Poker Tracker

Well, it's been a while since I've posted on anything poker related. Mainly because I have not been playing much and therefore there hasn't been much to report on. I have not been playing at the higher stakes like I was last year as I found the fluctuations were beginning to be too extreme. So I took my profits and ran! Well, not quite.

I withdrew most of the money out of my poker account into a US account for travel into the states and also for some US investing. I left some in my online poker account though because I wanted to keep the poker going, but at much smaller limits. I haven't found this to be anything profitable, but definatly entertaining.

Earlier this month I decided to start out on a theory after playing a few heads up winner take all tourneys. For a very small risk of $5.25 per player where $5 goes into the prize pot and the $.25 goes to the house. So if you win, you take home $10 or after you factor in the $.25 and your buy in, it's a $4.75 profit. I found that I would win far more than I would lose. With this information I decided to try a little experiment. Worst case the system would fail and I'd be out a couple of dollars, best case scenario is that I'd have a constant stream of income (albeit quite small, but free money nonetheless).

My theory is this, I play enough of these $5.25 games (each game can take anywhere from a couple minutes to as long as 15 or 20 in extreme cases - I'd say 5 mins on average) to take in at least $15 per day. Simply play everyday (if possible) and it should equal roughly $100US per week, $400US per month and $4,800 per year. Little bits add up! After a little while I can quite simply also increase the limits to the $10.50 games and then take all those numbers and double 'em.

So I'm right on track now after 9 days of making on average of $15/day. You can keep track of how my poker system works or fails just above the destination tracker to the right. =============>>>>>>

The hardest thing to do is stop after making the $15, but for my experiment I can't get greedy... need to stay consistant! I recommend this system to anyone and everyone! I call it little risk with nearly guaranteed results.. well.. in my case at least.. "your results may vary!" ...had to throw in the disclaimer there. ;)

Frequent Flyer Miles

If only I could get some sort of Frequent Flyer Miles while working. Unfortunately that is not the case. But the other day I was updating my flying hours and statistics. Since working for AirSprint I have accumulated approx 241,000kms while flying all over North America - from the Arctic Circle Down to Los Cabos, over to Florida and up to Ottawa.

Turns out that stastically speaking, I've flown around the world an equivilant of 6 times exactly! Cool eh?

Everying in the career of a pilot is based off of their flight experience. So the amount of hours in the airplane is what will determine your progression in the industry. And more importantly it's the type of flying accumulated in different aircraft, different types of flying and different locations.

Here are some rough figures to give you an idea of various stages of hour accumulation and what they're good for.

Private Pilot's License - 55 hrs
Commercial Pilot's License - 200 hrs
Airline Transport Pilot's License - 1500 hrs

Those are just the main milestones, each requiring more specific requirements and various other additional ratings.

I'm currently floating around 1300 hrs, 500 of which has been accumulated here at AirSprint. The most a pilot can legally fly in one year is 1200 hrs, but within my company pilots tend to fly around 500-700hrs a year. A career pilot can expect to end their careers with around 20-25,000hrs. So.. I'm on my way!

I'm in trouble

No I haven't gotten some girl knocked up... err.. hope not at least! ;)

I took the WRX in for the 42,000km scheduled maintenance and I wanted to check out the new 2006 models because they've done quite a bit of changes to it, the most noticeably being the new improved 2.5L engine as opposed to the 2.0L engine in my WRX. This helps to get rid of the horrible turbo lag that my car has (takes time for the turbo to spool up leaving a dead band of power when you first start out).

Well.. it took all of 2 mins on a test drive for me to realize how smooth and great this new engine is. So I say again - I'm in trouble!

I even went as far as to see how much my WRX would get for a trade-in and it essentially would be 2 years more of car payments and that would take care of the difference and I'd have a brand new car. My current car payments are getting close to being finished.. So I like the idea of having no more car payments... but I also like the idea of having a brand new WRX that has the whole turbo lag thing licked.

Woe is me.

SNL - "Lazy Sunday" skit

I laughed and laughed and laughed. Check out this "digital short" video that Saturday Night Live did a couple of weeks ago. This has got to be some of the funniest stuff that has been on SNL in the past decade!

SNL - "Lazy Sunday" Click me

Blog format updated

I wanted to change the format of the blog a bit. What do you guys think?

Happy New Year!

Holy cow, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a few events have transpired since my last post and I figure I'd better get to it and place the updates into word format below!

The holidays were great. At 4:30am on December 23rd I awoke and got dressed in half zombie like fashion. I banged on the door of my roommate who the day before had agreed to take me to the airport prior to finding out what time my flight was.. sucker! So I arrive at the airport just before 5am for my 6am flight to Vancouver. The luggage check in went smoothly, but then I turned the corner to go through security. It was right then and there that I realized how much private travel can reduce one's stress in life. A lineup like nothing I'd seen before. It must have had a couple hundred people waiting and I ran to the end to start the process.

After a few minutes I realized that I was likely screwed and not going to make my flight. And then it happened, a holiday time miracle, gate agents came racing down the line asking if anyone was on a 6am flight. I immediately breathed a sigh of relief and started following the woman as she was going to wisk me and the other poor unfortunates to the front of the line to cut infront of all the other individuals who had shown up VERY early for their 7, 8 and even 9am flights! Yeesh!

So I get through security (us pilots use our security passes to help speed along the process.. when emptying pockets we just convieniently put them in our trays making sure the security people notice, that gives us a lot more credibility going through that line and less likely to be mistaken for the next Osama)

I walk swiftly all the way through the terminal and just barely make it on board the aircraft. I was crammed in the middle seat and the guy next to me had a baby, so it was a not so pleasant experience... the whole while I was once again thinking to myself how nice private travel is.

In Vancouver finally and I get picked up by my dad in the SMART car. Yup, in case some of you didn't know, my folks have a SMART car. Crazy eh?

I get home and quickly have a nap. Ahhh.. relaxing. My time at home is spent visiting friends and family. We had our big X-mas dinner on the night of the 24th because my sister had to work X-mas night. That was good, just like old times. I had a great time. I also managed to score another X-mas miracle through work by requesting an extra day off (Boxing Day) in order to fly home on one of our Jets that just happened to be heading back to Calgary from Vancouver empty that day! And success I was able to hop aboard! 2 other employees had the exact same idea and so we were all on board the plane with some family of one of the other pilots. Wow... now that is the way to travel! That jet is one smooth machine. We were back in Calgary in no time.

The next few days were spent flying to various places like Grande Prairie and Winnipeg. I was supposed to spend New Years in Ontario again like last year, but the flights all got switched around. I managed to avoid that gong show this year thankfully. For those of you keeping count that's 3 holiday miracles! :)

New Years was spent modestly at home with some beer and my roommate and one of his friends. Nothing too big. Nice and quiet, with copious amounts of booze consumed.

Yesterday I was in Ontario briefly. I did the pick-up for those folks that spent New Years in Kenora, ON just like last year. But this year the weather was looking to be something horrible!! All out in that area was forecasted crap and the weather we received for the Kenora airport as we approached was no good at all. The weather was calling for 300' cloud bases with remarks of "ragged" which means that it could be 200' in some areas and 400' in others. The best instrument approach we could conduct to get into the Kenora airport gets us down to 308' above the ground. You do the math, it's not looking good.

Well I'll tell you, that was some of the most challenging flying I've had to do in my entire career. Because the weather was so bad, our company procedures call for us to conduct a "Pilot Monitored Approach - PMA". This calls for the first officer (me) to fly the entire approach while the captain's only responsibility is to be looking outside of the aircraft towards where the runway should be and if he receives enough visual cues to safely land the airplane he then takes control of the aircraft and finishes the landing. This is because it would take too long for me to readjust my sights outside of the airplane instead of inside looking at all the instruments and that split second of adjustment could mean we would miss the runway and have to abort the landing.

So at exactly 0.5 miles from the airport and skimming the tree tops at 308' we found the runway and safely landed. Now that's flying! We certainly made our money on that leg. We then flew to Winnipeg to pick up one more person and the weather was just as bad there, but Winnipeg has a better instrument approach there and it's not as complicated as the "non-precision approach" we had just flown into Kenora. We then flew all the way home to Calgary after that where the weather was much nicer. It was quite a turbulent flight however due to the fact we were flying right next to the jet stream and the difference in the wind strength and direction when so close to it causes a lot of turbulence.

As for today, pretty laid back and relaxed. I went out in search of some specific synthetic oil for the WRX today but everywhere was either sold out or no longer caring it!? I was pretty shocked. The car goes in for service on Thursday so I've got one more day to try and track down some good oil for it.

And there you have it. A bit of updating if you were able to read through it all!

My company... AirSprint Inc.

Well most of you know the company I work for. It's Canada's largest fractional ownership airline. We also do executive charters and things of that nature. But our main business is in selling "fractions" of an airplane to someone who can then use it like a time share. There is an initial buy in cost, then monthly costs and hourly costs depending upon your usage. We have 2 main aircraft that we use to make these things happen. The aircraft which I fly is the Pilatus PC-12, and we also operate the Cessna Citation Excel bizjet. So people buy fractions of these airplanes and are allotted so many hours a year to use them. Great for business write-offs and people with lots of money.

Pilatus PC-12 more info
Cost: $6,000,000 CDN
Seating: 7 or 6 passenger executive design with fully enclosed lav
Engine: Single engine Pratt and Whitney Turbo-prop (PT6-67B) produces 1200 SHP
Cruise info: 260knots (530km/hr) at 28,000ft

Cessna Citation Excel more info
Cost: $17,500,000 CDN
Seating: 9 passenger executive design with fully enclosed lav
Engine: 2 Pratt and Whitney turbofans (PW-545A) producing 3804lbs thrust each
Cruise info: 430knots (795km/hr) at 35,000ft but can and does go as high as 45,000ft!

So those are our main aircraft that we operate. This company is growing quite rapidly, a heck of a lot since I've been employed here. The prospects for long term employment are also great at the rate things are going. We operate 10 Pilatus PC-12's and 3 Citation Excels across Canada. This number will just continue to grow and grow. All the machines come to us brand new and maintained very nicely. We have future plans to operate bigger jets to allow our clients international travel. Pretty soon no place will be unreachable by one of our aircraft. That will be an exciting time for this company when we start to travel across the oceans and that time is not far off by any means!

In January we are expecting the delivery of a brand spanking new Learjet 40 more info. We will be managing it for a couple of our clients who have gone in together to purchase the aircraft.

We are also about to move into brand new facilities here in Calgary. We'll have our own set of hangars for the aircraft and a reception/lounge area for all of passengers when they arrive. The upstairs is also filled with office space for management and our flight coordination department, and there will also be some facilities for pilots to sit back and relax in as well. We're all looking forward to moving in as it is a bit behind schedule and we're currently operating out of temporary office space in our old facilities... not so fun.

So yeah, big things are on the horizon here at AirSprint Inc. It is certainly becoming the place where someone can be in my position and make continually progression right up the aircraft ladder to international flying. So who knows, I might stick around longer with AirSprint than I had originally thought. It's exciting to see the potential this business has. And the best part of it is the security. Our clients own the aircraft and we operate them for them. So there's always work. Not like an airline that needs to have people fly, we are in no trouble if our clients don't fly... but of course we do much better when they do, and of course it makes sense for them to use what they're ultimately paying for anyways!

So there you have it. A little insight into my company. Our website is AirSprint Inc.. So take a further look if it interests you. Post any questions you have, and if it's something along the lines of how much to charter us from Vancouver to Calgary and return... you're looking at roughly >$6,000CDN! We aren't cheap, but we provide the best service out there!

Home for the Holidays

well.. for the most part.

Just a reminder to all that I will be coming home and spending December 23rd to 25th in Vancouver on my scheduled days off. So I'll hopefully get to see some of you!

Other than that... not much to report. Still in a bit of a slow slump here at work. I did have one flight to Regina on Sunday night, but that was a quick drop off and before that I hadn't flown for a week. Well it's Tuesday night right now and I don't have anything on the books at all coming up. I do see a couple of flights, one to Texas and one to Arizona that haven't been crewed yet. So I'm hopefully I'll get to see one of those sunny and warm destinations.

Well that's all for now!

Crazy busy to crazy not busy

Yup. The story of my life lately.

I was super busy flying my ass of when doing that marathon flight last week that including transiting over most of the US and most of Canada within 3 days. Then we have times like right now where I haven't flown/worked in 3 days and now I'm about to go on my scheduled 3 days off. In the near future I see one flight coming up that's a trip to Kalispell down in the states, but that's right below the freaking border so all of an hour flight each way. I want to see more Palm Springs and Phoenix flights soon, they're great for racking up hours in the logbook, plus they're nice and warm destinations!

As for that flight down to Florida, what a disaster! We flew to the limits and then a little bit beyond. Hitting up Wichita Kansas, Marco Island Florida, then up to Latrobe Pensilvania which was only a stop so we could get adequate rest. The next day we continued on to Toronto where we swappend airplanes and kept on going all the way to Regina. A night in Regina where we both had the opportunity to eat a real meal (we had been working so none-stop that we really handn't eaten anything more than snacks the whole time). We went to Earls in Regina and each had big steaks with a couple of beers, ah the food never tasted so good! The next day we went to Edmonton and Penticton then to Vancouver for what should have been a drop off flight and then straight back home to Calgary empty. But we broke the plane in Vancouver and had to spend the night! Not a bad deal, except my entire family was on vacation in Mexico and we had housesitters at my house so I actually ended up spending the night in a hotel in my own home town! Oh well. The next morning the plane was all good to go and we flew home to Calgary. It was quite the trip, those 3 days accounted for 1 third of my monthly flying hours!

Well, time to get back to twiddling my thumbs here in Calgary. At least it's starting to warm up a bit.. we've spent a good week in the -20's! Brrrr... -7 ain't so bad right now!

No more Florida layover, but what a trip

Well, I don't get to layover for a week anymore in Florida. Instead we are going to be doing one heck of a flight over the next 4 days. The map below helps to illustrate how far we'll be travelling!

Saturday (RED) - Calgary to Wichita, KS to Marco Island, FL to Kitchner, ON. (~14hrs flight time)

Sunday (GREEN) - Kitchner, ON to Calgary to Pasa Robles, CA. (~13hrs flight time)

Monday (YELLOW) - A quick hop north to Montgomery Bay, CA. (~1hr fliht time)

Tuesday (BLUE) - Montgomery Bay back to Calgary. (~5.5hrs flight time)

So as you can see it's gonna be a lot of flying, especially the first couple of days.. we're pushing the legally allowed amount of flying in any given 1 day period. It should work.. just barely! Then next weekend I'm scheduled to fly back to Marco Island to pick up those folks we dropped off, so it will be another couple of crazy hour days. Very good for the logbook though, lots of time building which is good.


Click on the picture to see full size

Oh, and don't forget to check out my Mexico pics.. check out the last post below this one!

Mexico pics finally!!

Took me some time to get them done, but here they are. Take a look, if you don't have an imagestation account, just sign up for a free one and enjoy!

MEXICO PHOTO ALBUM

post some comments here of what you think!

Back from out East

What a trip... I did quite a bit of flying and not a whole lot of sleeping.

Once we got the plane there (5hrs and 12mins of flying) I called the office to find out what was on the books for me. I was supposed to do that Phili trip but things were totally chaotic and the whole reason we positioned the aircraft to Toronto was just cancelled and it didn't need to have made the trip. Wow.. what a piss off.

Well, now I was there so they slotted me in to do a trip the next day which was to leave Kitchner, ON (our main eastern base) at 5:35am! So I had to catch a ride with one of our maintenance guys that happened to be out at the Toronto airport and he drove me to Kitchner which was a good 45min drive. Once there I pretty much crashed at the hotel room 'cause I hadn't slept much the night before. I awoke after about 4hrs of sleep and couldn't get any more sleep before it was time to get up and get ready for that stupid early flight out of Kitchner. I took a cab to the airport and saw our eastern base facilites. Pretty cool. So we left for Ottawa to pick up some business folks and took them to the downtown city center airport in Toronto. Pretty cool, it's on a little island right next to downtown. We stayed in a hotel for the afternoon in downtown and then flew them back to Ottawa in the late afternoon. Then it was back to Kitchner for the night.

Once back at the hotel room again I get my finalized plans for the next day. One of our jet pilots was also landing in Kitchner and needed to get back out to Alberta so he and I had flights booked on Westjet at the same time (I was going to Calgary and he was going to Edmonton). At 7:15am out of Toronto, so at freaking 4am we were on the road out of Kitchner to make the flight.. crazy. I tried sleeping on the Westjet flight but only got a couple of mininaps in. Back in Calgary it was super warm. It ended up being 20 degrees here in the afternoon. These chinook winds are great sometimes.. talk about a mild couple of days.. we should be at -5 easy by now! And there's no snow around here either, which is totally odd too.

Oh well, not my problem, I'm loving it! Now I'm on days off getting ready to head off to Marco Island, Florida. I will be leaving on Saturday morning and will stay until the following Saturday afternoon. Woo hoo! My second 8 day trip in a matter of a month! And it's another beautiful location. I'll likely spend a few more dollars down there, being that it's not an all inclusive like Mexico, but I think I can afford to spend a little bit of money down there!

Off to the East Coast!

So tomorrow morning bright and early I hop in one of the planes and head straight for Toronto. The plane is an Eastern based plane that had been brought out to the West to help cover some busy flying. Well, that busy flying has subsided. So we are repositioning it there tomorrow.

Once there, I will spend a night in Toronto and then stay there an extra day to do an Eastern flight! Woo hoo. So I'll meet up with another eastern pilot and we'll be flying to Philidelphia on Monday. Cool. I've always wanted to do some of the flying out east. So now I'll get my chance. Then either Monday night or Tuesday morning I'll be flying back to Calgary with Westjet or Air Canada.

Should be fun!

Alarm problems and upcoming layovers

Well I'm just at the end of my 3 days off and I'm proud to report that I've done sweet fudge all! Haha... every once and a while ya just need to relax and do nothing, and I did one heck of a good job at it.

I've been having some problems lately with my paging alarm system for my WRX. I've had it since I got the car back in April 2003 and in the past couple of months it has started to act pretty quirky. The most annoying of which is it doesn't always work properly when locking/arming and unlocking/disarming. I will go to lock the car and arm the alarm and it will only arm the alarm, but the car remains unlocked. And sometimes I'll go to unlock the car and it will disarm the alarm and lock the car! Quite frustrating! So I managed to track down the guy who did the install and he's always been exceptional with customer service and his work is amazing. He informed me that the alarm brain is malfunctioning and happens with about 1% of the units (lucky me). So thankfully it's still under warranty and he is mailing me out a new unit which I will have to have professionally installed and reprogrammed by a dealer out here, they have referred me to a shop nearby that will do it for about 50 bucks in labor costs. Had I still been in the lowermainland they would have done everything for free, but c'est la vie. I'm quite willing to pay the cash to get this thing resolved. So as soon as it gets here am having that all done.

Tomorrow I'm off to Winnipeg and back, just a quick trip unlike the last time I was in Winnipeg over New Years for 5 days! A Kelowna layover is up and coming as well as another week long layover in another warm destination! I've got a trip coming up at the end of November to Marco Island in Florida (Lower west coast of Florida just south of Naples). That should be interesting if it stays. Time will tell.

Well that's the latest, back to continue my last day of nothingness!

Home for X-mas!

(The pics for Mexico are still coming.. taking some time to track down Colin and get his pics!)

But as per the title of this blog entry states... I'm coming home for X-mas. I was looking through my days off schedule through December and found out that my 3 days off run over Christmas.

The days in question are Friday December 23rd to Sunday December 25th.

So I will be leaving Calgary early early in the morning on the 23rd taking advantage of a seat sale with AirCanada and returning on the last flight on Sunday Evening. So this time I will actually get to spend X-mas at home with family and friends rather than working night shifts in our company office like I did last year! So.. just confirmed all the tickets online 5mins ago so it is a go, nothing better screw this up work wise, but it should be pretty solid. I'm one of the lucky few to have his days off fall over the holidays as we have holiday blackouts from December 21st to January 5th that no employee is allowed to take off as it is a very busy time for us as our clients fly all over the place visiting family and going to company parties and stuff like that.

On a side note, my last few flights have been crazy early in the morning and I've been getting some really crazy sleep. I've had 3 05:00am flights and even one that was scheduled for 04:42am! Keep in mind that's the time that the plane takes off and us pilots need to be at the airport at least an hour before departure to prepare for the flight. So add another 15mins for travel and 45mins to wake up, shower, shave and get dressed... and you're looking at a freaking 2:42am alarm clock setting! I believe I got about a whopping hour and 15mins of sleep that night. Thankfully we then had a day room booked at a hotel so we could go and sleep and relax for a few hours before the return flight home in the afternoon.

Well there we go... so hopefully I see some of you over Xmas! Woo hoo!