Month: January 2008

Speaking of planes whose engines quit

I was just reading the story of British Airways Flight 9 on Wikipedia. I hope that some day when I get into difficulty as a pilot, I’m as calm as Captain Moody:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.

That’s just beat out Captain Al Haynes “You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?” as my favourite aviation quote.

Well, that was fun

I was driving to work this morning, admiring that unfamiliar shiny yellow orb in the sky and thinking that if I wasn’t overburdened by work and it wasn’t windy as hell, this would be a good day to go out flying. But then I saw a pickup truck with a ladder in the back backing down the shoulder. “Why would he be doing that?” I wondered to myself, when suddenly the van in front of me ran over another ladder that was lying the road, causing it to pop up into the air menacingly. I swerved around it without hitting either it or any surrounding cars, and afterwards had time to wonder if it would have hit my grill or come in through the windshield if I’d hit it.

That’s me in spades

I just finished reading How To Recognize A Good Programmer, and kept thinking “hey, that’s me” for every point. So why did my last two job interviews not go so well? I’m a good programmer, I know I’m damn good actually, and according to this, everybody else should think I am too.

Oh well, I’ve got 6 months left on this contract. Maybe I should get some paper qualifications to impress the people who aren’t smart enough to read that article.

I feel so dirty

For this current project I’m on, I’ve resolved to give Eclipse a try. This is a major step for me, because my fingers have been typing vi commands for 20 years now, and it’s really hard to get out of the habit of typing “[escape]jjjjj” or “ZZ”. Everybody else here laughs at me because besides etags and the syntax colouring of gvim, I don’t have all the fancy stuff that they have. On the other hand, I can do everything through a ssh connection and can keep my hands on the home row.

Oh well. Welcome to the 21st century. Here’s your kazoo.