Author: Paul Tomblin

Well, I’m not going to get rich, but…

I just got a check for my share of the money Laurie Davis got from selling his new CoPilot for iPhone on the iTunes app store. If you just count the time I spent re-designing my database to accomdate the requirements of his app, writing the web app to provide the data for his app, and re-writing the load scripts to load in the new database format, I figure I earned about $50/hour. If you count all time I’ve spend on building and maintaining this database and web site, add in the money I’ve gotten from donations, and ignore the money I’ve spent on web hosting for navaid.com, and I figure I earned about $.00001/hour.

Still, it’s sure nice to have this check. Of course, my first impulse it is to blow it on something cool for myself, but on sober second thought I should probably bank (most of) it against a future jobless spell.

How I spent my winter vacation

I’ve been trying to import the data from David Megginson’s great OurAirports.com site into my Navaid.com site. The reason I want to do this is that they have a lot of data that I don’t. They crowd-source a lot of it, but some of the initial data loads come from sources that I never found for my site. My site, on the other hand, tries to get data from various data sources and merges it with other data from other authoritative sources like from the FAA (and the sadly obsolete DAFIF).
Continue reading “How I spent my winter vacation”

New Years Resolutions

1600×1200, 1080p, … sorry, I’m a geek, what can I say?

Real resolutions:
– break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial
– finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)
– figure out if I want to continue flying or not.
– develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something
– diet
– exercise
– get a better job
– once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain

Update: Today’s discovery is that if you use the WordPress “Publish on a later date” to queue up a post like this, the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin doesn’t see it.

What happened there?

StackOverflow reputation tracker

Somehow overnight, I got 80 new points from votes, but somehow my net reputation went down 133 points without any of my other questions or answers getting any down votes. I have no idea how that happened, but I don’t like it.

Update: It turns out that Jeff Atwood decided to implement some “fraud detection” and removed what he thought were “suspicious” upvotes. I should consider myself lucky – Konrad, who had the second most points on the system, lost 6,000 points and Daok, who was pretty high up in spite of the fact that English is obviously not his first language, lost 5,000.

Today’s workout

After the usual stretching and ball exercises, I did 4 sets of 5 minutes on the Kayak machine, keeping the speed around 5mph and then speeding up to 6mph for the last 30 seconds or so. This is what the first set looked like from the back:

(I can’t quite figure out how to get “embed” working in WordPress, so this is as close as I can get):

And this is the second set from the front:

I’m not sure, but I think that shows that I’m not really getting my left arm up and forward as well as I’m getting the right arm.