Category: Rant

I must have left my mind reading device in my other pants

The founder of the flying club is not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to using technology. He just sent an email to the entire club with the subject line “Advertising” and the text “$82,000” followed by his name and a AOL banner. Now, unlike most of the club, I know he’s involved in trying to sell the club’s Lance, so I have a bare inkling of what he might possibly mean, but even I’m scratching my head wondering what the fuck he’s talking about. I wonder if that’s his asking price or an offer we’ve received or the reserve he’s going to eBay it under or what.

Personally, I think that there’s no way in hell we’ll get $82K for a 1977 Lance with a clapped out engine (2480 hours+) and prop and ancient avionics. But I suppose one can live in hope. Looking at Trade-a-Plane I can see a 1976 Lance with less TTAF (Total Time on Airframe) with only 875 hours on the engine and prop, and they’re asking $80K.

“Anticipated Separation”? I don’t like it.

The mission was to get two planes back from Batavia, one of which was the Lance. We tried on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, but the weather didn’t cooperate. The weather was fine today, but only two of us could make it, so we only managed to bring back the Lance.
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Hold me, I’m scared!

A few weeks ago we had a “lessons learned” session where all the developers, QA people and field circus engineers got to talk about why development cycles are getting longer, we’re finding more and more bugs, and people are getting more disgruntled. It was amazing how many people thought that what we really need are clear requirements that don’t change from day to day, proper development methodologies, design review meetings, code reviews, etc. At the end of the meeting, our boss’s boss came into the meeting and the meeting facilitator gave him a precis of what was going to be in his report. On the way out of the meeting, a developer who is just as experienced and cynical as I turned to one of our younger colleagues and said “You realize that now that we’ve had the meeting and had a chance to vent, management will think the problem is fixed”.
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Oh, bugger!

Ok, the big load job just finished, and it appears I was loading the old FAA data, not the data that became current on Wednesday. Also, it appears I have a bug in the code that loads the runways – the old scripts seemed to have taken “U” or “” for the runway end latitudes and longitudes as null, but the new ones are putting those values in as 0. Oops.

I guess I’ll have to run it again – using nohup this time. See you next week.

Hey, Google

If you’re going to send a guy a survey to find out his impressions of your recruiting/interviewing methodology, you might not want to send it to somebody who has been waiting two months for you to pay his travel expense claim. Because he might just think that you’re a bunch of disorganized fuckwads. Just sayin’.

And a bit of further advice – you might want to make sure your expense spreadsheet actually prints out correctly using Google Docs and doesn’t require one to steal a copy of Microsoft Office in order to use it.