Category: Activities

Flight Home

Last night I flew home from Ottawa. Once again I had to stay lower than I liked because of the engine break-in, but this time it was nearly perfect weather. Clear skies, not too bumpy, and a little haze south of the lake. The hardest part was that for the first time ever, I had to refuse a clearance and try to negotiate something different.
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A great flight

I’ve been feeling antsy about the fact that I haven’t flown in clouds since the flight back from Oshkosh last year. So I’ve been thinking about waiting for a day with low ceilings, but not too low, and getting an instructor and going to fly some approaches in real conditions. But we’ve had so many thunderstorms this summer, and I’ve been working so hard that the confluence of the conditions I wanted and the spare time haven’t happened.

So something good happened – I got a chance to get a plane for the weekend, and it was nicely cloudy. The thunderstorms passed through the area a few hours before, and it looked like the nice sorts of clouds.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Last night, the Good was that Vicki and I went kayaking. I enjoy it so much – being closer to the water than in a canoe, it seems like you’re just flying along. Vicki was a little pissed at me because every time I tried to do a succession of 5 or 10 good technique paddle strokes, I’d end up 20-30 metres in front of her. Towards the end I think I figured out how to do good technique without pulling too hard, so I could paddle well but not too fast. I feel a good sort of pain afterwards – muscle tiredness, but no untoward joint pain that I can detect.

The Bad was that my TiVo recording of the Alpe d’Huez time trial cut out just as Lance Armstrong was about to catch Ivan Basso and Ullrich was still out on the course. Dammit – I wanted to see Lance’s climb on the upper parts.

The Ugly is that after a few hours of feeling that my glasses weren’t working out, I tried a few hours without them, and the net result was horrific eyestrain – not sure if the eyestrain came from the time I had with glasses or the time without them. I know that this morning my eyes are all gunked up, which seems to be happening because of the dryness I feel when wearing my glasses.

Cause and Effect

I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
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