Acquisitions

By lex, on May 7th, 2011

So, I’ve been wanting an iPad since practically the 70s, but I never could quite justify the cost, etc. Nor know exactly what I’d do with what is something between a laptop computer and an iPhone, without either a keyboard or telephony. Sure, you can carry your photograph library around for to bore your friends to stupefaction, and I’ve heard tell about people reading books and even magazines, etc. although no one has satisfactorily explained to me what advantages an electronic book has over, well: A book.

But a cuppla weeks back I flew up to Henderson-Las Vegas, for to cast aside my cares for the moment in the whirling milieu of Sin City attend an airborne networking conference, and my companion on the trip up had an original iPad loaded with ForeFlight which showed us our location geo-referenced to the Los Angeles sectional, when it wasn’t showing approach plates and airport diagrams. Not to mention the email he was working once on deck with none of the objectionable clunkiness of booting up a laptop at the airport terminal.

But your host is sufficiently advanced in years as to distinguish wants from needs, or at least he was until yesterday, when he found hisself shopping for birthday gifts for Our Final Child, who is on the cusp of near-adulthood, scheduled as she is for her seventeenth birthday in four days time, and she’s been keeping us on the clock with all her reminders, hasn’t she?

She has.

So I was shopping for the suitable digital camera to replace the last in a series of eminently suitable digital cameras that have been lost, stolen or cast carelessly into the sea over the course of I don’t care to count how many years, and maybe we should have waited until she had completed the fourth grade. There I was in the electronics section, and not too far away a pair of squealing brats someone’s priceless children were “playing” with the iPads on display as though they were some class of toy and not a Serious Aid to Aerial Navigation and Flight Planning, With Benefits.

I was feeling a little out of sorts and sorry for myself in any case for a bit of uncharacteristically good news on the home front had, all too characteristically, fallen apart: The Hobbit had noticed  a couple shopping in our neighborhood for a new home, and as it turns out sinn fein are preparing our own Crushing Burden of Debt for sale, so she invited ‘em over. They were happy with the place, and it seemed possible or even likely that we could do a FSBO thing, thereby avoiding giving away 5-6% of our hard won equity to a broker. We even offered to split the savings with the buyers: Win-win. A cash transaction too, for hizzoner had fled Wall Street for Sandy Eggo, pocketing a cool $5.6 million in his investment account, and almost all of it liquid – we could close in less than 30 days.

He came by the next day and made an offer, I counter-proposed the following day, and he wrote back saying that he appreciated it, but didn’t think it’d work out, good luck. I thought these Wall Street guys knew how to make a deal.

So with that in mind, and all dreams of financial security in ashes, it seemed to make a perfect kind of sense to plunk down an extra several hundred of the hard-earned on a device I had convinced myself – albeit unwillingly – that I needed. It didn’t help that you, Gentle Reader, having been generous over the years, have plunked a sum sufficient to the purchase in my PayPal account, nor that I’ve had a rather exceptionally elevated hit count over the last months, courtesy of one video I posted *, casually and almost carelessly, the which went sorta viral, elevating my traffic to what we reckon as stratospheric levels around these parts and causing the lesser gods at Google to send nice little payments on a more recurrent basis from time to time.

This disclosure does not redound to my advantage, but – despite the customary co-mingling of finances Chez Lex – I’ve come to think of that as my money. And there it was, burning a hole in my PayPal account.

So now I have an iPad.

And! I have downloaded ForeFlight HD, and all the local charts, approach plates and taxi procedures. It’s a beautifully well-designed application, and I can’t wait to take it flying. Except of course – and this is not a bleg – I just emptied my flying hour budget.

So, maybe next year.

Want to see some pictures?

* 10-23-2018 Link Gone; no replacements found – was neptunuslex.com 12-10-2010 Good Day At The Patch – Ed.

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