In amongst my podcasts, iTunes downloaded three “PDFcasts”, two from Make Magazine and one from PilotCast. Of all the ways that people on the Internet have found to re-implement the same basic idea as Usenet, this has got to be the worst. If I wanted content that I had to read on my computer, what’s wrong with a web page? Or better yet, an RSS feed for a web page. Or an email list. Or Usenet.
Archive for April, 2007
I-79 between Pittsburgh and Eire has a stretch where every few minutes you encounter large signs with black letters on a bright yellow background. They’re full of advice, mostly about wearing your seat belts (the best one was “Seat belts required, next million miles”), but also slogans like “Slow down and save lives”, “Stay alert”, etc. After a while it feels like they’re nagging you. Vicki and I spent some time coming up with suggestions for future signs:
STOP SLOUCHING, SIT UP STRAIGHT!
ARE YOU REALLY GOING OUT DRESSED LIKE THAT?
DON’T MAKE THAT FACE WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU - I’M TELLING YOU THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!
There is an old pilot’s expression: “It’s better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here”. In other words, it’s better to be disappointed than to be in trouble.
Continue reading ‘Another of those “better to be down here” experiences’ »
It’s time for pilot bloggers to think back and reflect on the highlights (and lowlights) of their flying “careers”, even for those of us for whom it is an avocation rather than a vocation.
The Good
There have been so many high points, but there are two that are definitely the highest:
- The day I passed my checkride, I got to take my wife flying as a “thank you” for her patience while I obsessed over the studying and spent vast sums of money on flying.
- The day I landed at Oshkosh. I felt like I had finally arrived as a pilot, even if I wasn’t manipulating the controls, I was PIC because we were IFR and the guy in the left seat wasn’t rated.
The Bad
Oh, this is embarrassing. I’ve never told anybody but my wife the truth about this.
The worst thing that happened to me flying was on my very first flight. I had just signed up with the Rochester Flying Club, and had interviewed a couple of instructors, and one of them, Geoff, wanted to take me for a flight, as a first lesson. The weather wasn’t great - it was overcast and the visibility stunk. But Geoff was ok with it, and who was I to say no? I had read books about flying and how to fly obsessively, so things went pretty well doing basic maneuvers. But the lack of a good horizon was making me air sick. I didn’t want to mention it, but he clued in and we headed home. But as we got close, he still had me flying but just as we turned downwind suddenly I doubled over with a cramp. And instead of spewing out the mouth, my sphincter let go and I did something I hadn’t done since kindergarten. I guess that big vindaloo curry I’d had the night before hadn’t agreed with the air sickness.
Geoff was a trooper. He went into the FBO and got some carpet cleaner while I tried to sneak into the toilet to clean up. Even more amazingly, he agreed to continue training me.
The (Plane) Weird
Hmmm. This category is harder. One of my aviation pet peeves is the fact that when you check in with a new controller en-route, some of them expect you to read back the altimeter setting and will prompt you again if you don’t, and some get annoyed if you do. There is no consistency. I find that weird.
Another weird thing is when you go to fly a route that you’ve flown before, and you file the same clearance you got last time, but this time they give you an entirely different route. And once or twice, I’ve gotten a full route clearance for a totally different route, and after I’ve gotten my GPS reprogrammed and into the air they give you a re-route back to what you filed. Or when you file a good route and they give you a full route clearance with what you filed instead of just saying “cleared as filed”. The whole process of handling IFR routes and clearances between flight service and air traffic control (ATC), and between different ATC sectors is seriously fucked up. You’d think by now they’d have it straight.
I finally got around to watching the TiVo’ed coverage of last weekend’s “Amstel Gold”, one of the “Spring Classics” pro bike races. Unusually for them, the weather was beatiful - probably too hot for the tastes of the riders, but it made for good coverage and I’m sure the fans appreciated it. In previous years it’s been wet or snowy or so foggy that the tv coverage was almost non-existant.
As usual on these sorts of races, there wasn’t much happening until the last 30 minutes or so. There was a break-away group up the road and a big peleton, but a couple of the race favourites manged to bridge up to the leaders. That’s what I mean about “the worst”. 2 hours of watching a bunch of guys cycling without any changes in leadership, without teams organizing chases, without anything really interesting happening. Yawn.
With only a few minutes to go, the lead group consisted mostly of guys who had a reasonable expectation or hope of winning, because of previous wins on this or similar races. The only wild factor was that one of these favourites, Davide Rebellin, also had a team mate with him. I expected this would mean that his team mate, Stefan Schumacher, would attempt to launch him on a break-away on the second last or last climb of the day. But instead, their team played a very clever card.
Schumacher attacked alone. The other guys in the bunch wouldn’t counter attack to bring him back because none of them wanted to tire himself out and give the upper hand to one of his rivals. You could see Paulo Bettinni and Michael Boogerd trying to get the others to lead the counter attack. They just couldn’t get it together to cooperate, knowing that Rebellin would sit on any counter attack but wouldn’t contribute to it. So Schumacher sailed on ahead and won by a good margin. Even better, Rebillin used his tactical advantage to grab enough rest that he could outsprint the rest of the group to take second. And that’s the best of bike racing, the team tactics that say it’s better for some second banana in your team to get a clear win than for your team leader to fight it out in a bunch sprint. Every team has its star, but when it comes right down to it, it’s the team that matters.
I discovered why OpenID comments went from working some of the time to working never: last time I upgraded my blog I’d inadvertently made it so none of the directories within my blog site were writable by the web server, and the OpenId plugin makes temporary files. That lead to the discovery that as well as OpenID comments, the directory used by the Gravatar cache wasn’t writable, which lead to the discovery that the Gravatars weren’t updating at all, even after I fixed the permissions, which lead to the discovery that when the Gravatar plugin discovers it can’t write to the Gravatar cache directory it just silently turns the “Enable caching” option to off, which lead to the discovery that even when I turned it back on, it still wasn’t updating, which lead to the discovery that there is an option in the plugin to “Use REST protocol” which evidently Gravatar doesn’t support any more so I had to turn that off. Phew. Now Gravatars seem to be working again.
Knees still hurt like hell, though.
It’s a beautiful day. I should be out riding my bike, or kayaking, or clearing out the basement, or putting up screen windows, or getting IFR current again, or something. But I’m not, because my knees hurt worse than they’ve hurt in months, possibly years, and it’s a chore to walk down the stairs to get something to eat, never mind do something that involves using them for anything. And it’s that stabby pain that I get every now and then, as opposed to that diffuse pain that’s part of the constant background, and that pain does not seem to respond to Alieve at all. The diffuse pain doesn’t respond quickly or well to Alieve, but at least if I forget to take it for a couple of days I notice the pain level increasing. This stabby pain comes and goes on its own schedule.
Maybe I’ll use the time to fix the OpenID commenting on this blog (or at least get it back to the point where it works for some people, like when I use it myself from my Powerbook, but not for other people, like when I use it myself from my Linux computer at work). Or fix the long broken loader scripts on my waypoint generator site. Or see if I can get the Gallery upgrade to work this time. But I don’t feel like it - I’d rather just curl up and try to sleep. At least then I wouldn’t be aware of the pain.
OpenId comment authentication seems to be extremely hit-or-miss. It works for some, and for others their posts get flagged as spam, and for others still they get swallowed entirely. I’ve tried to debug it, but I haven’t figured out what’s wrong. I tried to deactivate it, but it just made things worse. So until further notice, please don’t use OpenID or your LiveJournal ID to comment on here.
Update: I just remembered that I had to hack the source in order to make this work before, and I recently installed an update. The update probably over-wrote my hack. Now to dig though the backup to see if I can find the hacked file.
They say “you’re going to feel a slight pinch” when they really mean it’s going to feel like they’re driving an ice pick through the roof of your mouth into your eye socket.
They tell you to sit up so they can take an x-ray while you’ve got a 2 foot long pipe cleaner sticking out of hole in your front tooth. Then they tell you to hold the film in place with your finger.
They keep screwing these things that look about 2 feet long into your mouth, and then pulling it out. I kept closing my eyes when they brought it out because I was sure it was going to be covered in blood.
All during the root canal, you can hear her stomach growling, and afterwards she tells you not to eat for an hour. Yeah, I bet you’re not going to wait an hour.
And after it all, they tell you you’re going to have to come back in a week for more pain.
The ClearCase server machine is still dead. Evidently both hard drives went tits up yesterday, and nobody can bring it up. And I’ve got a bunch of files not checked in - from what I remember back when we had a ClearCase administrator, files that aren’t checked in aren’t backed up.
And just to make my day complete, I can’t log into Lotus Notes.
Good thing I’ve got some movies on my iPod.
Was there ever in the history of the world a worse bug tracking system than ClearDDTS? The user interface is so ugly, inconsistent and unfriendly that the only way they could have made it worse is if they’d used Lotus Notes as the front end. Slow? It takes a good 30 seconds to enter a new bug or process a change in an existing bug, something that should take way, way less than a second in any competent relational database.
And to top it off, recently it’s taken to kicking everybody off for 5-10 minutes at a time and not letting you log back in, while the sysadmin says “there isn’t anything unusual in the log files”.
The only reason for not throwing the whole thing away and switching to Bugzilla or something like that is that it integrates so well with ClearCase. And it has become apparent to me over the last few weeks that the only reason I loved ClearCase is that we had a really good full time ClearCase administrator, Steve. Since the powers that be fired him, we’ve got two guys struggling for a week at a time to do stuff that Steve could have done in a few minutes. And I no longer love ClearCase.
Let’s throw away the whole thing and replace it with that CMS that integrates with Subversion, ok? What’s it called, Trak or something like that?
Update: Just got an email from the sysadmin - evidently a process keeps dying. One called “update_htpasswd.sh”, which evidently updates the .htaccess file based on what is returned by “ypcat passwd”. Ok, I’m not an expert, but aren’t there ways to authenticate directly to NIS rather than building a .htpasswd file at regular intervals? Sheesh, talk about amateur hour!
Update 2: Minutes after posting that, the ClearCase vob crashed as well, and so I left for home.
As I wrote a week and a half ago the last time I flew the Lance the engine died on the taxiway and I flooded it and drained the battery trying to restart it. Nobody has flown it since and I wasn’t even sure if the engine would start.
Since I’m the club’s maintenance coordinator for that plane, the problem is really mine to deal with. So today I went out to the airport in the cold rain and hooked the battery up to a battery charger for 3 hours or so. Afterwards I verified that the engine started just fine, ran smoothly at full rich and leaned, and there was plenty of crank left in the battery.
There’s nothing that makes you feel more like an aircraft owner than standing in the pouring rain undoing screws with freezing fingers.
Step 1: Create a mailing list for developers, but allow non-developers including higher management to join it.
Step 2: Tell developers off for using that mailing list to discuss things that development needs to discuss but that management shouldn’t know about until it’s resolved.
Step 3: Use ad-hoc collections of mail addresses for real development communications, and then yell at developers for missing meetings that they never got invited to because you left them off your ad-hoc collection of mail addresses.
Is anybody surprised that I’m both the developer who got told off for using the dev-list to talk about development issues and the developer who accidentally got left off the invite list for the Thursday weekly meetings and got told off for missing them? Is anybody surprised that the issue I got told off for using the dev-list for was a complaint that when I mentioned a particular issue in meetings people ignored me and went onto the next item, and the person telling me off said that he’d never heard me mention this issue, thus proving my point?
Not to jinx myself or anything, but so far the upgrade of my domU from Debian Sarge to Debian Etch has been very painless. It upgraded over 200 packages, and I only had to manually resolve about 10 config files, most of which involved taking what the new package provided. After moving /lib/tls to /lib/tls.disabled and rebooting, everything seems to be working right.
Fingers crossed that it continues to work.
Watching a bunch of conservative pilots talk about Al Gore and global warming, I think a lot of them should be selling “Intelligence Credits”, since they’re obviously not using theirs.
