It gets in your blood, really.

Even though I miss my old heavy airframe WC-135W and B-52H days, I don't know how anybody's heart wouldn't skip a beat when viewing a lovely Beech Staggerwing - like this one I viewed at a local shindig in my little Wisconsin hometown:


I mean, just look at those curves!

Been retired a couple years now...

And hardly a day goes by I don't think about my previous vocation. Thanks to an astute boomer with camera, here's a shot of us on an operational sortie, filling up the gas tanks enroute to the AOI:

They look good, so maybe they'll shoot just as well!

A while back, I scored a box of 180gr Winchester Ballistic Silvertips, which are a joint venture between Winchester and Nosler. Of course, I had to have nickel-plated brass to load these beauties in, and some obliging friends from a few forums I used to haunt sent me a care package. For them, and others wanting to see what lovingly handcrafted ammunition looks like, I give you a photo with 20 each .30-06 rounds, and 5 each .308 Winchester rounds, all using those 180gr Ballistic Silvertips, courtesy of the reloading bench:

From Peabody's Way-Back Machine...

Back around 1989, I had an afternoon off from flying B-52H sorties out of Carswell AFB, so I walked into the Tandy Factory Outlet store near Dallas/Ft. Worth. In amongst the piles of returned items was this little Tandy Pocket Scientific Computer, Model PC-6. It intrigued me, since I had been prolific in BASIC starting with my first TRS-80 CoCo III, so I plunked down the $25.00 for the little pocket PC, and took it around the world with me for the next 15 years. It did yeoman duty figuring aircraft weights and balances, as well as radiation dose rates, etc. Heck, I even programmed it to play Blackjack.

Lately, I've been using it for trigonometry and GD&T calculations. It's seen better days, but I'll wager it would fit nicely into Tam's Digital Fossils collection. I'm just happy that it can still find use, nearly 20 years after it first hit the market.

Break out the Arctic Silver!

Since I can't sleep for crap pending the big day later this week, I decided to take my mind off things and do some tweaking of my big black IBM workstation - aka, Monolith.



See these little fellows? They're compact, heavy, and yet at least a generation or two obsolete. Still, I had to have them, because they're fairly rare XEON MP processors, 2.8Ghz, with the nifty additional 2Mb L3 cache. These chips aren't dual-core, but are instead hyper-threading enabled, which was an earlier run-up to the current dual-core and quad-core processors. I paid all of about $35.00 for the pair of them, and they got stuffed posthaste into this rat's nest of a case:


They generate a lot of heat, but sure enough, the Windows Task Manager shows 4 processors, and System Information confirms 2.8Ghz each. Woo-hoo!

(Now, if anybody tells you a pair of Xeon MP processors won't work in a system using the old Intel 860 chipset originally intended for one or two Xeon DP processors, they're liars!)

Ever get butterflies?

When do they go away, before or after the surgery?

I'm so damned nervous right now, I've seriously considered calling off the whole thing, and I don't go under the knife until this Wednesday.

Unfortunately, what they're cutting me open for won't go away by itself, and will actually get bigger if not tended to.

Pins and needles until then, I guess...

Speaking of tomatoes...

Happiness is having stuff like this growing on your back deck, ready to pick in the first week of July! For the record, I use equal parts of Miracle Gro potting soil, composted cow manure, and plain topsoil. I also bottle rainwater from the downspouts, because the plants really don't appreciate the city water that much. Bon Appetit'!