Category: Activities

Bill Law

The NTSB Probable Cause report is out for the Bill Law fatal crash.

The summary reads

The National Tranportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows.
The pilot’s mismanagement of the fuel by his failure to select the proper fuel tank which resulted in starvation of subsequent loss of engine power in both engines.

The Factual report notes that the plane had run for 3 hours on the outboard fuel tanks, (which is just about the theoretical maximum for the fuel supply from those tanks) and that the Information Manual for this aircraft says not to use the outboard tanks for maneuvering flight such as take-off or landing when they’re less than half full because of the danger the tank outlets could “unport” and start sucking air. The inboard tanks were full, but were not selected.

The thought that such an experienced pilot as Bill could make such a mistake is chilling. But I can speculate that maybe the tank on the side of the engine that had just been serviced was the first one to run dry, and he thought it was a problem with the engine rather than checking his fuel selector.

I am thankful that the planes I fly have a much simpler fuel management system than that Piper Navajo – no inboard/outboard tank switching, no cross feeds, just a simple left/right switch. I also carry as much fuel as I can, even for a simple trip to Batavia.

Trying to work this out…

My wireless at home is semi-secured with 128 bit WEP, although the SSID is broadcast. I’m not fooling myself that it’s foolproof, just that it’s good enough to make most people do down the road to find easier pickings at some open node named ‘Linksys’. But recently I’ve “relied on the kindness of strangers” using people’s nodes that they’ve either left open through stupidity (like my sister-in-law’s neighbours with the ‘Linksys’ ssid and the default login to the Linksys administration page) or open through an intent to share their resources (like Steven Cherry). So I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be returning the karma and have an open node myself.

But I’m worried about the implications of that. The first worry is that somebody could use my node to send out spam. I have enough trouble with my mail server being blocked by various RBLs that I don’t want to get on any more – I recently had problems because I was sending a lot of mail out through a friend’s relay, and he got listed in an RBL that I use myself, which caused all sorts of problems. But in actual fact, that’s pretty unlikely unless it was one of my neighbours.

The second worry is that by having strangers on my internal network, they’d get access to things that I probably don’t want them to have access to, like the nfs export of my /mp3s directory. I don’t want the hassle of having to harden some of the services I’ve currently got open to the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. And the related worry that they could snoop things like imap or pop between graphic email clients and the mail server. Personally, I ssh into the server and use mutt, but Vicki sometimes uses Mail.app and I think Laura uses Mail.app almost exclusively. I don’t know if Mail.app supports any sort of encrypted link, or if I could figure out how to support it on my Linux box. Not sure I’d want to.

So I’m wondering if what I need isn’t a configuration with two subnets, one open node for strangers to connect where they can reach the outside world but not my Linux box, and one secure node that once you’re in, you’ve got full access to the goodies? Maybe the open node should block outgoing connection to port 25 except for my ISP’s mail relay or something like that? The problem with that is that my current router/WAP isn’t capable enough to do that sort of filtering, and while I have a better router/WAP (a Linksys WRT54G) on order, I would prefer to use that for me, not for strangers.

Anybody have any suggestions?

BFR time

43977/977_1Today I did my Biennial flight review. Our club actually requires a “club ride”, which is like a mini-BFR, every year, but every other year you have to do the full boat. Not much difference between the two, except the club doesn’t require any ground review for the “club ride”. I also needed to knock the rust off, since I hadn’t flown since December.

The club also requires that you do the club ride in the “highest level” aircraft that you’re intending to fly that year. So if, like me, you want to fly the club’s Lance, then you have to do the club ride in the Lance.
Continue reading “BFR time”

What the fuck was that?

I’ve got top running in a very large window, and I happened to glance over at it and suddenly every process on the screen was httpd. Then I looked up at my httpd/access log, and I see that this one IP hit this blog 50 times simultaneously, with two different referrer strings, but quite different browser ident strings. Ok, somebody is doing something stupid or something quite malicious.


iptables -I INPUT -s 193.159.244.70 -j DROP

Bye bye, asshole.

I want to scratch that part of my brain out

I had the iPod on random play, as usual, and I had a loaded it up with random songs from my huge collection, as usual. And I got treated to something that’s actually worse than William Shatner singing “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds”. Rolf Harris doing “Bohemian Rhapsody”. With digeredoo. ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!!!!

I don’t even like Bohemian Rhapsody when Queen does it. Whatever possessed me to put that in my iPod?