Author: Paul Tomblin

Wow, flying twice in one weekend?

Last summer I donated a sight seeing flight to a charity auction a friend was running. That, of course, was before my gear was stolen, and before I started spending all my time kayaking instead of flying. Since coming back from Oshkosh in August, I’ve only logged 1 hour of flying time.

But I got a call from the winner this week, wanting to go. The weather forecast for this weekend wasn’t bad, if a little colder than I’d like, so I decided to go up Saturday and practice flying a bit and do my three landings for currency requirements, and then take them on Sunday. It actually worked out well – both days I got there just as somebody else was finished with the plane, so it was well warmed up. Both days the wind was coming from the east, which is a bit unusual here, and that caused some mechanical turbulence from the hills in that direction.

On Saturday I went out to Batavia to do some landings (and incidentally stop for $3.79 gas instead of the $5.40 gas at Rochester) and then visited my old sight-seeing favourites like the Perry wind farm (which has grown immensely since the last time I was there), and the trestle at Letchworth, and Irondequoit bay. I was surprised to find some open water in the south end of the bay, but of course still lots of ice fishers still out on the frozen part. Oh, and the entire creek looks like it’s open, so I can’t wait for it to be warm enough to paddle!

It was strange to be out flying again. It was nice to feel that feeling of accomplishment again. But by the same token, just buzzing around the same old sights just isn’t all that exciting. I think I need to find something new to do in the air – maybe organize a trip to the Air Museum in Dayton, or something.

Sunday I actually managed to find the guy’s house. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to, because as a non-pilot, he wasn’t really good at answering questions like “are there any nearby water towers” or “can you recognize that school over there”? But his brother in the back seat said “isn’t that it right underneath us”, and sure enough it was. They’re actually just outside the edge of the Rochester class C airspace, so the controller asked what we were doing as we were circling around. Fortunately the traffic was pretty light and it wasn’t bothering anybody. After that, we headed down to Letchworth, and then back up to Irondequoit and Sea Breeze. Then we headed back in to the airport, giving them a good view of the downtown and U of R. And as usual, my approach wasn’t great, not all that well stabilized, but I made a very smooth touch down.

Does anybody know anything about Mailman?

I upgraded my server to Debian Lenny the other day, and everything seemed ok until this morning. I evidently spammed myself with the couple of hundred VERPed bounce messsages that normally Mailman is supposed to silently handle. Instead, they seemed to have all ended up in my inbox, and there is no indication in /var/log/mailman/bounce.1 that Mailman even saw them.

I’ve checked that postfix still has the mail delimiter set to +, and if I send out a message to a VERP style address on my box it does get delivered. It even appears that the bounces got delivered to “/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailman”. I just can’t understand why they then got delivered to me – normally Mailman does whatever it does and doesn’t bother me about them.

XCode podcasts

At Kris Johnson’s suggestion, I downloaded and watched the two Pragmatic Programmer’s screencasts about XCode. Well, they didn’t make me love XCode as much as I like Eclipse, but they’re very helpful, especially the first one. Well worth the $10 I had in my Paypal account.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I tried to use the shortcut (command-shift-j) to turn some highlighted code into another method, XCode threw up a horrible message and wouldn’t proceed until I choose “Quit”. Very annoying.
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By all means, Paul, fuck with the hard drives…

I’ve spent the last two nights trying to get Vicki’s laptop working again. Back in August I bought her a new hard drive for it – a 250Gb one to replace her 80Gb one. The 250Gb one is the same model number as the one that came stock in my MacBook Pro, so I figured it was safe to put it in her slightly older MacBook Pro.

That’s great in theory, but back in December she was complaining about very slow response, and she ended up formatting and re-installing. And again this week, it started happening again. Console.log showed that once again, the disk was full of errors. We tried repairing things with Disk Utility and booting into single user mode and running fsck. Both repaired things, but the disk quickly started acting up. I installed TechTools from a AppleCare disk and did a surface scan, and it found lots of errors.

Ok, now it’s time to get serious. We burned a copy of the DFT (Drive Function(?) Test) ISO from Hitachi, but when you boot it in the MBP it asks for “Floppy B” and refuses to continue. Oh oh. So today I got *really* serious – I opened up the MBP (a tedious process) and took the drive out and put it in my Linux box so I could run DFT there. So my home Linux box is off-line for the rest of the evening as well. (Normally I would use my old Windows box for stuff like this, but the Windows box is IDE and the Linux box is SATA.)

While I was waiting for DFT to find the inevitable errors, I decided to start filling out an RMA request on the Hitachi web site. And I had a real feeling of deja-vu. And then I remembered – I’ve only returned two other drives in my life, and both of them were IBM/HItachi DeathStars. It’s nice that they make it so easy, but I think I’d rather they made the drives so they didn’t fail.

Pretty good work-out today

It’s been pretty disappointing to me recently that with my problems with my shoulder, I haven’t managed to much time on the kayak ergo. Mostly my work-outs have been lots of time stretching and doing core exercises, lots of time warming up on one of those exercise bikes that has the arm movement as well, but only a few very short stints on the KayakPro – just working on a bit of technique until the shoulder starts to hurt, and then going on to other things and then coming back to it.

Today, we took that tactic again, but Dan mixed things up more than usual and this time something really went right, and for my last time on the KayakPro I was concentrating entirely on the pull back with my torso, and trying not to push forward with my upper hand at all (or at least until there was no further resistance from the machine), and in spite of the fact that it didn’t seem to be slowing me down or adjusting my stroke at all, I managed to keep going and going until I was feeling both muscular and aerobic fatigue. I probably only went about 5 minutes or less, but it’s the longest single session I’ve gotten on the machine in weeks, and I was elated to quit for some reason other than a sore shoulder.

I can’t wait to start building time again. I know I’m not going to be racing 10 milers as soon as the season starts, but it would be nice to be able to finish the BayCreek Wednesday night time trials without having to stop for a rest like I did for most of the season last year.