01/17/07

Let the insanity begin!

Welp, I'm typing this out on my trusty PowerBook 170. It's the third day of my two week adventure in old-school computing, and so far so good. I'm in Miami at the moment, so I've been trying to spend as much time *outside* of the hotel room as I can - therefore I've been away from all computers, both new and old. Also, since I haven't yet loaded up the 170 with interesting goodies, I've really only used it for this blog and to fool around with ClarisWorks. Once I get the apps on it, as well as a SCSI/Ethernet adapter, the 170 will be a lot more fun to use on the road.

I did use my IIsi in an interesting way on Monday before the flight to Miami. I usually do all my flight planning on a site called FltPlan.com, and it's very useful for both the planning and the actual filing of the flight plan with the FAA. Although I prefer FltPlan.com, the government provides all pilots access to a system called DUATS to do weather checking, flight planning, and filing of flight plans. Generally it's accessed through the web at duats.com, but it can also be accessed via Telnet at direct.duats.com. So even though I couldn't use FltPlan.com with my IIsi, I was able to use Telnet to check weather and file my flight plan anyway. There are some things DUATS won't do, and I was forced to do a couple of things more manually than I'm used to, but the good old IIsi did a fine job of allowing me to get my flight plan on file, and everything went smoothly.

I'll get some pictures and screenshots uploaded once I get back on Friday.