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Showing posts from November 27, 2011

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
From Bloomberg 12-3-11. Try and tell me this isn't scary. We would all be in "occupy wherever" if we could allow ourselves to understand this situation. The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of th...
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Eric took a few pics of some property he is looking at today. We had the window open. The open window caused more drag that I thought it would.

My normal routines in Atlanta and NY

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I have been busy at work. It is getting to the end of the year. There are a lot of things to finish up. I am working a lot this weekend. This weekend is the first weekend of the month. My favorite weekend when I am in Atlanta. I have all the regular aviation activities that happen on the first Saturday. I am flying after the EAA 690 pancake breakfast tomorrow. Always a good time. I am going to miss a presentation from a new turbine engine manufacturer and the class down at American Eagles flight school. My leadership class is going well on Thursday nights. I certainly have got to know a bunch of people in the area a lot better and the spiritual context gives me a lot to think about. We had some conversation about Sir Edmund Hillary this week. Our paths crossed in Antarctica, spiritually a couple other times. It looks like I am not traveling that much for a while. I am headed up to Boston after Christmas and I have some trips somewhat emerging for Europe, North America and South ...