VolaciousNet

Hello friends.

I’d like to say everything is great, but I have to admit I’m a little sad.

I recently got turned down for a promotion opportunity at work that I really wanted… I thought I had a good chance at it, being the most qualified and having good experience. It’s made me sit here and re-think my career paths and where I want to be in 4-5 months. At that time, I will have finished university with two degrees, a CCNA, and have had 2 years of engineering experience under my belt. I’m bored where I am and not motivated.
I’ve had a look on Seek, and there’s a few things there that have sparked my interest, many of them in the Satellite Engineering field that I want to become a part of.
So yes… I have to say I’m disappointed and disheartened, as I believe that management have some personal / professional issue with me that they do not tell me about. The guy they picked, whilst being a top bloke and a good friend of mine, is currently working as a casual. That makes me think something is awry.
*le sigh*

Adam and I have also come to the point where we don’t think we’re going to host any of our big parties anymore… they have been getting less fun year after year, and whilst still big events we don’t think the effort is worth it. We had many confirm they were coming, and never turn up. I guess this is just generally disheartening. Add to that some snide comments during the night and after the event… I don’t know… maybe I’m taking it all too personally. I’m in one of those moods.

I’m very much in a “Fuck you all” mood right now. Which, frankly, is a good motivator. Never underestimate the power of spite.

Hey everyone!

Firstly, welcome to 2007!
I hope you all had a very exciting New Year’s Eve, hopefully in a much more exciting place than Leeton (the place to be!).
It’s been fun so far… weather is holding out on us a little though. I’ll give a quick run-through of the time so far….

Official Practice Day
Beautiful weather… fairly strong thermals, but guess what silly Gus did? Flew without a piece of the glider! I took the Total Energy probe off to fix a kink in the tube, and forgot to put it back on again before flight. Not a dangerous situation, but bloody annoying as it caused my varios (instrument that tells me whether I’m going up or down, and hence in a thermal) to lie to me and render them useless.
So I flew off into the first turnpoint about 40 km, relying only on feel through the seat of the pants to detect any thermals. Harder than it sounds, especially with 100 litres of water in the wings designed to increase inertia. After getting to the first turnpoint, I decided that the chance of me ending up in some farmer’s paddock was getting higher than needed, so I turned tail and headed home.

Junior Nationals Championships, Day 1
First day of the actual comp… weather was ok but some thunderstorms and rain were washing in and I decided to try and get around the task as quickly as possible and get home before I got stuck in any of it. I got past the first turnpoint and headed onto the second, and wouldn’t you know it there was a monster thunderstorm sitting right in my path. I started going towards it, planning on diverting to the east to get around it, but couldn’t find enough lift to make it past without losing too much height. At this time, another pilot gets on the radio: Delta Zulu, Juliet Romeo, just letting you know I saw two big bolts of lighting right next to your aircraft… Grrr… not the thing you want to hear. So I turned west instead and tried to go around that way, but the thunderstorm had grown to an enourmous size and there were microbursts (extremely strong downdraughts) all over. At this point I decided that I was losing a lot of time, and if I went on I was likely to outland. I was getting fairly frustrated, so I decided to abort the task and head back home. Good to get back to the airfield… 1 glider got around the task, 4 aborted like me, and 14 went into paddocks all over the place. Made me feel a bit better

Junior Nationals Championships, Day 1.9
Well… we all launched but weather was fairly crappy and could barely even keep the glider in the air. I ended up falling out of the sky, and as soon as I announced my intention to land the contest director got on the radio and called the day off due to bad weather.

And so on
Well NYD was a compulsory no-fly day, due to large amounts of hangovers. I have to say I was feeling fairly seedy! And today… high winds and overcast conditions meant we spent the day down at the pub. It feels good here… spending the day at the pub surrounded by beer-swilling, cigarette smoking gung-ho pilots. Nothing better!!

Meanwhile, we decided to make this video…