night. The widget is very simple. It uses the image generation API that librarything has made available. My widget is a sidebar widget. It is also full customizable with all the options and goodies that the API makes available. I have tried my best to follow all the WordPress standards and stuff. It was definitely fun. I think I stayed up too late finishing it tho.
This past weekend R and I went to The Montgomery Inn in KY. It was a very nice weekend getaway. We checked out the KY Horse Park and did a nice trail ride. It appears that I am allergic to horses. This sucks. I was sniffling and sneezing just a bit. I still enjoyed the ride tho. It was a nice leisurely weekend in a nice part of the state. The rolling hills and farms were a delight to drive past.
