Category: Revelation

Well, I’m not going to get rich, but…

I just got a check for my share of the money Laurie Davis got from selling his new CoPilot for iPhone on the iTunes app store. If you just count the time I spent re-designing my database to accomdate the requirements of his app, writing the web app to provide the data for his app, and re-writing the load scripts to load in the new database format, I figure I earned about $50/hour. If you count all time I’ve spend on building and maintaining this database and web site, add in the money I’ve gotten from donations, and ignore the money I’ve spent on web hosting for navaid.com, and I figure I earned about $.00001/hour.

Still, it’s sure nice to have this check. Of course, my first impulse it is to blow it on something cool for myself, but on sober second thought I should probably bank (most of) it against a future jobless spell.

How I spent my winter vacation

I’ve been trying to import the data from David Megginson’s great OurAirports.com site into my Navaid.com site. The reason I want to do this is that they have a lot of data that I don’t. They crowd-source a lot of it, but some of the initial data loads come from sources that I never found for my site. My site, on the other hand, tries to get data from various data sources and merges it with other data from other authoritative sources like from the FAA (and the sadly obsolete DAFIF).
Continue reading “How I spent my winter vacation”

Today’s workout

After the usual stretching and ball exercises, I did 4 sets of 5 minutes on the Kayak machine, keeping the speed around 5mph and then speeding up to 6mph for the last 30 seconds or so. This is what the first set looked like from the back:

(I can’t quite figure out how to get “embed” working in WordPress, so this is as close as I can get):

And this is the second set from the front:

I’m not sure, but I think that shows that I’m not really getting my left arm up and forward as well as I’m getting the right arm.

First snow drive in the Prius

I drove my Prius in a snow storm today for the first time. It did a pretty good job, considering. I’ve never had a car with traction control before, and Vicki has frequently complained that hers doesn’t allow her to get out of the driveway when the snow is bad. I didn’t have that problem, but there was one point where a pickup truck in front of me fishtailed badly on some snow that I just sailed through. Sure, there were times when the car didn’t react to the accelerator, but it kept going straight and didn’t get stuck.

In other news, I decided to reboot my colo box for the first time in 327 days (I checked the uptime before) because I got a new libc-xen. Of course, being that long between reboots, it had to fsck every file system before it would boot, so that took some time.

And in other other news, the right shift key on my laptop is getting balky. I’m going to have to see if i can pry it off and clean out whatever is lodged under it.