On the flight tip, I have a stage check on Monday that will thumbs-up or thumbs-down my progression to the solo cross country section.  That is: piloting a gas tank with a huge sword on the front, alone and basically unsupervised, above you / your loved ones / your property.  To the residents of Maine and NH: please try to keep your normal “firing rifles into the air in celebration of your freedom” to a minimum.

I’m not a lawyer or anything, but in the immortal voice of Bill Murray from Ghost Busters, “this chick IS toast!”

The correct “response” is for her to call a press conference, acknowledge that she spent years betraying the public trust, announce her resignation from the state senate, call off her re-election campaign, and speak frankly about all the other shady backroom detritus that’s floated within earshot during her time on Beacon Hill.

Of course, we can most likely look forward to her doubling down, and doing whatever she can to save her ass *except* flipping on cronies.  Why not?  Because I’m sure she expects to run another campaign someday, even after serving jail time, and she wants people to owe her a favor the next time around.

But maybe, just maybe, a bunch of other people will get caught up in this shitstorm without her help.  Time to stock up on popcorn.

Update: Did I call it, or did I call it? Then again, it was sort of like watching the mouse hit the bar 49 times to get the cocaine reward, then predicting the mouse would hit the bar a 50th time instead of checking into mouse rehab.

Lesson #1: If you’re going to navigate by ground reference at night, take a macro view and aim for really big, borderline unmistakable stuff.  Cities, lakes, coastlines, midsize airports with approach indicators.

Lesson #2: As a basic part of any flight leg > 50 miles or so, but especially a night flight, pick two VORs or other radio nav aids, get a solid feel for where they should be relative to you at a couple spots along your intended route, and just tune your two nav radios onto them before takeoff.  Fumbling with a sectional chart under the yoke in a darkened cockpit feels sketchy enough with an instructor in the plane, but could push one toward an unproductive emotional edge on a solo trip.  Make some bold marks on the sectional chart around the VORs’ compass roses.  Make a sticky note with the VORs’ morse code identifier strings in bold marker and put it somewhere easy to spot.  Overall, think creatively about how to construct a very high-speed level-1 cache for stuff you might really want to know right freaking now, particularly anything that could be stressful to look up in the moment.

Lesson #3: Do the above even when you have high-end GPS in the cockpit.  But when your GPS is working, don’t be ashamed to use it, because it’s freaking sweet.  When they’re in the plane, your instructor and/or FAA examiner want you to show them you know the old-school business.  When they’re not in the plane, they just want you to fly safely and relaxed.  There’s no shame in autopilot slaved to a GPS, especially if it frees up some cycles to be extra vigilant working the radio and spotting traffic.

As someone with a budget relevant (however thinly) to the company’s bottom line, I was to spend the days preceding said party at a series of meetings.  I was thoroughly-enough introduced to other business-area leads last year, and I’m keeping in touch with those whose products dovetail with stuff I’m looking to build.  So while I’m always interested to hear what the wiser and more-proven execs have to say, particularly our board chairman, I’ve sort of been feeling like my time could be better spent doing something else this year.

I stopped the CEO in the hallway yesterday, spoke my mind, and I’m doing something else this year.  December 1st-5th, I and my right-hand will be in Northwest Arkansas attending a mainframe assembly-language programming boot camp.

The worry I feel about the market tanking is worry for other people.  58 year-olds, employees of cash-hungry startups, etc.

I don’t expect to lose my job, and if I do, I expect to find another one.  If the value of our home plummets too far to recover before we want to move, our first child can either live in a small apartment, or we can move somewhere way cheaper and keep the apartment as an investment.  If I feel some deep yearning to start a business at a time when no venture capital is available, then I’ll just have to build a great product for a market I know well, and be profitable almost immediately.  As the market continues to tank, I expect to funnel even more income into the riskiest-rated 401(k) funds on the menu.

And the thing is, my situation isn’t anywhere near the upper edge of the national “financial stability” bell curve.  Am I just willfully ignorant and/or mildly self-delusional, or is there something deeply rational about this feeling that I, and most other people under 45 or so, should listen to current financial news with an interest that’s fundamentally devoid of fear?

Last night was back to the practice area for some night time.  Stalls, steep turns, and a couple night landings to meet reqs.  My next flight will be a night XC up to Maine, which I think may be identical to the first leg of my first solo XC.  If I can follow my own flight plan in the dark, it should be trivial to fly the same route in the daytime.

The FAA check ride is getting close enough to make me kinda nervous.

What.  Is.  The.  Point.

Of selling dance music (already a niche f*$%ing market) ON THE INTERNET if you’re going to RESTRICT SALES BY GEOGRAPHY?!?!?!?!  And moreover, if there’s a song that I’m not “geographically eligible” to purchase, WHY WOULD YOU PRESENT IT TO ME FOR AUDITIONING, AND PUT A BUTTON MARKED “BUY” NEXT TO IT?!?!

Quoth TJIC: “Rope.”

2. If the weather holds, I’m flying with my instructor down to Hyannis this afternoon.  I’m plotting two courses; one that assumes we get cleared into Logan’s class B airspace and another that takes us around it.

3. TJIC and I are both looking forward to seeing some off-duty cops get thrown in jail for punking civie flaggers on worksites.

4. The same economic events that are (rightly or wrongly) nudging people Obama’s way in the national election may also nudge people toward Yes on Question 1 locally (repeal of MA income tax).  Setting aside the whole “they promised to bring taxes back to 5% and ignored our ballot initiative to force them to” angle, I think there’s a decent case to be made for how repealing the income tax could not only help the regional economy, but lead to higher state tax revenues over the long term.  I understand why some state employee unions are flipping out over it, but hockey stick curves aren’t just some evil myth invented to prey on teachers.  Then again, easy for me to say.  Good luck, everyone.

Phase 1:  “The game is rigged.”

The debates will be unfair, because the moderator is always some left-wing nutjob.  This follows from the premise that the moderators are drawn from the MSM, and everyone in the MSM is a left wing nutjob.  Jim Lehrer is biased.  Gwen Ifill desperately wants Obama to win so she can sell more books.  Giving a straight answer to a debate question, for a conservative candidate, would be implicitly surrendering to the bias of the event itself.  It is a conservative candidate’s patriotic duty to say what he or she came to say, regardless of what biased questions are posed by the moderator.  The pressure of being forced to go up against both the moderator and the opposing candidate is so great, that if our candidate is somehow able to recite his or her talking points while retaining some coherent English sentence structure, may our cup runneth over with bonus points.

Phase 2: “If you heard it was a blowout, we only won the game by a little bit.  If you heard it was close, ZOMG we rocked impossibly hard!”

Whatever you heard, our candidate slew the double dragon of the moderator and the opposing candidate.  We know this because our candidate didn’t recoil into a pre-linguistic state on camera, or degenerate to the point of shitting on the podium and throwing feces into the crowd.  He or she formed thoughts despite the hopes, dreams, schemes, and expectations of local/remote Communists, local/remote Terrorists, and anyone who writes for a newspaper or appears on a nightly news broadcast.  Any pre-debate doubts on our part had little if anything to do with his/her past performances, and most if not everything to do with how his/her performances were subsequently reported in the liberal MSM.  You see, we’re all partially brainwashed by the constant media barrage of liberal messages, so we’ve lost our ability to properly determine for ourselves what a broadcast of underprepared and/or totally incoherent nervous babbling looks or sounds like.

Feralchimp’s meta-scorecard:

• Biden and Palin each performed WAY better than their [detractors hoped / supporters feared] they might.  Minimal incoherent babbling from Palin, no F-bombs from Biden.  Ship it!
• Those hoped/feared performance levels were both lower than what people really expected in both cases, but much closer to expected in Palin’s case.  The worst case scenario was so bad for her, people on the Right were unironically talking about getting shitfaced as a coping mechanism.
• Biden debated better than Palin, but Palin debated [ more (better than expected) ] than Biden.
• Biden supporters saw Biden win the show.
• Palin supporters saw Palin win the show.

If you think that setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq equates to “raising the white flag of surrender,” and anyone could be President given a year or so of the right speech coaching, McCain/Palin is the ticket for you!

If you think that giving judges the power to force lenders to write down the principal on a failing mortgage is anything other than the government using threats of force to unconstitutionally void contracts between consenting parties, Obama/Biden is the ticket for you!

Issues where I prefer McCain’s position:
pro globalization, clear anti eminent domain invocation for non-public use, pro nuclear power, anti ethanol subsidies, pro migration away from social security

Issues where I prefer Obama’s position:
pro abortion choice, pro explicit and sustained sex education, pro “attacking Iraq in 2003 was a mistake”, anti “don’t ask don’t tell”, pro aggressive federally-funded stem cell research, anti immunity for telecoms complicit in warrantless wiretapping cases

Supposed differentiators that aren’t swaying me due to my own ignorance and/or the candidates’ lack of clarity, or (least likely) a personal sense that the universe lacks sufficient example data with which a totally informed, reasonably intelligent person of moral standing could possibly make a sufficiently-informed choice:
No Child Left Behind, timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, supposed difference of opinion on Mexican border fencing, medical marijuana (both candidates are anti federal raids in states with pro weed laws), Bush tax cut permanence, gun control, universal health care