December Final Schedule

The schedules were released yesterday and I updated the link to the right to reflect my latest flight schedule.  Take a peek and if you happen to be in the same city as me, give me a ring. 

I'm not sure what happened to my website last night, but it seems like the additions were erased and a couple of other things were made unavailable.  I think that its back up, but you tell me if there are some missing links. 

I'm in Providence, Rhode Island for Thanksgiving just sitting in a hotel room.  My captain bought us lunch during our 2 hour layover in Columbia, SC and we called it an early night because we all woke up around 4:00AM!  What an awesome holiday!!!

The Greatest Place on Earth

I really enjoyed hanging out yesterday at Disneyland with Adelle and just exploring all the new things at California Adventure.  Seeing the Christmas Parade and listening to carolers  really gave me the feeling of Christmas!  It's definitely something that I needed.  Looks like I'll be headed to Providence on Thursday for a Thanksgiving there due to my flying schedule this month.  I do have Christmas and New Year's off this year which is great! 

I've been lagging in my studies for the advancement of my airline employability status, but because I've been slacking in my scheduling, I won't be able to break the nice round number of 1000 flight hours until January or February of 2008.  It's all good really, but if I set my sights on it earlier, I could have definitely reached that goal no problem.  I had a few months with only 50 hours of flight time, so once I get to 2nd year pay, I'm going to try flying my butt off!  On more ASA news, I just read online that the Tentative Agreement was voted in.  We should see the changed shortly at the company.  Hopefully and I'm sure that it'll be for the best!

I'm still writing for phonenews.com and I'm happy that my articles are becoming a little more un-blog like and more journalistic, but I still have a lot of growing to do.  Everytime I come back here to update this blog, it kind of brings me back to the comfortable style that I'm use to.  You can call it talking to the keyboard.  That's mainly why you can probably tell that I don't even proof reading.  Oh well, make sure that you leave comments on my articles and everyone else's on phonenews.com 

Testing Windows Live Writer 1.0 (just newly out of beta)

Well, this is the first time I'm going to try to use an offline blog writer and I happen to choose the new Windows Live Writer.  I'm doing this because the past experience that I have had with trying to cut and paste text from Microsoft Word 2007 onto an HTML text area produces unknown XHTML characters and I just felt that I could actively write while offline like for instance when I'm commuting back and forth from San Diego to Atlanta and back.  Let's just see how this works out.  (it didn't with blogger)

IT IS DONE!!!

Sorry to change things up again, but "the battle" is going to be no longer. I'll be porting all my stuff to wordpress and leaving blogger.com for something that takes a little more effort on my part in terms of programming, so that I can actually be a lot more motivated. You can head over there now by clicking www.elijahnicolas.com or just going directly to www.elijahnicolas.com/wp

That's all for now!!! I'll be updating that website from now on. please leave some comments there

Just checked...

I didn't notice that my other blog "the battle" was still online but now I have sent all redirects to here:  www.elijahnicolas.com/wp  I think that it might just stay this way for quite a while, maybe a dynamic picture uptop or something, but we'll see.  I remember doing that for my Luxembourg blog a while back so making this one will be a little of the same deal.  Maybe just random collages or something. Well, today was another day of nothing-ness.  Woke up early around 9:00AM and since then I've been catching up on my shows, playing a little more Call of Duty 4 and that's it!  Call of Duty has been a lot of fun but I still really wish that we could all play online together.  Oh well, hopefully in the next patch or something.

I ate a can of Soup, the one with the red label along with some popcorn for a lunch and for breakfast, I had the usual Eggo Waffles with topped with maple syrup and light butter spread.  I also had some blueberry oatmeal that my roommate left me and I was actually kind of impressed.  It was quite tastier than the usual brown sugar flavored oatmeal that I have.

I think that I'm going to try to expand a little bit today with the links to my schedule again and go from there.  I still don't know if I want all the sidebars and stuff because they really don't contain any useful information.

Hello world!

As the title states..."Hello world!" I'm just starting to really get back into really making my digital life feel like its worth something. I really haven't been satisfied or impressed with anything that I've been doing in the virtual world and decided to take it to another level. I've decided to migrate from Google's Blogger (after 8 years) to Wordpress. I've always been hesitant because it seemed like it required a lot of programming and customization variables. So, because of all the down time I have in hotel rooms during my long 4 day trips, I might as well get on with this and make it something worth while. I'm still going to be keeping up my blogging as much as I can and the links to my schedules, but it'll be a while before 1.0 is out. I'll make this post the first of .01 alpha release. (yes I'm a geek)

I decided to not sleep after my continuous on-duty trip to Jacksonville, North Carolina. For those who don't know what a COD is, it means, that I end up getting usually less than adequate sleep / rest at the away station. For instance, last night, I got about 5 hours total sleep but this is the way the trip is setup. It makes it so that you are on the duty clock the entire time you are on the ground and this makes it legal. So, I left my crashpad at 1900 yesterday, arrived at the airport around 1955, got on my plane and took off around 2053 heading for Jacksonville, North Carolina. We landed at 2222, got to the hotel around 2250 (23 minutes shuttle ride), and I went right to sleep. I woke up at 0500, got dressed, left the hotel at 0600, made it to the airport at 0630, took off at 0658, landed back in Atlanta at 0834, went to ops to fill out some paperwork, got on the shuttle and went home back to the crashpad. I haven't slept since.

In case you are asking what I've been doing since I got home after having a reduced night's sleep, I've been playing Call of Duty4: Modern Warfare on PS3 and rethinking my website!!! I was able to pick it up yesterday and its just been non-stop action. It stinks that in comparison to Warhawk, we can't play multiplayer local online --> 4 of us at home on one PS3 with the rest of the world online. Hopefully there's a patch out soon to enable this because it kicks Halo 3's ass!!!

can't decide...

Well, so far, I've been quite disappointed with my blog and its layout. I'm even really juts disappointed with my website overall!!! I think that I'm going to end up killing it all... Not just a template thing, but I mean, I'm really just going to start over the entire thing. Why you might ask? I'm just tired of repetition. In with the new for 2008 is what I'm going for! Maybe I'll make the switch to wordpress, but I really don't know how to that stuff anymore.

August Schedule

Back by popular demand, I just posted my new final schedule for August. I hope that if any of you guys / gals find yourself in the town that I will be overnighting in, don't hesitate to give me a call. I'm usually down to hang out and do stuff. As before in July, I will be off Mondays through Wednesdays. I'm starting to really feel the fatigue of a month's schedule of flying a lot, but I have to say that I'm excited for the per diem in my check this upcoming 15th of August. It's definitely going to help offset a little of my unnecessary expenditures. Adelle was in town this past three days that I had off and the following week (July 30 - August 1st) I will be visiting my cousins in Edmonton, Canada. That should be fun! I can't hardly wait for that trip. When Adelle was here, we got to spend some time doing the things that one must do while in Atlanta...go to the Delta Museum, and check out the world's largest granite rock, Stone Mountain. It was definitely an awesome hike up the mountain and I'm really glad that I got to do it with Adelle. It was a lot of fun and I really think that I will be undertaking a lot more trails of such in the south here. I have to admit that it was really hot, but it was definitely a great workout! Here's a picture of us at the top!

Anyways, my flight tonight into Fort Wayne was a little exciting with a traffic resolution where I had to pull up quite a bit in order to avoid a collision and the fact that we ended up a little high on the approach into runway 5. It was, of course, of no incident, but it was definitely something that is constantly reminding us of why there are still two human bodies at the controls of an aircraft to where they can make the right (well most of the time) assumption about the current situation and how to handle the aircraft. I have a great Captain once again on this trip and its just awesome how I keep on getting the good ones. I haven't had one incident yet, but lets not jinx this.

As a side note, I'm not sure if you guys have noticed but right next to the title of my blog appears little entries from Twitter that is more up to date and current than these long entries. It's been hard to update once again because like I have mentioned before, I've been getting exhausted on these trips. Oh yeah, the National Mediation Board also just announced that they want the ASA ALPA Committee to meet again with the ASA Management in order to come to an agreement! It's just preposterous how long we have been at it and that these people think that we will come to a resolution soon. We need to take action and really just start to do something about it. Oh well, the life that I chose to live...go figure. I wanted a challenge and I got one!

waiting...

So, I still can't seem to get the twitter flash widget to appear on my blog homepage on Firefox or Internet Explorer, but it seems to work on Safari. It's a little annoying really and I'm just thinking about simplifying the entire page because of this. So, I'm just waiting to get a couple hours of "time off" before I start on this journey. It's going to be a little difficult really being that its all setup and stuff. I'm just on happy with it.

Did you see that dunk last night by Mr. Davis?! Man, he just slammed that one in. It was like I was watching a replay from NBA Jam or something. Amazing. Also in sports news, 10Ks by Padres pitcher Jake Peavy!!! Tremendous job in setting the record for 4 games in a row with double digit strikeouts.

I'm waiting for a package that should come in today from a friend and we'll see what it contains when I get it. It'll be hopefully awesome.

I'm also waiting to see if I get a line next month. I'm not necessarily going to be expecting it, but we'll see what I get. I noticed that I moved down 3 spots on the CRJ FO list for ATL from #361 to 364 out of 435. My chances of getting a line are a little slim, but who knows.

The Office was definitely awesome but that's all I have to say. I'll end it with a quote: "may God guide you in your quest."

breakfast: spinach, albacore tuna, two slices of bread.

of advertising and IOE Schedule!

I figure that I have to make money somehow. So, I decided to finally put up two banners for NC Software, the ones who make a Logbook program for the PC, Palm and Pocket PC. I've been using it for almost two years now and have to admit that it pretty useful in every aspect of keeping time. There are others out there like LogTen for the Mac, but I'm sure that most of you don't even have one anyways. Under the "link" sidebar menu, there's another banner for APDL (Airline Pilot Daily Logbook) which keeps track of just about everything and even inputs all the data that you get from your scheduling department automatically with a cut and paste. It's pretty neat too.

I just got my IOE schedule and have posted it on pilotcrossings.com. On pilotcrossings, it shows you when you'll be near your fellow pilots that you have as friends. It's really neat. I have a couple of friends and family members that signed up and this is the first time that you guys get to check it out, so go do that! You actually have to sign up in order to see my schedule, but I'll be putting it up on my gMail Calendar or something too in the near future.

I was able to study for about 4-5 hours straight yesterday and looks like I'll be doing the same today. Hopefully I'll get more done, but it was nice yesterday to have that university feeling again. I actually went to Emory University's Main Library with Kurt. They have 23" iMacs all over the place along with dual screen PCs for their students and the place was packed! Pretty nice college if you ask me. Well, back to work!