Rants and Revelations

It’s 80 degrees out, and so Rob and I snuck out from work at lunch time and went for a paddle. We didn’t go too far, just up past the weir. But it was lovely. The weir was in full flow, and we had an audience of people who were hiking down a trail in Ellison Park who stopped to watch. So we had to make it, and it was touch and go for a while there - Rob didn’t line up with the outflow at all, so when he hit the V it of course dragged him immediately across and he banged into one of the uprights on the weir. I lined up and paddled with short fast strokes and made it up, but almost buried one side of the cockpit when I did it. Rob watched what I did and copied it successfully.

My kayak was sitting on the floor of the garage all winter because one day in the fall I took it down to try to install a decal on it, and was too lazy to put it back up. Consequently there was a neat little row of bird seed along the foot peg rails when I lifted it onto the roof rack. And I can’t seem to get the backing paper off the decal without removing the vinyl, either.

Along the way, there were a lot of pairs of Canada Geese out, mostly with the female hidden down in the weeds and the male at the edge of the free-flowing water making threatening noises and gestures as we paddled by. At one point, there was a single goose in some flotsam with his whole head and neck down on the surface of the water. At first I thought he was dead, but he turned to watch me was I paddled past. I’ve never seen that before. There were also lots of turtles, and a couple of male redwing blackbirds. The water was clear and fast and VERY cold.

Lifting my kayak and Rob’s kayak on and off the roof racks, I started wondering what it would cost to trade up to a lighter kayak. There are things I love about my kayak, and a couple of things I don’t love, but the only thing I hate is that is weighs around 70 pounds. I was talking to one of the salesmen at Bay Creek, and he says they don’t make the Skerry in fibreglas any more except as a special order. But they have the ‘glas Pintail, which is pretty similar but a little lower volume. Since I’m unlikely to be camping in the kayak, that might do. Given the price difference between what I could reasonably expect to sell the Skerry for and this, it might be doable after a few more weeks of overtime. If I don’t die from the stress first.

For the record, what I love about my Skerray:

• Handles beautifully. With the skeg up, I can spin it, with the skeg down I can track straight in a quartering breeze.
• Fast and responsive. It rewards your effort.
• The snug fitting cockpit gives you tons of control - the kayak feels like an extension of you.
• Looks nice. The grey colour isn’t harsh or glaring.

Things that I don’t hate, but don’t love about my Skerray:

• The cockpit. While it’s nice that my thighs go naturally into the thigh braces and the sides of the seat press into my hips to snug me in, it’s a right bitch getting into and out of the boat. I haven’t tried a wet exit yet, and I’m a little worried how hard it would be. They have two Pintails at Bay Creek, and one of them has a keyhole cockpit - if it means easier ingress and egress without giving up the snug feel, I’m all for that.
• The skeg sometimes makes an sloshing sound as it hits the sides of the skeg box when I’m paddling hard with it down. It sounds like somebody sneaking up behind me until I realize what it is.
• I don’t know if it’s the seat or the way I’m sitting, but my legs go numb after an hour in the boat. I read that some people put a rolled up towel under their knees to help that, but with the snugness of my cockpit I don’t want another impediment to getting out in a hurry. Somebody at Bay Creek today said to try rolling my butt forward a bit to take pressure off the sciatic nerve. I’ll try that next time.

My Garmin 296 is here. It’s very beautiful. There was a little bit of struggle to get the unlock code for the detail maps. I put it into auto mode and used it to get us to the restaurant for dinner. It was just like Kim and JK’s Street Pilot, which they demonstrated when we drove from New Jersey to Philadelphia for Maddy’s Memorial back in January 2004. The aviation mode looks pretty good too - I can’t wait to try it in the plane.

So far, nobody local has spoken up for my 195. So I guess it depends on whether I see Mark or Tina Marie first. (Unless Mark has changed his mind and doesn’t want it.)

A while back I was revelling in the fact that the comment spammers appeared to still be targetting my blog through the old Moveable Type comment URLS (which don’t work) instead of the new WordPress comment URLs. Up until a few weeks ago, it seemed that I’d get a spate of 7 or 8 comment spams over a weekend, and then nothing for weeks or months at a time. But then they found me, and I’ve been cleaning stuff out of my SpamKarma 2 interface daily. But the volume is going up and up and up - last night I cleaned out all the spam before bed-time, and woke up this morning to find 217 new comment spams to clean up.

Because of this volume, I’ve activated the “auto cleanup” function on SpamKarma 2, and I will no longer be examing the comments that it flags as spam to see if they were mis-characterized. So if your comment got flagged as spam, and you failed the capcha check, I’m sorry, but it’s gone. I hate to take this step, but by the same token I haven’t seen any false positives in a while.

According to Lean Left » Drunken Lullabies, anybody who reads this is supposed to post an anti-war song on their own blog.

Recruiting Sargeant

Two recruiting sergeants came to the CLB,
for the sons of the merchants, to join the Blue Puttees
So all the hands enlisted, five hundred young men
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

They crossed the broad Atlantic in the brave Florizel,
And on the sands of Suvla, they entered into hell
And on those bloody beaches, the first of them fell

Chorus
So it’s over the mountains, and over the sea
Come brave Newfoundlanders and join the Blue Puttees
You’ll fight in Flanders, and at Galipoli
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Then the call came from London, for the last July drive
To the trenches with the regiment, prepare yourselves to die
The roll call next morning, just a handful survived.
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Chorus

The stone men on Water Street still cry for the day
When the pride of the city went marching away
A thousand men slaughtered, to hear the King say
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Chorus x3

The Blue Puttees are the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, later given Royal assent as the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

The song refers to Suvla, which was part of the Gallolipoli battle, which the ANZACs seem to think was their own private hell, but they also shared it with the 1st Newfoundland and a few British Corps. The “last July drive” part is a reference to Beaumont-Hamel, one of the more atrocious parts of the atrocity that was the Battle of the Somme. 800+ members of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment went over the top on the first day, and the next day 68 of them were still standing for roll call.

People laughed at the line in Braveheart where Longshanks refers to sending Irish troopers because they were cheaper than arrows. But there was at least a touch of that attitude still prevelent in the British Army officer corps in 1917. As my dad said a little while ago, if commanders tried that sort of thing today they’d be tried as war criminals by their own side.

Our flying club requires you to do an “annual ride” every year with an instructor. Every other year, I combine that with a BFR, but on the odd years (like this one) nobody is really sure what we should do on these rides other than fly around and somehow assure the instructor that you still know what you’re doing.

I switch around to different instructors every time, so I get a chance to learn some different things. This year Jon offered to do it, because I’d offered to set up a mailing list for him and his fellow commercial pilots - he’s flying as a FO on a regional jet now. It’s nice to our relationship back friendly again, since I’d had a major blow-up at him a while back when he’d written to me disagreeing with an opinion I’d expressed in the newspaper, and he’d CC’ed every controller at our local airport. Just what I needed was hate mail from ATC. Plus he’d asked the club officers to forbid members and officers from identifying themselves as being members of the club without officer approval. But I got over it - he’d actually been right in some ways, although I still say the world isn’t going to end if they close the tower at Rochester in the wee hours of the night.

For some weird reason, I get a bit of performance anxiety on these things, even with instructors I’ve flown before. But I soon settled down as we did some steep turns, slow flight, stalls, reconfiguring between slow and fast, etc. Jon talks a lot, and it was a bit distracting at times, but that’s probably good practice as well.

But then I got a radio call I’ve never heard before.

Rochester Approach: 977 are you ready to copy a message?
Jon: Approach, 977. Go ahead.
RA: Your company 290 called to say that they're stranded in Batavia, and would like to be picked up.
Jon: Approach, we'll finish up our airwork then head on over. Thanks for passing that along.


And so that’s what we did - we did a bit more airwork, then went over to Batavia and picked them up. Evidently they couldn’t get 290 to start - the bendix wouldn’t engage. But what this means is the club is temporarily hosed - all of our fleet except the Lance is not flying.

• 290 won’t start.
• 05X just went in for its annual.
• 39Z has a dead mag.
• 23Y is getting a new engine, prop and GPS.

Boy I’m glad I’m a Lance pilot.

This morning I went to a Photoshop seminar presented by Vicki’s colleague Tom Policano. I learnt a bunch of useful stuff, but there was a problem with the pacing. The first 2.5 hours of the 3 hours seemed to go very slowly (mostly because Tom had to go around and re-demonstrate everything he’d shown on the projector on each person’s computer) and there was more time to practice each technique than I really needed. And then when we reached the last half an hour he realized we had a bunch of stuff to cover and so he just wizzed through it so fast I didn’t catch a few of the things I wanted to learn.

Fortunately he’s got a blog so I’m going to see if I can get him to explain a few things on there.

I won an eBay auction for a Garmin GPSMAP 296 and car kit. (New, that would have cost about $1850, and I got it for $1400 “lightly used”.) It’s a little scary sending that amount of money to a stranger via PayPal, but at least the seller is listed as a private pilot in the FAA Airman Registry. That should make it a little safer than most of the fraudsters out there that use a different email address than the one listed with eBay and who request money through Western Union.

Fingers crossed for a successful transaction!

So after a titanic two day struggle, we’ve got my home account moved to a server with a slightly newer version of NFS, and I seem to be running again. Except I don’t have Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office. Which, unfortunately, I really need in spite of the horror of having to use them on a daily basis. It seems that when I decided to blow the machine away and re-install, I didn’t save a precious little “id” file that allows me to log into the Lotus Notes server. The help desk form for requesting help for Notes requires you to specify what your Notes server is, and shows you how you can find it on your Notes screen - which of course I can’t do because I can’t get into Notes without this id file. It also promised that they’ll get back to you within three business days. Rob has warned me that there will be two more hurdles:

• First they will refuse to help me because they don’t support Linux, and/or because Notes doesn’t run under Linux. Evidently the fact that everybody in our office runs it under Crossover Office under Linux is just a figment of our imagination. Pointing out that this is just an authentication issue and not an OS issue evidently isn’t enough to get them to cough up this file without a fight.
• Even after they relent and send you the file, they don’t actually send it to you, they send it to your boss. And since my boss never reads his email and his secretary can never be bothered to send me the information when I try to recover my Windows network password (too busy with eBay and Solitaire), I’m not holding out great hope of getting this either.

When you or I advertise a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I have a piece of used equipment, and I want to sell it”. On the other hand, when Aircraft Spruce and Specialty advertises a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I might get some used equipment some day, and when I do, I’ll sell it to you”. They sent me an email today to say that they don’t have the advertised unit, and don’t know when they’re going to get it, but if I want I can cancel my order.

What’s the point?

Oh well, back to eBay.

(Apologies to Flogging Molly)

Spent the whole frigging day dealing with the problems I was having with my computer at work. I tried reinstalling the OS (CentOS 4.2) again. I tried replacing the hard drive that was giving errors. I tried installing it on a Dell 700 I had on my desk for testing purposes. Every time I got the same problem - I’d set up a Thunderbird or Evolution account, exit the program and come back in, and the program couldn’t find the Inbox file any more. Rob suggested the problem might be due to me having SELinux enabled, so I installed it without it enabled. Mike suggested that CentOS 4.3 just came out this weekend, so I tried that. Still no luck.

After a few attempts, I was looking for the Evolution configuration, but I got a weird error when I tried a “find . -type f -print” on my home directory. I didn’t get these errors on a local file system, or when doing it on my home directory on the NFS server. After a bit of messing around, we realized that the problem might be that CentOS is now using NFS v4, and might have obsoleted NFS v2. The server that has our home directories on them is an old SGI running IRIX 6.4 - it’s possible that it only does NFS v2. Tomorrow, Rob is going to look at moving our home directories to a machine running Solaris 9. Hopefully that will fix it.

Man I hate doing taxes. Is it just me, or are US taxes even more complicated that Canadian taxes? Ok, some of that was because of Jean’s inheritance (and we haven’t got it all because her house didn’t sell until the 2006 tax year). I’ve spent almost my entire “day off” on this crap. And I can’t file because I don’t have the 1098 for the mortgage on the old house.

And what’s the deal with TurboTax charging $40 for the software, and then another $30 to e-file? I used to use TaxAct and it was something like $15 total. And the rebate for people who’ve bought TurboTax and Quicken recently doesn’t apply to me because I bought Quicken from the Quicken web site so I don’t have a UPC for it.

I have a Wiki that I set up to try to stimulate some discussion about some sort of replacement to the DAFIF data that is going away in October. So far, it’s been pretty much a bust - nobody has contributed anything in months, nobody has done any of the grunt work like figuring out a database schema or XML schema or even the user interface, and so I’m thinking of forgetting the whole idea. I don’t have the time to do all the work myself, and if nobody else is going to do any, it isn’t going to get done. But that’s not what this rant is about.

This morning, I get a notification from the Wiki software that somebody has edited nearly every single page in the whole damn Wiki. Needless to say, it was all spam. It took me nearly two hours of messing around in RCS to get rid of every instance of the spam. But even worse, is that it turns out that somebody had already inserted the same spam into the navigation bars of the wiki months ago, and I hadn’t noticed. So my Wiki is actually showing up quite high in Google searches for certain drugs. ARGGGH!

Also, a while ago I mentioned that this blog tends to get spam in brief spurts of a few dozen spams over the course of a weekend, and then nothing for weeks at a time. Well, that seems to have ended - I’m getting spam every day now. I knew it was too good to be true. Fortunately SpamKarma2 is doing a great job of finding it and quarantining it so I don’t have to continually check. And it’s pretty good about not having false positives either - comments that it thinks are borderline spam are given a chance to fill out a captcha and then that comment gets through, and subsequent comments from the same user are given a few positive points. So I’m actually relieved that the expected has happened, and it hasn’t inconvenienced me much.

A couple of weeks ago, my work computer froze up hard while I was copying the source code tree to my thumb drive so I could do some work at home. (Yes, probably a gross violation of security rules, but it’s either that or do a lot less work.) Afterwards, I’ve had nothing but problems with ClearCase - I had to toss out a couple of the views I had, and make new ones, and even with those ones, about once every two days I’ll get some sort of I/O error and have to do a “ct recoverview -f -tag tomblin_DCOS6.0″ to get it working again. There were other problems on that machine. Plus it’s running on a 2.4 Linux kernel and RedHat 8 and all our new stuff is being developed on 2.6 and CentOS 4.2.

I decided the time had come to reformat and reinstall CentOS. The install went relatively smoothly, except at one point in the sequence I saw a message about a problem on one of my hard disks flash by too fast for me to read. Of course now that I’ve got the OS installed, I have to find and install Clearcase, Java, Jikes, Eclipse, Crossover Office, Microsoft Office, and Notes. But first I want to test that drive. I told smartctl to start a long test on both drives. I got Clearcase, Java and Jikes installed (the others can wait) and tried to do some work. And found I couldn’t, because one of my cow-orkers, who loves to “refactor”, managed to refactor a couple of files out of existance, so I can’t do a top level build successfully.

While that was going on, I tried Firefox. The Firefox that CentOS installed was 1.07, rather than the 1.5 I had been using, and I got a strange thick gray bar at the bottom of the screen below the status bar. It’s about as thick as the navigation toolbar up top, with a tiny red caret on the left side, but nothing else. I can’t seem to get it to go away, even by switching themes.

Ok, next up was Thunderbird. It opened up, and for my normal mail account, it showed “Drafts”, “Sent” and “Trash”, but no “Inbox”. I checked in the directory, and there was definitely an Inbox there. I sent myself a test message, it sent, but still no Inbox. I tried “Create a new folder”, but it wouldn’t let me create an Inbox because one already existed. Ok, I said to myself, obviously Thunderbird is hosed. How about Evolution. I opened up Evolution, and set up an account. It showed a couple of folders, but no Inbox! So I said “to hell with this”, and exited Evolution. But when I tried to blow away my .evolution directory, I got a bunch of NFS errors and some of the files wouldn’t go away.

That’s when I chucked it all and went home. I figured somebody on Monday can help me, or get me new hardware.

Because I’ve been working a bunch of overtime recently, I’ve got a bit of “free” money, and a pressing need to make myself feel better about all the free time I’ve given up. So I decided it was time to get an upgrade of my GPS - I’ve had my Garmin GPSMAP 195 since soon after I got my private pilot license in 1996. At the time, it was top of the line - I think I spent about $1400 for it.

At first, I was looking at the Garmin GPSMAP 196 - it’s similar to the 195 in that it has a monochrome screen, but it has a faster processor and a couple of high nifty value features, like being able to put the map and the HSI on the screen at the same time instead of switching between them like I do with the 195. Also, it will show an extended runway centerline, which is good for situational awareness if you’ve being vectored to an ILS - on the 195 if you select an ILS approach, it draws a line from your current position to the intermediate fix, and then from there to the runway, which is not optimal. Used 196s are going on eBay for anywhere between $510 and $760, and new ones are $800.

But then I counted up how much overtime I’ve earned, and figured that maybe I deserve a Garmin GPSMAP 296. The 296 is a colour version of the 196. When Garmin brought out the 295, the colour follow on to the 195, it sucked with a capital S. The 295 had a lousy screen and an almost non-existant battery life. The 296 is a different story entirely. The colour is so good that they provide a topographic view background map, and also a terrain warning function very much like the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System that the airliners have. (Not that I fly in the mountains, but it’s still a cool feature.) 296s cost about $1100-$1250 used on eBay or $1500 new.

And once you start looking at the 296, the obvious question is “Why not a Garmin GPSMAP 396?” The 396 is the upgrade to the 296 that came out last year - it has all the features of the 296, plus it hooks up to XM Satellite Radio to overlay all sorts of weather information on your moving map, from NEXRAD radar to satellite imagery and lightning strikes. Plus you can use it for listening to XM Radio. The problem is that this extra capability costs an extra $1000 - and don’t expect to get it on eBay at all. I couldn’t find a single legitimate eBay auction for these guys except for stores that had the Buy It Now price set to the MSRP. And don’t forget that the XM weather subscription is an extra $50 a month, plus another $13 if you want the radio as well.

Both the 296 and the 396 have an optional “auto kit” that allows you to use it for turn-by-turn directions while driving. I can see that being very useful, especially in courtesy cars in strange cities.

I agonized over the decision, 296 versus 396 for a couple of days. I lost a lot of sleep over it last night. Finally I came to a decision: I’m not the sort of guy who goes testing the fringes of thunderstorms or going on many long cross countries. In fact, other than going to Oshkosh and the rec.aviation fly-in in Pinckneyville, I just don’t do that many long trips.

So I reluctantly decided to get the 296. Then I found that Aircraft Spruce and Specialty is selling used 296s for $1095! I can use the savings to buy an auto kit! And maybe a new ANR headset. So that’s what I’ve done - I’ve ordered the used 296 and the auto kit. I still haven’t decided which new ANR headset to get.

By the way, anybody want to buy my 195? I can hardly call it “gently used”, but it’s in pretty good shape considering how I just toss it in the flight bag. Comes with yoke mount, at least one and possibly two external antennas (I recently re-found the one I thought I’d lost). Every now and then the zip-up carrying bag for the GPS shows up, so if you’re local I can pass that along to you next time it turns up. Same with the manual - I think it’s in the boxes in the library we haven’t unpacked from the move yet (but we’re getting the library painted in a few weeks, so those boxes will get unpacked very soon afterwards). They seem to be going for around $250-$300 on eBay (with a couple of outliers above and below). First local person offering $200 gets it.

I was rushing to the bathroom, when I got buttonholed by another aviation geek who works here. He wanted to ask me if I could do something for his group next week some time. I said “PAN PAN PAN” (aviation speak for an urgent but not life-threatening condition) but he just looked at me uncomprehendingly.

From this I learned two things:

• in spite of his years in the Navy working on A-4s, and his current work as a volunteer at local airshows, he’s not up on the pilot/controller glossary
• the Imodium isn’t working