I’m sitting in Rochester airport, half an hour after I’d planned to depart, waiting for a band of heavy rain to pass through. It hasn’t moved much, but it has gone from an angry red to a less-nasty yellow on the nexrad radar picture. Hopefully it will dissapate or at least stop showing lightning on the stormscope soon.
Category: Rant
The best laid plans of mice and men…
As mentioned in an earlier post, this weekend Vicki and I were flying over to Oshawa.
However, it turns out that Oshawa doesn’t have customs service after 4:30 or something on Fridays, and none on the weekends. And while I’ve registered with Canpass, Vicki and Laura aren’t. So that means that we had to fly into Buttonville instead of Oshawa.
This was my first flight in the Dakota since we installed the GPS in it. That was cool. I tried filing direct, but they gave me V31 LINNG then direct. Ok, only one intermediate waypoint. And about 3/4 of the way to LINNG they told me to go direct. I guess they wanted us to clear one of the MOAs or the CYA on the direct route.
Man, what a difference in activity level at Buttonville as compared to Oshawa. When we were turned over to the tower, we were number 3 for landing. There was a Bonanza in front of us, and I never thought I’d have trouble slowing down to the speed of a Bonanza but this guy was in no hurry. We ended up crossing the threshold while he was still on the runway so I had to do a go-around. Next time around, and I was still #3, this time behind a Cessna. But I slowed the plane down slower than I normally go and hung out all the flaps, and he got off the runway nice and quickly, so this time we landed.
Customs cleared us over the phone (and why couldn’t they do that at Oshawa, I ask?) and away we went. The car rental place had big signs up warning of dire charges if we went on 407, so we struck off down to the 401 and got stuck in the Friday evening “rush”. It only took 50 minutes to fly to Buttonville, and 1:15 to drive from Buttonville to Oshawa. We probably should have just cleared customs at Buttonville and then flown on to Oshawa.
Tomorrow there is some big street festival in the middle of downtown, and also the Molson Grand Prix at the Exhibition. That’s going to make driving to Ontario Place utterly impossible, so I’ve had to move up all the schedules for flying back and picking up Laura. Vicki and everybody here are going to take the GO train from Pickering, and Laura and I will go from Buttonville to the nearest TTC subway stop and take the train in. According to the GO transit web site, there is going to be a special route they have to follow from the GO Exhibition stop to Ontario Place. Hopefully it won’t be too confusing.
Computer Stupidities
I was spending some time reading Computer Stupidities, a fun little web site. Unfortunately some of the time you find yourself being more sympathetic to the poor “victim” of the story than the narrator because the narrator was being arrogant and not understanding of natural confusions that people new to computer might have.
One of the stories put me in mind of something that happened to me, and rather than submitting it there, I thought I’d put it here.
I was at Sun’n’Fun 2002, a large Experiment Aircraft Association (EAA) fly-in in Lakeland Florida. A local Florida ISP had put some computers that you could use to connect to the internet, with a time limit and no chairs to keep the line short. Not a bad idea, and best of all it was free. In 2002 I had a laptop, but no wireless card, so a wireless hotspot wouldn’t do me any good – this was my only access option.
Now as an aside, I should mention that I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I’ve been using email since the late 1980s, and as far as I’m concerned there are very few reasons to use HTML in email – I don’t care what font and colour you think your words should be, I’ll judge them on their content thanks, and I certainly don’t want to activate web bugs or see your spam. So accordingly, I use a plain text email client on my home machine, which I access through ssh or telnet. Pure text, fast as hell, and I can use extremely small and dumb clients like a vt100 emulator on a PDA.
So every day that I was at Sun’n’Fun I went into this area, fired up IE which was the only icon available, and typed “telnet://xcski.com/” which brought up the Microsoft Telnet client. I’d log in, read my email in less than the time limit and maybe also fire up my text-only newsreader and read a few newsgroups, log off, and leave.
The second last day of the fly-in, I was finishing up and about to leave when the guy running the booth that day came over and said “I know what you’re doing. And I want you to get out of here.” I asked what he thought I was doing, and he said “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes,” I replied, “I’m using mutt to read my email on my home server.” “You need to leave now.” “Why?” “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes, but evidently you don’t.” That’s when he threatened to call security. Since I figured Rent-a-cops would know even less than him about what you can do on the Internet that doesn’t look like Hotmail, I left. He must have seen a plain text window on the screen and somehow thought I’d gotten into the MS-DOS shell and was trying to do something on his screen, but trying to show him that I was on a different shell on a different system just didn’t register with him.
After I got home, I told my story on a newsgroup I participate in. One of the other participants used to work for that same ISP and asked me if it was “this guy” and sent me a link to a page on that ISP’s site with a bio and picture of their sales manager. I confirmed that it was. He said that while the bio on the ISP’s web site said he had 8 years experience with the Internet, it was more like 2 months experience 48 times over.
Spoke too soon
Ok, so yesterday I was speculating on whether it would be Basso first and Ullrich second, or maybe the other way round on the podium in Paris. I didn’t really think there could be any other result.
Now it turns out that neither of them is going to be there. Ullrich, Basso, and a host of other top riders have all been suspended because of the Operacion Puerto busts.
It makes you wonder if there are any clean riders left. It also makes you wonder about the heroes of the past, which is the saddest part.
I’m ready to give up on trying to work with this guy
Back in March, I wrote about a miscommunication between me and the MC for the Lance. Well, since that time, he has never told me what’s going on with the plane. I see it get scheduled for maintenance, but he never tells me why. I asked him what’s going to happen about the prop overhaul, and he didn’t answer me. This weekend, the guy who had the Lance booked for the weekend wrote to the club list to say that it was available, but if anybody wanted it, it was still out at Batavia. I asked and he said it was out there for an oil change. I guess the MC took the plane out without informing me, and without asking if I could help ferry the plane, or anything. And I don’t dare do something to get the plane back, because if he’s made other arrangements he’ll throw another fit if I get there first.
I’m on the verge of sending him this letter, (cc’ed to the VP of Maintenance) but I’m going to sit on it overnight first.
Dear Bill;
Since I’ve become AMC for the Lance, I feel like either you don’t want an AMC or you just don’t want me to be your AMC. You never communicate with me, you never tell me what is going on, and even when I ask you a direct question (like when I asked about the prop leak), you rarely if ever answer. You have grounded the Lance several times without telling me what was going on, either before or after. You have never asked me for help ferrying the plane, even when people are sending messages to the mailing list saying “the Lance is at Batavia if you want it”. The only function you have allowed me to perform is to pass information on to you, while never getting any information back. As AMC, I feel like my functions could be better performed by your answering machine.
I signed on as AMC so that I could help in the maintenance of the aircraft, and also so that I could be a useful to you and to all the other Lance pilots in the club. Since I am not getting that opportunity, I am resigning as AMC. I hope you can find another volunteer if you want one.