So how’d I do? (Aviation edition)

For 2006 I set myself a few goals for my flying. If I recall correctly, it was

  • Fly 50 hours this year.
  • Do some airwork and get more proficient at smooth flight, especially the use of the rudder.
  • Start work towards a Commercial or Float Plane rating.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. I only got 37.9 hours flying time (25.3 complex), although I would have been 5 or so hours closer to my goal if the Lance hadn’t been broken on the day we departed for Oshkosh, and maybe another 3 hours if we’d been able to fly to Albany on Thanksgiving weekend. Oh well. That’s still up for the 20-25 hours I normally put in a year. I also didn’t do much airwork, mostly cross country. So I still finding myself having to look at the ball and putting in rudder as an afterthought rather than feeling what needs be put in. However, I did get training in the Garmin 530, and I think I’m getting more precise in my approaches and IFR en-route flying. I also had a little adventure with ice avoidance and negotiating with ATC for what I needed on my way home from Pinckneyville. So while I didn’t meet my goals, I think I had a pretty satisfying flying year.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get to Oshkosh this year – this is our 10th anniversary and I think I’m going to be spending my vacation time on a cruise or something. So I probably won’t be heading down to Florida for Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base or up to Parry Sound for Georgian Bay Airways for a float rating either.

So my goals for this year remain

  • Become a more proficient yoke and rudder pilot.
  • Continue to fly more than I have been in the past.

What a pain in the ass

This morning while perusing my logwatch mails I see a strange result from the script that is supposed to email me with the day’s changes from my DAFIF Replacement wiki. It was complaining about a missing perl module in the twiki/bin directory. So I look, and the twiki/bin directory is totally empty.

Some low life found a vulnerability in TWiki, and used it to remove everything in twiki/bin. I guess I should count myself lucky that he didn’t find any way to remove or corrupt other files that were writable by the web browser, since he managed to do it *before* the nightly backup ran.

I was running a pretty ancient version of TWiki, so it was probably long past time to upgrade. The upgrade to 4.0.5 seems to have been pretty painless. But it’s not what I wanted to be doing this morning.

1992/2006

In 1992, I worked for a company called GeoVision. I’d worked there for 6 years, but they were having financial problems. The previous two quarters, the end of the quarter had been the time when they announced layoffs. And just like the previous two end of quarters, the bean counters from both the Ottawa and Denver offices were huddled together the day before, and this time they came around with a list and told everybody whether they had to go to the 2pm meeting or the 3pm meeting. I was invited to the 2pm meeting. It turned out that everybody invited to the 2pm meeting was laid off, and the 3pm meeting was to announce that they’d had to do this to ensure the continued health of the company (it didn’t work – 6 months later they were out of business).

Now flash forward to 2006. I’m on a contract at $EMPLOYER. I’ve been there for 4.5 years on this contract, and I was in a previous contract in the same office for 3 years. $EMPLOYER, as everybody knows, has been shrinking for decades. And they announced that our group (Entertainment Imaging) has to shrink by 10% (they’ve offerred the voluntary retirement package (called “getting tapped”) to certain eligible job categories, then next year if they haven’t met their targets they’ll fire some people) and also it’s becoming part of the Film Products Group (which really inspires confidence that our digital project is going to be a high priority). And then today, just to make my heart rate soar, they announced that there are problems extending our contracts, and the boss set up a series of meeting to “talk with each of you on Friday regarding our decision to extend your contract or not for 2007”. And I got one of the early ones.

Can you tell I’m not going to sleep well tonight?

Dammit!

What the hell is wrong with my colo box? For the second time in 10 days, it has gotten all weird on me and needed a reboot. This time, my “tail -F” on the various log files on my main domU was showing all sorts of ext3 errors. An attempt to log into the dom0 to reboot it got the now dreaded

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

I had to call Annexa to power cycle it.

This is ridiculous. Is it the machine? The disk? The combination of Xen and lvm? I’m not finding any clues in the logs.