- Rave: MovieQuotes.com. If you need a good way to kill some time and love movie quotes like I do, try the quote game. My sister and I interact exclusively through quotes from ten 1980s movies. OK, not quite, but close.
- Rant: Fog in Islip. Why can’t they add a CAT III approach at KISP (Long Island-MacArthur near Islip, New York)? Southwest had to cancel several flights yesterday due to thick fog, while we could have landed safely at several other airports in the northeast under the same conditions. With a CAT III approach, we can land safely with as little as 700 feet of visibility. To be fair, there might be a technical reason preventing such an approach, such as an obstacle or lack of room for the required lighting system.
- Rave: Smartphone Syncing. I like my new Blackjack. I loaded my Dec work schedule and events into it and synced it with my home PC. Then I reversed the process, loading my Jan and Feb work schedule into the PC, and then syncing it into my phone. That rocks.
- Rant: Ethanol. The government has apparently decided that ethanol is one of the best answers to our dependence on foreign oil. Unfortunately, ethanol is inefficient and expensive to produce and difficult to distribute, and it is driving up the price of many items that use corn during production (milk, for example). Adding ethanol to gasoline actually reduces your fuel economy. For more info, check out this article. I’m no energy expert, and I realize there’s no easy answer to our energy problems, but I don’t think ethanol is going to save us. Think hydrogen, people!
- Rave: My Family After getting to see most members of my extended family and in-laws over the Thanksgiving week, I must say how thankful I am for all of them. My family is no more perfect than any other, and we have plenty of interesting stories, but they’re overall good folks, and somehow we all manage to get along and have a good time together despite all of our little quirks and differences in personality. I actually look forward to seeing my family during the holidays.
Category Archives: Environment
Machines I Like
I like my car. After airing up the tires and spending lots of time on the highway, my Honda Fit achieved 34.6 MPG. That makes me happy. Sell your gas-guzzler and buy a Honda.
Tuesday night I had a special training session for work. A coworker and I spent two hours in a 737-700 flight simulator at Southwest. Yes, we both flew a bit, but the point was for us to observe an instructor pilot performing several different scenarios. I can’t adequately describe for you how realistic the simulator is, but it makes even gray-haired pilots sweat every year during their training. When we took off, I was pushed back into the seat, and I felt every bump on the “runway.” It was absolutely amazing. We saw landings in fog, stalls, windshear, engine-out climbouts, and landings on icy runways – the types of problems that our pilots don’t see on a daily basis but need to be able to handle if they ever do come up. I tried climbing out of Reno, an airport in a mountainous region of Nevada, right after an engine failure. It made me very glad that we have such well-trained and capable pilots up front rather than myself! I would tell you to go get your own sim while you’re getting your Honda, but they’re pretty expensive and hard to fit in your garage.
I also updated the Family page with links to cousin websites for Jeff and Lisa Cerney (excellent and timely if you can stomach the frequent pro-Aggie comments) and Joe and Erin Cerney (horribly out of date, but worth a look due to cute pics of daughter Paige).
Why I Like High Gas Prices
Wow, an update two days in a row! I don’t have anything to say about the game except that despite the outcome, it was very fun. =)
Today, I want to talk about why I like these high gas prices. No, I don’t like paying $35+ each time I fill up, which is nearly once a week. I like them because they are the only way to convince us to conserve gas. It’s easy to buy the huge, gas-guzzling SUVs and drive our own cars wherever we want when gas is $1/gallon. Now that it’s $3/gallon, people are buying more fuel-efficient cars, thinking more about alternative fuels, carpooling more, and using mass transit more. Jenny and I are even starting to talk about moving closer to work within a few years. The US consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s oil production but has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Think about that. To make matters worse, significant portions of the world’s oil supply are controlled by Middle Eastern countries whose opinions of us range from uneasy tolerance to hatred. President Bush was correct recently when he said, “America is addicted to oil.” Paying so much for it will slowly help us break our addiction.