Category: Activities

First paddle of the season

This is my earliest “first paddle” ever. If searching my blog is be believed, I’ve made it out in March once before, but only just – 31 March 2006.

Doug had sent out an email suggesting it. I hadn’t replied because I had my doubts about my ability to sneak out of work, or the state of my shoulder. Ken was the only person who’d responded positively, and I knew I was no match for either of them. But when the Baycreek web cam showed open water this afternoon, and I reached a point in the thing I was working on I could either leave now or start something that would take hours to resolve, I decided on the former course of action.

I figured I’d get there after they left, but at least if something happened to me out on the creek there would be other paddlers to come by and find me. So I got in and paddled up to the half-mile marker where the time trial course turns around, and turned there. I was tired and my shoulder was hurting. I got back to the dock and was talking to Dave there when Doug and Ken arrived back. They had gone up to the weir and back, so about double the distance I’d gone, and they were keen to do it again. The weir had been blocked, and the bay is still iced over, so they didn’t have anywhere else they could go. They convinced me to come with them. And you know, after a little bit, my shoulder wasn’t hurting too bad. I felt badly out of shape, and I had to keep stopping for breath, but I did it, and it was very pleasant to be out, especially with other people.

The Canada Geese were out in huge numbers, and the Red Wing Blackbird males were claiming their territories before there were even any rushes to claim, and Ken and I disagreed on whether that bird was a Red Tailed Hawk or an Osprey, but it really is a little slice of heaven back there.

It’s not kayaking so much as the potential for kayaking…

Tomorrow is going to be in the mid 40s. A couple of members of the kayaking team emailed to say they’re going paddling tomorrow. Just for the hell of it, I’ve put my kayak on the roof of my car.

Oh yeah, sure, I’ve got a sore shoulder, and I should probably be at work at that time. So I probably shouldn’t go. But I’ll have the kayak on the roof rack, so the potential is there. And that’s the important thing.

Wow, flying twice in one weekend?

Last summer I donated a sight seeing flight to a charity auction a friend was running. That, of course, was before my gear was stolen, and before I started spending all my time kayaking instead of flying. Since coming back from Oshkosh in August, I’ve only logged 1 hour of flying time.

But I got a call from the winner this week, wanting to go. The weather forecast for this weekend wasn’t bad, if a little colder than I’d like, so I decided to go up Saturday and practice flying a bit and do my three landings for currency requirements, and then take them on Sunday. It actually worked out well – both days I got there just as somebody else was finished with the plane, so it was well warmed up. Both days the wind was coming from the east, which is a bit unusual here, and that caused some mechanical turbulence from the hills in that direction.

On Saturday I went out to Batavia to do some landings (and incidentally stop for $3.79 gas instead of the $5.40 gas at Rochester) and then visited my old sight-seeing favourites like the Perry wind farm (which has grown immensely since the last time I was there), and the trestle at Letchworth, and Irondequoit bay. I was surprised to find some open water in the south end of the bay, but of course still lots of ice fishers still out on the frozen part. Oh, and the entire creek looks like it’s open, so I can’t wait for it to be warm enough to paddle!

It was strange to be out flying again. It was nice to feel that feeling of accomplishment again. But by the same token, just buzzing around the same old sights just isn’t all that exciting. I think I need to find something new to do in the air – maybe organize a trip to the Air Museum in Dayton, or something.

Sunday I actually managed to find the guy’s house. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to, because as a non-pilot, he wasn’t really good at answering questions like “are there any nearby water towers” or “can you recognize that school over there”? But his brother in the back seat said “isn’t that it right underneath us”, and sure enough it was. They’re actually just outside the edge of the Rochester class C airspace, so the controller asked what we were doing as we were circling around. Fortunately the traffic was pretty light and it wasn’t bothering anybody. After that, we headed down to Letchworth, and then back up to Irondequoit and Sea Breeze. Then we headed back in to the airport, giving them a good view of the downtown and U of R. And as usual, my approach wasn’t great, not all that well stabilized, but I made a very smooth touch down.

Does anybody know anything about Mailman?

I upgraded my server to Debian Lenny the other day, and everything seemed ok until this morning. I evidently spammed myself with the couple of hundred VERPed bounce messsages that normally Mailman is supposed to silently handle. Instead, they seemed to have all ended up in my inbox, and there is no indication in /var/log/mailman/bounce.1 that Mailman even saw them.

I’ve checked that postfix still has the mail delimiter set to +, and if I send out a message to a VERP style address on my box it does get delivered. It even appears that the bounces got delivered to “/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailman”. I just can’t understand why they then got delivered to me – normally Mailman does whatever it does and doesn’t bother me about them.

By all means, Paul, fuck with the hard drives…

I’ve spent the last two nights trying to get Vicki’s laptop working again. Back in August I bought her a new hard drive for it – a 250Gb one to replace her 80Gb one. The 250Gb one is the same model number as the one that came stock in my MacBook Pro, so I figured it was safe to put it in her slightly older MacBook Pro.

That’s great in theory, but back in December she was complaining about very slow response, and she ended up formatting and re-installing. And again this week, it started happening again. Console.log showed that once again, the disk was full of errors. We tried repairing things with Disk Utility and booting into single user mode and running fsck. Both repaired things, but the disk quickly started acting up. I installed TechTools from a AppleCare disk and did a surface scan, and it found lots of errors.

Ok, now it’s time to get serious. We burned a copy of the DFT (Drive Function(?) Test) ISO from Hitachi, but when you boot it in the MBP it asks for “Floppy B” and refuses to continue. Oh oh. So today I got *really* serious – I opened up the MBP (a tedious process) and took the drive out and put it in my Linux box so I could run DFT there. So my home Linux box is off-line for the rest of the evening as well. (Normally I would use my old Windows box for stuff like this, but the Windows box is IDE and the Linux box is SATA.)

While I was waiting for DFT to find the inevitable errors, I decided to start filling out an RMA request on the Hitachi web site. And I had a real feeling of deja-vu. And then I remembered – I’ve only returned two other drives in my life, and both of them were IBM/HItachi DeathStars. It’s nice that they make it so easy, but I think I’d rather they made the drives so they didn’t fail.