Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
The new departure procedure for Elmira airport, ELMIRA ONE, specifies the headings you’re supposed to fly to the hundredth of a degree.
I’m lucky if I can hold a heading within 5 degrees. Especially if there’s turbulence, and if there’s any wind at all at Elmira there’s going to be mechanical turbulence from the hills that surround the airport.
Damn I hate Linksys. The first time I bought a Linksys product was years and years ago. I’m beginning to wonder why I thought it would be any different this time.
Continue reading “God damned Linksys”
Computer Problem Causes False Stock Quotes
I spent nearly two years working for a company that made the software that, at the time, was responsible for over 75% of all the trades that took place on NASDAQ. My bosses attitude towards quality assurance and testing would have been laughable, if it wasn’t the fact that they could have cost people millions of dollars, and the fact that when I was working there we were losing market share hand over fist to a company that made a product that was faster, easier to use, and didn’t crash all the time.
I’m torn between hoping this failure wasn’t the fault of any of my friends still working there, and hoping that the people in charge will some day get what’s coming to them.
Most of our customers were “market makers”, which is a large step up from stock broker in the heirarchy. A lot of our customers, and three of the people in our company, were at work in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. One person from our company got out. The other two didn’t. One of the people who died was somebody whom I was scheduled to have a conference call later that day when she got back from WTC. I think about Julie a lot when 9/11 comes up in conversation.
I’ve never figured out whether the reason so many PHP sites are steaming piles of shit is because PHP is a horribly limited language with inherent flaws you can drive a truck through, or if it’s just the web equivalent of Visual Basic and so it attracts the weakest programmers on the net. But I do know this – unlike every other program on every other computer I own, this blog program is incapable of determining the correct local time and I have to manually change the offset from GMT when we switch from EST to EDT and back. So fuck it – I’m switching the time format to display GMT. Why not? I’m a pilot, I have GMT time prominently displayed on my watch. And it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to.
Because of that problem I have with my router losing it’s mind every few days, I decided to take advantage of a feature in the new firmware that allows you to schedule a reboot every day. I set it for 2 am. Last night was the first night.
I got up this morning, and nothing seemed to be talking to the outside world. I went to the router’s status page, and it showed no problems – the router had been up since 2am, I still had the same IP address, no indication of trouble. I clicked the “DHCP renew” button, however, and it gave me a new IP. That’s not good – that indicates that it probably hadn’t been talking to RoadRunner’s DHCP server since it came up. I guess there’s still a bug in the auto-reboot code.