Flying Around
Recently I had some troubles with my computer. It would occasionally just quit working. It was like the hard disk quit working. So I would reboot it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't. It always did eventually. But the failures kept getting more frequent. Eventually I convinced myself that it was the hard disk. So I made an appointment with the Apple store and took the computer in for a chat. It's long out of warranty so they told me it would cost $250 for a new 500 GB hard drive and another $99 to transfer my files. Not a horrible price for the work. However, the guy at the genius bar suggested, sort of under his breath, that I could probably do it myself. I knew I could get a 1 TB drive for about $100 and I was up for the adventure.
I borrowed some suction cups from my boss. You need suction cups to remove the front glass and he has broken the screen of his iMac twice. So he invested in suction cups to avoid the expense of having Apple do it. I eventually convinced him to buy a mac mini and quit hauling his 27" iMac back and forth to his beach house. That's when it got broken. Anyhow, I looked up about 5 different instructions on how to swap out the hard drive, purchased a set of small torx screw drivers and after about an hour had the job done. I'd show a picture but it looks just the same.
So I put in the Install Disk from the last OS and verified that the installation went OK and set out to install all the old stuff back. I won't go into all the details but it was a nightmare. It had to do with messing up the permissions when bringing in old data using Time Machine. Anyhow, after a lot of work installing all the old stuff again and figuring out the permissions thing, I decided to install my old flight simulator and take some time with a tutorial and learn to fly again. I had a bigger hard drive now (1,000 GB vs. 320 GB before) so I installed all the scenery (6 DVDs worth).
Tonight I was practicing turns somewhere off the sourthern coast of Spain when I spied an aircraft carrier just off shore. So I decided to land on it. Just as I was about to land it took a sharp 90 degree turn, but having learned how to do turns without losing altitude, I whipped the plane around and got back in line to land. I dropped the flaps and slowly ascended down to the deck of the carrier. As the radio was shouting "wave off", which means "get lost", I neatly touch down on the deck. While I was there I got a picture. Here it is. As you can see, the plane has the markings from the flight training school. OK, maybe you can't see them.
