Month: March 2007

Forgot to mention…

As we were leaving Rochester air space, I heard N2259Q on the frequency. That’s the second time I’ve heard good old 59Q in recent weeks. If you look back at my previous post where I said how many hours I have in which planes, you’ll see I have nearly 25 hours in 59Q. It was the second or third PA28-181 Archer I checked out in, but at one time it was my favourite club plane because it wasn’t so heavy on the controls as N2902S. I wrote the “for sale” page for when the club sold it. Although nobody believed that anything other than an ad in Trade-a-Plane would sell it, the eventual buyer did see he saw the web page I made first. I also flew it out to Dunkirk or Hamburg for its pre-purchase inspection, and took the prospective buyer on a turn around the pattern in it.

I wonder if it still has that faded old red and white paint job? I wonder if it’s still missing the end-caps on the landing gear struts? I hope the buyer is enjoying it. He was joking on the frequency with the controller because he was heading out to a fly-in breakfast and there was somebody else from the same airport in another plane going to the same breakfast, so they were asking about each other’s ground speeds. So it sounds like she found a good home.

How much to advertise on a dead page?

Back in 1998 I did some work to use some experimental sendmail rule sets to block spam, and wrote up a page on how to use them and how to test that they worked. I even gave a talk about it to the local Linux and Sun user groups. It’s all terribly obsolete these days, because sendmail has changed, spam has changed, and the tools available have changed. A few years ago I found a better page, and put a header on my page to tell people they should read this other page instead. But people still kept finding this page, and it was getting more and more obsolete. Last year I wrote another header briefly mentioning what I use now (postfix, rbls, spamassassin, bogofilter). But the page is totally worthless and if it didn’t get dozens of hits a day I’d just take it down.

Today I got an email from somebody who wants to pay me $35 to put an ad on that page. No, he didn’t tell me what the ad would say, no mention of a time scale, just $35 to put an ad for “a site that provides businesses with email hosting”. I have no idea if this person is advertising a spam-friendly or spam-unfriendly email hosting site, and frankly I don’t care. I find the whole idea of putting an ad on a page that shouldn’t even be there just too creepy to consider.

Very strange.

Fascinating Facts

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

  1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
  2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
  3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
  4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.