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Merry Boxmas
My parents sent a small box of presents, so I guess I will open mine this morning.
Gwen is really digging the box.
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Repatriation
The United States government charters planes to fly people in the US without legal status back to the countries where they are from. We usually get one of these charter planes every Tuesday evening here in San Diego. The plane N440US (operated by Swift Air) comes from Oakland, stops here in San Diego, goes to Phoenix, and then continues on to Guatemala the next day. Every week. Same plane, same time, same route.
This morning we got N441US. Super-weird. We never see this plane. We never get repatriation flights on Sundays; we rarely get repatriation flights during the daytime. This one came from Phoenix, is headed to Houston, and after that it is going back to Phoenix.
RPN 441: Lingbergh Tower, Repatriate four-forty-one. Visual two-seven.
Lindbergh Tower: Repatriate four-forty-one, good morning. Wind calm. Runway two-seven, cleared to land.
RPN 441: [Unintelligible]Lindbergh Tower: Repatriate four-forty-one, traffic will depart prior to your arrival. Seven-thirty-seven.
RPN 441: Thank you [unintelligible].Lindbergh Tower: Repatriate four-forty-one, left turn Bravo niner. Contact ground.
RPN 441: Ok, left at, uh, niner, contact ground. Repatriate four-four-one.
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Making Grocery Shopping Great Again
One nice thing about having a sewing machine, a serger, and a large stash of sewing supplies is that it was really quite easy for me to obtain a reusable shopping bag with Сделать Америку Великой Снова appliqued on the side of it. When it is time to shop for groceries in our neo-dystopian future, I will be ready.
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All Rows, All Columns
Usually my first instinct is just to
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE 1and then just figure everything out in R afterwards. I intone the words “all rows, all columns” just like the airline gate agent boarding all rows, all passengers.But the database that I’m dealing with these days has a particularly pesky column that is filled with quotation marks, commas, backslashes, grouping symbols of various sorts, and assorted other things that seem to predict disaster. And today I had a remarkable breakthrough on the problem that I’m trying to solve. I could do two separate
SELECTs: one where the gnarly column wasLIKEsomething and one where it didn’t matter because something else wasNULL, and I didn’t even need toSELECTthe troublesome column.After that particular win, I left the office two hours early so that I could beat the traffic and get to the airport by the time that the Delta 747 N669US would be landing at San Diego International Airport less than an hour after the 747 from BA. Now, we get the 747 from BA every day (as I’ve mentioned), and it tends to come in right around sunset, maybe a little bit earlier. But Delta’s 747 was landing during Nautical Twilight. For the sake of photographing something that is moving really, really fast, that is really, really dark. And my fast lens has fierce lens flare when it is wide open. And airports are just covered with lights.
And did you notice that earlier this week Delta retired all of its 747s from regular passenger flights? All of them. If a Delta 747 is coming to your airport, it is a special occasion. (In this case, a Michigan State charter for the Holiday Bowl.)
And while I was waiting for N669US to arrive, I saw the SpaceX launch. If you look up the LiveATC.net archive of Lindbergh Tower, you will hear that they had no idea that it was going to be happening nor what it was.
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An Ego-Boost from Amazon?
I am pretending that Amazon thinks that not enough people are expressing their admiration for this blog, hosted in an S3 bucket, and so they are offering me a botnet that will say nice things to me.
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Culinary Bad Ideas
Some people are “tasters” who can appreciate subtle flavors. And there are other people, like me, who notice approximately nothing. I’ve taken to drinking really smoky tea with too much sugar in it.
And I have an idea that is either the best or the worst.
You know how tea with citrus in it is a thing? There are people who put lemon and sugar in their tea?
You also know how that grapefruit Radler that Stiegl makes is really good with a mezcal float? (You didn’t know that? I’m told that Live Wire has the Stiegl Radler on tap and also has a full liquor license. Sycamore Den tends to have the Radler in cans.)
So now I am thinking that I might find a way to infuse some of my tea with grapefruit.
My ideas so far:
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There is a house in my neighborhood with a grapefruit tree that comes to harvest roughly this time of year, producing so many grapefruits that the residents can not eat them all. They put a box of grapefruit on the sidewalk with a “free” sign. I could take some grapefruit and do some experiments. Brew tea and add grapefruit juice? Put some grapefruit peel in the tea canister?
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Essential oils are all the rage! Put a few drops of grapefruit essential oil on the bottom of the tea canister, put a bit of cheesecloth over it to keep it from touching the tea, and then putting the tea back into the canister to absorb the grapefruit essence.
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There is a product line with the name “True Citrus” that consists of little foil packets filled with a scientifically-produced essence of a citrus fruit, and grapefruit is one of their offerings. I could add a packet of “True Grapefruit” to my tea.
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Stay at Work? Or Go to the Airport?
Have you ever flown in to San Diego International Airport? Did you remember descending into the city, feeling like you would almost hit a freeway or a parking garage? Our airport is within walking distance of downtown, on a bit of “land” that was reclaimed from San Diego Bay. Because the terrain drops over 200 feet in the last mile or so of the approach, there is no glide slope on Runway 27 (and the prevailing winds are off the ocean, so Runway 9 isn’t usually a good option), so pilots need a decent amount of visibility for the localizer or the RNAV approach. Also, the ocean generates the so-called “marine layer,” which blankets the aiport in fog on a not-irregular basis. And guess what else? Due to the location of the Marine Corps recruiting depot, we only have room for one runway, 9-27. And the last time that the runway was repaved was a large number of years ago, so they are repaving it now. Every night from midnight to 5am the airport is totally, 100%, completely closed, and no planes can land or take off.
You might think that an airport in a small-ish city with a 9400 ft runway (with a displaced threshold of 1000 ft on 9 and of 1810 ft on 27) with significant drawbacks and that is not unreasonably far from LAX might not get a lot get a lot of interesting planes, but we do! These days we get a daily 747 from British Airways. But the plane that I’ve sort of been stalking has been the A330 from Hawaiian Airlines. We get it every day! But it typically lands after 10pm, when there is no decent light to take a photograph.
Last night my FlightAware alerts told me that HAL 16 was going to be delayed.
Hawaiian Airlines #16 flight information has changed
Departure Time is now Tue 19-Dec-2017 05:00PM HST
Arrival Time is now Wed 20-Dec-2017 12:12AM PSTAnd I am thinking, no way is that going to happen. That plane is going to be diverted. Would it be diverted to Ontario (a popular diversion location)? Would it have so little fuel that it would be diverted to Miramar (unlikely, since they must have known that it was going to be diverted before it took off)?
It was diverted to LAX. And then N399HA will fly to Kailua/Kona, HI later this morning. I’m assuming that the passengers from HAL 16 are being bused to San Diego.
But what about the people scheduled on today’s HAL 15 from San Diego to Honolulu?
Hawaiian has scheduled a repositioning flight! N383HA will be flying here from Seattle as HAL 8024! It will be landing around 1pm! It is a beautiful day out, clear and sunny – really good for photographing planes landing!
But my camera is at home, so I can’t just dash to the airport over lunch. And I’m working on something using computational resources that can only be access from within the office, so I can’t just go to the airport and work from home the rest of the afternoon. And it seems sort of silly to take the rest of the day off to go take a picture of an airplane. Especially, as I did get one shot of the A330 back when San Diego had an NFL team and one of their opponents chartered an A330.
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