Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I had the iPod on random play, as usual, and I had a loaded it up with random songs from my huge collection, as usual. And I got treated to something that’s actually worse than William Shatner singing “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds”. Rolf Harris doing “Bohemian Rhapsody”. With digeredoo. ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!!!!
I don’t even like Bohemian Rhapsody when Queen does it. Whatever possessed me to put that in my iPod?
As anybody who reads my blog obsessively would know, I have a love/hate relationship with my iPod. It’s a wonderful device, and it keeps me from getting all stabby with my cow orkers, but I don’t have good luck keeping them working.
For the past couple of days, when I’ve started it up in the morning for the drive in to work, played one song, got about 20-30 seconds into the second one, and frozen. Or it’s just skipped one song before freezing on the second. Each time, doing a reboot (hold down the menu and play buttons, curse yourself for not removing your earbuds first because it makes a really loud click, wait for the menu to reappear) has fixed it. Until this morning, when the first attempt to play made a lot of those drive chuckling sounds, and I could feel the drive head moving, which is unusual. It of course immediately froze up, and I rebooted, but it wouldn’t come up. I got an Apple icon and then nothing else. Thank goodness it didn’t show the bad disk or the sad iPod icons. I rebooted a second time, and this time it came up.
Last time I hooked it up to my laptop (last week some time, I think), it updated the firmware to version 1.5. I think it’s time to re-lookup how to reflash the firmware again. I wonder if I can go back to the previous version?
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.
Continue reading “As expected, the shit storm”
I’ve been looking at some WordPress themes, and installed two that I really like. One is called “Dark Maple”, and the other is called “Quentin”. Both of them look fine on Firefox and Safari, but they look like crap on IE 5.2 on Macintosh. Should I care?
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.