Category: Rant

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.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit

Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.

Pictures:


Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.

Why aviation is expensive

Subtitle: “Why the American Legal System turns grievers into money grubbing scum”

Some idiot pilot flew his plane into a thunderstorm, and inevitable two things happened:

1. The plane is torn into little pieces and tossed on the ground.

2. The family files a wrongful death lawsuit against anybody who had anything to do with making this flight possible. Except of course the guy’s brother, who was the one and only cause of his own demise.

Sorry, grieving family, but when your flight instructor warns you two weeks beforehand that you have “deficient decision making” when it comes to flying near “adverse weather systems”, and the before-flight weather briefing shows massive area thunderstorms (not isolated cells) on your route of flight, IT’S NOT PIPER AIRCRAFT’S FAULT THAT IT DIDN’T PREVENT YOU FROM MAKING THE FLIGHT.

So grieve all you want, but realize that your brother killed himself. Piper didn’t. Pratt and Whitney didn’t. Naples Air Center didn’t. He did. As surely as he’d taken a loaded gun and stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.