Category: Rant

As expected, the shit storm

After that article in the paper, I got email from a member of the club. He was rather upset that I’d presumed to speak for the club (which I hadn’t, although the article did identify me as a secretary of the club) and that I’d presumed to speak for all parties involved in the closing, citing problems that this would cause for commercial operators and airlines and the controllers themselves. I never did presume to speak for them – I was asked for my opinion as a private pilot and a user of the air traffic control facilities and the airport, and I did so. When they ask a football player for a quote about a game, do people assume he’s expressing the opinion of the team management, the other players, and the league? I don’t think so.
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Expect penalty vectors

Remember how I said I have become the local media “go-to” guy for aviation stuff? Well, the same guy who called me about the Steve Fossett thing called me today to ask about the FAA’s proposal to close a bunch of towers after midnight on some of the less-busy airports.

When I read about this on AvFlash, I didn’t bother looking at the list of airports, but I assumed Rochester was going to be one of them. The airport is nearly dead at night, except for the occassional frieght dog in an AzTruck and the FedEx jet. So when this guy called, I said “No big deal”, only much wordier than that. I said there are ten times as many non-towered airports as towered airports out there, so pilots know how to handle the lack of a control tower just fine. (Actually, come to think of it, there are probably 100 times as many. I should look that up on the AOPA web site. Ok, not bad. According to the “GA (General Aviation) Serving America” web site, there are 5200 public use airports, 550 served by airlines, so my factor of ten is probably not too far off.)

However, saying “no big deal” to a tower closure, even a part-time closure, is not going to endear me to the members of the air traffic controllers union. I guess I’d better not let anybody in the air traffic controllers union know who I am on the radio for a while, lest they re-route me via Timbuktu.

Sure, I’d use it more often, if…

…it weren’t a soul and productivity destroying piece of shit.

My boss is always nagging the developers to do more documentation, and to put them into the “documenation blog” (which actually has some blog-like features, but it’s mostly a web front-end to a CVS repository). Oh, and you can’t just attach to the CVS server and use good old command line tools – no, you have to use the web front-end, because otherwise it screws up the permssions for everybody else who uses the web tool.

Ok, I’m a team player. I’ll be nice.
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Hit me, spammers

I switched from MovableType to WordPress so that I could take advantage of all the fancy new spam fighting features in WordPress – and because I was stuck on MT 2.661 and development in the MT world was passing me by. Initially I was reluctant because WP is written in PHP and I don’t know if it’s the language or the people who use the language, but PHP web sites tend to be great gaping holes with a big welcome mat for spammers, trojans, script kiddies and every other anti-social reject on the net.

So now I’m sitting here checking my SpamKarma page several times a day to see how well it’s working, but the spammers are still attempting to hit my old blog – I see the hits in my httpd logs for “GET /movabletype/custom-comments.cgi over and over again.

Sad but true – I can’t wait for the spammers to find my new blog.