Just in Time

Just in time.  My sanity was slipping away and I was beginning to panic.  Even Ethiopia seemed like a great place to work.  Then the phone call.

Want to fly a 787?

Yeah, alright.

Cool, you start in January.

If you go to Flight Radar website and filter B788 you'll only ever see a couple flying in the whole world!  How nice it will be to be exclusive and special.  It won't last long, they are pushing these things out at a tremendous rate.

I shall ponder my place in the universe from the comfort of my bed.

Yes, it has beds! And internet.  Messy combination

A few months to hang about before I start.  Bit of volunteering or some other project to waste the time.

Excitement is a great thing, especially after a forced period in tracksuit bottoms and string vest.  I feel I can contribute to humanity once again!  Just not straight away.

The Transition

Oh dear.  The little company I've been working for went bust.  Wouldn't have known if it wasn't for the wonders of Google Translate.  Sat in the hotel playing Sins of a Solar Empire (awesome game), Finnish email came through.  I'll translate it later, after my game.  Unfortunately that game takes hours but something nagged at me.  Translate.  The word "bankruptcy" leapt out at me.  I leapt out my chair, shoved everything into a bag and legged it calmly out of that hotel in Birmingham and drove home.

And here we stand, hoping very much for a transition from this-

Retro and Hipsterish.  Not acceptable

To this-

Shiny and new.  I'll have some of that

The Boeing 757 was designed about 40 years ago.  It is a classic in every way but they don't make them anymore.  This means job opportunities get less and less.  This does not please me.  As much as I love it, I hope never to fly it again.

To the future!  I want to fly the 787.  Brand new with the new plane smell I have never smelled.  It may mean moving away for a while but I'm willing to do it for the career.  And head-up display!!  

The transition will be straight forward.  Boeing are lovely people and keep a certain philosophy to their design.  It is one I know well.  I'll just have more toys to play with.

To the future.

Gee us a job....

Lazy Git

No posting since April!  How lazy.  Without massive angst and a steady flow of shit in my life it is difficult to rant and rave in an amusing manner.

Spent a lot of time reading and playing Bejeweled on the iPad.  One is worthwhile, the other is not.  Outside of that, the collapse of civilisation in Europe has forced me to consider the "I'll never consider that" scenario of moving to Middle East for work.  As a pilot, Europe is not a good place to be.  My old colleagues are finding this out and wherever I look in Europe for anything decent it is rather depressing (notice Europe, not UK- UK is even more messed up!).  

I could hybernate for 5 years.  Considered it but my phobic tendency of  "arghh, life is passing me by" reared its head.  That is a no go.  Total career change, meh, I don't know how to do anything else that would pay decently enough.  Looks like stuck with flying for the moment.  

So from this

To this

I guess I'm going to have to get used to the idea.

T5

I'm sitting in T5 Heathrow right now.  Fuck this place.  It is everything that is bad about the world.  Consumerism abounds, all the shops that have shit without price tags are here.  You'd have to drug me and drag me in to one of these places.  Horrific, as are the people I see walking in to them.  The Champagne bar has a couple of Toffs in it trying to be pals with the bar staff.  So pathetic, the place is so full on wannabes.

That'll bring me onto the more enjoyable aspects of this place.  BA crew!  There are a lot of them shuffling through here.  What a sight.  Old bags that are the cabin crew and some poor first officer being bored to tears by the babblings of some crusty captain talking utter shite in a posh voice about God knows what (I did hear recycling chat- "yes, you separate the paper, aluminium.....".  I thought about giving the poor lad an application form for Thomas Cook).  One of my pals is joining this lot and I just don't have the heart to mention any of this.  He doesn't read this thankfully.  I'll get myself into trouble if I talk about them at any length.

Then there are Hipters!  God bless their little non-matching socks.  Lots of them here to endlessly amuse me but I'm so sorry, beloved reader, I just don't have the balls to take a photo of them.  Soon perhaps...

Pointless FAQs

Praying or meditating will not help you with this shitty place!  Be a man and face up to the horror.  I do a form of meditating (self medication?)- it's called Guinness and it works pretty well.

Bit like Mixed Martial Arts but with silly hats.

T5- avoid if at all possible.

Christ, they're boarding my flight..........

Repeat After Me

Richy's Not a Hipster

Now watch the video

My bike has 24 gears.  Proof enough (like you needed any).

All Serious For a Moment

Just bumming about on Youtube, as we all do from time to time, watching kittens fall down slides and a teen sensation getting what he deserves I came across something profound and a lot scary.

It's a lecture about basic maths and the consequences for nothing less than the future of our civilisation.  I'd urge you to watch it and share it with everyone you know.  I for one will be accelerating plans to get myself a modest house with some land in a quiet part of Scotland.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

It's in 8 parts and this link should list them all.

Who'd have thought an old guy talking about maths could scare the shit out of me.  The people in the classroom really weren't getting it I think.  Dumb shits.

Never Gonna Give You Up

Have I found a Rick Astley  clock?!

Yes, I took this picture today. 

Some context may have been appropriate.  My inane grin in the shot perhaps?

It may have to be stolen and replaced with one of my classic Flava Flav time pieces.  

Honoured reader, what do you think?!

The Dangers of Nostalgia

Hipsters don't suffer from nostalgia.  It's all about the now.  Not being a Hipster, I do suffer from nostalgia.

Every 5 years or so I will break out my Sinclair Spectrum (must be worth a few quid by now) and try and load up a game.  Finding a tape player is becoming increasingly difficult but once hooked up I listen with joy and the beeps and whistles of the game loading, trying to recapture the original excitement and anticipation I felt all those years ago.  Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the games starts and.....

Ant Attack.  You wouldn't believe how many hours I played this for.

I turn it off because it's shit and disappointing.  We expect and get so much these days.  Going back to the early days of computing and gaming is just a major let down.  That is the problem with nostalgia- as soon as it is indulged it evaporates very quickly.  So the Spectrum gets carefully packed away and the nostalgia will build again for another 5 years.

(Now you can play Spectrum and many other old games on your browser- go here http://www.zxspectrum.net/ and get disappointed without having to find a tape player)

And now to a game I'm playing that harks back to the halcyon days of Commodore Amiga.  Syndicate was an amazing game back in the day, and a shocker.  It kicked up a lot of shit for its extreme violence (way before Grand Theft Auto was on the scene).  I remember taking great pleasure in setting crowds of people of fire with flame throwers.  Ah, those were the days.

Oh, it's my guys on fire.

So, if there was ever a reason to use nostalgia and do an awesome remake of an awesome game, here is the chance.  And they did.  It's a first person shooter (a pretty good one too) but the only real link to the original is the background story of mega-corporations and enhanced super soldiers who do the corporation's bidding. 

Now, I'd have enjoyed this game much more had they not tugged at my nostalgia chord.  Nothing can live up to the memories I had of the original.  So don't try.  Call it something else.  It's a great game, it just has me wishing for the good old days.

This is where we're at now.  Don't look back.

Alien Sex Time Again

Mass Effect 3 is out in a couple days time!! Very excited, as you can imagine.  Here, watch the trailer then I'll let my mouth flap some more-

Play me in 720p please!

So off we go again, shooting stuff, getting cool armour and having sex with crew mates!  I only got to shag a couple in ME2 (the bald chick with tatoos and the second in command).  The one I really wanted to do was the self righteous blue one with big tits.  Lesbo.

I'm sure there will be ample opportunity in number 3.  Looks like pretty much the same characters judging from the trailer.  I refuse to read reviews and plot giveaways, so not too sure.  The main character, I'm pretty sure, will still be a dog with two dicks and sexually harass his crew.  I guess in space laws to protect crew from this kind of behaviour are suspended.  

Will be concentrating more on the sexual harassment of the crew this time round.  The other titles I focussed on missions and killing stuff.  I feel I've not appreciated the titles fully.  Won't make that mistake this time round.  Probably spend a lot of time hanging about the female toilets and showers (yes, they were in the previous game but I didn't spend enough time there).  Or just be brazen and hang about inside their quarters.  Captain's privilege (which in real life is sadly very against the law)!

So roll on the blue women and the one with the mask on, I can't wait for this roller coaster of titilation and rejection!  Just like real life but without the blue women. 

Told you she was of lesbian persuasion! 

Goodbye to Inane

I did it.  Deleted my Facebook.  Very liberating I must say.  The amount of pointless shit I was subjected to by my "friends" got to critical levels and I couldn't abide it any more.  My real friends know my email, that's all that matters.  

Things that drove me over the edge-

• Status updates like "having a coffee in Braehead".  Yeah, advertise your pointless life why don't you! Mine might be equally as pointless but at least I dress it up with things like "bit a junkie's ear off" or "drove so fast I encountered time dilation effects".  Learn to tart up your mundane existence FFS.

• Pictures of babies and pets.  All. The. Time.  Now I'll quickly say my siblings are very restrained in their posting of said cute baby photos and they are both awesome and wise.  However, if your life consists solely of your pissing and shitting creation (lets face it, that's all they do in the first 6 months) you got issues.  I don't want any part of it.

• Having personal conversations on the pages between family members that would be infinitely better to do over the phone or face to face.  "You got my phone?", "I'm coming over in 30 minutes".... This is unbelievable.  I'm not going any further with this one as I'll have another episode.  My doctor suggests I stay calm at all times.

• Exaggerated expressions of love or devotion to your partner.  Feeling guilty about something?  Why do you need to tell the whole world?  Tell it to your partner face to face then show him/her how much you REALLY care.  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.  Fawning parasites.....

I guess those are the main ones that got on my tit end.  And really, they pretty much summed up my Facebook experience.  Not Facebook's fault, just my poor selection of "friends".  From what I hear, I'm not the only one who chooses unwisely.

Do yourself a favour....

And to Facebook

PS Financial health warning-please FFS, don't buy the unbelievably over valued shares in this company when the finally list in the US.