Austin Moody

I’m ready to call this one a success. The only sports I’ve event paid attention to is ETSU’s game in the first round of the NCAA tourney. That was it. I didn’t even watch the freaking Super Bowl! The spell is broken, freeing up time for reading, writing, and other things.

...I’m just terrified of crashing.

I think this sort of sums up my issue. I’m not really scared by the act of flying or even dying. I’m scared of the possible ways of dying as a result of flying. Make sense?

This phobia is one that has taken root in me sometime in the last 6 years or so. There was a time that flying never bothered me, actually I looked forward to it. And then I snapped.

It first hit me when I wanted to fly to visit family in South Carolina from Vermont, where I lived at the time. I got the time off of work, booked my flight, and let everyone know I was coming. Then, a week before I was supposed to go, it hit me… oh shit I’m getting on an airplane.

I went through with the trip, and when I’d landed in Philadelphia after the first leg from Burlington, VT I actually felt a bit silly about losing sleep for week about it. However, instead of it being a one time freak out it has just gotten worse at time goes on.

The last time I flew was about 4 years ago to a conference in Boston for work. I couldn’t sleep for weeks leading up to the day, literally drank my face off before boarding here locally and during a stopover in Charlotte. By the time we were ready to leave Charlotte for Boston I would have flown on a winged unicorn…

Now I avoid air travel at all costs. Two years ago when I had to take a business trip to Chicago I rented a car and drove 11 hours instead of flying. Last summer when my brother got married in New Jersey I rented a car and drove over 13 hours.

However, this summer, I have an event that I must fly to. As in there is no physical way to drive a car to it. So here I go… trying to attempt to figure out some way around this fear.

This week I setup www.floatcamp.org as a way for people to get information about the event and add their information, etc… Several people involved and wanting to attend complained about the main BarCamp website and the fact that it was yet another login you needed (however I do think that site allows for OpenID now). So we thought it would be a good idea to get our own domain.

Me being bored as usual of everything decided it was a good chance to play around with Google’s App Engine. I found some existing example Wiki code and went from there. So far so good. And if it wasn’t for the fact that you have to use Python I’d probably do a lot more with that App Engine.

The date of the event is also solid now. March 28, 2009.