Author: Paul Tomblin

Fuck pain

The pain in my knees is really getting out of hand. It’s been getting worse for decades, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting a stabbing pain on top of the usual diffuse pain – I used to get that every few months and it would only last for a day or two. My tolerance for any sort of activity has gone way down, and Alieve isn’t doing as much as it used to.

I was planning to clean out the basement and my office this weekend, and hopefully get out kayaking for the first time of the season. Instead, all I managed to do was replace the locks on the garage and clear out the cardboard boxes that have been waiting to be flattened to go out to recycling for months. Oh, and walk around the block once looking at the garage sale. And for that, I’m paying in agony.

I guess if I recover enough, I’ll have to do the cleaning out in short chunks of time every evening instead of one big weekend project. And hopefully fit in the kayaking one of these days.

(And yes, I am going to talk to my doctor. Not that I have an iota of hope that he can do anything.)

Bleargh

Last night I attempted to do an IPC with the instructor (Lenny) who I did my instrument rating with.

I’d booked our club’s Dakota because we’d just upgraded our GPS from the 530 to the 530W and I wanted to try a LNAV+VNAV approach in it to see how it compares to an ILS.

Because I’m the sort of geek that I am, the first thing I did was download the new 530W manual and the 530W simulator, and read through the manual and try a couple of approaches in the simulator. The new upgrade gives the 530 significantly more information, especially guidance through approach holds and procedure turns, and turn anticipation, which is pretty cool. One thing I couldn’t find was information about doing ad-hoc holds, like at an en-route VOR. Unfortunately, the simulator simulates an HSI which our plane doesn’t have, so I wasn’t sure if the method I worked out to do them on the sim was going to work with the Dakota.
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Dear Boss

Three years ago, when I was asked to implement a DocumentCache class in the cinlib, I made a mistake so that first build that had it was actually horribly slower than before it was implemented. Yes, I admit it. But I fixed that problem in the very next build, and it actually did end up being a net gain.

So is it really fucking necessary that every time since then when there the slightest question about cinlib performance, the first words out of your mouth are “can we try disabliing the DocumentCache to see if that fixes it”? I mean, it’s been three years. Give it up, already.

A tale of two flying clubs

Greater Rochester International Airport (KROC) has two flying clubs, which through historical accident have a lot of overlap in our respective fleets, but huge differences in our operating philosophies. Both clubs are also suffering from the down turn in flying caused by the lousy economy, high fuel costs, ridiculous security theatre, stupid liability law climate, etc. Our costs are going up, which causes members to leave, which causes costs per member to go up further, which causes more members to leave, etc. It’s a bad spiral to be in. So naturally both clubs are wondering if we could combine forces to weather this down turn.
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A stupid idea, stupidly done

In amongst my podcasts, iTunes downloaded three “PDFcasts”, two from Make Magazine and one from PilotCast. Of all the ways that people on the Internet have found to re-implement the same basic idea as Usenet, this has got to be the worst. If I wanted content that I had to read on my computer, what’s wrong with a web page? Or better yet, an RSS feed for a web page. Or an email list. Or Usenet.