Rants and Revelations

My favourite computer accessory store, FrozenCPU.com, now sells PolyGFX Case Skins to customize your case. Even better, they’ll let you submit your own imagery and they’ll print you up a custom case skin.

I’ve never been all that tempted by some of the “Pimp My Box” stuff like cold cathode tubes or water cooling systems, but I’m sorely tempted by this. My gigantic Linux full tower sits up on my desk to keep it from getting clogged with dust, but it’s sort of overwhelming there.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Photoshop Elements to make a couple of candidate images. Here are a couple of small copies of the huge images I’ve made: Early morning departure and Clouds

The originals are 49 inches by 17 inches at 300 pixels per inch, so they’re pretty damn huge. I’m not going to stress my cable modem by putting links to them here.

I grabbed the highest resolution satellite images I could get off of Terraserver, and stitched together a mosaic, and colourized the water, so now I have an Irondequoit Creek Map. It might be useful to carry this around on the river.

After all the hassles last time, it’s really nice to just walk into my Aviation Medical Examiner’s office, and walk out a half hour later with a third class aviation medical. Phew!

I didn’t doubt I’d get it, but I still was a little nervous. Thank god I won’t have to do that for another two years.

After my very positive experience with the VCP Avocet RM, a couple of people suggested that the VCP Skerray RMX might be better for somebody of my advanced weight. It’s a bigger boat, with higher displacement, but similar lines.
Continue reading ‘The Skerray RMX Kayak’ »

In today’s paper there is a columnist writing about every miniscule difference between John Kerry in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004. I don’t know about you, but if somebody had *exactly* the same opinions on everything that they did 20 years ago, I’d call them so pig-headed and stubborn that they don’t learn from experience, don’t change their opinion based on new evidence, and don’t grow personally.

So here’s a toast to John Kerry’s ability to think and reason and admit when his original position no longer makes sense based on new information.

A couple of people have already asked me how I can feel safe flying if somebody of Bill Law’s years of experience can crash. A guy I know wrote this response to similar questions. It’s not exactly what I would have written, but it’s pretty close.
Continue reading ‘In the aftermath’ »

One of the oldest members of the flying club is proposing that the club do a “Missing Man” formation over Bill Law’s memorial next weekend.

A Missing Man formation, in case you don’t know, is where 4 or 5 aircraft in relatively tight formation fly over a memorial or funeral, and then one peels off leaving his space empty, the gap representing the person being memorialized (uh… make that “remembered”). It’s usually done by highly disciplined military or private air teams, who practice formation flying together regularly and who are all flying aircraft of similar characteristics.

Bob is proposing that we do it with our club aircraft, the slowest of which can barely manage 105 knots at full throttle, and the fastest of which feels a bit mushy if you slow it down below 90 knots. He feels that since he took a formation flying course some years ago that he’s eminently qualified to fly this formation, in spite of the fact that the course involved identical aircraft and was lead by highly skilled and highly practiced instructors, and he just has to grab 3 or 4 others who’ve taken a similar course and maybe even practice it once.

What a great way to remember Bill Law - by having a fatal 4 plane mid-air collision over his memorial service! Oh well, at least the club would get some new planes out of it. Too bad we’d never get insurance again, and the club officers would be put in jail for not stopping this lunatic. Oh wait, I’m a club officer!

In software development, there is nothing sadder than seeing a nice simple and elegant design turn into a mishmash of special cases and exceptions - except maybe having your project relocated to India. And in this case, I’m not close enough to that part of the project to see if it’s just that real life turned out to be a lot more complicated than the design, or if (as I suspect) the guy doing the work is overlooking simple and elegant ways of solving the problems and grafting on complicated band-aids on top of other complicated special case band-aids.

I already wrote about flying from Rochester to Ottawa in a previous blog entry. The rest of the trip was a lot more of an adventure in some ways.
Continue reading ‘Last Weekend, Part #2 - Ottawa to Ladysmith’ »

Today Vicki and I went kayaking again. This time, instead of the tried and true Dagger Magellan that I usually use, I took the Valley Canoe Products Avocet RM. I think it’s a bit shorter boat, and it was definitely quite a bit narrower. It was a tight squeeze getting in and out, and the sides of the seat were pressing into me quite hard the whole time, but the firm connection made me feel much more a part of the boat. I had perfect control of the tilt of the boat just by thinking about it, and being narrower in the water as well, I could paddle closer to my body which I liked. It seemed fast, and it seemed to hit that sweet spot between tracking well and being able to turn when you wanted. It had a skeg but I never used it - but it’s nice to think that if I needed better tracking to get over a windy lake I could have it. In comparison, the Magellan was a better tracker, but there were times when I wanted to turn it and it seemed to take too much effort.

Vicki had the other Avocet RM, and she liked it too. She started out with the skeg down, since she’s found the other boats they had almost uncontrollable without one. But after having trouble making it around a few corners, she seemed to mostly paddle with it up, except maybe on some straight-aways.

The only thing I’m concerned about is that several web sites say it’s for paddlers up to 180 pounds. I’m considerably heavier than that - I was heavier than that when I was skiing in the Canadian Ski Marathon and I’ll never be that fit or that light again. I don’t know enough about kayaking to know what is wrong with paddling a kayak meant for a smaller person. Obviously I won’t get the optimal hull profile in the water, but am I in danger of swamping? Or is it just that I’d be limited in the gear I can carry? Because if that’s the only problem, it’s not problem - I don’t intend to carry anything more than a lunch.

R News: Your NewsChannel

I just found out that Bill Law, the man who has probably done more for general aviation in Western New York than anybody since Glen Curtis, just died in a plane crash.
Continue reading ‘Shaken’ »

Our QA group works in the basement of this building. I work on the third floor. The only elevator is a freight elevator at the other end of the building, and I think you need your doctor to swear on a stack of bibles that you are legitimately handicapped before you can use it. Consequently, when the QA people need me to come down and look at a problem, I have to haul myself down this steep stairway in one of the danker and more industrial smelling parts of the building. I would like to I avoid it as much as possible. However, one of the QA people, Lisa, always calls me first whenever she has any problem, and she’s not very good at describing what the problem is, so I have to go down the stairs to see her. Unfortunately she’s very nice and pretty good at her job for the most part, so I can’t just tell her to fuck off.
Continue reading ‘Pulling out the thermo-nuclear trump card’ »

Some pictures to go along with my last blog entry:

Gallery :: Flying from Rochester to Ottawa

The mission was to get to Ottawa and points north. I was going to Maddy’s interment on Saturday, and spending some time with my kids on Sunday. I had booked the club’s Dakota, which is my favourite plane, but when the Lance became available I switched to it instead - the Lance is a bit faster, which is nice, but the main reason is that the club’s insurance company is looking to restrict who can use the Lance so it won’t hurt to have a lot of Lance hours on record.
Continue reading ‘Last Weekend, Part #1 - The flight’ »