Rants and Revelations

As seen in simonb: From the latest personality quiz:

You are an SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

Except for the bit about exploding, I don’t see it myself.

For that last couple of days, people on the LUGOR (Linux Users Group of Rochester) have been trading back and forth screen shots showing their particular setups. (Oh, and they’ve all been smart enough to put the screen shots on a web site somewhere and just emailing the URL - thanks, guys.) But that got me thinking about something that happened over 10 years ago.
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I noticed that a very large proportion of the comment spam I get is all on one blog entry, number 20. So a quick

update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 0 where entry_created_on
 < now() - interval '180 days' and entry_author_id = 2;

and now nobody can comment on entries that are older than 180 days. I’m just wondering if I should do the same with the other blog authors.

I haven’t been blogging much. Part of it is that I’ve been busy at work. Part of it is that I have writer’s block - I want to finish up my “bad work experiences” series and I want to write about the cruise, but I haven’t felt like it. And part of it is that I’ve done some good work on my CoPilot waypoint generator.
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One of my favourite late spring/early summer activiites is watching the Perigrine Falcons on Kodak Office raise another clutch of babies. Well, that simple pleasure is just about over, as the young eyases are just about the fledge. They’ve been hopping all over the nesting area, and down to the “playpen” (the balcony) and back up. I’m sure any moment now one after the other will start flying around, although from past experience they will hang around the nest box for a few more weeks. But we’ll see less and less of them until finally we’ll see nothing.

Sorry, Edmund Blackadder.

Here is what I’m currently dealing with both as an officer of the Rochester Flying Club and as a member

• Our insurance company, and indeed all insurance companies, are saying that they won’t write “whole club” insurance policies on our Lance any more. They prefer to write “named pilot” policies with only 5 or 6 pilots per policy. Another local club is carrying two policies on their Lance because of this. Since we’re paying $8000 a year for the existing policy, we’re not looking forward to this. Since they’re going to be looking to insure only high time pilots with lots of experience, and I’ve only *just* checked out in the Lance earlier this year, and I only have 15 hours in it so far, I’m definitely not looking forward to this.
• The Lance’s engine is old, but is still showing no major problems, but we could have to replace it soon - and if we have to sell it because we can’t get the insurance, we’re stuck with eating the cost of the new engine whether it needs it or not.
• We’ve known since its last annual that the engine on the Dakota probably won’t pass inspection next year, so we’re planning on replacing at annual, or sooner if the engine compressions drop or we start seeing metal in the oil samples.
• The oil leak on one of our Archers was going to require reboring a cylinder stud hole and replacing the stud with a bigger one, but when our mechanic got the cylinder off he found the case was cracked, so we’ve got to rush-job get a new engine for it.
• Fuel prices continue to climb, and therefore so do our hourly rates for the aircraft.
• Our club’s recievables have been in a terrible mess for a year, often going several months without a bill. Well, I just got notice that after the President of the club audited the bills, they discovered that a payment that I had made for $800 got credited to my account twice, so when the next bill comes I’m going to owe that $800 plus however many months of flying I’ve done in the mean-time.
• And while I’m legally current to fly instruments, I haven’t flown in real IFR conditions for so long that I’m feeling like the first low overcast day I should find an instructor and do some holding and approaches in the clag.

On the first couple of days, before I really adapted to the time out there, I got up fairly early to wander around the ship, especially out on the promonade decks. I discovered some cool little hidden corners of the ship that way, like this little promonade in the bow that you could only get to from the promonade above it and which had a sculpture that evoked an old fashioned ship’s wheel and binnacle.

On the second morning I was up on the deck at about 7:30 taking pictures as we came into Juneau. And I got to talking to another guy who was just up there enjoying the view. He had an Irish accent, but he said that he lived near Manchester. Well, I lived near Manchester back when I was working for GeoVision, subcontracted to Andersen Consulting. I told him that I’d spent 6 or 7 months working in Warrington and living near Manchester. He said that he lived in Altrincham. Oh, too freaky - while the first month I was there I lived in a hotel in Knutsford, the rest of the time I’d lived in Altrincham. He asked me if I lived in Bowden or (someplace else). I had to admit that I couldn’t remember any street or neighbourhood names, although Bowden sounded a bit familiar. By now I’m thinking that he probably thinks I’m making it all up just to be chummy. “Where did you drink?” Ah, finally a name I could remember - The Griffin. “I live 5 minutes walk from the Griffin!”. I remarked on how back then it seemed like all the young people were drinking bottled Budweiser instead of the quite good house bitter, and he agreed that this trend still continued, and that now the pub pretty much has two crowds, the young Bud drinkers early, and the older bitter and scotch drinkers later on. Sure enough, it appears from comparing notes that it’s quite likely that back in 1992, we might have been in the same pub at the same time, and now here in 2004 we’re on a cruise ship together. Now that’s just freaky.

I keep meaning to write more blog entries about our Alaska cruise, but I haven’t been able to. Part of that is pure intertia - I still haven’t adapted back to local time and I keep waking up in the middle of the night and falling asleep in the day time.

So in order to get some of it down in a timely manner, I thought I’d write about what for me was the highlight of the trip.
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Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

For the past couple of days, this “Willow Internet Crawler by Twotrees V2.1″ has been agressively crawling my site. And I mean agressively - they download every single page as quickly as they can, with no pause between them. This is a bit of a pain, because it means they are sucking down my bandwidth that I’d rather use for live human beings or better behaved applications.

But today was the last straw - I have a robots.txt file because when web crawlers hit my image gallery, they tend to cause errors in the php code that gets logged in /var/log/messages. So today I noticed a “Last message repeated 147 times” message scrolling by, I looked and sure enough “Willow Internet Crawler” isn’t obeying the spider guidelines - they haven’t even looked at my robots.txt.

first thing I did was go to their web site - and discovered that under “Contact Us”, you can only see their email address while your mouse is hovering over the title - once you move the cursor away to actually type in a mail program, it goes away again. And the address isn’t in the same place as what you are hovering over. Making it a (probably purposely) difficult to cut and paste the address into mutt.

So fine, you want to be an asshole? I can be an asshole too. I opened up /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the “allow all” line, and added a “deny 68.244.166.8″ after it, restarted the web server, and now I’m watching “Willow Internet Crawler” get a lot of 403s. So fuck you, Twotrees.net, and the horse you rode in on too.

Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.

Pictures:

Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.

Subtitle: “Why the American Legal System turns grievers into money grubbing scum”

Some idiot pilot flew his plane into a thunderstorm, and inevitable two things happened:

1. The plane is torn into little pieces and tossed on the ground.

2. The family files a wrongful death lawsuit against anybody who had anything to do with making this flight possible. Except of course the guy’s brother, who was the one and only cause of his own demise.

Sorry, grieving family, but when your flight instructor warns you two weeks beforehand that you have “deficient decision making” when it comes to flying near “adverse weather systems”, and the before-flight weather briefing shows massive area thunderstorms (not isolated cells) on your route of flight, IT’S NOT PIPER AIRCRAFT’S FAULT THAT IT DIDN’T PREVENT YOU FROM MAKING THE FLIGHT.

So grieve all you want, but realize that your brother killed himself. Piper didn’t. Pratt and Whitney didn’t. Naples Air Center didn’t. He did. As surely as he’d taken a loaded gun and stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I have a credit card that’s issued by MBNA through the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). When I first came to this country, I kept getting turned down for supposedly “pre-approved” credit cards because none of them would check my Canadian credit card records and would say “no credit record”. AOPA/MBNA were the first to issue me a US dollar credit card, and at first it had a hideously low credit limit ($300), which meant I’d almost have to use it as a pre-paid card when I wanted to make a major purchase - preloading a large credit balance before hand.
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It was very weird to walk out the front door this morning to see a FedEx Ground truck parked on the road, and find that it wasn’t going to us but to our neighbour. We buy so much stuff on-line that the UPS driver once joked “Here’s your daily delivery”.

What’s even weirder is to see Brad Choate misusing apostrophes. I sent him a link to Bob the Angry Flower’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots, but then I realized that it doesn’t say anything about the little quirk that you never use apostrophe-s as a possessive form with the word “it”.

Oh well.

Update: Brad saw my trackback ping and changed his blog entry. So if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about: where it now says “is on its last leg”, it said “is on it’s last leg” when I wrote the above. Sure, it’s nice to score one on a much better writer than me once in a while, but since he fixed the error, I look like a dick for pointing out an error that isn’t there. Thus I’m taking the unprecedented (for me) step of going back and updating this entry.

According to AvWeb’s NewsWire, the FAA is FINALLY getting the idea that it’s better to have pilots who are on anti-depressants than it is to have depressed pilots who are afraid to seek treatment for fear of losing their medicals.

Let’s hope this doesn’t take as long as most FAA studies.