Walking on the Moon

And then depression set in.  From slashdot.

I’m sure you’ve all made your preparations and are enjoying the day.  It is getting a little commercial, but I love the specials.

This gallery is really impressive. Be sure to enjoy how abstract and innocuous the paintings look at the size you’d see them in most homes or museums. The 2004 gallery seems to have a bug, but earlier galleries will let you see each painting at a larger size.  From The Reverse Cowgirl.

In a failure unrelated to the blown capacitor, I also lost my jabber server this week. There was an upgrade to the FreeBSD port for the daemon and when it came back up, I couldn’t talk to it. It’s always been shaky, and I finally decided if I was going to have to fix it again, I would spend that effort fixing it in a way that helped in the long term.

The result is that I’ve jumped over to ejabberd which is being actively developed and supports some gateways. We have lost the ability to bridge messages to Yahoo, buit other than that things seem OK. If I seem slow to respond to jabber or AIM, drop me an e-mail.

You may have noticed that ylum’s been a little shaky this week, staring on Labor Day or so. The good news is that shakiness should be abating. The bad news is that I’ve had to work some to get that to happen.

I opened it up on Sunday (the 3rd) to put a drive in for backups and get them running again. On the way, I found that my case fan had seized up. You nemember that 100+  degree week at the end of July? I imagine that’s when it seized. The bad news is that’s also probably when the capacitor blew on the main board (see the image).

Surprisingly this didn’t just shut down the machine when it happened, though the hardware has been sensitive, and I haven’t been able to reliably talk to my iriver. Well, I couldn’t leave it like that once I found it, and I really wasn’t happy with the cooling properties and general crumminess of my case, so a new case was called for as well as a new mainboard.

The new case is pretty spiffy – black with two cooling fans and real mounting hardware – and after a wrestling match with the AML on the BIOS chip, I’ve got FreeBSD booting and running credibly on the thing. This needs a little more tweaking, but it’s servicable.

Now proper backups are running as well, so there’s some hope that if my disk fails, some of this stuff will survive. Overall, things are better than they were – faster CPU, more memory, better cooling – but it was a pain getting them here.

I’ve got a cell phone again.  I finally found time to go down to the Verizon store, find out that I was out of my contract period and that they would replace the phone I lost in <cough> January, and get a new one.  It cost me $20 and I have a simple clamshell phone from Samsung that looks like a little Star Trek:TOS communicator.  I really like it, though it’s positively quaint by the standards of the nerds I hang out with.

After I got the phone I decided I should check my messages.  After all, I’ve been without a phone for 7 months.

Of course, no new messages.  At least I know my friends know me.

My jaunt to do approaches Saturday was also interesting because it was the last entry in my first logbook.  When I started taking flying lessons on 12 Feb 2000, I bought a student pilot package that included a Jeppesen logbook.  Now the first 6 years of my flying experience are in one place, with a bow wrapped around them.
I’ve got an electronic copy of all the stuff, but the physical book is an interesting artifact in its own right.  There are the out of order entries around 9/11 that show how desperate I was to fly, but how I couldn’t look at my logbook while I was grounded for fear that I wouldn’t get to add another entry.  After I got to fly again and started instrument training I added the missing entries, but in the excitement I’d forgotten to add them in order.

There are a lot of firsts in there, too.  First passengers, first flight in 32169, first trip out of state, first everything, really.

As a nice coincidence, I didn’t get to make the last entry.  Flying with Andy as a CFI he gets to make and sign the entry.  Just like he made and signed the first one in 2000.
Now I get to start another one.  I’m a lucky guy.

My CFI and I were up shooting approaches Saturday morning. We actually filed each leg IFR through the tower entoute control (TEC) that the LA basin employs, which makes it super easy to fly IFR legs locally. We filed 3 legs, the first two one after the other and the last one after an hour or so break for lunch.

I was issued the same squawk code for all three legs.

I don’t remember ever getting the same squawk for 2 legs, much less 3 with an hour between two legs. Weird luck.

Apparently I mostly read the blogs of people who show me distrubing things.  I don’t know is that says something bad about me or them.
In any case, Jeffrey Rowlands disturbed me today by showing me a site where you can pay to be responded to.

I’ve posted a review of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass on BBC.