Rants and Revelations

I’m thinking of replacing my 17″ Powerbook G4 (aka “AlBook”) with a 17″ MacBook Pro (MBP), although I’m waiting to see if they announce something with the new three-touch touch pad like the MacBook Air (MBA). Rumour has it that they’re waiting for Intel to bring up production levels on a new chip before they do, and that’s why it wasn’t announced at the same time as the MBA.

The best feature of my AlBook is that I got a custom “skin” made featuring a picture of the Snowbirds in flight. I took it to the Wings and Wheels air show in St. Catherines last year, and got all the Snowbirds officers (including Snowbird 10 and 11, and their public affairs officer) to sign it. Several of the pilots expressed admiration for it, and asked where they could get one for their own laptops. The skin is made of vinyl, and the web site said you could peel it off, but I very much doubt it would transfer. And I don’t want to risk damaging it, especially since one of the pilots who signed it died in an accident this year. So it’s going to stay on the Albook. But I definitely want one for the new MBP.

I went to the Snowbirds web site and downloaded some of their high resolution promotional pictures, and their logo and wordmark which are available in EPS files, and played around in Photoshop a bit. I definitely wanted one with all 9 planes, and I think I like this one best, but I can’t decide on the placement of the logo and wordmark. First time ever I wished I’d installed that poll plugin, but please look at the following two pictures and tell me in the comments which you prefer. (As always, clicking the thumbnail will take you to a bigger version.)

Option 1	Option 2

And before you ask, yes, I am procrastinating. I need to re-engineer one of my tables and the classes that use it, and I don’t want to.

As I wrote in a blog entry a few weeks ago, I added up all the money I spend on Gradwell web hosting and domain registration, and realized that because of the exchange rate, I hadn’t realized I was up over $400 a year.

I decided that I could do everything I’ve been doing on my Gradwell account with a $20 a month Linode virtual Linux host, and 5 domain registrations at GoDaddy, and a couple of free dns entries at ZoneEdit, for a total yearly cost of about $285.

The rest is even more boring than what’s come before, so I’m putting in a cut line.
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Hey, does alaska2004/whale_jump the wpgallery tag work?

Oh, yes it does. Sweet.

Ok, I’ve got my Fedora Core 3 CDs and I’ve studied my blog entries from the last time I did an upgrade, and I’ve made a checklist of everything that I can remember that I do with the box. It looks like this weekend is upgrade time.

Ok, 1, 2, 3, “By all means, Paul, fuck with the hard drives”

Vicki and I were discussing the possibility of buying a Pioneer DVR-810H, which is a combination TiVo and DVD recorder and player, because they’ve been discontinued and sites all over the net are advertising them for less than half price. However, I soon discovered that any site that claims they have it in stock is lying through their teeth, and will cheerfully tell you that they’ll ship it to you as soon as it comes in - I guess they don’t quite get the concept of “discontinued”.
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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.

Right now my nemisis is the FAA and DAFIF data that I use for my navaid.com waypoint generators. Doing airports and navaids are simple. The problem that’s bugging me right now are the various and sundry “waypoints”, and the ridiculously lax and inconsistent way the FAA and DAFIF files name them.
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In Rants and Revelations: Remind me again why I do this? I ranted about the abuse I get because I ask people to not send HTML email to my mailing lists. The usual rejoinder, after they finish being rude or calling me unprofessional or a luddite is to say “Where does it say I can’t send HTML?” So as of right now, it says it on the list info pages. Check out the LUGOR newbie SIG page for an example.

Note that I word it as a request, not a demand, and I even link to a page that shows you how to configure a bazillion mail clients to not send HTML mail. Damn, I’m too nice.

My friend Rohan noticed some time ago that I had over 7000 units on SETI@Home, and he appeared to take it as some sort of challenge.
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Vicki keeps bugging me for what I want for Christmas. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
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Yesterday was like an early Christmas. Today is like the cleanup afterwards.
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I’m getting ready for an orgy of upgrades and improvements on my computer. Read about it here.
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Plane & Pilot magazine is having an on-line poll for the best aviation related PDA software. As some of you already know, I’m rather heavily involved supporting my favourite piece of aviation related PDA software. Of course, CoPilot is free so it can’t win against software that actually buys advertising in the magazine running the poll, but it would still be cool if they actually report the vote correctly. So if you don’t mind on-line votes, I’d appreciate it if you’d go in there, select “Other” in the drop down, and put “Laurie Davis’ CoPilot 4.3″ in the “please specify” box.

Thanks.

I’m still working on the flying club web machine. I’ve put together a main page for them to look at. Basically I think the machine is functional as it is, but I want more.
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I’m setting up a computer for the flying club’s ops room. Basically I want this to be a “web kiosk”, as idiot proof as possible, because let’s face it, when it comes to computers, some pilots are complete idiots.
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