Category: Activities

Forgot to mention…

As we were leaving Rochester air space, I heard N2259Q on the frequency. That’s the second time I’ve heard good old 59Q in recent weeks. If you look back at my previous post where I said how many hours I have in which planes, you’ll see I have nearly 25 hours in 59Q. It was the second or third PA28-181 Archer I checked out in, but at one time it was my favourite club plane because it wasn’t so heavy on the controls as N2902S. I wrote the “for sale” page for when the club sold it. Although nobody believed that anything other than an ad in Trade-a-Plane would sell it, the eventual buyer did see he saw the web page I made first. I also flew it out to Dunkirk or Hamburg for its pre-purchase inspection, and took the prospective buyer on a turn around the pattern in it.

I wonder if it still has that faded old red and white paint job? I wonder if it’s still missing the end-caps on the landing gear struts? I hope the buyer is enjoying it. He was joking on the frequency with the controller because he was heading out to a fly-in breakfast and there was somebody else from the same airport in another plane going to the same breakfast, so they were asking about each other’s ground speeds. So it sounds like she found a good home.

How much to advertise on a dead page?

Back in 1998 I did some work to use some experimental sendmail rule sets to block spam, and wrote up a page on how to use them and how to test that they worked. I even gave a talk about it to the local Linux and Sun user groups. It’s all terribly obsolete these days, because sendmail has changed, spam has changed, and the tools available have changed. A few years ago I found a better page, and put a header on my page to tell people they should read this other page instead. But people still kept finding this page, and it was getting more and more obsolete. Last year I wrote another header briefly mentioning what I use now (postfix, rbls, spamassassin, bogofilter). But the page is totally worthless and if it didn’t get dozens of hits a day I’d just take it down.

Today I got an email from somebody who wants to pay me $35 to put an ad on that page. No, he didn’t tell me what the ad would say, no mention of a time scale, just $35 to put an ad for “a site that provides businesses with email hosting”. I have no idea if this person is advertising a spam-friendly or spam-unfriendly email hosting site, and frankly I don’t care. I find the whole idea of putting an ad on a page that shouldn’t even be there just too creepy to consider.

Very strange.

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.