Category: Revelation

Milestones

Getting ready for my upcoming BFR, I was entering some flights from my PDA’s AvLogbook program to my paper logbook when I suddenly ran out of pages, and had to run out and buy a new logbook.

Looking at that old beat up logbook and the shiny new one, it’s not hard to feel the pride of all that aviation history. I maybe haven’t flown as much or gotten as many ratings as some aviation bloggers, but I feel proud of what I’ve done and the fun and hard work that old logbook represents.

First flight: 27 June 1995
Last flight: 24 Feb 2007
Total hours: 445.6
Ratings and endorsements: Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land, Instrument Airplane, High Performance, Complex.
Airplanes Flown (in the approximate order I checked out in them):

N38290 PA28-161 169.8 hours
N29020 PA28-181 16.0 hours
N21065 PA28-181 6.7 hours
N2259Q PA28-181 24.8 hours
N9105X PA28-181 59.2 hours
PCATD PCATD 5.2 hours
N8429Z PA28-181 36.2 hours
N8323Y PA28-236 65.3 hours
N43977 PA32R-300 62.4 hours

Dunn tire for teh win!

This happens so infrequently to me, I had to blog about it.

My front tires are quite worn. I need to take my care in tomorrow to get a state inspection, and I wasn’t 100% sure they’d pass. So I was planning to take the care to Dunn Tire, where I bought them, to get them to have a look. But this morning as I was getting in my car I realized that the rear tires were bought at the same time, and they look fine.

I went into Dunn and asked them to look at the tires and see if they needed replacing or just rotating front to back. They put it up on the rack and said “they’re fine, but they do need to be rotated, and possibly balanced”. And rotation is free because I bought them there, so I just had to pay for the balancing. I was so stunned I agreed to pay for them to put nitrogen in the tires, even though that’s a bunch of hooey. $33 when I was expecting hundreds.

OpenID is a go, it appears

Last night I had an idea. And typically for me, I couldn’t sleep properly as I kept trying to remind myself about the idea. I should have gotten up and tried it, but if it hadn’t worked I would have gotten even less sleep.

Anyway, the problem I was having with the OpenID plugin is that I forgot to make the plugin’s temp directory group writable. Most people seem to be ok with just making all their blog files writable by the web server, but I worry about the number of security holes that seem to pervade PHP applications so I make all the WordPress files belong to the user “blog” and only the ones that the web server has a legitimate reason to write belong to the group “www-data” and are group-write. When I installed this plugin, I made the tmp directory belong to the group “www-data”, but I forgot to “chmod g+rwx” on it. Duh. Even more “duh” worthy, I see that the plugin page has a FAQ that has that as item 1.

It seems to be working now. Let me know if you can’t comment.

Another attempt

I think this should do it. Famous last words. Last test got the correct comment one *and* the -1 comments thing. This should get rid of the “-1 comments”.

If this works, I’ll look into OpenID commenting (thanks for the suggestion, Jen) and I’ll strongly suggest everybody who has currently LiveJournal friended “ptomblin”, “ptomblin_rss” and “rantsnrevels” to unfriend them and friend “ptomblin_lj”.