The Best (and Worst) App of All Time

Flightradar 24 in map mode. You can see that a jet from London Heathrow headed for JFK in New York City is a few miles north of my location in Newburyport.

I’d be the first to acknowledge that the proliferation of so-called “smart phones” has been a major contributing factor in the decline of human civilization over the past couple of decades. Between the stupid games and the instant access to an infinite supply of useless information and the ever-expanding social media options — and occasionally, GASP!, the ability to actually communicate with other real, live people — having a supercomputer in your pocket has not created the Great Society some may have hoped for.

So it is with a mixture of pride and shame that I share with you an app I believe is absolutely awesome. Or the worst thing ever. Or, more likely, both.

It’s called Flightradar 24 and if you’re a geek, nerd, travel buff or just dig airplanes, you gotta have it. I think I paid $4.99 for it and while I am usually loath to pay for an app, I’m glad I paid for this one. There’s a free website of the same name (which is how I found the app) and it’s a good introduction to what the app is all about — a try-before-you-buy plan, so to speak.

What Flightradar does is combine your location and air-traffic data from all over the world. So when you see that airliner leaving a vapor trail overhead, you can find out what airline it is, where it’s coming from, where it’s going to, it’s altitude, speed, vertical speed, geographic location and more. It’s an aviation geek’s wet dream and while I’ve yet to actually orgasm, I have become slightly addicted to the damned thing.

And therein lies its negative attribute: once you start using it, you can’t stop. Whether you’re on the beach, out for a hike, in the city, on the golf course or anywhere else, inside or out, sunshine or rain, you’ll see or hear a plane going overhead and you can’t NOT pull out the app and see who it is. Sometimes ignorance CAN be bliss, but with Flightradar in your pocket, a vapor trail generates a hypnotically induced reaction: you reach into your pocket and pull out your phone because you…can’t. Help. It.

Here’s that same flight using the iPhone’s camera to find it by sight. This photo would be more impressive if it wasn’t overcast today.

On top of that, the compass and gyroscope-thingie in the iPhone (I can’t speak for how it works on non-Apple platforms) can determine where you are so when you set the app to visual mode, you can just point the camera at the plane and…voila! It’s too damned easy.

It really is mindless fun and useless information. But again, if you’re a plane geek, you’ll dig Flightradar. Living where I do — on the coast about 30 miles north of Boston — there are certain times of the day where an armada of jets from Europe passes overhead, and other times when that same armada is headed overseas. It’s cool to sit on my deck and watch the blinking navigation lights head out to sea and be able to know it’s an Aer Lingus flight headed for Shannon, Ireland, or a freight-carrying 747 headed for Luxembourg. At certain times of the day, depending the sun’s position in the sky, I can see the airline logos on the fuselage and tail with binoculars and match the plane up with the data in the app. (Like I said: it’s for geeks and nerds.)

Thus far, I’ve seen some pretty far out departure and destination cities. Sure, there ample flights to and from London, Paris and Zurich. But then there are the flights to and from Qatar, Moscow and Oslo; Tel Aviv, Milan and Istanbul; Beijing, Reykjavik and Madrid. Some of the more interesting (to me, anyway) flights I’ve seen have been from some Europe direct to Havana and Mexico City.

There’s one other problem with the app, in addition to being a serious attention-grabber and time-suck. Plenty’s the time I’ve seen a flight coursing above me, looked up the info on my phone and wished I’d been on the plane. Flightradar definitely adds to the wanderlust.

Travel, , , ,

It’s a Young Man’s Game…Or Is It?

A bunch of different threads in this post today, the result of a bunch of different threads “runnin’ around the ol’ Duder’s head”  the past few weeks. So bear with me while I talk through things out loud. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, although a lot less effective, I’ll grant you (and probably not very interesting to you).

So, a month ago I wrote about how I’d thought about spending the summer when I was 26 at the surf break known as the Mexican Pipeline. I finally made it there this year, in March, when I turned 51, and I wasn’t ashamed to say that, upon my arrival, the waves were intimidating.

Puerto Escondido definitely intrigues me as a potential long-term destination. (I have every expectation that if I wind up dying of old age it will be in a foreign country. After seeing the way my father, a World War II veteran, was mistreated by this country’s health system, what can a selfish deadbeat like me expect as his body starts to wind down? But that’s a topic for a separate post.) But when I thought about spending significant time in a surf-focused life, I wondered if that really made any sense to an aging (as are we all) middle-aged man.

Puerto Escondido is a destination for young surfers from all over the world, and there’s a reason that particular demographic overruns the town during peak season. It takes strength and fitness just to step into the ring at a serious wave. And while I still go to the gym and play hockey and lead a generally fitness-focused lifestyle, well, there’s a reason I play in the over-50 hockey tournaments now. Can I still handle a wave like Puerto? Yes. But it’s exhausting. And potentially dangerous. And my recharge capabilities aren’t what they once were. Those are just facts.

So when I look at potential paths I might take — and I do that a lot as this year in which the generations of my family changed hands winds down — I question whether such a pursuit is an appropriate core focus of my life. In fact, I question WHAT should be the focus of my life to come.

And that’s an important question because in just a few months my father will have been gone for a year, at which point (or shortly thereafter) my role as executor, trustee and caretaker of the family’s assets and physical legacy will come to a close. And I have some decisions to make.

Do my brother and I keep our family’s house (our sister has no interest in keeping her share)? Does that mean I remain living there? If so, what do I do for a living around here? If not, do we rent out the house? Or do we sell? If we rent or sell, where should I go and what should I do? And if we keep the house, how do my brother and I come to terms about what we should do about various aspects of the house’s management and upkeep (and who should pay for them)?

Questions of career, location, home, legacy — questions that have built up over the close-to-a-hundred years of my parents’ lives and the lives of the children they produced, including me — are about to require an answer. And as those of you who know me well can attest, I have a wide range of interests and dreams pulling me in an even wider range of directions.

The security of a “straight” job back in Corporate America has its appeals but in my field those options are largely out west. And even if they’re in around here, among the reasons I didn’t opt for a commuting-into-Boston career when I got out of college is the fact it’s a hellacious, dangerous, expensive and exhausting commute from Plum Island. And it still is. But shouldn’t I be maximizing my income (and savings) at this point in my life in an attempt to set up my so-called “golden years”?

Or: What about carving out some sort of niche, working-for-myself career? Can I parlay my skills (cough, cough) and experience into something that lets me work from, say, the office on the third floor of the house at Plum Island? Travel — to Boston, New York and beyond — is easy enough. My mother always implored me to be my own boss (as she was), but I’ve yet to make that happen. Maybe I can create enough of a career yet stay at home — and keep that home in the family. But can I even create that career now, at this age?

Speaking of which: underlying all of these internal (now external) debates is the aforementioned fact that I recently turned 51. I’ve already experienced light doses of ageism and I can only expect them to increase, right? Is Corporate America or building one’s own career every bit a young man’s game as living for surf in a grubby apartment in Mexico?

Then there’s the age-old dream — and those of you who’ve known me for any length of time have heard me talk about this since I was a teenager — of buying a sailboat and taking off. I came close back in the ‘90s (Mom, in her infinite wisdom, refused to help me out financially then, for which I remain thankful). I came close in 2011 (which, given what happened to Mom and Dad in 2012 and 2013, I’m glad fell through). And when I returned to New England last spring I planned on two things: one, helping Dad; and two, buying a crappy, old boat and fixing it up to head south in November. That plan went with Dad in July, but there’s no reason the plan can’t be resurrected this year.

I follow the journals of friends who are living a life of early retirement. I follow those who continue to work but live on the road. I monitor the experiences of those courageous souls who never bought into the system in the first place. Hell, I even adore the fictional character Travis McGee and his plan for “taking retirement in installments.” So the pull of that dream I’ve had since I was a boy remains strong. And this might be the time to make it happen. Selling the house would certainly generate enough cash to go. Keeping the house and renting it out would generate at least some income on which to live. Hell, there might even still be enough money left in my savings to go as I’d planned to last year (though I’ve been burning through a lot of it this year as I’ve been living at the island and chipping away at what’s needed doing), but would managing that be more trouble than it’s worth?

No matter what I wind up doing, I still need some sort of purpose in life though, don’t I? Elon Musk raised the question of a universal basic income as a response to the rise in workplace automation, but questioned what, if anything, such “free” income could do for people in terms of a reason to live. As I’ve been mostly idle for the past year, I’ve come to realize that a focus, a calling, a purpose is a good thing. It’s a requirement, actually. Elon’s right.

Which brings me back around to today’s original question: What to do when those things that might function as a focus in my life are largely geared toward those (much) younger than me? Do I rage against the dying of the light? Or take up a serious golf habit?

These are the things I ponder of late. A lot.

Navel Gazing, New England, Ocean Fun, Personal, Travel, , , , , ,

The Highlight(s) of My Week

Is it the hockey itself, the playing, that made my Friday evenings the highlight of my winter? Was it the camaraderie in the locker room and on the bench, a bunch of men (and a couple of women) ranging in age from teenager to 60-something all gathered for the common love of a game? Maybe it was simply the winding drive through the rolling forests and swirling creek bottoms of southeastern New Hampshire, the New England farmhouses with their white siding and green shutters peeking through the trees.

Whatever it was, getting involved with the Friday-night skate at a local prep school was the one part of each week that was inviolable. But with the end of scholastic hockey season in early March (while I was celebrating my birthday by surfing in Mexico), the school had shut off the rink’s compressors, putting an end to my weekly sessions. I was bereft. What was I to do? Like a junkie going through withdrawal, I’d begun to hallucinate upon my return from Mexico.

Even in sunny San Diego there’s fun hockey to be found (photo courtesy: Jeremy Spitzberg)

I’ve written before of the joy I take in playing hockey, the pure Zen I experience when I’m on the ice. And every winter — save one: the year I lived in Austin, Texas — since I started playing the game in 1971 I have played hockey. Even San Diego afforded me the chance to skate regularly and achieve temporary satori.

Fortunately, I recently connected with another group that has doubled my weekly hockey dose. The new group skates twice a week at another local prep school, this one about a half-hour south of my home and reached by taking an even more scenic drive through quaint, picturesque New England towns than my winter drive north. We play later in the evening so the late-night drives home through those sleepy — and sleeping — towns scratches my Robert Frost-induced Yankeephile itch. And while the competition is not as strong as the winter skate, it’s still solid and challenging, and there are always two goalies — a rare occasion in the pick-up skates I had been attending to fill the void.

I don’t know how far into the spring or summer I’ll skate with this group, but the instant community that engulfed me once the puck was dropped my first time out and I could show what I was capable of has been comforting to this curmudgeonly hermit. As an added bonus, the workouts (and their timing) has helped me keep off the weight I lost in Mexico. And then, of course, there are those fleeting glimpses of nirvana when my blades hit the ice with each shift…

New England, Personal,