Author: Paul Tomblin

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

Dunn tire for teh win!

This happens so infrequently to me, I had to blog about it.

My front tires are quite worn. I need to take my care in tomorrow to get a state inspection, and I wasn’t 100% sure they’d pass. So I was planning to take the care to Dunn Tire, where I bought them, to get them to have a look. But this morning as I was getting in my car I realized that the rear tires were bought at the same time, and they look fine.

I went into Dunn and asked them to look at the tires and see if they needed replacing or just rotating front to back. They put it up on the rack and said “they’re fine, but they do need to be rotated, and possibly balanced”. And rotation is free because I bought them there, so I just had to pay for the balancing. I was so stunned I agreed to pay for them to put nitrogen in the tires, even though that’s a bunch of hooey. $33 when I was expecting hundreds.

Can’t win, shouldn’t try

I got a notice that Gallery 2.2 is out, and they recommend upgrading. So I thought I’d try. And it seemed straightforward enough. I did all the steps, and when it got to the part in the automated upgrade about updating plugins, it start spewing hundreds of errors, both database and file system. And any attempt to continue the upgrade without updating the plugins got me to a page saying the theme I’m using wasn’t present, and when I attempted to change the theme it booted me back into the upgrade process.

I deleted the entire php directory and restored it from backup, and deleted the database and restored it from backup. But it told me that I was using a newer version of the Gallery core module than the rest of the program, and said I couldn’t do that. I have no idea where this “core module” is if it’s not in the gallery2 directory. So I’ve blown away the entire gallery, including the g2data directory, and am restoring it from backup. That includes all the picture files, so it’s probably going to take hours. Let’s hope it works.

Typical, just bloody typical

Last night I took my Powerbook into the Apple Store to get them to look at why my CD/DVD drive won’t eject. It’s been like this for months, but I waited until yesterday because I’d finally gotten my taxes sent off and so I wouldn’t be needing it for a few days. Except as soon as we got home, Vicki was comparing notes with her sister on their joint inheritance from her mom’s estate, and discovered that I’d entered the wrong value in some schedule or other and so missed a significant deduction. Which means that when I get the Powerbook back I have to figure out how I can file an amended return using TurboTax.

Plus it’s a real pain having to use Vicki’s spare iBook for normal web surfing and stuff – I don’t remember the passwords for web sites, Firefox remembers them for me!