Jimisola.com - keepin’ on

Too much. So, where do I start?

Let’s start with track… My club hosted the Swedish Indoor Championships this weekend. My club mates managed to get six gold, five silver and two bronze medals!

I had hoped that I would be able to run 60m dash myself as I was on a training streak in December and it went really well. Had my lovely spike shoes on and ran in them for the first time in almost a year! I even sat a new PB in jumping over a bar/hurdle with 145cm (previous record was 4-5 years old at least and, yes, I know that Stefan Holm has far greater springiness)! Sadly, the groin started to act out again between Christmas and New Year’s and I lost my momentum. However, my physio claims that I’m strong enough - “it should work” - and training felt so good that I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve been persistent on making it back since it started (fall of 2005) and I truly dream about being back on the track competing. Time will tell…

Life at the moment more or less equals aviation. The last three weeks have been hectic as we started to fly the PA31 Navajo and been flying almost everyday. I had my first bird strike during these weeks. Luckily, it was just a small sparrow that hit us after take-off and not one of bigger birds that “hangs” here at the airport. The exercises have been mainly airwork, i.e. training slow flight, stall, steep turns etc with one and two engines. I’m usually quite tired after the exercises as every exercise drills me on something new and therefore requires a lot of focus. But, it’s fun and that is the most important thing in the long run. It also helps to know that each day is a day closer to graduation…

Me performing "the Swing" (sv: "Gungan")

As I mentioned before we are getting close to start flying the twin-engined PA31 Navajo. But prior to that we have a couple of sessions in our old FNPT2 (Flight Navigation Procedure Trainer) where we learn the basics of the airplane, such as instrumentation, switches, checklist etc. So, the last week have been full of checklist rehearsals since we need to know parts of the checklist by-heart (i.e. without looking at the checklist when we perform the checklist items).

During the PA31 phase the students are “teamed up” two and two. My buddy is Espen (from Norway) and we’ve been working on the checklists together quite a lot. We are scheduled on Thursday to have our demo ride. It an en-route flight where a Flight Instructor flies to give us a mental picture of what to expect from us in five months we are to do our skill test for CPL/ME/IR.

Our PA31 cockpit mock

Me performing by-heart items on the check list while Espen checks that I’m remembering everything

De-icing equipment (prop and surface de-icing) almost off…

I’ve been longing to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.x for a long time. There are some nice features that I wanted. So, when Freshy 2.0 was released I could not really wait.

The internals of Freshy 2.0 is quite different from Freshy 1.0, so I haven’t decided if I’ll do my mod Freshy JL mod of it. Most likely, I will try to make it happen with just the new Customize plugin that Freshy uses. I have some concerns, but I’ll adress them with the author of Freshy and to see what we can come up with. I would really like if I just have to make my own style and not change php (better having just one theme than a theme and a mod). Hopefully, the things that I miss can be added as options or something.

The most urgent one is to have pages, comments, links, categories etc itemized in some way (using bullets or something - the way Freshy 1 ). The current way makes it really hard to see where a “Recent Comment” or “Recent Post” begins and ends. I’d also like to have RSS feeds after Categories and Tags.

Anyway, please be patient as I will do some styling (changes to colors and layout) when I have the time.