Rants and Revelations

You know, normal people have “flying dreams” where they’re floating above the surface of the earth. Last night I had a “flying dream” where I was sitting in an airport pilots lounge shooting the shit with my pilot friends. And one of them looked a lot like Bill Law, although not enough to make you think it was him, although at first the guy was pretending to be him, but trying to give people very dangerous advice about flying in ice producing clouds. Then he admitted to being Bill’s long lost brother from Canada.

Very weird.

Last night, lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I had a few random thoughts about my blog.

• If I were to just put the already generated pages of Maddy’s blog and the memorial blog, and not allow new entries or comments, then it doesn’t need a blog engine behind it, and so therefore I could upgrade *this* blog to the newest version of MovableType or TextPattern. I can’t currently upgrade MovableType because the current version’s free license only allows one author.
• I should make a new category for a pain diary, but not put it on the main page. Sort of like how on Maddy’s blog only her entries go on the main index, but other stuff posted about her by others goes in the category index on the side.
• I should put all the updates I’m doing to the navaid.com site into a blog, either this one or another one. I should also transition the copilot-announce mailing list to Gradwell.

This entry is posted at 8:20 local (12:20 GMT), but the the index.rdf entry will show the date as

<dc:date>2004-09-29T08:20:00-05:00</dc:date>

That seems to imply that the GMT offset is 5 hours, when (thanks to daylight savings time) it’s really 4 hours. So should MovableType put the current offset in there, or should anybody attempting to parse that file have to know about DST?

Thanks to Rone, I will, as he says, say goodbye to my free time, my productivity, and my life as I know it. And say hello to a stunningly addictive game. My only hope is that they never bring it out for Palm OS.

On Saturday at Bay Creek Paddle Center’s end of year sale, I saw several people getting into or out of canoes and kayaks made by Swift Canoe & Kayak. It took a strong effort of will, but I didn’t refer to a single one of them as a “Swift Boat Veteran”.

Read this for a taste of what it’s like to be a maintenance programmer: Friday Feature: You’re all Morons. Read it quick, because I bet it will be taken down as soon as the honchos at Star Wars Galaxies find it.

My lusers aren’t as stupid as his, but what they don’t have in teenaged arrogance and stupidity they make up for in type-A personalities and ability to throw around purchasing power. “Oh, your last release had a bug in it? I guess we’ll take our $45 million contract somewhere else then instead. I bet your competitor doesn’t have bugs.” I bet they do, fuckwit.

I just want to lie here and sleep for two days, but I can’t convince Vicki to spoon feed me. After buying my new kayak, I of course had to fix the canoe rack.
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Oh, probably. But I can’t help it - I went out today and bought a kayak. “My” paddle store, Bay Creek had their end of year clearance. I went still undecided whether I wanted to buy the Valley Avocet RM that I rented a few times and found a really fun boat, or the Valley Skerray RMX, which I rented several more times and found it *almost* as nice as the Avocet, but with a few drawbacks.
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My dad gave me his old camera because mine crapped out. The lens he gave me with it didn’t include filters, and the filters on my old lenses don’t fit. So I thought I’d get the bare minimum, a 1A Skylight filter and a polarizer, from eBay. There was a guy selling a whole bunch of camera stuff, and he said in his actions that if you used the “Buy It Now” feature you didn’t have to the shipping, and if you bought two or more, you could take 50 cents off of each item as a “bulk discount”. He was an eBay power seller or whatever they call it, and he took PayPal so it should have been dead easy.

So I did the “Buy it now” on the two filters I wanted. The eBay checkout procedure would allow me to remove the shipping cost myself, but not the bulk discount. So I emailed the guy and asked him to update the price so I could send him the money. No answer. So the next day I just calculated how much the total should be and Paypal-ed him the money. But he still hasn’t answer any of my emails, nor has he acknowledged me in any way whatsoever. It’s been 4 days so far.

At what point do I say to myself that the money I paypal-ed to him is lost, he’s a fucking rip-off artist, and buy another couple of filters?

Oh, and just to make my life complete, his site advertises that he’s got “autofeedback”, so if you leave him a negative feedback on eBay he’ll automatically leave you a negative feedback.

New TSA Rule

Short summary - any non-citizen wanting any sort of flight training has to get TSA approval, and as well as the cost and hassle of getting the photos and fingerprints and stuff, there will be a several hundred dollar fee. Oh, and knowing the federal government, probably a 6 month wait for approval.

In spite of the fact that the Bush camp has turned the whole debate around to be about one set of probably-forged papers, one shouldn’t forget that the basic facts are not in dispute. And those facts are that Bush received a sweetheart deal because of his wealth and status, and then didn’t fullfil his committments, and then has had his proxies and surrogates lie and dissemble about this. Why does he get a by on his obvious lack of integrity and faithfulness to his comiittments from the majority of the press?

Air Force Times

Some highlights:

“I heard George Bush get up and say, `I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery, Alabama,’” retired Lt. Col. Robert Mintz said on camera. “Really? That was my unit. And I don’t remember seeing you there…”

“Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.” - That’s from Colin Powell’s 1995 book “My American Journey”.

Vicki and I flew across the lake this weekend. Except for a day trip to Ben and Jerry’s, we haven’t flown an “away” trip together since 1999, when we went to Piseco, NY for a weekend. I love it when we get to fly somewhere together - it sort of makes me feel like all the money I’ve spend on my pilot training wasn’t totally selfish.
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I’ve always thought that my ideal place to live would either be out in cottage country with woods and a lake, or right downtown in a vibrant exciting city in a high rise with a huge window with a great view. And I always thought that was sort of contradictory of me. But visting Vicki’s friend Jonesiexxx, (who, by the way, lives in a cool neighbourhood in a vibrant exciting city with a huge window with a great view), I think I figured it out.

One of the things I liked living in the country was the quiet and the closeness to nature, but another thing I liked was the sense of belonging to a small community. As we walked down the street, and Jonesiexxx was recognized by people at her neighbourhood butcher and green grocer (yes, real stores with real specialties, not monster supermarkets), I realized that was something that the tiny village of Rupert Quebec and her corner of Toronto had in common - a small community that you could belong to.

Funny that something like that would appeal to an introvert like me. My fear is that if I did live in a place like that, I *wouldn’t* get to know the community and miss out on the whole point of living in a place like that. Fortunately, I have Vicki, who would know everybody in a 5 block radius within two days of our arrival.

If you discover a bunch of old files in /var/mailman/qfiles/shunt, do NOT run unshunt. It doesn’t get rid of them, it delivers them to the mailing lists that they’d originally been rejected by since they came from non-members and are spam.

I just sent 18 peices of spam to the members of the Upstate Aviation Mailing list. And they’re all helpfully tagged ‘[UpstateAv]‘ in the subject line so people know where they came from.

WEINER WITHHOLDS “OUTRAGEOUS” ANTI-GENERAL AVIATION BILL IN HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE

This bill would have essentially outlawed general avaition. For one thing, it would have required the Department of Homeland Security to security screen general aviation flights - I could see them rushing out to put screening stations in all 18,000 general aviation airports in the country. And what about private airfields? And for what? To make sure my friends and family don’t threaten me with a box cutter when I’m taking them flying?

Another provision would have forbidden me from flying within 1500 feet of any structure or building. I don’t see any exemption for airport buildings. I wonder where I was supposed to land?

Oh, and it would have required all aircraft to remain in contact with the FAA (presumably by radio), regardless of altitude or location. Remember that 18,000 airport figure? Guess how many have control towers. About 600. Somehow I don’t see the FAA rushing out and building 17,400 control towers.