Seeing Acadia’s 2004-2005 schedule makes the end of my internship here in Toronto seem so close to the end. Just over 4 months left and then back to Wolfvegas!
Now it’s time to make the perfect schedule for my final year once they finalize the timetable.
While reading through the documentation for Flight Simulator 2004, it mentioned something about online virtual airlines. Since I’ve always dreamed about being some kind of a pilot, this interested me.
After finding several virtual airlines, I joined Atlantic Skies which operates out of major centres such as Paris, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, and Sydney. I decided to start off with the Miami hub. So far I’ve taken one flight with 3 crew members and 79 passengers from Miami to Key West in an Avro BAe 146 and everyone survived! Check out my flight info if you want to see where else I’m flying.
There are plenty of ‘cool’ features with this Atlantic Skies such as live flight status. You can see how many flights are currently at the gate, departing, en route, or landed. Also, each flight has a financial sheet which shows how much the company received from passengers tickets and cargo expenses, plus how much the company had to pay for fuel. You also get a virtual salary after each flight. This should give me a good start to a career as a virtual airline pilot!
If I hadn’t gone into computer science I probably would have ended up attending the Moncton Flight College. It turns out that it was a good decision, with the declining airline market at the moment.
Getting to the topic of this post, on Wednesday I bought Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. After having trouble flying by just using the keyboard, I went back to Future Shop on Thursday after work and purchased the Saitek Cyborg Evo 3D Joystick which is much easier to use.
To say the least, this game is amazingly realistic. It includes pretty much every airport or airstrip in the world (approximately 24,000). So far, I’ve flown a Lear Jet from Moncton to Halifax in real time (about 25 minutes), from Manchester to Heathrow, Palm Beach, and into Chicago’s O’Hare. This should keep me entertained well into the future.
Update: As requested, here are some screenshots of Flight Simulator 2004. More to come while I continue to fly around.
It was a great weekend spent at home in Riverview. I arrived back in Toronto yesterday morning shortly after 9:00am and caught a taxi to the apartment instead of taking the bus and subway.
I just added another 120 pictures to the gallery. They were added in the Easter 2004 and From the Archives galleries. Here is the coolest picture, in my opinion.
Also, you know you work in an awesome place when they invite Toronto Maple Leafs alumni to come and speak. That’s right, next Monday Wendel Clark will be visiting the lab to speak with the employees, answer questions, and sign autographs.
I arrived in Moncton at 1:15pm this afternoon where I will be spending the Easter weekend. It was somewhat of a surprise trip since my mom thought I was coming at 9:30pm tonight and my dad didn’t know I was coming at all. Only my sister knew that I was arriving early this afternoon so she picked me up from the airport.
I did my fair share of reading this morning while en route to Moncton. When I caught the bus outside the apartment in Toronto at 6:30am I read through one of the Toronto daily newspapers. Upon arriving at the subway station I had finished it so i picked up the Metro newspaper which kept me company until I arrived at the final stop of the subway. I made it to the airport shortly before 9:00am where I swiped a free National Post from the good people at JetsGo (I was flying CanJet, I don’t know if you’d classify this as stealing or not…). I read through the entire paper and finished up just as we were landing in Moncton. It was an overall good trip and I took some pictures from the plane, where one of them includes an aerial shot of our house here in Riverview.
I’m looking forward to the beginning of the Battle of Ontario tonight when the Senators visit the Leafs at the ACC. I predict the Leafs will win in 6 games.
I just got back from the SkyDome about an hour ago where the Jays lost to the Tigers again. It was a pretty boring game except when the Jays scored their few runs. It looked hopefully as they were down 4-3 but Detroit took control of the game again in the last few innings. The dome was closed tonight which doesn’t provide the best atmosphere for a game since all of the sounds reverb and echo too much. It will be nice in the summer when they have the roof open.
Here I go again with my weekly updates with what’s going on in my life. As usual, not much new is happening.
The Blue Jays opened their season this afternoon in a pathetic 7-0 loss to the Detroit Tigers at the SkyDome. Hopefully they can pull off a win tomorrow night when Sean and I head down for the first $2 game of the season. I might even post pictures of the game, if I remember to take my camera.
It was extremely bright here this morning at 7:00am, even with the hour change which I thought would mean it should have been darker than usual. Looking outside, it looked warm, maybe around 5 degrees. I decided to wear my spring fleece and baseball cap which was a bad idea once I got outside. The wind was howling and it was freezing. Ahh well, atleast spring is on the way.
Unfortunately, the Oilers didn’t make it into the playoffs but they did put up a great fight. This past Saturday I was down at the Hockey Hall of Fame store looking at buying an Oiler hat or shirt. I didn’t want to buy something in case they didn’t make the playoffs. But even though they didn’t make it, I’ll probably still buy a hat when I head down to the Hall of Fame again in a couple weeks to commemorate their great run at the end of the season. I already have enough Maple Leafs gear.
