Flying to Oshawa

Man, I’ve got to sign up for a CANPASS pass.

I flew up here to Oshawa Ontario yesterday evening. In spite of the fact that 90% of the time clearing Canada Customs consists of phoning 1-888-CANPASS before you leave and then 1-888-CANPASS after you arrive (the other 10% of the time, they’ll say “wait there, a customs officer will be with you shortly”), they don’t have customs at Oshawa after 16:30. If I signed up for a CANPASS pass, I could clear customs without the second phone call, which also means you can arrive even when customs is closed. But I haven’t done that yet, so I had to fly to St. Catherines airport to clear customs, and then fly on to Oshawa.

It was a beautiful day, so I filed VFR for a change – mostly because around Toronto it gives me flexibility to avoid them playing games vectoring me all over the place. When I file IFR around there, I file for a nice high safe altitude for over the lake, and then they try to keep me down low and still send me over the middle of the lake, or vector me all over southern Ontario. The straight line between St. Catherines and Oshawa misses the Toronto Class C airspace by about a nautical mile or less, but it does miss it, so I didn’t even talk to Toronto controllers, just climbed until my GPS said it was time to descend, and then kept up there until I was much closer. Altitude is life, and while I trust the club planes a lot more than some random rental, even the best maintained plane can turn into a glider with little warning.

It’s a bit weird to be flying a cross country VFR. I haven’t done it in a while, and the silent radio is deafening. I may do it again on the way home.

Wasting time.

On Monday my boss issued a directive saying that contractors can’t bill more than 40 hours in a week without prior authorization. So today I was walking out at 2:30, finished for the week, and I met him coming in from his long lunch. Bye Mike.

I’m flying to Oshawa. I phoned for a 18:45 arrival, only to find that Oshawa doesn’t have customs after 16:30. Which is a bit weird because most of the time, “customs” is just a phone call to 1-888-CANPASS. So instead I’m flying to St. Catherines to clear customs, then hopping over the lake from there. But because it’s a short flight and customs requires two hours notice, I’m waiting around at Rochester airport until 18:00. Thank goodness for open wireless nodes. This one is called FLGCAP.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I got two emails today with questions about my CoPilot Waypoint Generators from this guy. I answered one as best as I could, and tried to get him to clarify what he meant in the other. Except both messages bounced. So I looked at his original mail messages. His “From:” address is foo@sbcglobal.com, but he has a “Reply-To:” of foo@earthlink.net. I know a bunch of earthlink people went to sbcglobal a while back – I guess one got sold to the other or something. So he set up a Reply-To that he didn’t need back when he was on earthlink, and then didn’t change it when he changed over. And now he probably wonders why nobody ever replies to his messages.

A slight difference in cultural heritage

I was watching the Ken Burns series on the Civil War (thanks to Netflix), and several times I caught myself wondering about the background music. About three times I had to remind myself that wasn’t “God Save the Queen” they were playing. What’s the name of the American song that uses that tune? “America Tis of Thee” or something? The more puzzling one is that a tune that I identified as Billy Bragg’s song “There Is Power In a Union”, which is about labour unions and hardly appropriate to a show about the Civil War. But I got to wondering – the chorus begins “The union forever”, and I wondered if it was originally a song about the Union in a “Union versus Rebels” rather than in a “union versus management” sense. That would make more sense. A little googling showed that I was right, it was “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, and the iTunes Music Store has several versions of it.

Did a spam test

I was interested to see what WordPress did when I attempted to post a comment through a spam proxy – I didn’t know if the option under “Options->Discussion” to block posts from open proxys would catch it silently, or if it would be caught by and presented under the menu on “Options->SpamKarma”.

I did a “grep poker /var/log/httpd/access| tail -1” and grabbed the IP. A quick telnet showed that it was running an open http proxy server on port 80. So I set that as my proxy server, fired up Safari and attempted to comment on my last entry. SpamKarma got it and presented a warning to the comment poster that it was doing so, which meant that I could go to “Manage->Comments” and review it and delete it.

Ok, so it’s nice to know that when the spammers finally figure out where to spam my blog comments, SpamKarma will be on the case. It’s interesting to see that it’s not silently deleting spam now, which means that the spammers still have not figured out how to attempt to blog spam me. That’s just a little weird.