This year Texas Monthly magazine did another Top 50 BBQ restaurants roundup. And, naturally, someone else beat me to it creating a google map showing the restaurants’ locations … see the map.

This is going to come in handy because I’d like to fly out to try a few. This Friday we’re going to visit Coleman’s Barbeque in Clarksville. I just need to call the airport there and find out if there’s a way to get into town … it’s 3 miles from airport to town.

It has been a long long time. My last flight was in December (yeah, surprised me, I thought it was in January). So today was my first flight of 2008. I needed to do some touch-and-go landings to regain my PIC currency (meaning I can carry passengers). The mowers were out at McKinney Airport so while the runway was open for operations the tower wasn’t allowing touch-and-goes.

It was interesting to see how the mowers worked. They had three guys on large commercial tractor mowers followed by a guy in a pickup truck. Then there was a street sweeper following the mowers and two guys on foot walking the runway and taxiways looking for debris. Whenever an aircraft wanted to land or take off the tower would radio out to the mowers asking them to clear the runway. The mowers (actually I think it was the guy in the truck) would radio back once they were clear. After the aircraft finished the tower would radio them the all-clear to continue.

The tower actually chided one of the mowing teams after I taxied out because while they got out of the way they didn’t respond over the radio. He didn’t give them the all clear for quite a while and when they asked he said something like ‘well if you don’t respond to me I don’t know what your intentions are’. You just don’t jack with the man in the tower!

I flew at 3000′ from McKinney to Bonham Municipal Airport and did four touch-and-go landings. I was tuned into the common traffic advisory radio frequency and it was really busy. One CTAF frequency will serve several different non-towered airports in a region so flyers will call out the airport first when they make their calls.

“Terrell Traffic, Skyhawk XXX is on left downwind for runway 17, Terrell Traffic”. etc.

There was so much radio traffic that people were constantly stepping on each other’s calls. When that happens you’ll usually hear one of the pilots but behind their voice is a loud squealing noise. Sometimes all you get is the squeal. Unfortunately, the pilot transmitting can’t tell he’s interrupting someone else. The trick is to be patient and listen and when there’s a gap jump in and do your think.

Though, it’s tricky sometimes. If you’re in the pattern to land you need to make your calls at the appropriate time and that means you have to balance being polite with being safe. If there are other planes in the pattern that I can see then I’ll opt for safe.

After the touch-and-goes I flew a little further north to follow the Red River for a while. That’s always fun for site seeing. I took along my new binoculars to see how they work in the cockpit and turns out they work great. It’s a little hard to focus on an object and fly at the same time so I think they’ll be better use for Greta when she’s riding along as passenger.

Congratulations to Kotooshu for winning the Summer Sumo Basho in Tokyo. He’s the first European ever to win a professional sumo tournament. And what makes it especially sweet is he did it with only one loss and he beat both Yokozuna …. Asashoryu and Hakuho.

Lightning just struck the high power lines in front of my house. We’re sitting here listening to the rain and watching the storm coverage on tv when there’s a bright flash … loud thunder … loud humming and a shower of sparks down onto the median and the road.

From the little I can see out the front windows it doesn’t look like a line is down but they’re swinging in the wind pretty crazily.

I think one benefit of having those tall steel high power line towers in front of the house is that it’s VERY unlikely lightning will ever strike the house.

The sparks were kind of pretty.

Since I have a MacBook Pro I’m using Boot Camp to run Windows XP Pro on a separate partition. It performs really well except in two areas … 1) battery consumption and 2) processor usage. I have to admit the battery usage issues have gotten better but typically my battery just doesn’t last as long running Windows than when I’m running OSX.

But the processor usage issue really burns me up … so to speak. Running Windows taxes the processor enough that the MPB really heats up. More than usual. And I’m not using overly graphical programs .. usually Visual Studio and IE or Firefox and SQL Studio Express. Oddly enough, this doesn’t happen if I run my Windows partition in emulation using Parallels.

It’s gotten so bad that today I went and bought Apple’s wireless keyboard. It’s beautiful … extremely thin … very light … small … I’ll be able to pack it in my laptop bag. I’ve only had it for three hours and I already can’t live without it.

Here’s one of my favorite movie quotes ever. Can you guess the movie?

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

My xbox 360 has bitten the dust! I haven’t played Call of Duty 4 in about three days and now I’ll have to wait for probably another 20 days!!!

I’m already starting to get the sweaty shakes.

I was afraid the hardware was headed for this. Lately, I’ve been getting ‘disc unreadable’ errors with COD4. They were always random and I’d remove the disc and look at it and not see any problems. No scratches, minimal dust. So if the disc looks OK then the problem is probably with the drive.

Guess I have no excuse for procrastinating my job hunt now do I?

A couple of folks in the Creative department at my company have arranged a company art show. Everyone is welcome to submit art. There’s no jury, no restrictions. All media are welcome. So, naturally, I’m submitting some photos.

Everything is due tomorrow and, of course, I have waited until the last moment to print out my pics. They’re drying now (inkjet prints) and tomorrow I’ll just carry them and the frames to work and assemble everything there. I can’t wait to see what other people bring in.

For a long time we’ve been Bookpool.com customers, but recently we discovered that a competing online tech book seller is a resident in our neighborhood! Nerdbooks.com has pictures of the warehouse on their web site and at one point had an invitation for people to stop by. The web site doesn’t say that anymore so this morning I called them up to see if they still welcome visitors.

Friendly Dave told me that yes, you are welcomed at any time as long as you agree to three conditions … 1) you’re not scared of dogs. They have some beautiful resident Labradors running around inside the warehouse. 2) you shut the door behind you. The Labs are fond of romping around parking lot. 3) Don’t bring small children. Their warehouse consists of aisles and aisles of books arranged in very logical groupings with comfy couches and chairs to sit at and three Macintosh computers to shop with.

It’s not a store in the traditional sense. It is truly their warehouse. But you’re welcome to browse all you want. When you find something you want to buy you use one of the Macs to make your purchase through the web site (no shipping charges). The Mac automatically prints out your order in their office. Within a minute someone came over to doublecheck that we had the books we purchased.

What an incredibly relaxing shopping experience. I could spend hours there!

Here’s what we picked up:

• Foundation Flex for Developers
• Foundation Flex for Designers
• ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook
• ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns
• The Laws of Simplicity
• Programming Sudoku
• ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training

Greta found this gem on DallasNews.com …

Body of missing Mansfield man missing found in Louisiana canal