Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.
Pictures:
Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.
Subtitle: “Why the American Legal System turns grievers into money grubbing scum”
Some idiot pilot flew his plane into a thunderstorm, and inevitable two things happened:
1. The plane is torn into little pieces and tossed on the ground.
2. The family files a wrongful death lawsuit against anybody who had anything to do with making this flight possible. Except of course the guy’s brother, who was the one and only cause of his own demise.
Sorry, grieving family, but when your flight instructor warns you two weeks beforehand that you have “deficient decision making” when it comes to flying near “adverse weather systems”, and the before-flight weather briefing shows massive area thunderstorms (not isolated cells) on your route of flight, IT’S NOT PIPER AIRCRAFT’S FAULT THAT IT DIDN’T PREVENT YOU FROM MAKING THE FLIGHT.
So grieve all you want, but realize that your brother killed himself. Piper didn’t. Pratt and Whitney didn’t. Naples Air Center didn’t. He did. As surely as he’d taken a loaded gun and stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
It was very weird to walk out the front door this morning to see a FedEx Ground truck parked on the road, and find that it wasn’t going to us but to our neighbour. We buy so much stuff on-line that the UPS driver once joked “Here’s your daily delivery”.
What’s even weirder is to see Brad Choate misusing apostrophes. I sent him a link to Bob the Angry Flower’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots, but then I realized that it doesn’t say anything about the little quirk that you never use apostrophe-s as a possessive form with the word “it”.
Oh well.
Update: Brad saw my trackback ping and changed his blog entry. So if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about: where it now says “is on its last leg”, it said “is on it’s last leg” when I wrote the above. Sure, it’s nice to score one on a much better writer than me once in a while, but since he fixed the error, I look like a dick for pointing out an error that isn’t there. Thus I’m taking the unprecedented (for me) step of going back and updating this entry.
According to AvWeb’s NewsWire, the FAA is FINALLY getting the idea that it’s better to have pilots who are on anti-depressants than it is to have depressed pilots who are afraid to seek treatment for fear of losing their medicals.
Let’s hope this doesn’t take as long as most FAA studies.
159.115.185.165 – – [03/Jun/2004:12:54:48 -0400] “GET /~ptomblin/spam.html HTTP/1.1” 200 62881 “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=how+make+spam&y=y&e=15316877&f=0%3A2766678%3A2718086%3A254845%3A9156085%3A91953%3A91989%3A15316877&r=Society+and+Culture%02Food+and+Drink%02Countries+and+Cultures%02Hawaiian%02Recipes” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
Decoded, that means that somebody went to the Yahoo directory pages for “Society and Culture/Food and Drink/Countries and Cultures/Hawaiian/Recipes”, then searched for “how make spam”, and ended up at a page of mine that describes how to stop email spam (now extremely out of date). I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they wanted.
