Author: Paul Tomblin

Q. Why is Frosty the Snowman smiling?

A. Because he heard we’re getting a snow blower.

Today’s large snow fall was the last straw – we have in and bought a snow blower. Home Despot had them for 30% off, and an additional 10% off if you got their credit card. We got a 5.5hp 2 stage Ariens with electric start and multiple forward and reverse speeds, and with the discount it was less than the list price for the Yard Machines 5.5hp one I was originally looking at that didn’t have electric start and only one forward speed.

It’s still hard work to push through the snow, but it’s got to be better than shoveling another plow hump.

Dear GoDaddy

I set up “automatic domain renewal” so that I wouldn’t have to take any action, or indeed have to think about it, when one of my domains comes up for renewal. So why do you send me four identical emails within 10 minutes telling me that one of my domains is coming up for renewal? I don’t need to know, that’s why I told you to take care of it! Even one message would have been more than sufficient. But do you really need to blast one to the technical contact, one to the billing contact, one to the registrant and one to the email address on the account? What the fuck is the purpose of having a separate “billing contact” if you’re going to write every email possibly associated with the account about a billing issue. It’s called “billing contact” for a reason, fuckwads.

What were they thinking?

Update:Added the “Where is this body you want disposed of” picture.

We had a Energy Star energy audit of our house recently. One of the things the audit mentioned that there was some asbestos on one of the vent pipes in the basement, and that would have to be “abated” before they could work. Today I decided to take care of it. The pipe in question goes through “the scary room”, one of two dirt floored areas of the basement. Until today, I’ve never set foot in either one of them. There is no apparent reason why this particular pipe has been wrapped in asbestos – the portion of the pipe that is wrapped isn’t close to the furnace so it’s not very hot, nor is it in contact with insulation or something flammable. The register it serves is in the “breakfast nook”, which we suspect wasn’t part of the original build of the house.

I got advice from experts in the field who assured me that the sort of asbestos that forms into sheets isn’t the dangerous kind, but I should still take some precautions.

So armed with a tyvec painter’s coverall, dust mask, googles and rubber gloves, I entered the scary room to do battle with the evil asbestos. And that’s when I discovered that the asbestos wrap evidently held condensation or external water against the bottom of the vent, and now the vent pipe has rusted completely away on the bottom. But it’s fine at the top, which means there is a part between the bottom and the top where there are sharp edges and flakes of rust. So instead of just removing the asbestos wrapping, I ended up hacking out the whole rusty pipe, and stomping it flat to throw it away. And the sharp edges cut my gloves to ribbons, but at least I didn’t get any visible cuts in my skin. Unfortunately the unwrapped part of the pipe only had one hangar on the whole length, so it fell down without the added support on one end. And the “box” where it went into the register in the breakfast nook was also wrapped and rusty so I had to remove it as well.

It wasn’t until after I was done that I noticed the notice on the air mask that said it’s not for asbestos. Sigh.

Well, the whole thing is down now. Hopefully I didn’t do myself any damage doing it.

No, that’s not good either

I wrote about some work I’ve been doing on the Waypoint Generator in Rants and Revelations » Getting there, still some collateral damage. In that, I said I wanted to do some more testing. Well, I did. I reloaded the entire DAFIF dataset. The test took 4 straight days to run, and that’s not including losing a day or so when my router lost its mind. And what this test told me is that the new algorithm for eliminating duplicate points is overzealous.
For instance, it classified two Canadian airports, CYEE Midland/Huronia and CNL8 Wyevale/Boker Field, as being the same. They’re actually nearly two nautical miles apart.

I was calling points the same if the types matched and they’re within 0.05 degrees latitude and 0.05 degrees longitude of each other. Unfortunately that is just about 3 nautical miles in the north/south direction, which this test has shown is too wide a net.

The problem is that I want to spot duplicates when a waypoint changes id, AND when they update the coordinates. I’ve seen places where they’ve updated the coordinates by half a degree, especially in the case of user-entered data.

I think what I’m going to have to do is trust that the coordinates aren’t going to change a whole bunch at the same time the id changes. So what I’ll do is call something a duplicate if it’s within 0.05 degrees if the ids match, but within 0.01 degrees if the ids don’t match. That’s less than a nautical mile, and it would be pretty odd to find two airports within a nautical mile of each other. (A lot less odd to find heliports or reporting points, unfortunately.)

Damn, this means another multi-day test run, unfortunately.