Aaaannd away again.
Devon and I flew down from Portland yesterday in the Deb. Lovely little flight – ignoring the headwinds-both-ways bit. Reminds me what that sort of flying is all about. Took us about three and a half hours each way; no, we didn’t need to take off our shoes or remove liquids from our luggage. I even conspicuously brought my Swiss Army knife along.
Made it back yesterday in time to drop into the office to try and be of some assistance on my “day job” – a depressingly large amount of what I do these days seems to consist of hovering and asking if there’s anything I can do to help. But my team is scrambling to get some stuff ready for an experimental trial next week, during the period I’m out of office, so hovering and asking is about the best I can do right now (not actually, true, I guess – I did manage to close out two pending bugs yesterday, but didn’t manage to fix the docs so that others would be able to fix them if they encountered them again).
On the other hand, the amount of publicity we’re getting for the Antarctica Street View stuff is staggering. There’s even a promo link from the Google home page – yay, us!
This morning: Very different kind of airplane: about 15 minutes in the T-6, trying – unsuccessfully – to work out a carburetor problem. This was my third, and final try at getting some T6 refresher training prior to the England trip, and it was three-for-three in failing due to a bad rpm drop on the left magneto. Sigh.
And now: somewhere over the North Atlantic, about an hour east of London. No mechanical issues on this plane – a lovely British Airways 747-400 purring along on its RR turbines. I’m back in the cheap seats, 33A, but BA’s cheap seats are surprisingly comfortable. Thumbs up on the new split headrest design – I ask for a window seat so that I don’t lean off and end up in my neighbor’s lap, but the new design holds me pretty well. Window’s still lovely, of course.
Looks like they’re starting to wake everyone and do the pre-landing breakfast thing, so I’ll sign off here for now. More on what the heck I’m doing in England coming up… (as River Song would say, “Spoilers…”)
David Pablo Cohn 