Just a few more hours left in Florida. It's time again for live flight tracking, and I've actually figured out the flight numbers.
Orlando to Memphis (4:00p-5:02p)
Memphis to Des Moines (6:50p-8:27p)
I've tried changing seats, but all the flights appear full, so so much for getting pictures on the way home. Guess I'll just have to take a nap. For now I've got to get my crap packed and head out of here.
Hah, it would figure that I've come to Florida and they had record lows last night and possibly again tonight. 63. Aw, poor babies. In fact, I saw a bunch of people wearing sweaters outside of my window this morning. Bunch of wimps. 
I know this isn't Miami, but dang there are a ton of Hummers driving around in this city.
Work has gone pretty well this week. I'm back to doing what I did last time. Prepping shows and commercials for the new CW station WKCF. This week I can tell a huge difference in how things are working. Stuff definitely makes a lot more sense to me this time. That's not to say that how some things work confuses the crap out of me… but I'm definitely getting a hold on how things go. I forgot to county yesterday, but today I input 67 commercials and promos into the server and prepped 22 programs. This will definitely scare people back at home, but this is apparently the norm for here. The number of commercials I put in was even lower than what I could have put in. I have another 14 from one advertiser, but their tape won't arrive until the morning.
In a way, now, I'm beginning to like how things work here. The only weird one is the purging for the new station. The way the media client talks to the storage servers isn't quite right yet. So tonight when I got my purge list, I had to go to the file server and delete the files one by one. Then I could finally come back to the media client and delete all of the database entries. There were 217 items to purge…..yeah. So guess what? I'm going to bed! Sorry for the lack of photos, but since I don't really get out, there isn't that much to take pictures of. Plus, my seats on the planes have been away from the windows. It looks to be the same on my way home, but I'll see if I can't get my seat changed when I check in.
This is what I-4 looks like this morning. I'd say it's a bit busier than last time I was here.
Well, I've made it. A couple of interesting flights on the way down here. The trip from Des Moines to Memphis was on a 2-2 seater, so I sat next to a guy from Louisiana. We talked for a bit before asking each other what we did. It turns out he's a parachute rigger with the National Guard. He's the guy that stuffs the parachutes into backpacks. That's his full time job. He also does freelance as a bounty hunter. 
He was a cool guy, though, so it was a pretty good trip.
Once getting to Memphis my flight to Orlando was delayed by about an hour. It gave me a chance to grab a bite to eat and take a nap near the gate. While there, there was one of those "I have no indoor voice" ladies on the phones. She was bitching about the plane being so delayed. Then as we were boarding she suddenly realized that the ticket agent had changed her seat like she wanted, but to the wrong seat. When we got on the plane she was next to a baby…that screamed almost the whole way to Orlando. Ahhh, sweet justice.
I'm still not sure what exactly is in store for this week, but from a call I got yesterday, I have a feeling it's going to be a bunch of the same again…prepping shows and some commercials. I'm seriously beginning to wonder what they're telling my place because it seems every time I come down here it isn't for what I thought. Oh well. Time to get ready and then to try to find some breakfast.
…but I can't. For some reason none of my flights this time are coming up on FlightAware. You can still try to track me once the flights take off from Des Moines and Memphis. I really have no idea why it isn't working like last time.
So instead, I give you the current weather for Orlando.
After about a 2 year absence from APRS, my mobile tracker is again working. The original reason for the downtime was my GPS receiver died. A few months ago I got another one, and then the connector inside the radio became disconnected. So, I've modified things a bit and will now use one of my handheld radios hooked up to a GPS and a smart position beaconer called the TinyTrak to send out my position via my big radio in the car.
It may come and go for a bit as I get things truly figured out, but tests yesterday and today have proved successful. If you have Google Earth, you can now track me in there by using this placemark file. If you don't have Google Earth, it's all good. You can still track me at the jFindu page. That page should refresh on its own, but I've been told that some people behind firewalls don't see it refresh automatically.
When I get back home next week from Florida, I plan on building a housing for the radio & TinyTrak device so that I can tuck them away somewhere out of sight. I may leave the TinyTrak out, but the radio definitely needs to take on a covert mission somewhere in the car.
Let's delve into the world of math for a second. Ryan drives to and from work. The distance traveled is about 9 miles each way. Let's estimate that on a given night I encounter 100 cars and their associated drivers. Each trip I average seeing 2-3 total idiots in cars. Tonight it was 2 girls who decided they wanted to go north on MLK rather than crossing it at the last second. I had to lock up my tires to avoid a collision. Then on the way home no less than 10 minutes ago, some idiot cuts into my exit ramp lane with no turn signal and proceeded to slow down to about 30 mph. I didn't lock up my tires for the sole reason it was pouring, but I probably would have if it were dry pavement. The end result was another way to near miss. Even the car beside me that had been behind the guy flashed their lights at him.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the math. So, if 2 out of the 100 cars I pass each day are retarded, that means an average of about 2% of the drivers in this county are legally stupid. Doesn't sound bad? Let's do more math. The 2005 census population of Polk County was 401,006. Take from that the 24.9% of the population that was below 18 in the 2004 census and we approximately have 301,155 residents in Polk County1 that are of driving age. Now the 2% of idiots results in 6,023 people that have the ability to perform a retarded act at any moment on the road. Sounds high, doesn't it? I could try to add in the fact that much of Polk County's traffic is probably also from drivers outside the county and we'd have an even larger number.
I wish I were making this up, but seriously, everyday on my way to or from work I see some varying degree of stupidity on the roads. I'm not going to claim my own innocence here either. I'm sure I've pissed off a driver or two, but I do know I haven't heard the squealing of tires as someone tries not to plunge head first into my trunk.
I've got my flight booked once again for another trip to Orlando next week. This time I'll leave on Monday and come back on Friday night. Not much excitement actually going on in Orlando this time. This trip's objective is apparently to train the new people at the station. I have no idea what I'm training them to do, but that's what they want me there for. Apparently last time down I didn't screw up enough stuff. 
I'll take my camera down with me again, but since it looks like this trip wil have even less free time on it, you probably won't get to see that many exciting pictures.
When I get closer, I post the live tracking links again for the flights so everybody can e-stalk me. To give you a clue, though, I'll leave Des Moines at 5.10p on Monday, connect in Memphis and arrive at Orlando around 10.16p. Then on the way back on Friday, I'll leave Orlando at 4.00p and connect in Memphis to get to Des Moines around 8.27p.
We had a triple play of sorts last night at work. First, CBS sports went long so the 10pm news didn't start at 10. Then the news ran long, and with weather cutins for most of the night, my programming schedule kept getting bumped back. I spent a good chunk of the night rearranging commercial breaks by killing promos and PSAs. I also had to do some funky working with the late night replay of the news because I didn't want to freak people out into thinking there were still tornado warnings for places that shouldn't even have been seeing rain at 4:30 in the morning.
I actually killed enough spots at times to just have a 10 second promo in between segments of shows. And you know what? I LOVED it. Seriously… there's just something that I like about actually being able to use my brain and think while working. It was honestly probably one of my more enjoyable nights in master control.
So, from saving the world, I'm now off to sleep. There doesn't seem to be too much excitement on the horizon for tonight, so I'll probably be bored out of my mind once again.
