AOPA Online – Enough is enough

Phil Boyer, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) has a great response to the latest fear-mongering over the Liddle crash. It’s addressed mostly at Mayor Dailey in Chicago, but also takes swipes at other General Aviation (GA) bashers like Hillary Clinton.

AOPA Online – Enough is enough

You know, for a Republican, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg is a pretty good guy. And he’s also a pilot with more ratings and experience than me. When he says that GA is not a threat to his city, why can’t other people, especially New York Senators and Congresscritters listen to him?

Leaf Peeping Flight

One of the things that Vicki and I have never done is go up and look at the fall colours from the air. Today was a wonderful day, severe clear and not very windy. The leaves aren’t at their peak yet, but we’re there, the plane is there, and we don’t have anything else to do. So when we got back from Buttonville and cleared customs, we headed off again.

I wanted to stay low to get a better view, unlike the flight across the lake, where we kept very high for a smoother ride and better glide distance while over the lake. That made it a bit bumpy. But not unbearably so.

We left Rochester airspace going south at 2500 feet. As soon as we got out of the airspace, I punched my user waypoint for the local wind farm into my GPS, and we headed out to look at the windmills. Not only are the windmills scenic themselves, but they’re near a nice valley. That was good. Then I headed towards Letchworth Canyon and cruised along it down to the famous Upper and Lower Falls and railway trestle.

After that, we cruised back up the canyon in the other direction. Then Vicki had a nifty idea – to go fly over our house. The Rochester airport hadn’t been too busy when we’d come in – they’d cleared me to land while I was still 15 miles out. So I figured what the hell, I’ll ask for it.

First thing is to try to find something that the controller would recognize. I zoomed in the hand-held GPS to try to find a waypoint near our house – I had an idea that we were near the outer marker for the ILS 28 approach. But I couldn’t find anything. So I told him that we weren’t too far south of the southern tip of the Irondequoit Bay – I figured they’d know where where that is because of the seaplane operations there. The controller approved our request, so I descended to pattern altitude, because I knew it would put us below where the airplanes on ILS 28 would be at that point. Vicki spotted our house, and I did a steep turn around it so we could get a good view. After our turn, I thanked Rochester Approach and they cleared me for a straight in to runway 25.

That was really nice. I hope we can do that again some time.

The perils of not checking NOTAMS

I’m in Whitby at my Dad’s place today. Because of customs, we flew to Buttonville. But then when I told the FBO guy “oh we’re not staying – as soon as we clear customs we’re heading to Oshawa” he just laughed. Evidently I carefully flight planned the trip to Buttonville, but hadn’t even looked at NOTAMs for Oshawa.

Oshawa is closed for three weeks, because they’re repaving both runways. God only knows why they couldn’t stagger them. Hey, oshawapilot, why didn’t you mention this?

Is “Redirect permanent” (301) really that hard to parse?

I just moved my blog from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/ to https://blog.xcski.com/. I set up a “Redirect permanent” on the old location, so that anybody or anything using the old location will get automatically redirected to the new location. And for a lot of places that used to hit my blog at the old site (like rss feeders) seem to have handled the transition painlessly. For instance, NetNewsWireLite, which I use on my laptop, updated the subscription information and doesn’t appear to hit the old URL at all any more. Same with the LiveJouranl syndication.

But for some reason, a lot of them haven’t handled it correctly. For one thing, my spam load is down to almost nothing. Ok, that’s a good thing. But I also notice that some RSS feeders, like various “Planet” web sites, see a redirection from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/feed to https://blog.xcski.com/feed, and feel like they can ignore the fact that the hostname part of the URL is different, and try to fetch the redirection at http://xcski.com/feed, which of course isn’t a valid URL. It can’t be that they have an old DNS cache entry for blog.xcski.com – it didn’t exist until a few days ago. It must be that they’re trying to be too clever, or not clever enough.

Stress, stress, and more stress.

I’m a contract programmer, a damn good one. I’m on a project that is based in Rochester NY, but which also has a programming team in China. Also, because I got this job through personal contact and reputation rather than through a headhunter, I’m very well paid. I’m sure it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the whole China team probably costs about the same as I do.

So my continued employment is probably dependant on being more productive and better than a whole team of Chinese PhDs. And so far, I’ve been doing that. Often the code they produce shows a lack of understanding of the tasks they’ve been set, or of the approach that we’ve been taking with the rest of the code that they have to work with. Although, to be perfectly honest, the biggest factor keeping me ahead of them is the fact that our higher ups are not capable of producing a clear set of requirements – but I can sit down and talk to them and build a clear picture of what is needed, or talk to the other developers and kick stuff around. I can even go to customer sites and talk to the end users. But even so, I feel a continual breathing down my neck.

Right now, we’re on a big push to produce some major new code for a new customer. I’ve been working my ass off. My code “lives” in between the user interface one of my fellow local programmers, and a module that is being produced in China. Fortunately, by working 50-55 hours a week for the last month or so, I’ve managed to keep ahead of both of them.

I’m going to see my daughters this weekend. Life events have conspired to keep me from seeing them for a while, and I need to see them this weekend. Unfortunately, I also have to do a bunch more work this weekend. Assuming I only work my “normal” 10 hours on Friday, I need to do at least 5-10 hours this weekend. That’s going to cut into the time with my daughters a bit.

I’ve got a very sore front tooth. I have a referral to a peridontist about that, since the gum is receeding so far it’s exposed much of the root. But I haven’t had time to go. And this evening walking out the car, my knee locked up in an extremely painful manner – it does that every now and then, and there’s nothing I can do about it except try to hop on the other leg. And now, right now, just to top it off, I can feel a bit of soreness swallowing. Which means that by Monday I’ll having a full grown cold, which means my productivity will be halved.