Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Take a look at these graphs: Free Disk-Space for ‘/usr/lib/news/spool/articles’ on freenet9, especially the “Monthly” graph, and see if you can figure out what happened. And then look at the “Yearly” graph and see if you can spot when I made the same mistake and didn’t spot is so quickly.
Sheesh, I feel like an idiot.
For those of you who are instrument pilots, you know what CFR (nee “FAR”) 61.57(c) means. What it says is that you can’t fly as pilot in command on instrument flight rules unless in the last six months you’ve flown 6 instrument approaches, holding procedures, and “intercepting and tracking course through the use of navigation systems”. (And I defy you to do the other two bits without automatically doing last last bit about tracking courses, so I don’t know why they put it in there.
Continue reading “CFR (FAR) 61.57(c)”
…the installer for the latest update to Photoshop Elements thinks it has to kill every other application running on your computer? Even bloody Terminal! Don’t they realize that Mac OS X is a modern OS, not Mac Classic or Windows 9x where an inadvertent gnat fart could crash the computer?
At lunch time today a group of us were having a political discussion. As usual the most anti-Bush of us were the most vocal. I say “anti-Bush” instead of “liberal” because one of the most vocal guys is a hard-core Republican who is ashamed that he’s going to have to vote for Kerry because Bush isn’t really a Republican, because of his record deficits and assault on the Constitution. Before the USA PATRIOT act, he and I got into very heated arguments about the purpose of government and who should be helping whom.
Anyway, today we had a woman joining us for lunch who used to eat with us, but stopped. And I think I see why. She’s a hard-core partisan Republican, and claims that Rob isn’t a Republican because he’s not voting for Bush, and Bush is the only person who can fight terrorism. I was trying to be fairly moderate to not make her too uncomfortable while she’s so out-numbered by people who disagree with her politics so completely. But then she turns to me and says “You shouldn’t even be talking”. “What?”, I asked. “You’re not a citizen, you can’t vote, so you shouldn’t even be talking.” I was flabergasted. I half expected her to tell me to “love it or leave it”.
Sorry, I was under the misapprehension that freedom of speech had only been drastically curtailed, not totally eliminated.
I was cruising down the New York State Thruway on the way home when I was feeling tired, so I stopped at a rest-stop for a snack and a diet coke. The gift store was in the process of locking up as I got there, and as I didn’t have any small bills for the vending machines, I reluctantly got in line for the McDonalds. There were five people who had already ordered and were waiting for their food orders, and during the time I was waiting at least three people came back to fix problems with their orders. I should have paid attention to that.
I ordered a diet coke and some of these new chicken strip things. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself all weekend over the sore elbows thing, and one manifestation is I’ve been going pretty heavy on the starch carbs although still trying to stay away from sugar carbs as much as possible, and *breaded* chicken is something I allowed myself. On Friday when I was really depressed, I ate a big bag of barbeque potato chips, something I used to do regularly. If you are only used to USian barbeque potato chips, you probably wouldn’t understand, but Canadian barbeque chips leave the inside of your mouth burning for hours afterwards – they’re wonderful.
As I hit the road again, I noticed the Coke tasted a bit weird, but I told myself it was just because I’ve been drinking Canadian Diet Coke all weekend, and I’m spoilt by the better sweetener they use in Canada (Aces-K, real name acesulfamine potassium or something like that). I should have paid attention to that.
Half an hour later, I notice my heart pounding, my head throbbing, and I feel like I have a very slight hangover or head cold. Oh oh. Those bastards gave me real Coke instead of Diet Coke. I check the lid – well, they didn’t push down the little button on the lid to indicate “diet”, but they often don’t if they’re giving it to you directly. The guy said it was diet when he handed it to me, didn’t he? Hmmm, maybe he didn’t?
I pull the blood sugar tester out of my bum bag. Just the other day I was wondering why I still drag this thing around, since my blood sugar hasn’t been lower than 70 or higher than 95 since I went on a low carb diet. I still have the knack for testing myself while I’m driving. 198. Not the highest it’s ever been, just the highest it’s been since I stopped poisoning myself with 3 regular Coca Colas every day.
Fuckola. It’s going to be a long night. Oh, and I forgot to stop at the drugstore to replenish the Alieve that I ran out of on Friday night.