#183 Embassy & Life Progress
I have been trying to minimize my digital life for the last couple of weeks. I've canceled several services, including Spotify and Shortform (they actually refunded me 50% of my fee although they weren’t happy about it). I also have decided to migrate my Canadian Hush e-mail account over to my ProtonMail account. That is taking quite a bit of time because several financial accounts and quite a few online accounts were connected to the Hush e-mail address. However, I have decided to consolidate onto my ProtonMail account because that seems to make the most sense. I’ve definitely let it grow where it didn’t need to. My goal is to trim what I can by the end of August and post a report on this in September.
I have been in quite a funk for the last couple of weeks. Part of that is due to the somewhat slow process with the US embassy, which I will explain further in my blog post next month if it is completed. I hope that it will be done by that point. I just got the initial appointment for my phone interview yesterday. After 2 weeks of waiting.
Another part of my funk, as I may have mentioned in previous posts, is that after chasing the passport thing so long, I am almost at a loss of what to do. And the problem is that I don't have a lot of energy to do anything else because I am still in the process of trying to resolve my back issues. I'm not sure if normal is possible, but I am working on it. I bought a treadmill for the house, because I'm supposed to be doing some kind of walking every two hours. And it was just very irksome to have to go outside the house every two hours. Having the treadmill in place has really made a difference for me.
One of the very few things that I seem to have any enthusiasm for these days is languages, although I'm only spending about an hour and a half a day on them. That's between 4 languages. Spanish, French, Turkish, and Italian.
I have also put some time and effort into really getting my flight simulator set up to work. A close friend of mine made an offhand comment to me months ago, which still I'm carrying around like a dumb ox, that I don't finish a lot of what I start.
Now, in some ways I feel that is a little unfair. If I look over at the last few years, I said I was going to get an Argentinian passport, learn Spanish, and refresh my French and Turkish. And I have done all those things. But, I did say I was going to see if I could get my private pilot's license and I have allowed the obstacles involved with trying to get my flight simulator set up to stop me, at least at this point.
However now that I have a little bit of time at the house, I am concentrating on it and I have finally found one person in tech support with the flight simulator hardware company who seems to be willing to help me. So, I have refreshed where I was with that and why I was having the problems and I hope to see if I can get that working by the end of next week. It really is a complex system to configure. You have the hardware (Flight yoke, Throttle controls, Foot Pedals) and the software (duh 😊) and what I discovered was that once you do the initial calibration of the hardware to the software you then apparently have to set up a configuration file for whatever plane you are going to fly on. This stumped me because I don't know anything about planes.
And this is where it gets very complex because the ‘Throttle Quadrant’ from HoneyComb, can be configures as almost any type of plane. From a dead simple single engine Piper Cub up to an Airbus 380 (believe it or not). So, this is where I am at the moment, corresponding with the tech support guy to see if he can help me with what my basic configuration should be and what I should use for the first plane I attempt to fly. The left image is a sample of the software calibration for the throttle quadrant, the middle is the overall setup, and the image on the right is the throttle quadrant itself.
So next month I’ll let you know where I got with all of this. 😂