President Obama Cairo Speach – very long

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaxZPiiKyMw

A Mistake!

Somewhere back a week or three I made a mistake in a website edit. The site is for a professional organization that I have been helping out. I was using my traveller notebook and I forgot to download the index.xxx files before I edited them. Well, not only did I edit a file several months old and upload it to the site but then later when I was back on the desktop machine I overwrote the good file with the old one. Guess when the last backup was made? Needless to say I made a mess of things that has taken two days to get all the data up on the site again.

I was sufficiently disturbed that we left the boat early to get back to the desktop just to see if I had saved the correct file or over-written it. Not a good day yesterday! I am still sort of bummed.

Gloomy Thursday

The Dow lost a couple of hundred points over the last two days. I guess that is sort of bad news. The skies are winter overcast and it looks wet and cool outside. What makes it even more gloomy is the fact that the bills keep rolling in at an unabated rate. I’ll get this all off my chest right now so the future posts are a little more positive.

Ralph & Dianne Emerick lost their 28 year old son Lucas last Thursday night in an auto accident and the funeral was yesterday. The Pastor did a great job and the services were in the AG church in Angola where the Emericks have attended for several decades. Lucas was a national level roping competitor and had many belt buckles. The funeral was well attended by his cowboy friends.

Shocking: Federal Reserve Oversight

This is a pretty shocking and disappointing performance of our financial leadership. Was she just having a bad day? Trying to avoid an antagonist? Or is she really that bad? I think I could do better than this and I do not have any experience in the field.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXlxBeAvsB8&feature=player_embedded

Facebook?

I have to say I was enamored with Facebook. I loved it! The romance has died a bit but I still like it to keep in touch with the family & extended family. The problem is I like to write in my blog but FB takes time away from that endeavor. The second problem is field bandwidth – I just do not have it when I am pursuing my summer activities. I suppose connectivity will become much better in the years to come and I will be able to get on the net from anywhere 3G/4G/LTE will exist.

Bits & Pieces

The ITS Michigan Annual Exposition 2009 has come and gone. It was nice to meet with old friends and network a bit. Who knows, I might get some consulting jobs out of the deal. At least one person mentioned that he could use me for some field consulting. It would be fun to try.

Last week we spent the second week on the boat and it was sort of a non-event. We did get work accomplished by refinishing the cutting boards and they look very nice now. In addition, we refinished and varnished the red/green navigation lights and I re-crimped all the connections. The look much nicer now. SAM got in a lot of walking, we used the heater every night, saw the sun go down at Oval Beach two nights and bounced around in the high winds – the barometric pressure high was 30.45″ and that is quite high for this time of year.

Today I worked at the airport with Mike doing maintenance on the hangar doors. We got two doors done and participated in the TSA Hangar Owners executive committee meeting. I think we have about 4 or 5 more doors to go. We discussed the possibility of getting a jet on the field and the Board of Aviation actions regarding that subject. It would be nice for the airport to have a jet based there.

ITS Michigan Annual Exposition

CWM was invited to the ITS Michigan Annual Exposition as an honored guest. While no longer on the Board of Directors due to term limits the activity remains constant as the Webmaster of the site www.itsmichigan.org. Therefore, I was the press so to speak and I got to interview everyone

Time flies

It has been more than a week since my last post. Time has been flying away from me lately. We have been doing the church work, tending the boat and early this week we went to Detroit to the Annual Exposition of the Intelligent Transportation Society of Michigan. I designed and maintain the website of the organization so I was invited to be there as the “Press”.

We have started the boating season and live on the boat most of the time. This summers plans include a few weeks of cruising Lake Michigan. We would like to get up to Mackinac Island, Drummond Island and in the process visiting the Fox , Maintou and Beaver Islands. then we go down the west side of the lake to the Green Bay Peninsula. From there the plan is to return to Saugatuck direct across the lake. What a grand trip.

Cinco de Mayo + dos

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srYi5eUZ1xI

NYC Flyover by DOD – R U Nuts?

New York to White House: Are You %$#&*^& Nuts?
By Paul Bertorelli

No, make that the entire country to the White House.

Monday’s flyover of New York for a photo op of the 747 that serves as Air Force One was the most stunningly stupid decision by a group of adults authorized to use government airplanes that it’s possible to imagine. On a scale of 10 for utter idiocy, it’s a 13. It makes those clueless guys who busted the Washington ADIZ in a Cessna 150 a couple of years ago look like Lindbergh finding Paris with a compass and a watch.

The most disgusting part of it—it’s damn near evil—is that the FAA and the White House notified the NYPD of the flyover ahead of time but classified it, preventing its release to the public. There is no other way to described it than this: These agencies engaged in negligent terrorizing of a public still traumatized by the September 11, 2001 attacks. While we’re talking about resetting relations with Cuba and Venezuela, what we really need to be doing is resetting our own government, or at least the part of it that deals with the highly charged relationship between airplanes and the national security apparatus. And surprise!…it applies to Air Force One, too.

Somewhere, I’m sure a few people are saying, “Oh, New York, get over it.” I wasn’t in New York on September 11th, but I know many people who were. I can’t look deep enough to get over it. When I saw the pictures of Monday’s fiasco, I had the same gut wrenching dread that we all had on that awful day almost eight years ago. It still seems like yesterday to me. I don’t think the country is anywhere near being able to tough it out when an airplane as big as a 747 flies that low over New York or any other major city. Nor should anybody be testing the premise.

And this was done by the same people who have the unmitigated gall to frisk the citizenry before boarding airliners, to bar general aviation aircraft from ever more airspace and to generally make life miserable for the rest of us while they do they very thing that scares the hell out of all of us.

It’s hard to know how even to respond to this sort of lunacy. I for one expect President Obama on the tube today explaining himself and illuminating us on who he has fired. I don’t care if he knew about it or not. It’s his watch. We just loaned him the airplane.

Meanwhile, to whomever originated this stunt, how about this: A 12-year-old with a copy of Photoshop could have gotten your photo op with a lot less grief than this mess will create.