Category: Rant

Bait and Switch

Today I had to make yet another concession to advanced age – I’m getting reading glasses. Actually, the optometrist came up with the same prescription that he came up with last time, but last time he basically said “You can take them or leave them”, and this time he gave a harder sell. Of course, having just spent half an hour playing Toucan on my Palm Tungsten in his waiting room, my eyes were a little stressed, so it wasn’t that hard to sell me.
Continue reading “Bait and Switch”

Yet another reason to HATE Time Warner

As if I didn’t have enough reasons already. One of the best things about having a TiVo is that I can record the live Tour de France stages and watch them when I get home, instead of the half-hour summaries that I sometimes got to see back in the years BT (Before TiVo).
Continue reading “Yet another reason to HATE Time Warner”

In other news…

I noticed that a very large proportion of the comment spam I get is all on one blog entry, number 20. So a quick 

update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 0 where entry_created_on
 < now() - interval '180 days' and entry_author_id = 2;

and now nobody can comment on entries that are older than 180 days. I'm just wondering if I should do the same with the other blog authors.

My (flying) life is strewn with cow pats from the devil’s own herd

Sorry, Edmund Blackadder.

Here is what I’m currently dealing with both as an officer of the Rochester Flying Club and as a member

  • Our insurance company, and indeed all insurance companies, are saying that they won’t write “whole club” insurance policies on our Lance any more. They prefer to write “named pilot” policies with only 5 or 6 pilots per policy. Another local club is carrying two policies on their Lance because of this. Since we’re paying $8000 a year for the existing policy, we’re not looking forward to this. Since they’re going to be looking to insure only high time pilots with lots of experience, and I’ve only *just* checked out in the Lance earlier this year, and I only have 15 hours in it so far, I’m definitely not looking forward to this.
  • The Lance’s engine is old, but is still showing no major problems, but we could have to replace it soon – and if we have to sell it because we can’t get the insurance, we’re stuck with eating the cost of the new engine whether it needs it or not.
  • We’ve known since its last annual that the engine on the Dakota probably won’t pass inspection next year, so we’re planning on replacing at annual, or sooner if the engine compressions drop or we start seeing metal in the oil samples.
  • The oil leak on one of our Archers was going to require reboring a cylinder stud hole and replacing the stud with a bigger one, but when our mechanic got the cylinder off he found the case was cracked, so we’ve got to rush-job get a new engine for it.
  • Fuel prices continue to climb, and therefore so do our hourly rates for the aircraft.
  • Our club’s recievables have been in a terrible mess for a year, often going several months without a bill. Well, I just got notice that after the President of the club audited the bills, they discovered that a payment that I had made for $800 got credited to my account twice, so when the next bill comes I’m going to owe that $800 plus however many months of flying I’ve done in the mean-time.
  • And while I’m legally current to fly instruments, I haven’t flown in real IFR conditions for so long that I’m feeling like the first low overcast day I should find an instructor and do some holding and approaches in the clag.

And the horse you rode in on, too!

For the past couple of days, this “Willow Internet Crawler by Twotrees V2.1” has been agressively crawling my site. And I mean agressively – they download every single page as quickly as they can, with no pause between them. This is a bit of a pain, because it means they are sucking down my bandwidth that I’d rather use for live human beings or better behaved applications.

But today was the last straw – I have a robots.txt file because when web crawlers hit my image gallery, they tend to cause errors in the php code that gets logged in /var/log/messages. So today I noticed a “Last message repeated 147 times” message scrolling by, I looked and sure enough “Willow Internet Crawler” isn’t obeying the spider guidelines – they haven’t even looked at my robots.txt.

first thing I did was go to their web site – and discovered that under “Contact Us”, you can only see their email address while your mouse is hovering over the title – once you move the cursor away to actually type in a mail program, it goes away again. And the address isn’t in the same place as what you are hovering over. Making it a (probably purposely) difficult to cut and paste the address into mutt.

So fine, you want to be an asshole? I can be an asshole too. I opened up /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the “allow all” line, and added a “deny 68.244.166.8” after it, restarted the web server, and now I’m watching “Willow Internet Crawler” get a lot of 403s. So fuck you, Twotrees.net, and the horse you rode in on too.