Month: July 2007

Hating re-routes, part II

I woke up this morning at was shocked to find it was raining. This was a total surprise to me, as I thought the forecast was for more sun. This was a huge disappointment, because I’d decided that I’d prevent New York controllers from giving me a half hour ground hold or re-routing me all over hell’s half acre by flying VFR.

Fortunately, while it was raining all over most of southern and eastern New York and New Jersey, it was all layered stratus clouds so no thunderstorms. So it would be IFR, but flyable IFR. That’s good.
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Have I mentioned recently…

…how much I hate flying near New York City?

Yesterday, we flew down to a friend’s birthday party. She lives in New Jersey, which places the nearest airport to her Monmouth Executive (KBLM) in the slot between New York’s Class B airspace and Philadelphia’s Class B. Because of that complexity, I decided to take the club’s Dakota, figuring the Garmin 530 GPS would be a big help. And it was.
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LazyWeb: Slow DNS lookups on MacBookPro?

Vicki complains that sometimes she can’t ssh into my Linux box (foo.xcski.com) from her MacBookPro. This morning she said it was happening again, and when I looked on her system “host” and “dig” couldn’t get an address for it, while at the exact same time, my Powerbook got the right address just about instantaneously. A few minutes of poking around and not doing much, it suddenly started getting results again, and she was able to ssh in.

We have exactly the same DNS settings – two DNS servers, 192.168.1.1 is the local one that knows how to find *.xcski.com servers, and 192.168.1.254 is the DNS server on the wireless router which probably just redirects to the ISPs DNS servers.

I’ve never had any problems with DNS lookups on my Powerbook. So why is she getting these problems?

This is pretty cool

David Megginson has put together a really nifty little AJAX/Google Maps application to allow people to record what airports they’ve been to, and record comments about those airports. He’s put me to shame, since I’ve been intending to do something with AJAX and Google Maps for over a year now and haven’t even started.

But in spite of my jealousy, you can click the above link and see the 30 airports that I’ve landed at so far. The page doesn’t work 100% correctly in Safari, but it works great in Firefox.