Author: Paul Tomblin

Hey, you know those distractions? They’re very distracting.

I thought I had no problems with distractions. After all, I’m a highly trained and experienced pilot, and when I was a student pilot my instructor had spent a fair amount of time making me deal with distractions. But today I was taking some friends out flying, and just as we were leaving the class C airspace I noticed a bit of a strange noise – and I looked over and realized the door wasn’t latched at the top. I unlatched the bottom to try and get it re-shut, but it wasn’t possible to get it closed. I slowed the plane to 80 knots and tried to get the passenger to close the door, but he couldn’t do it. Unlike the club’s other aircraft, the Lance doesn’t have a strap you can yank on to pull the top of the door closed, so neither of us could get it properly latched.

Now you and I both know there is nothing wrong with having the door open except for the breeze and noise, and the potential for having your charts whisked out of your hand at a bad time. But I didn’t want to do a two hour scenic flight with all that noise and wind, especially not with people who’d never flown before.

Fortunately, Ledgedale Airpark was about a mile off my right wingtip. So I told Rochester departure that I’d be making a landing there, and did a 180 degree turn to enter the pattern. But I was having a terrible time in the pattern. The winds at Ledgedale down low were gusty as hell. But I can’t blame the horrible pattern I flew entirely on the gusts – my speed and glide slope control was ridiculous. I heard the stall horn a few times, I got the “Landing Gear Unsafe” light a few times before I put the gear down as I horsed the throttle around overcorrecting altitude and speed excursions. I was so low on final I had to put in full throttle so I wouldn’t touch down a dozen feet short. And then my landing was, to put not too fine a point on it, a bit firm. I must have let the door distract me. And that’s not good.

I guess it’s time to spend some time with an instructor re-learning how to deal with distractions.

More problems with the home box

My home Linux box is acting decidedly weird. This time, when it froze up and wouldn’t reboot I opened the side to clean out some dust. I noticed two strange things:

  1. One of the case fans wouldn’t spin when I pushed it, like all the others
  2. Even after I removed that fan, when I booted the CPU fans would spin for a second or two and then stop.

I left it to cool for a few minutes, and now it’s booting. But that business about the fans spinning and then stopping is worrying me. Could it be overheating, or a sign that this motherboard is nearly dead? I was bzip2-ing a large file when it happened, and the hard drives were making ugly noises.

Inspirational quotes?

Somebody has put up a bunch of those oh-so-inspirational quotes where business leaders said something really stupid. I’m not sure how these are supposed to inspire us, especially since almost all of them are urban legends. One of them I walk by every day says

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

— William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876

I’m trying to figure out the clip art they used for a banner on the quote, because I really want to replace it with

“These digital cameras are a fad. People will always want the quality that they can only get with film”

— Any Kodak executive from 1975 to about 2005

Time to list my old 1U server

I bought this server several months ago to live on a colo rack. But it was flakey, so I bought another, much more expensive one and brought this one back home to experiment with. And so there it’s sat for months.

The problems I was seeing were drive related, but sometimes it was /dev/hda and sometimes it was /dev/hdb, and I figured that there were only two possibilities – either the IDE controller itself was pooched, or the drive cable was bad. Easy enough to test – I bought a new 80 pin IDE cable. I was going to try to try the Hitachi DFT “Exerciser” to stress the drives with the old cable, and then try again with the new cable to see if I get a different result.

I tried a bunch of different things, but I just couldn’t seem to get it running at all with the old cables. I’m running it down with the new cables and it’s running fine. I set it to run for 3 hours continuously. Once that works, it’s going on eBay, unless somebody reading here wants it.

It’s a VA Linux 1220. 2 1GHz Pentium 3 processors. 2 512Mb PC133 RAM. 2 10/100 Ethernet. Built in IDE and SCSI controllers (I’ve only tried the IDE). PS/2 keyboard port. I tried to boot it with a USB keyboard once, and it didn’t work right.