Worst flight ever
Went to Phoenix over the weekend for Pammy’s brother’s (Todd’s) wedding. She flew out Friday morning so I had to fly N233ME out on my own. Pretty uneventful trip with light headwinds ended up taking me 2:15 to get there. Not bad. Listened to the Ipod the whole way. The return trip was another story.
We left Sunday around 1pm, expecting a not great flight – winds out of Goodyear airport were 15 gusting to 25 knots. At altitude they were forecast to be not much better. I expected a bumpy, somewhat longer ride. I wish. Taking the same route home (for pilots out there it was KGYR-BLH-PSP-KEMT-KVNY), we started running into cumulus buidups with virga falling about 50 miles east of Palm Springs. I diverted around that, and found what appeared to be clear passages through PSP as well as across the desert into Palmdale. I elected to go via PSP and through the Banning pass because it would mean not having to go around Big Bear – saving 10 minutes.
When I got close to the Banning Pass, I realized it wasn’t going to work out. The weather was low there, and scud running didn’t look like an option. I considered going IFR, but the reports of heavy precip and icing made that sound somewhat less than fun. I turned around and now traversed ALL the way around Big Bear, and in clear air with moderate turbulence the ENTIRE way some with 30 knot headwinds. Whole trip took just over 3 hours. At least the landing was good.
Summary:Â It SUCKED.
Losing that last 15 pounds
I knocked of the easy stuff – the first 35 pounds. Now it’s time to drop the last 15. My assault begins on April 21, and ends June 21 – the first day of summer. 4 workouts a week and extensive cardio, coupled with watching my diet like a hawk should get me there easily. I’ll take some before and after pictures and put them on Flickr – assuming I MAKE IT. 🙂
Ubuntu update
Bottom line – I love this operating system.
It’s fast, stable, installed 95% perfectly, and is now running absolutely perfectly. Printer works like a charm. Plaxo works with Thunderbird. Firefox is wonderful (I knew that before, but you get a better taste of it when you use it exclusively). What is now left for me to mess with is Wine (the windows emulator for Linux – allows you to run Windows apps inside Ubuntu) so that I can run Visio and Project – and that is only because I haven’t looked to see if there are alternatives that run natively in Linux. I also need to look into one of the many alternatives to Itunes for my music and Ipod.
I’m roughly 1 week away from installing it on my HP laptop and bidding farewell to Windows forever. I kid you not.
My daughter is smart
And in some cases, smarter than I.
At dinner tonight, while discussing how important math is, she said “Yes – I know. I do a lot of math. Do YOU even know about AVERAGES?” I laughed. I’m in the programming business. I know all ABOUT averages. She proceeds to write out a list of 10 numbers, and tells me to give her the mean, median and mode of them.
SHIT.
I know what those mean to SOME degree, but don’t remember which is WHICH. She is now very happy. She INSISTS that I figure it out. I fumble through, and with help from her and Pam both, I finally get it. Sheesh.
Later she is doing her homework, and she asks what a declarative sentence is. I tell her (I get this one right) and watch her write it down on a sample sentence. Unfortunately, she spells it declarative. I correct her by saying it’s spelled declaritive – with an I. Absolutely WRONG of course, which she looks up and finds INSTANTLY. I leave the room.
-sigh- (But I still love her so much)
Live from Ubuntu
Ok – so now I’m really up and running with Ubuntu – a search of Digg for help with the OS yielded a post on Top 13 things to do immediately after installing Ubuntu – very helpful indeed. I installed flash, codecs, fonts, repositories – everything. The only thing not working at the moment – and I feel confident I’ll fix it shortly – is my printer.
So the jury is still out, but it’s usable for now. Much more learning to do.
The God Delusion
Just finished reading this great book by Richard Dawkins. Always been an Atheist to SOME degree, but I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know to WHAT degree. I am now convinced, absolutely and completely, that there is no God. (I capitalize only because it is the standard convention)
This book truly is a life changer for me – in terms of my own thought process on religion, on how it affects my child (not to mention ALL children), and clarifies for me that nagging feeling I’ve always had when discussing religion with someone when a) I felt like they were deluded and b) I felt like i couldn’t openly discuss it with them. Neither of these will be problems for me ever again.
So to all of my friends i say this – please read this book. To those who still believe, I really don’t know what to say.
The continuing Linux test
The Linux movement is one I have acutely aware of, but not terribly involved with. My software company is going to be running on Linux (the App server anyway), and so i see it as necessary to become an expert of sorts. i decided to start with it at home.
I started by installing Debian, and was more impressed with the installation than i was of Fedora 6 on our office server. It was easy, fast, and fairly complete. I say FAIRLY complete, because it lacked Firefox – which I would need to install. I found this to be a confusing process in itself, but got through it. I then decided to install Gaim (I live and die by IM), and that was FAR worse. I had to consult Josh again – and finally made it work.
Att his point i was pretty unimpressed with this particular distro anyway, so I decided to back up and install the most popular of all distros – Ubuntu. A slightly larger initial download, but a VERY smooth install, with FireFox AND Gaim both included.
I’m going to play with the install over the next few days and see how it goes. Will report back.
IFR the old fashioned way
Since the club took delivery of our newer planes, I’ve been very happy to utilize all of their capabilities – namely the autopilot and approach-approved GPS receivers. It’s a key thing to know how to use – especially when you are IFR without another pilot in the plane – which is most of the time. Unfortunately, it can also have the undesirable effect of letting your hand-flying skills get rusty. Fixed that today.
Decided Pam and I would head to Camarillo for the tri-tip (she had breakfast – not a bad choice either it turns out) in the lightly-equipped 2257E/  To say it was marginal VFR on the way out was putting it mildly. I considered turning back a few times, only to just catch site opf clear air in time. Never dangerous of course, but I probably should have gone IFR. After eating Pam suggested that we go IFR so I could get the practice. Yes – she is COOL.
So we did. In the clouds from Fillmore all the way through the Newhall pass on the ILS into Van Nuys, and in moderately bumpy clouds to boot. There IS no GPS, or autopilot, or much of anything else in this plane – so it was all me. Flew it great, if I do say so myself. Needles in the donut all the way until we broke out, under complete control all the time. I feel sorry for pilots who ONLY learn with the current equipment – they certainly can’t be as accomplished as those who learned it the old way.
Rats!
I’m a fairly manly guy. I take care of the manly things around the house. I open jars. I replace lightbulbs. I fix things. I kill bugs. If necessary, I could get a snake out of the house. But I cannot STAND rats. They are vermin in the truest sense of the word. So when I realized we had at least one in the house, I was NOT happy. Apparently, what he likes to do is hang out in the attic during the day, then at night crawl through a hole in the water heater closet and hang out on top of the warm water heater – and apprently poop constantly, judging from the amount in that closet.
So Pam called an exterminator to come out and handle things. I met the guy at the house, and when i went to show him the closet in question, there was not one, but TWO rats in there. This was a serious deal. Multi-rats. Kill them immediately, I said – and then went to work out.
I came hom expecting a bill for their services and a note saying “All rats eliminated – zero chance on any getting in ever again. Have a nice day.” Instead I saw nothing. Pam then told me that they had not, in fact, killed the rats, but instead FED them. They block off the hole into the water heater closet, and then put food in the attic for them. This bothers me on a great many levels. First of all, I’m not a big fan of training them that MY HOUSE is the RAT BUFFET. Word gets around (not sure how exactly, but it does), and soon other rats will be showing up for the early bird special. Second, they are now TRAPPED (like, well, you know) in MY HOUSE! I’m sure there is an element of genius to this plan, but I’m not quite seeing it yet.
More as the story develops.
You can’t spell Windows without WIN.
Setting up the new office (including some rack servers), I have come to truly appreciate not just how EASY a Windows server installation is, but truly how mature and stable Windows is compared to Linux.
Wanting to install the same setup as our offshore partner, we installed Fedora 6, the Sun JVM, Apache, and Tomcat on our app server. We had already installed Windows server 2003 on two other machines – one for a doc server, and one for a SQL server. These installs went flawlessly, all patches were easily applied, and the servers are humming along, doing the jobs they were selected to do. Notice I didn’t say “the jobs they were DESIGNED to do”. Windows servers can easily fulfill a number of different roles easily. If only it were that easy with Linux.
The install itself was painfully slow, the patches took FOREVER, and then the VIDEO didn’t even work right. I had to monkey with it for hours before it actually was even usable. Once I got to installing the Sun JVM, I had to actually call in an expert – my buddy Josh. He made reasonably short work of installing everything, but even he couldn’t get it all working exactly right (to be fair, he had limited time to stay – onoy about four hours).
Now I understand that Apache is a great platform – and that Java on a Linux box works just fine – that is why we selected it to use as our platform for thousands of clients. But come ON. I’m a pretty knowledgeable guy when it comes to things computing. If I can’t install the server software, how in the WORLD would anyone ever consider using it for a vanilla user on the desktop. And now with Vista coming out, it would appear that Microsoft is safe forever on the desktop.
You heard it here first. Or second. OK. Millions of people have said it. Whatever.