Author: Paul Tomblin

Fascinating Facts

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

  1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
  2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
  3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
  4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Getting there

After restoring my backup using
ssh ptomblin@192.168.1.1 "cat /media/usbdisk/albook/home.cpio.0" | ditto -xv - .
I’ve had a “fun” afternoon re-downloading and installing applications. Fortunately, the two I was most worried about, Quicken and TurboTax, I had left the .dmg disk image files on my Desktop for just this reason. I only have three gaps left in my Dock – one (Photoshop Elements 2.0) because the sticker with the serial number is mangled so I can’t read it, and the others because they weren’t 100% legal copies and I have no install media. Oh well. There’s a couple of things I decided not to reinstall, like iWork 2005 because that version of Pages sucked rocks. I understand the new version of Pages is better. And they’re up to 4.0 on Elements for Mac (but 5.0 for Windows) so maybe it was time to buy a new version anyway. I’m still debating whether to install fink.

I think when this is over, I’ll have a better system with fewer crap programs left over from days gone by, but it’s still no fun getting there.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

(I should probably stop using this as a title – Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)

I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back – the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.

They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?

And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.

Milestones

Getting ready for my upcoming BFR, I was entering some flights from my PDA’s AvLogbook program to my paper logbook when I suddenly ran out of pages, and had to run out and buy a new logbook.

Looking at that old beat up logbook and the shiny new one, it’s not hard to feel the pride of all that aviation history. I maybe haven’t flown as much or gotten as many ratings as some aviation bloggers, but I feel proud of what I’ve done and the fun and hard work that old logbook represents.

First flight: 27 June 1995
Last flight: 24 Feb 2007
Total hours: 445.6
Ratings and endorsements: Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land, Instrument Airplane, High Performance, Complex.
Airplanes Flown (in the approximate order I checked out in them):

N38290 PA28-161 169.8 hours
N29020 PA28-181 16.0 hours
N21065 PA28-181 6.7 hours
N2259Q PA28-181 24.8 hours
N9105X PA28-181 59.2 hours
PCATD PCATD 5.2 hours
N8429Z PA28-181 36.2 hours
N8323Y PA28-236 65.3 hours
N43977 PA32R-300 62.4 hours