Rants and Revelations

Schumer, Clinton see danger in curtailing hours at airport tower

The important bit:

“It’s not a huge deal. There’s 10 times as many uncontrolled airports as there are with control towers, so pilots are pretty used to flying without towers,” said Paul Tomblin of Greece, secretary of the Rochester Flying Club.

“There’s not a lot of traffic after midnight. I’ve been to Rochester in the middle of the night and the controllers sounded pretty bored,” Tomblin said.

alaska_cruise/DSCN1437

What the on-line edition spares you from is the horror of seeing the picture they illustrated the article with. It was basically this picture from our Alaska cruise, but cropped in a bit so you couldn’t see the PFD and spray skirt. Oh, the horror.

Hmmm. Picture doesn’t show on the first page of my blog, but does on the article page.

Remember how I said I have become the local media “go-to” guy for aviation stuff? Well, the same guy who called me about the Steve Fossett thing called me today to ask about the FAA’s proposal to close a bunch of towers after midnight on some of the less-busy airports.

When I read about this on AvFlash, I didn’t bother looking at the list of airports, but I assumed Rochester was going to be one of them. The airport is nearly dead at night, except for the occassional frieght dog in an AzTruck and the FedEx jet. So when this guy called, I said “No big deal”, only much wordier than that. I said there are ten times as many non-towered airports as towered airports out there, so pilots know how to handle the lack of a control tower just fine. (Actually, come to think of it, there are probably 100 times as many. I should look that up on the AOPA web site. Ok, not bad. According to the “GA (General Aviation) Serving America” web site, there are 5200 public use airports, 550 served by airlines, so my factor of ten is probably not too far off.)

However, saying “no big deal” to a tower closure, even a part-time closure, is not going to endear me to the members of the air traffic controllers union. I guess I’d better not let anybody in the air traffic controllers union know who I am on the radio for a while, lest they re-route me via Timbuktu.

…it weren’t a soul and productivity destroying piece of shit.

My boss is always nagging the developers to do more documentation, and to put them into the “documenation blog” (which actually has some blog-like features, but it’s mostly a web front-end to a CVS repository). Oh, and you can’t just attach to the CVS server and use good old command line tools - no, you have to use the web front-end, because otherwise it screws up the permssions for everybody else who uses the web tool.

Ok, I’m a team player. I’ll be nice.
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I’m a Moonbat and I’m proud.

I switched from MovableType to WordPress so that I could take advantage of all the fancy new spam fighting features in WordPress - and because I was stuck on MT 2.661 and development in the MT world was passing me by. Initially I was reluctant because WP is written in PHP and I don’t know if it’s the language or the people who use the language, but PHP web sites tend to be great gaping holes with a big welcome mat for spammers, trojans, script kiddies and every other anti-social reject on the net.

So now I’m sitting here checking my SpamKarma page several times a day to see how well it’s working, but the spammers are still attempting to hit my old blog - I see the hits in my httpd logs for “GET /movabletype/custom-comments.cgi over and over again.

Sad but true - I can’t wait for the spammers to find my new blog.

I don’t know why I get as excited about the road bike season as I do. As a rider, it was mountain bikes that I liked, not road bikes, and even there I only did one piddly little race before my knees started hurting. But the season’s started, at least as far as OLN TV’s coverage of it is concerned. And that’s a good thing.
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The best dog in the history of the world was named Heidi, and she was part of my life for most of my teens.
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Hey, does alaska2004/whale_jump the wpgallery tag work?

Oh, yes it does. Sweet.

I’d rather fight than switch. I’ve switched my blog over to WordPress. I’ve got the font size issue fixed. Everything is imported from the old blog. The only problem is that links to the old blog won’t work, because the naming convention of individual posts has changed. Now if only I could remember to uncheck “Uncategorized” before saving each entry.

Anyway, if you’re having any problems with the way things render, links not working, comment spam blocking requiring you to jump through too many hoops, you’re seeing comment or trackback spam, or other problems, please let me know via email to ptomblin at xcski.com

I’m just testing out switching from MovableType to WordPress. It looks ok and seems to have better spam control, but the fonts are absolutely tiny.

I had 60 comment and trackback spams overnight. All but one of them were for the same URL. By the time I got through MT-Blacklist removing them, it had already blocked 5 more attempts to spam the same URL.

The problem isn’t keeping up with the URLs that they’re spamming - that’s never going to be completely under control, but MT-Blacklist does an ok job. The problem is the compromised PCs that the spammers are using. Last night’s spam run involved about a dozen different IPs - you can bet your life that ever single one of them is some idiot’s home PC that’s been taken over by a virus, trojan or spyware.

I can’t keep up with that list of IPs, but I bet there is a clearing house out there, and a plug-in for *some* blog software, that will. Any suggestions?

Steve Fossett made it - first solo unrefueled flight around the world. I’m thrilled. No particular reason why. It’s not like in the grand scheme of things it’s as important as Americans dying in Iraq and the genocide in Sudan, but I’m thrilled. It’s just fun. And once again Burt Rutan proves that if there is an aviation challenge, he can design and build the airplane (or spacecraft) to meet it. I’m even more thrilled to hear that Space Ship One is going to be at Oshkosh this year. That’s just doubled my conviction that I need to go.

In other news, I got my laptop back from the shop. The hinge is definitely stiffer than it was (I think they replaced the whole screen, not just the hinge), but it fails the “propped up on your knees while sitting on the couch” test - it still flops down, just slower.

And in other news, I’m at Piedmont Hawthorne waiting for the flying club officer’s meeting to start, and the god-damned wireless internet connection blocks outgoing ssh and telnet connections. Thank God I installed Squirrel Mail so at least I can read my email, even if I can’t read news.

It started when RNews called me after some guy crashed near the airport. Evidently they got my name from the Rochester Flying Club web site. I tried very hard to say positive things about aviation and not to speculate on what the guy might have done wrong, and I figured they’d probably hate me.

Then they called me after Bill Law crashed and died. I did the same thing - except for the fact that I heard about his death from the RNews reporter, which is pretty shocking, and because I knew and liked Bill I could say more about what a great guy he was and how important he was to aviation in Rochester.

Well, it’s continuing on. Today I got a call from a local reporter who wanted to know if I’m following Steve Fossett in the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. I told him that I’ve been watching the
Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer : Flight Tracker for every waking hour since before he took off until now. He asked me some background stuff, and asked me if I’d like to be doing what Fossett is doing. I said I wouldn’t mind being able to spend all my time doing aviation adventures, but I don’t think I’d want to spend 80 hours in a noisy cockpit. He then said that if Steve makes it they’ll probably want some reactions from local pilots.

Ok, I guess I’m up to 10 minutes of fame.

MacShack called to say that the replacement hinge finally came in, so I reluctantly brought my Powerbook in. He says that it should only take 24 hours. Going back to using the Cube is painful - not only is the screen much lower resolution, but the processor is way slower.