Rants and Revelations – Page 296 – Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.

Bax

Gordon Baxter died yesterday. He was 81.

I don’t think Gordon Baxter will mean much to most of you, but he was a radio personality (and I do mean “personality” – not a personality-free meat puppet or a screaming idealogue which as what they mean now when they use that term) and writer. And to me, he was the epitome of what it meant to be a pilot.

When I started to fly, I subscribed to a load of flying magazines, including the iconic “Flying”. They’d all arrive about the same time, but before I started on any of them I’d turn to the back of “Flying” and read “The Bax Seat”, Gordon Baxter’s column. One of the first one I read was about how he’d had to surrender his medical and couldn’t fly solo any more. Many of his later ones were about flights taken with kind friends who would be Pilot In Command but let him take the yoke or the stick for old times sake. Many of his articles made me cry.

He didn’t write much about the gory and mundane details of flying, weather, regulations, airspace, or the machines (although he loved his Mooney). Flying for him was about being in the company of people who you love like your best friend on first meeting because they share your love for flying. It was about the places he went and the people he met. And he wrote about it in an easy effortless manner that many have tried and failed to emulate – because it was obvious that they were trying, while “Bax” didn’t have to try, he just wrote.

A few years ago one of the Flying editors said that Bax was too sick to write any more, and they started running some of his best old columns in the magazine. Then they wrote how overwhelmed Bax was by the outpouring of love from people who’d never met him.

I never met Bax, and yet I feel his loss.

Blue skies, Bax.

Time Warner is pissing me off

Time Warner were supposed to come to the new house to install cable (and more importantly, cable modem) some time between 4pm and 7pm today. Vicki was at the house from 1:30 on because some new furniture was delivered today, but she wanted me there to point out to the cable installer where I wanted the cable modem and the two TV drops. So I grabbed my laptop and the Linksys router which I’m not using any more (see many, many blog entries) and headed over. Got there at the stroke of 4pm. And waited. And waited. And waited. Helped Vicki put the curtains back up. Tightened some screws. Put some more screens in. And waited some more. Vicki went out and bought some food. Watched the last Doctor Who episode which I happened to have on my hard drive.

At 7:45 I called Time Warner to find out where the fuck the installer was. And they told me that the installer had been there at 4:59 and was unable to get in. I told her that her installer was a fucking bullshitter, as the house was continually occupied with both front and rear doors wide open and nobody drove down our driveway, nobody knocked on either door, and nobody rang any doorbells (actually I’m not 100% sure we have a door bell, but that’s besides the point). She then asked if I’d gotten the two messages they’d left me, and I said no, because I was away from my home phone at the new house WAITING FOR HER GOD DAMNED INSTALLER TO COME.

I got home, and found messages on our voicemail from 4:35 and 4:44 asking for me to confirm that I was going to be there for the installer. Since I told them when I booked the appointment that this was a house we hadn’t moved into, and since they called and left a message reminding me of the appointment yesterday, what the hell do they need me to confirm this? And why are they calling after the scheduled appointment time to confirm?

And just to make my annoyance complete, that 15 minutes I was on hold I was subject to continual commercials telling me how much better Time Warner’s customer service is than the satellite companies. Unless satellite companies actively come over and kick you in the balls while you’re waiting and then leave without installing anything, I can’t see how they could be any worse.

When did I become such a weather wimp?

Back in the day, I’d ski all winter in a skin tight lycra suit. If it was really cold, I might add poly underwear (Lifa brand, of course) to wick the sweat away and a T-shirt, and shorts because frostbite “down there” is excruitiatingly painful, believe you me. I’d orienteer in the spring and fall, and in the summer I was backpacking and canoeing, all of these things done in every condition from hot and humid to freezing rain and snow. I won’t say I was comfortable all the time, but I coped.

Now I can’t seem to get comfortable. Other people’s houses (like my dad and step-mother’s this weekend) are air conditioned to the point where I’m freezing, outside the heat and humidity hit me like a solid wall, and even in my own car where I have complete control over the airconditioning and heat felt like I could get the temperature about right but were still too humid. At least in the airplane I can get up to where the air is thin and cold and turn on the heat. But I just feel “wrong” all the time. And it sucks.

I wonder if the secret to being able to stand the seasons is to spend more time outside in them and less time in over heated or over air conditioned cocoons?

And this is supposed to save me time… how?

I got my DVD burner today. It’s a 16X, only $50 at Staples. I took a couple of DVD blanks from Steve, the guy whose DVD burner I’ve been using all along. They’re Verbatim 4x and I’ve never had any problem with them in Steve’s drive. But the first couple gave me some weird-ass error, as mentioned in a previous post. My cow orker Rob suggested I try K3B, which is what he uses. In the process of installing it, I needed to chase some dependencies, and one of them suggested that the version of the Linux kernel that I’m forced to use (for ClearCase dependencies) has a SCSI bug. I get it installed and Rob comes over with a blank DVD. This one is a Memorex 4X, but I didn’t think the different media was signficant. It burns cleanly while I’m logged in as root. I log in as myself and try to burn another DVD. I get a few percent through burning, but then the LEDs on my keyboard start flashing and the computer is hung. I power cycled. I thought maybe I’d corrupted that DVD on a previous burn attempt, so I try a few more, with different combinations of being logged in as root or not, being booted to the 2.4.20-8 versus 2.4.20-13.9 kernel, etc. Sometimes burning woudl get part way through and then tell me that I don’t have any media in the drive, other times I get the flashing LEDs and a hung computer. I made a bunch of coasters.

Then Rob tells me that DVD burners are far more sensitive to the media than CD burners are, and I should try the Memorex blanks again. I do, and it works first time.

On the way home, I stopped off and bought a 10 pack of Memorex blanks. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll actually get some work done instead of making coasters.

UPDATE: The Memorex DVD+Rs I bought burn nicely at 16X, and they boot just fine.

DVD arrived, still not satisfied

After the company ordering system said that it would be several days before I got my DVD burner, my boss sent his secretary out across the street to Staples, who have one on sale for $50. I got it and installed it, but unfortunately I can’t burn to it. I get the following error:
Blocks total: 2297888 Blocks current: 2297888 Blocks remaining: 948384 Starting to write CD/DVD at speed 4 in write mode for single session. Last chance to quit, starting real write in 0 seconds. Operation starts. Waiting for reader process to fill input buffer ... input buffer ready. trackno=0 BURN-Free is OFF. Performing OPC... Sending CUE sheet... Starting new track at sector: 1349670 Track 01: 0 of 2635 MB written./usr/bin/dvdrecord: Input/output error. write_g1: scsi sendcmd: no error CDB: 2A 00 00 14 98 26 00 00 1F 00 status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION) Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 00 21 02 00 00 Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0 Sense Code: 0x21 Qual 0x02 (logical block address out of range) [No matching qualifier] Fru 0x0 Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid) cmd finished after 0.003s timeout 200s

I think I’m going to have to shut down again and check that I’ve got the devices jumpered correctly.