Walking on the Moon

A short review of The Age Of Gold is up in Bell, Book, and Candle.

I had a couple small problems with the grap source I posted in 12 Mar.  Those problems have been fixed.  It was an install bug, so if you’ve got the code, you have good code.  New source is on the grap page, but I didn’t bump the version.

Oh, how I love the BBC.

New grap release is available.  Go forth and graph great things.

As always, we thank you for your support.

An e-mail archive visualizer, caught by the eye of Warren Ellis (or someone he knows…)

This is making lemonade given lemons.  Traffic reporting via cell phone tracking.  I mean if people are dumb enough to turn the things on every time they get behind the wheel, and governments are going to track them…
As with many wonderful things, Warren Ellis saw it before me.

I found some time to cruise out to California City Airport this weekend. California City is in the high desert, north of the LA basin near Mojave. I took one of my student solo cross-country flights there and I like to go out and check in every once in a while. On weekends the field is usually bustling with gliders and skydivers and others having a good time. There’s been a restaurant there on and off, but when it’s there it’s always very hospitable.

I headed off at a reasonable 10:00 AM hour, planning to head up north of the airport and do some air work. Work has kept me on the ground lately and I wanted to shake some rust off. The weather was nice and I was able to cruise out pretty easily.

On the way out, talking to Joshua Approach, I heard the worst radio discipline I’ve ever heard on an approach frequency. Now, admittedly the frequency didn’t sound busy while it was going on, but protracted air-to-air communications between pilots discussing the flatulance of one pilot’s dog is really out of line. Don Brown would have had a heart attack.

As I say, I went up north of the airport to get some air work in and did some credible slow flight, a couple pretty good steeps (if I do say so myself), and some decent stall recoveries. I was pretty happy with all of the work. While I was doing it I got to hear Joshua Approach deal with some confusion from one pilot squawking the code assigned to a different aircraft while in a restricted area. The plane that was supposed to be squawking that code didn’t clearly state its position and it took a while to work it all out. Nice debugging on the fly by the controller, though.

I settled in to the airport and had lunch. The restaurant has been taken over by the folks who run Foxy’s Landing at William J. Fox Field in Lancaster. The food’s good here and the people friendly. There was a car club and some other folks hanging around that day, so the place was pretty busy. I think under the Foxy’s folks it’ll stay open for a while, which is great news. I also learned that Foxy’s is running a restaurant at Mojave, which means I have an incentive to stop by there now, too.

On the way out I took some pictures, including a beautiful restored Culver Cadet and some sky divers.

The flight back was pretty routine, but clear and beautiful. I got to pull a pretty nice “plan minimal time on the runway” landing at SMO, too. Fun day.

Today we had our first attempted spam comment.

Rich and I were blogging back and forth a little about the flu and I realized I hadn’t put up this link, which epitomizes my concerns about this whole hubub. I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about the possible sudden spread of an infectious disease, like the flu – though I think Ebola’s more theatrical – and we should be taking reasonable steps to be prepared for it.  But the whole thing is still very speculative, and we have real problems that are much less speculative.  There are going to be more hurricanes this year, whether you believe in global warming or not, and I think those are a more pressing concern that the flu.

But the issue of the link is also pressing – opportunists will be taking their best shot at using this to further their own agenda.  I’ve heard Bush call for the same kind of martial law.  All this about a disease that has killled <100 people in 5 years.  Shouldn't we be more concerned with the continuing suck-ass distribution of AIDS assistance to Africa?  I mean there's a disease with a track record of killing people in large numbers.  30,000 people are going to die this year of other flu strains in America.  That's a factor of  1200 more (America's 1/4 the world population).  More than that will die of car accidents.  Hell, more have been struck by lightning. Yes, being unprepared for bird flu could lead to a lot of deaths, but the hype is way out of proportion to the assesable threat.  And a bird flu pandemic is not the only bad thing that could happen.

The end times are truely upon us.  A cat has died in Germany.