Posts from — October 2006

So, last Tuesday, Boulder got hit with its first snow of the year. The forecasts were calling for the possibility of “flurries” later on in the day, but the way it went down was that the flakes started falling around noon, and didn’t stop ‘till Wednesday morning.

Around 6:30 pm, I decided that things weren’t going to improve for a long time, and, despite being totally unprepared for the winter weather, I headed home on my bike. No gloves, no hat, no rain gear. At least I had a headlight on my bike.

A couple minutes into the ride, my front was completely white and I was slipping and sliding all over the place. The tires I bought a month ago will make great springtime tires, but they are out of their league when the snow and ice comes to town.

By the time I got home, I was freezing and my fingers were starting to bark at me. It took a minute to get them to behave enough to enter the security code on my garage door, and once I got into the warm, things got worse. I stood in the foyer with Emma meowing at me for five minutes while I blew into my hands to warm them up enough to unbuckle my helmet! After changing clothes I headed to the bike shop for some real snow tires, and fenders are next on the list. It’s time to accept the reality that winter has arrived.

My fingertips remained numb for three days after that ride, but the view from our bedroom the morning after the first snowfall was worth it, I feel:

True to form, the sun came out in full force Wednesday morning and melted much of the troublesome snow away and dried the roads out. It snowed again on Friday night, but once again, by today things were basically dry, which was great because it allowed me to get out and ride my latest two wheeled acquisition, which is surely going to be talked about in the coming days…

Wow. (Another) Yankee goes and gets himself killed flying, and now the criminal (yes, criminal, just like his asshole father) Chicago Mayor Daley and Hillary Clinton are yapping about how dangerous these small planes are. CNN’s shitty website ran a poll recently asking the good citizens of the websurfing world if small planes should be “allowed” to fly over densely populated cities, and the majority answered no.

Chill out, people.

I have never Monday-morning-quarterbacked a plane crash before, but moments after hearing about the Lidle crash I already had a good idea what had happened; after watching the video and seeing the smoke streaming west I had all the info I needed. Cory and his instructor flew up a dead end canyon of airspace and tried an already tight turnaround, downwind, in a stiff and gusty wind. This strong wind took them over Manhattan and they were apparently caught unawares and before they knew their mistake and could plan an exit they flew into a building. They were idiots, pure and simple. And now asshole politicians are using this tragic act of stupidity to twist it into moronic legislation and more fear mongering. This is retarded bullshit and it pisses me off. Some kid hopped up on Accutane flew a stolen Cessna into a Florida office building a couple years ago and all he managed to do was break a window and stain a carpet. Cory Lidle and his brilliant instructor did a little more damage, owing to some fuel burning, but the bottom line is the plane pancaked into the building and fell to the ground. Terrorism shouldn’t even enter into the discussion, but it does, even with the democrats. I’m so sick of these moronic politicians attaching themselves to “causes” that don’t need attention, scaring people, hamstringing pilots and restricting freedoms to further their political careers because the masses are uneducated about general aviation.

Fuck you, Hillary, drop dead, Daley. Lautenberg, you can kiss my ass too.

I learned to fly in the New York City area and I never thought to fly up the East River Corridor for the very reason that it required a tight 180-degree turn to get back out. It’s really only meant for helicopters, or good pilots on a good weather day. Cory made a mistake, but his accident affected a lot of people, and that’s unfortunate. But this post-9/11 climate has allowed People like Daley and Clinton to seize on this event for their own political gain. They can all go to hell.

If you doubt my assessment of the crash, here’s a screenshot of Cory’s view of his last few seconds. My friend loaded up a flight model of a Cirrus SR-22 (the plane he was flying) into Microsoft Flight Simulator, placed the plane at the last point (lat/long and altitude) he was tracked northbound on radar, set the wind speed and direction exactly as it was at the time of the crash, and began a 60-degree (very steep) turn to get turned around and head south out of the East River Corridor. Here’s what he saw:

The wind took them over the island of Manhattan (into controlled airspace) and they simply didn’t recover or form a Plan B in time. I’ll eat crow if I’m wrong (turns out I wasn’t, but I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that that’s what happened, pure and simple. It’s a damned shame, but we don’t need to be grounding pilots because of it. Plenty more people get killed every day by assholes who can’t drive.

Microsoft Outlook SUCKS!

I have resisted this stinky pile of shit for years and years, and was delighted to see they used Thunderbird here at my new job when I came out here a year and a half ago. I snickered and then sighed a long resigned sigh when both of my last two employers haplessly “upgraded” to Outlook when I left those companies and they were forced to hire general IT consultants, who of course mindlessly toed the Microsloth party line.

But, alas, it’s finally happened. My present employer, wanting some groupware features such as shared email folders and calendaring, has finally made the jump. The back end is not Exchange, so at least this thing runs fairly quickly, but the client application is Outlook, and I was one of the last people in the company to get upgraded (I stayed under the radar as long as I could), and this week has just been one annoying discovery after another.

The fact that this bloated, nonsensical, dismal excuse for an email application is the single most popular email client in the world is about as sensible as the fact that this country re-elected our current dismal excuse for a President.

There is more shit in here that I don’t need, tons of hoops to jump through to get the program to leave your email alone and format it according to time-tested internet protocols, and apparently NO way to format replies in such a way that avoiding top-posting is not a cut-and-paste extravaganza.

Good job, Microsoft. Your stuff sucks.