Walking on the Moon

My review of The Best American Science Writing 2006 is up in Bell, Book and Candle.

A couple weeks ago I posted about the bees that seemed to be setting up shop at my local airport. Last Thursday, 29 Mar, I was taking a friend up for a tour of LA and heard and saw more.

First, when we got there the formerly bee-covered Cirrus was gone. We were told that the owner had ripped the cover off – bees and all – fired up the engine and gone to another airport. This left a few perturbed bees running around SMO, but though we were around for a while, none of them bothered us. They tell me that most of the bees in LA county are africanized, so that’s pretty good luck.

Other than coming back and finding that the bees had taken my parking space that was my whole involvement. But the story I heard was that our friend with the bee-covered plane had proceeded out to his destination and only found a few intrepid bees still gripping his aircraft on arrival. On departure to return to SMO, a few more wayward bees had appeared. When he returned to the ramp, however, the remaining local bees began returning to the plane and re-establishing the clump.

After the clump began re-forming they summoned a beekeeper who, I’m told, vacuumed them up – queen and all – and there’s been peace in the valley since then.

I would have loved to see the little buggers clomp back on to the plane on return, though.

Warren Ellis posted an amazing shot of Atlantis’s departure. Actual picture courtesy of NASA, in more ways than one.

I was up shooting approaches this morning with my favorite CFI and we saw a pretty amazing thing on the ramp when we got back. A swarm of bees was attached to one of the aircraft parked on the ramp, in full on “protect the queen” mode.

That whole dark patch is bees. I hope for the owner’s sake that the bees are just moving the hive somewhere and that they haven’t decided that they’d rather have a moving base of operations. Man, what a potential nightmare.

Practical matters aside, I’d really hate to have this happen. When I was younger I had a serious phobia about stinging insects – I sat on a hive full of ground-based bees at an impressionable age. I’m pretty well over that now, but I still wouldn’t like have to deal with a hive in the Archer.

I’ll be hosing my plane down with wasp and bee killer for the forseeable future. (Image courtesy of Andy Hoover.)

For the first time since installing Akismet I had to moderate a spam post today. Not bad.

I’ve put my review of The Weather Makers up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

When I jumped up to WordPress 2.1.2, I also turned on Akismet, a plug-in that filters blog spam. If you’ve never run a blog, you probably can’t believe the volume of crap that gets autoposted to even the most backwater and benign of blogs. When I logged in after 3-4 days of not touching this blog, there were more than 600 comments all spam. At least I was forced to believe they were all spam; love comments though I do, I’m not reading 600 ads for unsavory, illegal “products” thinly disguised as comments to find the one comment that might be out there.

The 600+ set was a pretty big wakeup call. I think my blog has passed some threshold or some new set of comment spammers have appeared and there’s been a sudden jump in comment spam. At any rate, I was finally sick enough of it to get an application key and start using Akismet.

So far – after a few hours – things look pretty good. If you’ve been trying to comment and not seeing your posts show up, now’s a fine time to try again, as I’ll probably see them. If you do post a comment that doesn’t appear, send me a note.

I started Akismet up a couple hours before this post.  When I made the post, Akismet had blocked 10 bad comments.  You can see the current total near the bottom of most pages.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2. Let me know if anything looks too weird.

The other day I got spam mail from Bucky Barnes. As I mentioned, I’ve been a big fan of Brubaker’s Captain America run, so this pleased me much more than the average unsolicited advertisement.

In addition to all getting the topology set up more sanely, I’ve moved the network allocation functions off onto the WRT54GL. Now computers connected to my wireless can continue to access the Internet even if ylum is down or off-line.

Practically speaking, I put the DHCP server and a lightweight DNS server up on the little router. These are actually part of the same program, dnsmasq, that comes with OpenWRT. The result is that even if ylum is sick for days, or I’m fooling with it, laptops and other local machines can still reach the rest of the world. Hmmmm. Might be a good time to invest in some MXes, though…

In any case all of this should be invisible to the outside world, but makes me a little happier.