Flew my ass off!

I'm on days off now after my busiest flying stint since last summer I think. And the fact that it was winter added to the headaches. Winter weather equals added headaches and stress. Having to deal with icing and snow and poor weather adds a lot to the flying experience. We had pretty much every weather phenomena known to man over the 5 days of flying. My schedule looked like this:

Day 1
Calgary to Edmonton
Edmonton to Victoria
Victoria to Edmonton

Day 2
Edmonton to Regina
Regina to Victoria
Victoria to Edmonton

Day 3
Edmonton to Regina
Regina to Edmonton
Edmonton to Grande Prairie
Grande Prairie to Calgary

Day 4
Calgary to Edmonton
Edmonton to Grande Prairie
Grande Prairie to Edmonton
Edmonton to Victoria

Day 5
Victoria to Edmonton
Edmonton to Calgary

So yeah.. it was busy!!! With weather varying from beautiful blue skies on the coast to full on blizzard conditions in Regina and 1.5 ft of snowfall in Edmonton. It was intense.

Unfortunately I did not get to participate in the big poker event, we didn't make it back on time on Sunday. So next week I'll be playing in the big $125,000 event.

I did get to test out my new headset a lot and it worked great. So quiet and comfortable. I'm very happy with my investment.

Big Poker Tourney take 2

Well I've finally received word that the tourney has been rescheduled for next week. My entry fee was refunded and they've added some extra coin to the guaranteed prize pool amount.

It will now be a prize pool of $150,000!

So I'm looking forward to entering it this coming Sunday. Again, it'll be at 9PM EST.

I however am flying for 5 days straight starting early Wednesday morning and only getting home in the late afternoon of Sunday. So I'll have to hustle home in order to make the start time!

RAGE!!!

So I get myself all prepared for the big tourney to start. I go for a drive to calm my nerves, I have some coffee to make sure I'm alert, I do some light stretching and even shadow box to the theme song from Rocky during the final countdown to 9PM EST.

Then, nothing. The tourney info page says that the registration is closed, but nobody gets seated at a table. I think hmmm, maybe just a slight delay. But other 9PM games are running properly.

Then all of a sudden the game totally disappears from the tourney listing. It's gone! Holy moly something has gone horribly wrong.

The site had recently done some upgrading and had problems last week with games. It appears to have struck again at the most inopportune time! The only 2 games that I can see that were really affected was mine and another large tourney that had already been playing for 6.5hrs. That game was in weird quasi suspension and I have no idea how they're going to fix that for those guys.

So I've sent my email off to customer support and I'm sure they've got 500+ from the other players as well. I guess I'll be playing in next weeks game instead? Who knows, I await my response and hopefully good news.

Man I'm irked! Big time!

Biggest Poker game of my life tomorrow!

So ever since coming in second in that nice big poker tourney a few weeks ago, I've had the itch to play in even BIGGER events! If I can spend $33 bucks and walk away with over $1,800 like I did before, then the cash has got to be good if I get myself in a bigger event.

Well, the biggest event that my poker site (Ultimate Bet) hosts is their Sunday Night $125,000 Guaranteed Prize Pool Tourney.

First place does not get all that cash, but a sizeable sum. The last event I played had a prize pool of $12,000 and for second I got the $1800. With this big tourney tomorrow night first place usually goes for around $35,000!

Well, how much must it cost to get into this huge event!? A tidy $215. I'm not willing to spend this much of my bankroll on one event. So what's the next best thing to do? Play in smaller tourneys that specifically are put in place to allow the winners a direct entry into this big event games! And if you hadn't guessed it by now, I just won one! I beat out 50 some odd other players and am entered in to play tomorrow night!

I'm not expecting anything huge out of this, and I plan on playing the best poker of my life tomorrow and hopefully won't make any stupid plays. I've been buckling down lately with my play and it's paid off.

So I hope to turn the $11 I spent today on the smaller tourney, to get me a nice return on investment.

You can watch my live play by downloading the free software on Ultimatebet.com. I'll be playing in the Real Money, Scheduled Tourney, ALL tab, Sunday March 12th 9:00PM EST, $125,000 Guaranteed Tourney. My poker ID is "Drifting", surprise surprise. You can ask me further via email/msn for details.

Another cool factor about the tourney is the chance to play with actual pros. The poker site I play on has endorsement deals with certain pro players and part of their contract is to play games on the site. So I might get the chance to play up against Phil Hellmuth or Annie Duke tomorrow!

So yeah.. wish me luck! (Now that I've hyped it up so much things could go very sour, but I'm happy with just being entered in it for now.)

Check back late late tomorrow or early early Monday for a report on how things went.

Bose X Aviation Headset Review

Bliss. Pure bliss.

WOW. What a headset, this thing is a performer. It's so light and comfortable and cancels out so much noise. I can see this making a huge difference after a long day of flying where other headsets can increase fatigue because of the continous pressures and loud noises that we're exposed to throughout the flight.

Another fairly active day of flying tomorrow. Should be fun! Can't wait to put on the headset, flick the switch, and sit back and enjoy the bliss!

My wallet is a lot lighter

Well I finally took the plunge. I purchased a new aviation headset. And thanks to my good fortune in poker last month, I was able to go for the top of the line. Nothing beats a BOSE!

I actually had to call up my credit card company first and get them to raise my limit (I had recently switched my credit card over [to a Starbucks Duetto Visa] and therefore the limit was set quite low to start). So once that was taken care of, it was off to the pilot supply store which is right around the corner from our new hangar facilities here in Calgary.

This headset is freaking unbelievable. There are a couple of different headset choices one has. You can either go with a headset that only offers passive noise reduction (which is what my last headset was). The passive means just that, it takes no extra measures other than the fact that you are wearing a heavy, clamping device on your head to help keep the sounds of the aircraft out. The other option today and which is becoming very popular is Active Noise Reduction. These headsets typically have good passive noise reduction and then have the added bonus of electronics within the headset to further reduce noise by using all sorts of fancy microphones and speakers within the ear cups that work together to emit sound waves to cancel out a lot of the noises of the aircraft. Have I lost you? :)

The difference between my headset and your everyday good Active Noise Reduction headset is that BOSE went to considerable trouble to perfect the technology in such a way that it relies on almost NO passive reduction to achieve the same quietness as it's competitors. So essentially it's just all electronics. This makes the headset very light and with little clamping force on your head (just enough to keep it from falling off). When the electronics are turned on you hear white noise and it's like you're in heaven. I was amazed. Can't wait to try it out in the plane, so far it looks like I'll have to wait nearly a week! Ahh the torture! Haha.

Here are some pics I snapped while opening the sucker up, I felt like a kid on Christmas... a kid missing a very large sum of money from his bank account... :)







The controller that's attached to the wires turns the electronics off and on and has volume controls and a few other gizmos that allow you to tweak the headset to just how you want it.

Here is a link to the BOSE website which I've put on here before, but it goes further into the technology behind the active noise reduction.

Now, back to the poker tables to rejuvenate my bank account! :)

Seinfeld lives...

As most of you know I'm a rather big fan of the tv sitcom Seinfeld. Well, back in high school when it was announced that Seinfeld would be ending, I began a project that would allow Seinfeld to live forever!

That sounded too deep. Essentially all I did was write my own Seinfeld script. I had a great time writing it and lots of people read it back in high school and made some great comments. Last year when I was back in possession of the only hard copy of the script I decided to re-write it back out onto the computer and give it some freshening up.

The result is my Seinfeld masterpiece. :)

It's entitled "The Button". I have never really been able to write a synopsis of the episode, so I'll let the whole script speak for itself. If you've got some time and were ever a fan of Seinfeld, I'd like to hear your opinions!

I've put it up for download here: Seinfeld - The Button

Post your comments right on this blog entry!

Brokeback Parodies

I must say I laughed pretty good at these. Here are a couple of great parodies for the movie trailer to "Brokeback Mountain".

First of all, here's the link to the actual movie trailer for Brokeback Mountain:


http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brokeback_mountain/trailer/


Here's one I saw a while ago, aviation themed. :)

http://ebaumsworld.com/2006/01/barebacktopgun.html

And this one was really well done, I just saw it today...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfODSPIYwpQ

Enjoy!

Better job or better job?

If it were only that simple eh?

2 options will come to me over the next few months. I will either have the chance of being upgraded to Captain on my current aircraft (Pilatus PC-12) or have the option of going First Officer on our jet fleet (Citation Excel).

Both have advantages and disadvantages. But even the disadvantages aren't that bad!

Both involve nice pay raises, the Captain job would pay more though. The experience to be earned in each will be very benificial to my career and really doesn't make a whole lot of difference if I were to go either way at this point. From my own point of view however I would like to go Captain first on my current aircraft. I might go a little stir crazy flying from the right side all the time! :)

However, the jet has some great benifits as well. An extremely impressive machine which travels all over north america daily. Our fleet is expanding with the jets rapidly and it goes to some great destinations.

Tricky stuff.. we'll have to see what the near future holds. If I'm offered the jet and hear that I won't have a chance to go Captain on the PC-12 for more than 6 months I'm likely to take the jet.

I'm just grateful that these are my tough decisions as of late!

Hotmail no longer forwarding to BB

Well after some thought I've decided to stop having my Hotmail messages forwarded through to my Blackberry. Even with all my filters in place, I still get 8 or so junk emails a day to my hotmail account. So no longer will anything sent to hotmail show up on my BB, so if you need to get a hold of me "instantly", you'll have to email my BB direct. Most of you have the address but if anyone else wants it, just ask away and I'll let ya know. I won't be posting it on my blog because I most certainly do not want junk mail going direct to my BB! My hotmail address will still be used, but just not in connection with my BB.

These junk emails hurt especially when I'm in the states and I pay $0.008 per kb of data while I'm down there on my BB. I hated the fact that I was paying for junkmail! And believe you me, it adds up at .8 of a cent per kb!

California... not so hot!

Literally. Back from my adventures down in Cali.

We left last week when the weather conditions in the morning here in Calgary were horrible. Wind, snow, cold. We depart, get above the clouds and weather and it's a beautiful flight down to Salt Lake City where we dropped off our passengers.

It's really nice there in Salt Lake City with all the snow capped mountains around. It was sunny and warm there and we hung out at the airport for a little while until we needed to depart for Santa Rosa, CA. Another great flight, flew over top of Lake Tahoe and we didn't see many clouds at all. It got a bit hazy as we landed in Santa Rosa but was warm and pleasant. As we were waiting for our taxi I overheard someone talking about the storm which was about to hit California... great.

And storm it did! We were slammed with a couple of back to back systems which produced lots of rain and wind. So we didn't really get out too much. Forget about going for wine tours, we were lucky to run half a block down the street to grab a bite to eat. We hung out at the hotel the majority of the time.

Then when it came to leave the clouds parted a bit, but that was very misleading! Now thunderstorms where brewing all around us. We saw many mean looking clouds around us so we plotted our departure and had it all organized when we started to taxi out to take off. The air traffic controller then proceeded to tell us about weather warnings just issued. Massive thunderstorms were causing chaos just south of us near San Fransisco. A 747 had been hit by lightning and tornado's had been reported nearby as well. We confirmed it was all south of us and decided to give it a shot. We took off and climbed through some blue sky directly above the airport before proceeding northbound for our Vancouver stop. A few bumps on the departure, but overall not a bad flight. We had been warned about some more possible thunderstorms up the coast that could pose some problems for us, but they never developed.

Then the gongshow of the day began. We arrived in Vancouver and customs had met the airplane. They asked for everyone's declerations and were told about some cash goodies and 16 bottles of wine (the maximum allowable for their stay). One of the agents boards the plane and notices all the gift bags and all the other bags (a lot of luggage!) and wants to look at it further. So the passengers are lead into the customs building to be out of the way and the other pilot and I unload all the bags and they are ALL searched! We were stunned as they found a total of 51 bottles of wine!!!!!

So the customs officers tell us that the passengers have to go to another building at the airport and fill out some paperwork, and that all of the wine but 16 bottles will be seized! So yeah, crazy. We load up the plane again minus all the wine, the passengers all go to another building to get all that stuff figured out. It took an hour to just search all of the stuff. The other pilot and I kept looking at each other hoping to god we weren't going to get in any trouble, or worse yet, our company! But thankfully they were not concerned with us and dealt only with the passengers. In the past, situations like this can flag the aircrew and the aircraft and cause problems in the future. One thing for sure is that whenever this client travels into Canada, customs WILL meet him EVERY SINGLE TIME!

The flight back to Calgary was uneventful aside from the blizzard like conditions we returned to.

It is currenlty very chilly outside and will remain that way for another couple of days. I guess we're getting punished for our super mild winter up until now.

Oh, and my poker cheque came in the mail so I'm off to do some shopping this weekend. It's new headset time, BOSE!

Cali-for-ni-a

Off to Santa Rosa tomorrow and will return on Tuesday. With stops in Salt Lake City and another stop in Vancouver before returning home to Calgary.

Will be spending the majority of the time in Santa Rosa right in the middle of Wine Country (Napa Valley and the like). Post again upon my return!

5hrs and 19mins...

Last night I had a massive headache... but the good kind of headache.

I decided to enter into a higher stakes poker tourney online last night. I was usually just playing in the $5 and sometimes $10 range, but was curious to see how the play was at the higher buy in levels. I was looking around last night with not much else to do and I came across a guaranteed prize pool of $10,000 in a $30+3 buy in no limit hold 'em tourney. This was pretty good bang for the buck so I decided to enter.

However I had already missed the opening bell of the tourney! Not to fear, on some tourney's they'll allow alternates to join in and take the place of people who get knocked out within the first two blind levels. So I was successful in making my way into the tourney. This was shortly after 8pm Calgary time.

What happenened over the next 5hrs was something I couldn't quite comprehend. I was playing my "A" game poker for most of the hands. Rarely risking much if I didn't need to, and making sure my chips were in the pot when big pay outs were to be had. I fought and battled through many band hands and bad beats. But I did have some great hands that unfolded well for me. Some lucky, some more than lucky and some just great skill :) well.. lucky skill perhaps.

I recall one hand as we were getting down close to the money, I had AK and found myself going all in and up against, yikes... KK! The cards started flopping and I'm chanting "ACE ACE ACE" and thank god and Ace did hit! I had just doubled up and was looking good as I now was within top 10 of the further remaining 50 ppl.

422 people had entered the tourney and therefore pushed the prize pool for all payouts above $12,000. Not too shabby! And as long as I didn't do anything stupid I was at least guaranteed some money as we soared through the final 50.

So I was now in the money and feeling pretty good. Stealing some blinds as the competition got down to the nitty gritty. I was on my game, only risking it when I needed to. I did have 2 hands though that I can recall where I was on full bluff and my opponent thought long and hard before folding. I could read what they had, but damn... tense moments and I was hoping they weren't going to call with their crappy hands (but which would have been far better than mine!).

Now we're into the final 20 and I'm not doing anything too stupid, too many large chip stacks at my table. 8 of the 9 leading chip stacks were at my table! It was crazy. Nobody was really willing to risk a whole lot, and most of the hands that ended up getting played were two great hands but only 1 winner.

Final table... holy crap, is this really happening. I'm aware that the payouts are going to start getting quite nice at this point. And I'm now in 8/10 at this final table with my chip stack. So I'm only going to risk it for solid gold. I manage to steal some more pots and secure myself with chip stack 5/8 as another couple players bite it. I'm doing ok. And then it happened. The turning hand. I'm dealt J10 offsuit. There are 3 of us in the pot, the flop comes Q 9 8. Hmmm... I do believe I've just flopped the nut straight! However, there are also two hearts out there now. So I'm a little concerned. I check the bet, the player to my left checks and the player to my right bets the minimum. I come over the top feeling this guy might have a little something or is perhaps on a draw for those dang hearts. I raise it up big. He simply calls. I'm concerned now that he is indeed on a drawing hand. The turn card is a 5, not a heart. I go all in for the rest of my stack which is not a very impressive amount but I'm called very quickly. The cards are flashed before the river is shown. He has KK. I have him licked. Nothing is going to save his baken now! I have now crippled his stack and doubled up. I have taken chip lead and am sitting quite pretty.

I play very carefully now not wanting to lose my lead, but not wanting to risk too much either to maintain it. Another key hand came maybe 30 hands later. I had K10 and was dealt a not so hot looking flop of A Q 7. I make a minimal bet as I'm in bad position and try to represent an ace at least. He calls and now I know he has an Ace at least. The turn of course, is heaven for me. I just made the damn straight! I make another minimal bet and he calls. His stack is now VERY small. So the river hits with garbage and I push all in and he calls. He was holding two pair off the flop with his AQ. My straight takes it down and propels me into a commanding lead over the now reaminaing 5 players.

The next 2 players will killed off by the other players at the table. Holy cow. I'm I seeing this correctly? I'm not only at the final table of this huge tourney, but I'm now final 3!

I battle with these other two players for quite some time. I manage to make a couple of good hands and maintain a fairly good constant threat, taking good chunks out of them when need be.

Then it happens, the two other opponents are all in and I get the hell out of that hand. The smaller of the two is eliminated. I'm beside myself. I am now headsup with a slightly smaller stack then my opponent. I make a couple decent plays right of the get go and take down a couple good sized pots to make us more or less even. This battle goes back and forth for a few more mins.

Linkin Park is blarring in my headphones as it is now quite late in the household and everyone else is asleep. But not I!

I have a really good idea of my opponenets playing style and feel very confidnet in this heads up battle. But then it happened. I'm not sure what the heck was going through my mind, but it was nothing too great. I made a horrible move. I pushed a huge stack of chips in when I had bottom pair off the flop and somehow thought this was going to scare off my opponent. He didn't buy this and came out gunning with his top pair. OUCH. The rest of the cards flip and there is no help for me. I have been eliminated from the tourney.

However.... I have just placed SECOND in a HUGE tourney. I scroll down to see my winnings, just to make sure as I knew exactly what I should be getting based on the payout listing on the main tourney page. And yup... there is was. Tourney profits after my $33 entry fee... a very nice and respectable $1,861.50! Cha ching!

So it was now 1:19am and my head is hurting from all the concentration. It took me until freaking 4am to finally get to sleep. Partial excitement, but also just crazy bad headache which I popped some pills for.

And then of course I wake up at 11am today, load up my internet schedule to see if I have any flights booked in the next few days (hadn't all week long) and boom. There it is. A flight for tomorrow morning at 8am. OUCH! That means a 5:30am wakeup. I'm gonna be slightly screwed trying to get to sleep tonight. And the best part, I'm off to the prairies where it's blizzarding tomorrow! Woo hoo, a few hours in wonderful Estevan SK! So yeah. That's my excitement, time to go and get a few things ready for tomorrow's excitement.

100th Blog Post!!

Yup! Since I've been blogging since last fall I've posted 100 times. This is quite the milestone. You can send your celebratory gifts and cards to my home address here in Calgary. :)

Well I've got a few postworthy tidbits so here they are:

Destination Tracker MAP!

I have found this place that uses google maps as a base map for their service. It's mainly to be used to track your friends from around the world and all that, but I've customized it to show all of the places I've flown to. It's quite neat to visually see where I have travelled within North America. And what is also impressive about this little tool is that you can write comments at each pin you put down. So, that's what I have done. On all of the places that I've been there is a little comment about the location. So check 'em out. When it first loads off the webpage it's all the way zoomed in, so zoom it out and it looks like this:

It also has options to view as a satellite image so you can zoom right in and on most of the maps the detail is quite good. I've placed the pins directly on the airports at all of these locations. It took a long time! The link only takes you to a basic page though and I'd like it to just be the image itself but I can't seem to figure out how to use the various html codes so that you just see the image (like the one I posted above) instead of it always being zoomed in closely everytime you click the link. If anyone else knows a way to do this, let me know!

To access the map you can click this link HERE, or you can click on the new picture below the text version of my destination tracker on the right hand side of the page.

Calgary Cold Snap

Yesterday was a little chilly. How's -41 degrees with windchill for ya!? She was so cold that my battery in my Subaru said "screw this" and wouldn't start for me yesterday morning when the temp was -28 degrees (not accounting for windchill). So I had to get someone to give me a lift to help out at work (not flying). Brrr, I was working outside for a good chunk of the day too... it was very very chilly. My lips were not very happy and of course I had left my chap stick at home! Bah!

And it didn't help that yesterday my company decides it's going to do the bulk of it's office move to our new location across the other side of the runway here in Calgary. So of course anyone that's not flying or on days off gets the call to come in and help. So I went in and spent 11hrs of the day loading boxes, furniture, office supplies and many many files into a rented U-Haul making numerous trips back and forth to our new facilites. Hopefully the majority of it is all done, as I just received an email from work stating that we are no operating out of our new facilities 100% now and no longer using the old office/hangars. Woo hoo! The new hangar/office space we have is very nice. Just in the passenger lounge downstairs at the front, I'm sure $50,000 was spent on furniture, TVs, special coffee machines, mini fridge etc. The hangar is brand new and state of the art and can house all of our planes. We have a $32,000 John Deer tractor with multiple attachments. It's main purpose is to tug our airplanes around the hangar and ramp. But it can also snowplow, forklift and do many other things too. Pretty crazy. The offices are great upstairs with lots of room for everyone, and the pilots have a little lounge area as well. So it's pretty nice all around. I'll take some pics and post 'em up as soon as most of the kinks are worked out and it's looking its best.

Poker update... it had to happen

I won't go into great detail, but I took a trip (online) into some cash games (1/2 limit) and got hit pretty good by bad plays and suck-outs. So I opted to hope into a no limit game and play super tight and make it back. It was a success, up until the point when my AA got cracked by QQ on an all in move where the Q came on the turn after all the chips were in after a rag flop. That's poker unfort, I was quite irked and so I'm taking a break for a few days. It was a costly day at profits standing at -$180 for the day. It sucked.

So there's the goods on my 100th blog post. My flying schedule right now has me not booked on any flights until March 9th! Haha, that'll change but it's just not too busy right now. I go on days off this weekend and monday, so I'll be taking it super relaxed and looked forward to my next flight being operated entirely out of our new building.

Benifits of being an Albertan

I must say that for all the grief that some people put upon Alberta, I've been pretty happy within the past couple of weeks.

First off, simply enough, we have no PST. :) That's like an extra 7% per year right there!

Also, Alberta has been making stupid amounts of money in the oil business. By stupid amounts I mean they made 8 Billion freaking dollars last year. They took some of this money and decided to give it back to Albertans. Every person in Alberta, children and infants included, received a prosperity cheque this month for a nice $400 bucks. Not a crazy amount of money, but hey, anything helps! You should see all the incentives in town right now. All the department stores want you to come and spend that money so they're offering deals like "bring in your $400 prosperity cheque and it's worth $440!" and things like that. What am I going to do with my $400? Quite simply I need a new headset for flying and it'll go towards that.

And the other benifit right now is my car insurance. Being a singe male, under 25 with a car like the WRX does not prove to be a great combination for ANY auto insurance plan. Back in BC I was paying around $3,000 per year on auto insurance!!! And here in Alberta it didn't get a whole lot better at $2980, but I did get some extras like a "free accident" and extra free roadside assistance and things like that based on my safe drivers record. That's something that I likely would not have seen for even a couple more years with ICBC.

Now here's the kicker. As soon as you're 25 or older in Alberta the miracle happens. I knew I was entitled to cheaper rates so I called up my insurance company last week to inquire. And yes, for all you bastards out there who forgot my birthday... I'm now 25!!! :)

So I talk to them and explain I want to redo my insurance. Because it was setup in August I would actually have to cancel my current policy and redo a new one. No problem if it's going to save me money, lets get this show on the road. So we do up the new quote. I nearly passed out when I heard the difference in price. Remember my old policy was $2980. My new policy... freaking $1,437! Can you believe that! I simply turn 25 and my insurance rates drop an amazing 51%! So I'm pretty happy about those savings. I wouldn't be seeing rates like that in BC that's for sure. It doesn't help that I'm driving one of the most highly rated (bad thing) vehicles in terms of insurable cars. In the same vicinity that Porsche and other high end sports cars get labelled. Mainly because it's a common car that's been in many accidents, is expensive to repeair and has been a very desirable car to steal as of late. Yay for me.

So getting older pays off once again. Now I just need life to SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW down so I can enjoy my youth. Haha.