work
- During the day, as new to-dos come up, dump them into the Things inbox with as little overhead as possible.
- Every morning, triage that Inbox, assign due dates to things that need them, and file them appropriately into projects.
- Every morning, after triage, see what’s in Today. If there’s enough to keep me busy all day, I’m done. If I have some extra bandwidth, review the “Someday” tasks to see if there’s so thing to pull into Today.
- Start working and checking off tasks once they’re completed!
- My back, arms, and shoulders are a lot less sore at the end of each day. I’m tall (6-4) and squishing myself under a desk all day just wasn’t good form. Standing up is a lot better.
- My legs are slowly getting used to it. The first day I stood up all day I was definitely ready to get off my feet at the end of the day.
- I got a standing mat that helped a lot. Having 3/4-inch of foam between my feet and the floor really helps.
- I learned really quick which shoes are comfortable (my Merrell Road Gloves are awesome) and which ones are not (my cheap black dress shoes).
- My co-workers were amused, interested, and curious. I don’t know that any of them will take up the trend, but many of them observed that it might be a nice change. (It’s also possible they were just being polite and really think that I’m a weirdo.)
- 0715: Arrive at company facility at CR airport
- 0716: Announce myself and get name checked off on the manifest
- 0725: Walk out onto the tarmac and board the plane
- 0730: One of the pilots points out the emergency exits to me, the first-timer
- 0735: We take off. Once we climb out, we cruise at 36,000 feet and nearly 600 MPH
- 0840: Land in Wichita. Climb off the plane and walk across the street to the FAA office.
- 0900 - 1230: Meet with the FAA
- 1230: Walk back across the street to the airport
- 1245: Board the aircraft and take off again
- 1300: Eat a box lunch after we’re back up at 36,000 feet
- 1405: Land back in CR
- 1415: Get off the plane after being towed into the hangar
- 1435: Arrive back home
- Outgoing
- Energetic
- Sociable
- Responsible
- Respectful
- Flexible
New Boeing CEO: Kelly Ortburg
It’s not too often that the national news runs an update that talks about someone I know, so when the alert came up on the NY Times app this morning, it was pretty cool: Kelly Ortberg is becoming the new CEO of Boeing.
Kelly was the CEO at Collins Aerospace (where I work) for several years prior to our merger with United Technologies back in 2018. I presented to him in meetings at least a few times when he was in a VP/GM role probably 11-12 years ago. Always thought he was a good guy. I’m have hope that he will be the right guy to turn things around at Boeing.
25 years!
A milestone snuck up on me this weekend: as of June 1st I have been working at Collins Aerospace for 25 years. In 1999, fresh out of college with a CS degree, I moved to the Midwest to take a position in an industry that I knew almost nothing about. Still, a job was a job, and this Nebraska boy was ready to be done living in Texas. 25 years later, the name on the door has changed a few times, but many of the faces have stayed the same.
I started as a software engineer for flight management systems. Two weeks later, I got loaned out to our flight displays department, and FMS never got me back. After ten years doing software development, I got interested in airworthiness certification. Got my FAA DER ticket and for the next 13 years I worked full time in our certification group. For the past two years I’ve worked in Advanced Technology, trying to apply the lessons I learned from all my time doing compliance finding to help us do better, easier work during the design cycle.
I know I’m a little bit of an anomaly for my generation to be so long with the same employer. One of the advantages of working for a large organization is that at whatever point I’ve gotten bored in my current position, there’s been a new position I could move into, and the learning could start again. On the whole, I keep enjoying the job, and they keep paying me, so 25 years later I’m quite happy and thankful to still be here. I’d say “here’s to another 25 years”, but I sure hope I’ve retired before then.
The State of my Task Management, 2024
As a new year begins and I settle into a new-ish position at work, it has been time to again rethink my task management strategy.
Let’s set out the constraints first. My work computing ecosystem is a highly-constrained Windows laptop. My employer doesn’t provide any sort of task management software, and restricts any data flow between company devices and personal devices. I have access to my work email and calendar on my personal device, but it’s very hard to move data back and forth between domains.
Historically I haven’t really used task management apps. I have downloaded free ones and purchased paid ones on occasion, tried them out for a week or two, and then fell away from them one I got comfortable enough with the new task or role that the overhead of using the tool outweighed the benefit it provided me. I use my email inbox as my primary to-do list. If an email is still in the inbox, it means I need to take action on it. I like to use the inbox “snooze” function when I can to dismiss the email from my inbox and bring it back at some scheduled later date, but unfortunately “snooze” only works on the web version of Outlook, not the app versions, so I rarely use it. The upside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face. The downside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face.
I paid for Things on my iPhone and iPad a few years ago and have largely neglected them. But right now I have just enough different and new things on my plate between work and church that I need a coordinated reminder system to help make sure I don’t forget something. So last week I jumped back into Things, added a few categories and a couple dozen tasks, put a widget on my iPad Home Screen, and decided to give it a go.
I’m sure I cribbed my basic pattern for using Things from Rands but I have no idea which post. It works like this:
I’ve been working this way for a couple weeks now and I think it might take this time. I really enjoy being able to just quickly dump a to-do onto my phone when I think of it, knowing that I’ve already got a plan for reviewing it later. I have also unexpectedly enjoyed not having all my to-dos staring me in the face. By doing the triage and scheduling tasks, I have a level of comfort in knowing that whatever is on my Today widget on my iPad is all I need to worry about today. I’ve had a couple small panics so far where I jump into the Upcoming view to make sure I do have some particular task scheduled, but I suppose that’ll fade as I start getting more consistent with using Things every day.
Catching up with myself
In the past two weeks I’ve logged 13,000 miles in airplanes, 1500 miles in the car, and spent 9 nights out of 13 across four hotels and an Airbus A330 business class seat. I visited Köln, Germany and Washington, DC for work, and then road tripped to Rapid City, South Dakota, to pick up my oldest daughter from college.
Maybe sometimes travel is glamorous, but most of the time it’s just travel. It’s sure good to be home.
Some thoughts on the FAA's decision to allow use of phones/tablets on airplanes from gate to gate
The FAA announced today that it is directing airlines to enact policy that will allow passengers to use their mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) from gate to gate - a welcome change for travelers who are used to the “turn everything completely off until we get above 10,000 feet” announcement at the beginning of every flight.
So my first thought comes as a frequent traveler on this nation’s airlines, and I can summarize it like this:
It’s about time.
But what about the concerns over device usage? The FAA has said for years that they thought it was possible that having phones turned on during takeoff and landing could affect the aircraft. Is that really not the case?
Now, before I start offering opinions, I should explain that I have a little bit of background on this topic. I work for a company that designs and manufactures avionics equipment for big (and small) aircraft. We build things like displays, autopilots, communications radios, and GPSs for just about every aircraft manufacturer you could name. I work in our Certification Department. While my specialty is software certification, I work every day beside men and women who are some of the foremost industry experts in hardware testing relevant to concerns over the use of mobile devices.
Usual disclaimer: all the opinions in this piece are mine, do not necessarily reflect that of my employer, the FAA, or anybody else in the whole wide world.
First off, I’ve had discussions with these guys about the use of mobile devices on board, and they seem wholly unconcerned. That’s a significant data point in my mind. Second, I’ve flown multiple times on our corporate jet with our lead FAA-authorized test pilot flying the plane. Never has he expressed any concern that we make sure our cell phones are turned off prior to takeoff. (I try to make sure to kick mine to airplane mode just so I don’t drain my battery while searching for signal!)
Secondly, I’ve seen the test reports on how this hardware is tested.
Every critical piece of equipment that’s going on the aircraft has to go through a challenging set of qualification tests. The exact tests will be dependent on the how the equipment will be used (for instance, you don’t need a sand test for a box that’s only going to used on the inside of a 747, but you would if it were mounted external on a helicopter), but you’re always going to have to test it for things like vibration, temperature (bake it and freeze it!), and (most pertinent to this discussion) Radio Frequency susceptibility.
I’ve seen the pictures of the test setups, and while I can’t show them to you directly, here’s the general idea of what they do:
In this example, Dr. Doofenshmirtz is the tester, and the unit under test (display, autopilot, etc) is sitting on the table, while Agent P sits there monitoring to make sure it continues to run correctly while the Evil-Inator (or some similar sort of radio transmitter) beams radio waves at it.
(I’m not exaggerating much here.)
To pass these tests, the unit under test must work correctly while being bombarded with a whole range of radio frequencies. If it stops operating correctly, stop the test, update the hardware, and try again.
There’s a reason they test avionics this way, and it’s not because they’re afraid of people who forgot to turn off their cell phones. Airplanes frequently fly past radio transmission towers, and not infrequently through electrical storms. You want to be sure that you’re not going to lose all of your displays and controls even in a freak situation.
The systems design to perform the most critical functions on the aircraft are carefully designed and analyzed to ensure that they will fail no more often than once every one billion flight hours. That’s an amazing standard, more stringent than any other industry, save maybe nuclear. The engineers I know who design systems like our autopilots are some of the finest engineers I’ve ever met.
So suffice it to say I’m not particularly worried about being on a plane where everybody is allowed to have their iPhone or iPad or Kindle turned on during roll-out.
According to that CNN story, Delta Airlines has already filed plans with the FAA to allow their passengers to use devices below 10,000 feet. I’m excited to hear that. I don’t know how fast the FAA will move, but.. I’m flying to Florida next Monday for work, and I’d love to be able to keep reading my e-book or watching my movie from boarding all the way through arrival.
Standing Desk Update
It’s been a little over a month since I began using a standing desk at work.
So how’s it going after a month? Pretty well, actually. Some observations:
I’m planning on sticking with the standing desk for the time being. If I’m still gung-ho about it after, say, Christmas, I might start pursuing the possibility of getting a real standing desk via the regular work channels. I understand they have one that is electric and adjustable, which would be nice. It’d also be nice to bring all of my work surface (not just my monitors and keyboard) up to standing level.
One of the dangers of a standing desk...
…is that when I’ve got my headphones on and I’m grooving to some music, I’m not just in danger of air drumming, but now it’s possible to be working on my white boy dance moves as well.
Now that can be a little bit hard to explain when the boss walks in.
Today, though, the boss is out on travel, and I have Bruce Hornsby to blame for my grooving.
Standing Up (at my desk)
I’ve been intrigued by the online discussion about standing desks for a while now. Heck, it’s clear enough to anybody willing to think about it that just sitting, all day, every day, can’t be good for you. Add to it that I’m 6-foot-4 (that’s 193 cm for my two Canadian readers) and it’s not so easy to cram my legs underneath the desk, and I end up needing to unkink myself every hour or so during the day. Even doing that I still end up with achy legs, a sore elbow from leaning on it too much, and a sore back.
(To be fair, the sore back could be more due to the slouching I do in bed at night reading and watching tv. And the fact that I’m not getting any younger. 35 still feels like it’s on the happy end of my 30’s. Next year ain’t gonna feel that way.)
There are some ridiculous cool standing desk assemblies out there, at ridiculously uncool prices. Not in this guy’s budget. Now, I work for $MEGACORP, so there’s probably some bureaucratic process I could go through to make the request for a standing desk, and some ergonomic person would eventually sign off on it, and 6 weeks from now I might have something. But I really wanted to try the idea out sooner. Here’s what I ended up with (click on it to see the full-sized pic):
I ended up spending just shy of $20 at Lowe’s for a nice piece of coated shelf board for my table tops, and then a chunk of 1x8 for the legs. My monitors now sit 20" above my desk, and my keyboard/mouse about 15". I’m about 3 hours into using it so far, and so far so good. We’ll see how sore my feet and legs are tomorrow. I’m actually sort of easing into it, since my all-afternoon meeting today and tomorrow means I’ll only be standing for half-days.
I figure if I decide I like it, later on I can make the ergonomic request and see about a “real” standing desk. For now, though, this’ll do.
I am now spoiled to commercial air travel forever
Yesterday I traveled with five coworkers from Cedar Rapids, IA to Wichita, KS, to participate in our quarterly update meeting with the FAA.
Normally, commercial travel to Wichita from CR means taking a flight connecting through either Chicago O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth. For a Wednesday morning meeting you’d need to leave CR early afternoon on Tuesday, spend hours in airports, 3 - 4 hours actually flying, spend the night overnight in Wichita, then reverse the procedure on Wednesday afternoon to fly home, possibly making it home in early evening… assuming the weather is decent and all the flight connections happen.
To counter this massive hassle and resulting lack of productivity for several engineers, enter this fine little piece of hardware: the company Hawker 800 XP.
It’s fitted out nicely on the inside, too, similar to this:
Being able to fly on our company jet made our itinerary for the trip to Wichita run something like this:
It’s still stunning to me - we went down to Wichita, had a half-day meeting, came home, and didn’t even use the full workday.
I am now spoiled to commercial air travel forever.
The Patient Notebook
I keep a notebook at work for scribbling to-dos and other things I need to remember. I don’t go through notebooks very quickly - my short-term memory is pretty good and I use sticky notes and scrap paper when I’m at my desk, but a notebook is handy for carrying around to meetings.
Back in February my notebook (a Mead brand 80-sheet 4/5-per-inch “quadrille”) was starting to fill up (read: it was maybe 2/3 full) so when I noticed a spiffy new National brand Computation Notebook was available in the supply cabinet, I grabbed it.
About that same time I was applying for a new position here at work - a position in line with my long-term career goals, one that I’d been hoping to get for a long time. I knew the manager of that new group wanted to hire me (I was offered the job!), and I was just hoping the process would work out and I could transfer. So I set the notebook aside and decided that I would symbolically keep it in reserve until I got the transfer to the new position.
To make a long story short, senior management decided I was too critical in my present role to be allowed to transfer. Both my boss and the manager trying to hire me assured me that they’d try to make it work out later on, but in March someone else took that position and I stayed where I was. I was initially neither very patient or very happy about the situation, but what else was there to do? So I waited.
Patience is one of those things you probably don’t really want to pray for. The process of learning it isn’t fun. But it’s a valuable lesson to learn. My old Mead notebook got thinner and thinner through the summer, but I stubbornly left the new notebook on the shelf. Finally at the end of August I had a moment of weakness and carried the new notebook to a meeting, but didn’t need to take any notes. After the meeting I gathered my resolve and put it back on the shelf.
September 1st rolled around and I got a phone call. Another job req was opening in that department. I was welcome to apply again. I applied. I re-interviewed. I waited. It took nearly the entire month of September to get through the process and see if I would be allowed to transfer this time. The notebook waited patiently. Me, not so patiently. Finally, last Friday, I got the official word: the transfer would be allowed. And today I got the official phone call confirming that I would take the position, with the transfer effective in two weeks' time.
When my transfer is complete and I start the new position, the old Mead notebook will find its way to a recycle bin, and the patient National notebook will finally take up the role it’s been waiting for since last spring. It will be a happy day for both of us.
More busy than a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest
That’s the way my friend Steve used to describe it, and this week has been one of those weeks. Half my calendar at work has been meetings; each meeting seems to generate more tasks for me; the remaining non-meeting time doesn’t seem to be sufficient to complete the tasks at a rate that will bring me anywhere close to keeping up.
Help is on the way, though: a loaner laptop to help me get work done during meetings, and a minion junior engineer who can be responsible for some of my lower-priority-yet-still-time-consuming tasks. Next week is still meeting-heavy, but I have hope that my group and I are making progress.
On the home front, we were able to keep Katie asleep long enough last night for Becky and I to blow off some steam on the new Wii. So far we’ve only got the Wii Sports and Wii Fit, so we played a bunch of head-to-head sports. She quickly proved she could beat me at tennis, baseball, and golf. It’s some small comfort that I can still take her in bowling, though. One of these days I’m gonna pick up Mario Kart and then we’ll see who’s boss.
Now we approach Easter weekend, and it’s gonna be the most relaxed Easter weekend we’ve had since I don’t know when. Saturday is the 8th (!) annual egg hunt out in Stone City at the Berberich’s - will be so good to catch up with them. It’s been far too long.
I’ve got a post on music floating around in my head that I’m gonna try to get written this weekend, but until then, dear readers, be patient and put up with my automated link posts. Go read the articles if you’re bored - they’ve gotta be good before I’ll link ‘em. :-)
A dilemma of sorts
Last week I accepted a position in a new group here at work. It’s a group I’ve worked with for several years, and I knew I wanted to work in that group if the opportunity arose. The opportunity did arise, and I got the position. While the exact transfer date has yet to be settled upon (sometime today we’ll get it figured out, I hope), it’s just a matter of time.
Which leads me to this dilemma. I have two options for my new office. (I’m not quite senior enough to get my own full-sized office yet… one more engineering grade to go.)
Choice 1: share a two-person office with a co-worker, getting the end of the office near the door. One desk, one table, file drawer.
Choice 2: get my own little mini-office. Basically it’s standard cubicle-based office furniture inside a room with a door. It’s not very big, but it would be my first-ever “own office”.
One thing that makes the choice easier: my new department will be moving to a different building within the next couple of months, so my choice really only impacts the near term. What think ye, friends and readers?
Denver
OK, so bad travel plans notwithstanding, I made it to Denver on-time on Monday evening. Tuesday was spent in an all-day FAA DER Recurrent General Training class (boring), and today and Thursday I’m attending the National Software and Airborne Electronic Hardware Conference. It’s sponsored by the FAA and NASA Langley Research Center, and there are some really interesting topics if you’re into safety-critical airborne software. Which, I know, none of you reading this are. :-) So enough about the conference.
Haven’t really seen much of Denver yet, though I may atone for that this evening and travel about. I’ve just got too many things on my to-do list for this week. Sermon prep for Saturday, new Conversation Cafe website (now branded Topics On First - check it out! - but it’s still the beta version of the site), planning orders of service for the fall, updating church bylaws and membership covenants… so much to do, so little time.
Denver is a little bit frustrating, location-wise, because you think you’re in Colorado, there should be mountains… but there aren’t really any mountains in Denver. You can see them off in the distance, but they’re still too far away to get to without some more serious time driving than I’ll have. Oh well. Maybe one of these summers we can hit them for a vacation again.
Well, lunch hour is almost over so it’s time to head back to the conference. Good times.
Montreal
So today was the day I finally ventured outside the good ‘ol US of A; traveling to Montreal, Quebec for the next round of SC-213 meetings. No big details, pictures, or etc so far, but it was nice to actually have decent travel this time around. The flights were more or less on time, the lines were short, the rental car big enough (the PT Cruiser has an amazing amount of leg and head room!) and the hotel comfortable.
Now it’s just after midnight and I’m sitting up too late working on an andrewosenga.net redesign. I finally got the layout working more or less how I want it… now it’s time to make it pretty. Well… that can wait until tomorrow.
No, I don't play golf...
This week has brought me to Augusta, GA for the quarterly SC-213 meeting. The inevitable first question/comment I’ve gotten from friends when I say Augusta is “did you take your golf clubs along?” So as a preemptive strike: no, I don’t play golf. I’ve never hit a ball in my life. Yes, I know they have some fancy course here where they play some tournament every spring. I even know that a guy from Cedar Rapids happened to win that tournament last year. But it doesn’t mean I’m gonna be playing it in my spare time. :-) I will probably drive by it at some point just to have done so.
You don’t want to read the litany of my travel travails; suffice it to say that Monday I was scheduled to get into Augusta (including drive from the Columbia, SC airport and everything) by about 6 pm - I ended up getting in about 10:30 pm. Not so much fun.
Yesterday was the first day of meetings, and it was fairly useful. Last night I was looking for something to do and noticed in the paper that the local ECHL hockey team (the Augusta Lynx) was playing at home. The arena was only six blocks away, so I headed over, bought a ticket, and watched my first hockey game in some time. The game was poorly-attended (maybe 300 present) and the local team gave it a good effort against the first place Texas Wildcatters, but took too many penalties and couldn’t seem to pull the trigger and shoot the puck on the few power plays they had. Final score: Texas 3, Augusta 1. (As a side note: I went to look up the Wildcatters to find out where they are located in Texas; their team website actually didn’t say, any place that I could find. Poor website content. The ECHL site tells me they are in Beaumont, TX.)
So now I’m eating breakfast and getting prepared for another day of meetings reviewing this document my committee is creating. Good times.
Halloween at Work
No costumes ‘round our building today, but we’re having an event that appears to be proving popular enough that it should be continued in following years: a chili cook-off. A dozen or so contestants brought in crock pots full of chili of varying color, flavor, and spiciness. (Question, though: can green tortilla chicken soup really be called “chili”? I think it should be disqualified. It is tasty, though.) The rest of us brought in acoutrements. Voting ends at noon. Sampling has been going on all morning.
Maybe next year I’ll have to give it a whirl… but the competition would be stiff. Were I to have brought a pot of my usual chili along today, well, I wouldn’t have voted for it. There are some amazing chilis out there.
Might be time to go through and sample some more. The little styrofoam cups are just the thing, though one guy should win the innovation award for sampling utensils: he brought along a 6-cup muffin tin. Brilliant!
Oklahoma City
Business has brought me this week to Oklahoma City, square in the middle of the Sooner state. I’ve been to the Tulsa area many times (my grandparents having lived in Collinsville for twenty years), but while I’ve driven through OKC on I-35 a multitude of times, I don’t recall ever having stopped; certainly I’ve never stayed here overnight. So it’s like visiting a new place, which I really enjoy - a chance for observations, to learn a new city.
My first impression of OKC was at the airport. I like the OKC airport. It appears to be fairly new, is large, open, airy, and bright. It’s a fair bit larger than my home port of Cedar Rapids, but not immense; twenty-some gates and a three-story parking garage. It was only a short walk through the terminal to the Hertz desk to pick up my key, then a short stroll to the parking structure to my car (a Toyota Corolla, very nice). The Hertz #1 Club Gold, letting me skip the paperwork and head straight to the car, is worth every penny.
Shortly after leaving the airport, I ran into the seemingly inevitable road construction. In this case, the construction is on Meridian Ave, the main drag that heads north out of the airport and up to I-44 and my hotel. This trimmed a four-lane highway down to two rather narrow lanes, and made the waits at traffic lights frustratingly long. Still, the trusty Never-Lost GPS system in the car got me within visual distance of the hotel before announcing “You have arrived.”, and I could handle it from there.
My next impression of OKC came from the hotel that the Federal Aviation Administration selected for our training this week: the Clarion Meridian Hotel and Convention Center. The hotel seems to be a microcosm of the city as a whole, trying to move forward from the dusty, tired, and worn trappings of the old oil and ranch business into the technology of the twenty-first century. The hotel dates to probably the 1970’s. It was originally all exterior-entry rooms, but some time later in an attempt to upgrade an additional hallway was built outside the room doors, allowing for climate-controlled access to the hotel lobby from the rooms. The room itself has had fresh paint and sports two 25-inch televisions with local cable, but it’s still obviously a remodel and the layout just isn’t quite right.
Driving through the city the past couple of nights I have seen the same contrasts; on one side, dusty, dated businesses feeling like the older southwest of the 70’s and 80’s; on the other side, a trendy, new city whose Dell Computer campus gives you another reason to compare it to Austin, TX. My restaurant choices thus far have been limited to the “new” side of things; I ate at a “grill and brewhouse” on the north side of town tonight that was very tasty. I might still be tempted to try an older steakhouse tomorrow night… I guess I’ll see what sounds good when my class has wrapped up.
The instructor at our class today told us he’s lived in Oklahoma for most of his life. He described OKC as “a great place to live, and an OK place to visit.” Now, when the Oklahoma tourism folks originally created the “Oklahoma is OK” slogan, I’m guessing they weren’t intending the suggestion of mediocrity that our instructor gave us, but after being here two days I’m thinking he’s closer to the truth. In many ways, the situation that OKC finds itself in reminds me of my home state of Iowa; a good, solid midwestern state, a good place to raise a family, a place struggling to find its way beyond its agricultural roots into technological opportunities. Not a super-exciting place to visit, but that’s OK. It’s a lot less hassle than the more exotic destinations, too. For this traveler, this week, Oklahoma is, indeed, OK.
Seattle
It’s 8 AM in Seattle and this hotel restaurant is a pretty comfortable place to sit and write. The in-room web access doesn’t seem to be working, but the wi-fi in the lobby works just fine, so I can sit here and catch up on news and email whilst eating from the voluminous breakfast buffet. It’s fairly cloudy and cool this morning, but there’s the threat of sunshine this afternoon, which would be nice.
I’m in town to support a meeting with a customer, but it still leaves me with most of the morning (the meeting doesn’t start until 11) and a good portion of the afternoon (the meeting is over by 2 or so) free. Couldn’t manage to get a flight back home tonight on short notice, so I"ll be leaving on the early (5:45) flight in the morning. Such fun.
This is my third trip to Seattle, and I really do enjoy the area. So beautiful with the mountainous terrain, all the water, and I just adore the cool weather. After the meetings today I’m planning on heading downtown to the Pike Place Market; for sure a tourist location, but it’s been recommended by a couple friends so I guess I’ll give it a go. I’ll be sure to post pics tomorrow when I get home.
Well, I’ve pretty much finished up here at the restaurant so I think I’ll move to the lobby, find a plug-in for this laptop, and start working on some work stuff. Should be at least moderately productive today. :-)
New Orleans: FAA SW DER Conference
Today through Thursday is the 2007 edition of the FAA’s SW/CEH DER Conference. You can follow the link if you really want to know more about it; basically it’s a technical conference for those of us who work with the FAA to approve aircraft equipment and software. Good times. This year, the conference is in New Orleans, LA. It’s my first time in New Orleans.
The trip was a bit of a pain; my flights were from Cedar Rapids to Dallas/Fort Worth, and then from DFW to New Orleans. The first leg of the flight left about 40 minutes late, but no worries, I had a long-ish layover at DFW. Well, that long-ish layover turned into a very long layover, because my flight to New Orleans, supposed to arrive in NOLA at 9:20 PM, didn’t leave DFW until 10:15 PM. It seems to be a recurring theme when I travel to these conferences; last year I was driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight to find the hotel, this year, through downtown New Orleans.
Day 1 of the conference is always rather boring; it’s a general session where we get updates on the progress of various industry committees and information on what the FAA’s doing. We got 45 minutes this morning on how they’re gonna be using some new tools to do more uniform safety analyses of aircraft programs…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Tomorrow and Thursday are more interesting when there are topical break-out sessions.
I just finished lunch at Ugly Dog Saloon, recommended by Scott as the best BBQ in New Orleans. It was pretty tasty. Now I’m thinking I’m gonna skip the next couple committee updates and go walk through the Riverwalk area across the street. Tonight I’m meeting Scott and Jacob for dinner. Tomorrow night I guess I’ll go hit the French Quarter and try to hear some live music. Should be fun.
Good Qualities for a...
We were sitting in a conference room at work the other day and there was a large pad that someone had written on in a previous meeting. I don’t know the context of the meeting or the notes on the pad, but what was written on the pad was this:
We took a minute to be amused at it, and then one of my co-workers asked “so what word shall we add?”
We all thought about it a second, and another co-worker chimed in, “Inflatable?”
It was all downhill after that.