*-)- welcome aboard *-)-
just me. my current interests and stories for the interwebs.
Instead, after two weeks of failure on what I can determine is / was on Google's Part, I successfully was able to import my CSV file only when it contained 4 lines under the header. With the suspicion that Google abandoned the Calendar application and (Coach McGurk) even diagnosed the service issue.
Read MoreI did it...my first attempt at Torrey Pines was a success. I kept my cadence up and felt pretty good once I got to the top. It was my first time riding by myself in a while and without surprise it definitely isn't as fun. It paid off as I got a ride back home once I reached my destination. As a matter of fact, I had it in me to bike back home along the same route and make a it a roundtrip but my phone was at 10% and I didn't want to get stuck somewhere without it just incase anything happened i.e. I'm too tired to ride up back the 56 bike path.
After the ride, I hung out for about an hour until Adelle got off of her 12 hour shift at Scripps La Jolla Hospital, headed to Robertos in Carmel Valley for some Carne Asada Fries then over to Yogurt World in Mira Mesa. Good eats for sure!
Thanks to that special someone that wrote in chalk along the bike path some motivational notes. In the beginning of the climb, there was in bright pink, "Almost there," followed by a "Dig Deep," then another,"Just kidding, a little more to go," and then the final, "You made it!" There was also a message saying,"Happy Birthday to D _ _ _ _." Some pretty awesome stuff to read while you struggle up the little hill.
Anyways, here's a post of my route. Check it out!
Of all the randomness in flying for the Delta Connection Carrier, Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA) based solely out of Atlanta, my four day schedule had an assignment that was to operate a Cincinnati to Miami roundtrip. New to me and apparently pretty new to the system I might add. Last summer, I got to fly the Miami system through Tallahassee, Florida and that was a blast, so I was really looking forward to this trip. I would have loved an overnight in MIA but I guess we won't be doing any of those in the near future. Flying towards Miami, we noticed that the normal summer cloud build-ups were in every quadrant. It was going to be all about the quick turn. Looking at our schedule, we also noticed that we had more than ample time to grab some Cuban Coffee and a sandwich. Coffee was a success but the sandwich place closed I guess. Massive fail as I was left to eat a Meat Stromboli from Sbarros. Definitely not the Cuban Sandwich I was hoping for.
I did my walk around and of course it stated to sprinkle a bit. Just enough to get me a little damp but not dripping. Flying out of Miami was a lot of fun though. Departing 8R we made a turn to the north and was vectored toward the northwest in order to get around and through some cloud build-up. Fun stuff! Check out the radar and the cloud picture of the cavern we flew through!
An of course after we landed in Cincinnati Airport which many of you might not know is 1) a ghost town since Delta has slowly changed all of its routing and deleted many flights from the CVG system 2) is actually located in Northern Kentucky. Check it out on this map:
We made our way to one of the nicer hotels we stay at, Hilton Airport, and then we headed out to celebrate my birthday. Happy hour at Applebees has become the common theme with overnights lately just because the deals are too good to pass up and there's nothing else nearby! We had a couple of drinks, great appetizers but I chose the liquid diet last night. Fun times! On the walk back to the hotel, we hit up Rafferty's for some of there fine honey butter croissants the called it a night. Good times guys and thanks for the great night!
Flying the CRJ700 has been definitely more exciting than the CRJ200 and this week was just another example. I guess it might be the mere fact that 1 more flight attendant / stewardess adds to the mix during dinner or that I'm just getting lucky being paired up with great crews. With that, this was a rather enjoyable week. The first night was an overnight in Quad Cities, Illinois which I have already blogged about... great food! Check it out here. (http://www.elijahnicolas.com/wp/2009/07/26/overnight-in-quad-cities/)
The next night exposed me to the true horrors that Newark, New Jersey is. Rudeness was in the air but friends were around to pick me up and create a lightened atmosphere. We headed to the Shorthills Mall which was pretty high society status. Too bad it was an indoor mall but shopping around is always fun when the weather outside is humid, muggy with a chance of thunderstorms. We ate at a great place called All American Joe's Bar (something like that) and concluded the night with a drive through a ritzy neighborhood w/ average home sales of $2-4M, stroll through it's local town full of boutique shops that had tennis outfits in the windows. I can't remember the name of the town but there was an theater playing Public Enemies and that was what we were watching. For a two and half hour movie, it kept me going. I enjoyed it thoroughly but I have to admit that 500 Days of Summer (trailer) was more entertaining. Johnny Depp had a great roll, Christian Bale looks a little skinny and didn't convince me so much, but overall it was a great biography on John Dillinger. Albeit more appealing I guess in it's very unique story telling. Go watch it already if you have not! It's playing in select theaters so make you scope out the local area for show times.
I'll write up part two tomorrow starting off with some good MIA weather story and capping it off with a fun night in Cincinnati...er Kentucky...that one place that we stayed at last night. Here's a picture of the morning sun rising over Manhattan skyline as seen from the Newark Airport. You can see the Empire State Building too if you take a close look! Check it out!
Found a great place near the hotel called Rock Island Brewing Company (map) that had a great selection of beers and food. I ended up with a Ribco Burger (comes with a fried egg! <-- freaking awesome) and a Delirium Nocturnum and two others. I wish that I can remember their names but they were all great! Quad Cities doesn't really open for business till after 1900 but a meal at 1700 is pretty choice especially when you have to go to sleep early in order to wake up at freaking 3:30AM!
The past week brought me to Baton Rouge, Montreal - Canada, followed by a quick night in St. Louis then back to San Diego for a ~35 mile bike ride. In all of that, I left my iPhone charger in Baton Rouge, got the chance to finally run in my new Asics GT-2140, try out a pair of Monster Beats by Dre headphones, ride the jumpseat home, sleep for 4 hours then ride early morning as far and fast within a time constraint. Good times all in all. Here are a few pics of the weeks' adventure.
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here's a map of my ride in San Diego:
It's been a little while since I rode ~40 miles. Most of my latest riding adventures added up to just shy of 15 miles around the local neighborhood with an effort level of 7. Reason being is that I've been trying to concentrate on my cadence more so than my mile time, but I thought I would kick it up a notch the past Friday, July 10th. My overall route covered the 56 Freeway Cycling Path up the coast and back. Pretty basic ride but it definitely has some long climbs throughout the the mix. By the time I was heading back home on the 56 climb, I was beat...I mean BEAT! My uncle beat me to the top by about 15 minutes and I was going nowhere averaging about a 6.5 mph climb. My Gatorade was exhausted, the FRS that I bought at B&L Solana Beach had already run through my body's veins and the water that was remaining in my bottles were warming up to the noon time heat.
I definitely need to pick it up a bit, but with my irregular dieting, irregular flight / workout schedule, it's hard to get that basic rhythm down. Here are pictures from the ride.
Everyday, every plane that I fly is a different story. With various maintenance issues that are posted from time to time, line pilots have to learn how to deal with each occurrence. Each plane is unique in there own way but of there are similarities between the various anomalies. The Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) has morning sickness (has to warm up a little bit in the cool months in order for the electronics to "come alive"), has an awfully hard time getting cool during the feverish months of summer and little bugs here and there that “pop” up from time to time. Today was just one of those instances. (actually a week or two ago) Getting pushed back from the gate is when we usually begin to start our engines in order to move about and head towards our respective departure runway. Because of this, we don’t’ usually become aware of the problems that we might have with our electrical systems or our powerplant systems. After our electrical system switched over from the APU (auxiliary power unit) to the right-side engine driven generator, we noticed that our main battery was being activated and the backup TIES were switching back and forth showing us that there was an abnormality within our system. It was posted to be a short roundtrip flight but it was leg one of four so any delays were going to prolong our duty day.
After talking to maintenance we were advised to go back to a gate for further inspection. We had to wait around for about 20 minutes for a new gate and then once parked, we were told my maintenance that it would take about 30 minutes for a battery swap. Mind you, we had a plane full of passengers from moms with strollers and multiple bags to businessmen and other various clientle of Delta. Since it was only going to take “30 minutes” we were advised that the passengers remain on the plane so that we could get out of there as fast as possible once we were ready to go. Well, after the first battery swap, 30 minutes later, we ended up finding out that we would need to deplane as maintenance would have to diagnose the issue for about 2-3 hours.
We deplaned, ended up getting assigned a different aircraft, which was still enroute from another destination and waited as the clocked raced on. From being on-time, to being 1 hour delayed, we ended up being 3 hours delayed by the time we took off. With so many variables in the airline industry, these types of delays end up creating negative publicity and passenger dissatisfaction.
Needless to say, we got our passengers to their desired destination safely and ended up having our day cut short. This was made so with a standby crew that ended up operating our 3rd and 4th leg so that the passengers on those flights would remain on time. I got on the next available flight to San Diego and am home relaxing until the next adventure begins.
I just had to make a shout out and create a separate post on this awesome plug-in by BraveNewCode:WPTouch (Plug-In Website)/ WPtouch iPhone Theme (WordPress Plug-In Site)
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
It's awesome as you can now visit simply elijahnicolas.com on your iPhone/iTouch/Android mobile device and load up a very friendly iPhone/iTouch/Android webpage. Check it out, browse around and post a comment!
It was easy to activate as I don't feel the need to edit or do anything with it. It's was way too simple as are many of the various plug-ins that are available on the WordPress Content Manager Platform. Of course, if you want to view my website in it's normal site appearance, there's an option in the footer courtesy of the app's awesome interface options.
rating: Perfect 10!!!
As some of you know or don't know, I work for a commercial airline that serves as a connection carrier that is solely based out of Atlanta flying for the big "D". I started out thinking that the associated flight benefits were going to be something out of the extraordinary; Coupled with the excitement to travel everywhere and anywhere in the system, I set out to just to do that. Being tired after flying for four days kind of knocks out the excitement of getting on another plane but the biggest let down is the game that you end up playing while traveling on "non-revenue" status. Being classified as a non-rev, you are left dwindling at the bottom of the barrel scavenging for open seats on aircraft that fly from your desired point A to point B. This status is below those that are of course, revenue customers, as well as mismanaged customers, those who missed their connections due to late arrivals, weather or maintenance, employees of the mother airline that have a higher seniority date as well as some others that might have been just plain and simple: a higher priority in the system.
The current industry as a whole has been reporting passenger loads exceeding those pre-9/11 which doesn't necessarily also account for the multitude of flights that have opened up in our system. All in all, with more people flying that ever before, the planes are fuller than ever. With current airline practices accounting for roughly 10% of passengers to miss their flights, airlines are forced under the rules of carriage to "oversell" a given flight based upon a pattern that is developed for that particular city pair and time of day/month/year.
It is not completely ridiculous to conclude that with these loads, getting on a given flight with a buddy pass is near impossible. It is a sad privilege really because you want flights to be sold out which means money and profits, but the it doesn't give you room to appreciate the perks of yesteryear. Smaller planes, less frequency in the upcoming months and overall reduction in flying (10% cut in Delta's domestic flights this fall) will prevail in creating an unwanted roller coaster ride of commuting back and forth. Here's to the jumpseat on the 757 and the 4 hours of one way, unadulterated, unpaid travel!
Oh yeah, my buddy passes are expensive too but that's doesn't allow me to tout them as a reciprocal gift during an exchange of affairs, so if you want one, just ask. =)
Deducing from FAR 121.471, a pilot can log just shy of 8 hours of flight time while being on duty for a maximum of 16 hours straight as long as he/she gets 9 hours of rest. Most airlines institute a 14-hour duty day limitation, which can be extended to 16 hours due to inclement weather and mechanical delays. But in no instance shall a crew take a flight knowing well that they would violate the 16 hour regulation. At that point, your pilots usually advise you that they will need to re-crew the aircraft and flight in order to get you to your destination.
Read MoreIt's been over a month since my last update, but since then, I've moved over to the CRJ700 / CRJ900 making an extra $1.00 for flying 20-26 more passengers while operating an aircraft approximately 20,000 pounds heavier. It's been such a great aircraft but the mere fact that I'm flying something new and learning again keeps me grounded.
I've also started up another venture called "peak interest" so make sure to visit the website. You can also follow @whatspyi on twitter for more up-to-date messages and happenings. I've always wanted to start a podcast, so I finally found someone I can jibe with back and forth for countless hours and "peak interest" is the culmination of our efforts. Beyond being a work in progress, it's rough on many edges, but fine tuning it is something that will keep me busy throughout the next few weeks. I'm sitting here at Starbucks in Rancho Penasquitos and within the first 40 minutes, I've already added a few widgets to the new Thesis theme that I deployed a couple of days ago. I know it's dangerous to go live right away with kinks, but since we're growing, I'm sure you wouldn't mind growing with us.
If you haven't already, listen to our podcast on www.whatspyi.com or subscribe on iTunes via this link (opens iTunes).
So I finaly gave in and decided to watch "Twilight". Granted I was riding onboard Delta's first class and had the complimentary option so I figured might as well get acquainted with what everyone has been talking about. I have to admit that it was a little slow, and that the colors of the movie where a little too dreary for me, but overall, the story was alright. It isn't something that I'll be diving into, but different is a good thing. A great piano piece on Edwards' CD Player proved to be inspirational. I might just have to pick it up, learn it and play it. I also liked the theme song that he was playing on the piano, so maybe that too!
I can't say that I'm too enthralled by the whole vampire thing. If you know me, I'm not all into that genre of horror, scariness, thriller type; not that this follows that lineage, but it's okay. Of course, now that I've seen the first, there are so many unanswered questions that I want to follow up on so maybe I might just have to indulge a bit.
