Category: Rant

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I got two emails today with questions about my CoPilot Waypoint Generators from this guy. I answered one as best as I could, and tried to get him to clarify what he meant in the other. Except both messages bounced. So I looked at his original mail messages. His “From:” address is foo@sbcglobal.com, but he has a “Reply-To:” of foo@earthlink.net. I know a bunch of earthlink people went to sbcglobal a while back – I guess one got sold to the other or something. So he set up a Reply-To that he didn’t need back when he was on earthlink, and then didn’t change it when he changed over. And now he probably wonders why nobody ever replies to his messages.

Those sorts of meetings are never fun…

We just had a mandatory all-employees (including contractors) meeting. Distilled down to the bare essentials, it comes down to:
“We’re reducing the R&D budget by 30%. We’re going to try and do that by shifting some costs into other budgets, cutting a few projects, pushing back some schedules.

Oh, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll cut staff. We’ll let you know when.

Have a nice day.”

First kayaking of the season

kayaking/DSCN1853I went kayaking for the first time this year. Actually, except for the day of the sale, this is my first time kayaking in my own Skerray RMX. And it’s a great boat. In the narrow twisting sections and while trying to photograph the numerous kayaking/DSCN1856geese and kayaking/DSCN1874swans, I could put the skeg up and make it maneuverable, and when I went out on the lake to visit kayaking/DSCN1879Mike’s plane, I could put the skeg down part way and get a lot more stability.

kayaking/DSCN1861I probably went a little too far. My elbows are complaining a bit. I’m going to take some more ibuprohen and ice them down a bit. But man, it felt good. I went up to the weir, which was running pretty strong and I got splashed quite a bit when I side-ferryed into the tounge of the water coming through from the eddy beside, and suddenly I had to paddle like crazy just to stand still.

kayaking/DSCN1871There was almost nobody on the creek today. I saw two people setting off just as I was arriving, and they returned just ahead of me too. There were two people milling around looking for somebody who worked there, and I saw them later on the water so they did manage to find somebody to rent them kayaks. But otherwise it was just me, a few turtles, geese, swans, redwinged blackbirds, and one great blue heron. It was glorious.

Don’t I feel like a dork?

I was off Monday, and yesterday I forgot to bring my PDA into work, so today I went to the pimp’s web site to enter my hours. Normally I don’t even look at the login screen, and just click through to the page where you have a box for each day of the week to enter how many hours I’ve worked. But when I got there, there were boxes for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but nothing for Thursday through Sunday. “Hmmm”, I thought, not coming to the realization that I’m sure most of you have already come to, “must be a technical glitch on their end”. So I called the pimp, and they said “Oh, you have to change the Time Period drop down box from ‘Week Ending April 10’ to ‘Week Ending April 4′”. “D’OH!”

Ok, slap me upside the head for being an idiot, but when I normally enter my timesheet on Mondays, the correct “Week Ending” is already selected.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

I’m sitting in the Ottawa Flying Club’s cafe, waiting for the updated weather forecast that comes out in half an hour. They’ve got a wireless access point, although I had to have them reboot the server to get it working. For some stupid reason, they block outgoing SSH connections, which means I have to use Squirrel Mail to read my home email. That kind of sucks.

Mostly I’m wasting time by going through old blog entries and correcting all the internal links that broke when I moved from MovableType to WordPress. I also added a butt-load of new categories. The old categories, “Rant”, “Revelation”, “Route” were alliterative, and indicative of the mood of the post, but not much help if you were looking for posts about flying, or geek stuff, or photography, or whatever. WordPress makes it WAY easier to put articles in multiple categories, so the old categories are retained as well.