home in Oregon, Thursday, 1996-01-04 08:30 local (Z-8)
We're leaving this evening. We'll drive to PDX, then a redeye to Chicago, then to San Juan, hotel Friday night, board the ship on Saturday, return to San Juan the next Saturday, then all the way to PDX the same day, and drive home.
That makes me tired already. <g>
I have my home page back up, this time on the Eugene Free Net. I'll probably not keep it there because they're kind of unreliable. The URL is http://www.efn.org/~terryl.
If any of the rest of you want to set up a home page, I've bought a copy of hotdogpro2, a web page constructor. Actually all you need is any text editor, but the page constructor programs make it easier.
David, you might consider a home page as an online portfolio of your work. It's very convenient to just hand someone your home page address, and then they can look everything up you want them to know at their convenience.
I'm going to set up a home page for C.J. She'll put her portfolio in there and also have a Comforts for Children section.
Really, everybody will eventually have a home page. Janice, I understand you get these messages via C.J. or David. If you're still involved in your gym, you should put up a home page for that.
I'm finding that in my mind, the home page serves an an anchor, a baseline. This is what you want people to know about yourself. This is where you can be reached, etc. Setting it up also forces one into a bit of retrospection. After all, literally millions of people could see it. Did anyone see the comic strip—can't remember which one—where the father was feeling good about having had a few hundred hits on his home page, then his little boy casually mentions that he got 156,000 hits on his. God, it is hard for the old to keep up with the young. I don't know yet whether I'll be able to plug in from the ship, but tomorrow night I'll attempt to log on from San Juan. C.J. has an editor at Threads Magazine that is editing Jean's article that will soon appear in that publication, and they're communicating via email, so we're going to try and log on once a day if possible. A year can make quite a difference. At this time last year I was getting ready to go down for simulator training and a check ride at my own expense in Miami—and having to draw down what was left of my IRAs. Things were pretty bleak. Overall, I had to spend more than $10,000 before I got any income from Tower. I must admit the whole experience has left me with a basic distrust of life. Shit happens. I keep thinking of the captains on the Amsterdam incident and the JFK accident. One moment you're on top of the world, the next moment your job and career—not mention your mental well being—are in imminent danger, but that's better, I think, than the captain of the AA Cali flight. Well, as I've always said, this business of being a human being is definitely a mixed bag. Oh, in case any of your are familiar with the name Bob Hoover, he now has his medical back and is flying in the U.S. again. Thanks to his fame and backing from prominent people, he soundly defeated the FAA, although at tremendous cost. The current AOPA Pilot magazine has an article on the affair. The same guy in the FAA, a Dr. Pakul, that shot me down shot him down. It's nice to know that Pakul got clobbered, although I don't exactly feel good about taking pleasure from another human being's troubles. See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.aviation.misc/pJg8RSr96QY/jhXyJNw6j2YJ for detail on the FAA attempt to railroad Hoover. Pakul is mentioned in the paragraph: The judge overturned the FAA's earlier ruling but the FAA appealed to the NTSB and based on the testimony of one FAA doctor, Barton Pakul (who claimed that the other FAA doctors were "mere tools", the NTSB upheld the original ruling. If you don't know who Bob Hoover was, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Hoover or just Google his name. Terry