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Ok, I've created a php function in the page template for my blog. It implements a function that takes the name of the source image as an argument, and depending on what directory it was invoked from, puts the correct pathname into the
So...anyway. I was recently shopping for aircraft headsets, and there was a neat emergency flashlight advertised on the front page of one of the sites I looked at. It doesn't have batteries in the conventional sense. The main barrel of the flashlight is hollow, with a couple of coils of magnet (very fine) wire around two spools. A tube goes through the middle of the spools, in which is a small magnet. When the shake the flashlight, the magnet slides from one end to the other and back, passing through the coils on the way. The changing magnetic field due to the moving magnet induces voltage and thus current in the coils, which is tapped to charge the flashlight. I assume the actual energy storage is capacitive.
It has a cool blue light (LED I think). It'scalled an "LED Shakelight".
It's interesting how smells can be very strongly tied to memories. I came downstairs this morning, to the smell of wood smoke, and the house "felt" different than it had in a long time. Interesting.
I was going to finish this post up with a photo of a new gadget I just got, but it seems that due to the file archiving structure that blogger uses, photos won't show up correctly in directly linked single posts. So...I'll have to code up a php function to figure out what directory the file is being called from. Interesting.
That's the news...and I am outta here...
Being trained as a physicist, I sometimes (Ok, often) fall into the the trap of thinking that I know more about things than I really do, because I have training in some of the inner workings of matter. It's good for me when someone who knows much less about physics than I do puts my in my place by showing me that they know much more about an aspect of applied reality than I do.
My wife is back home, and her father is visiting. We'd given up using the fireplace in our house because it put lots of smoke into the house. This is very sad, because we like fires very much. When at their house, we'd discussed with my father in law the possible reasons for the fireplace not performing as it should. Yes, we had opened the damper. Yes, we'd primed the flue.
However, we now have a cheery fire burning in the fireplace. It turns out that the fireplace burns quite well, and doesn't smoke into the house if the fire basket (the metal grate-thing that the logs sit on) is pushed all the way to the back of the fairly deep fireplace. The fire burns nicely (and draws quite well; that is, the smoke is drawn up the chimney strongly). It never occured to my wife or I to move the fire away from the front.
Ah well--one mystery solved. :-)
March 9, I went to Decatur and joined the flying club there.
A flying club is an organization that owns one or more airplanes, and "rents" them to its members. The idea is that airplane ownership (to say nothing of operation) is a very expensive proposition, and amoritzing the costs over a larger number of people is a pretty financially sound thing to do. If you own an airplane and fly it a lot, then the hourly and monthly costs will pretty much be a fixed amount. However, if you dont' fly for a while, you're still incurring hangar rental, and insurance and other fixed expenses. The idea is that in a club, the fixed costs are shared with as many other people as possible, so you only pay per hour what it really costs per hour.
The ideal flying club to be a member of is one where most of the people fly very little or not at all. Their monthly dues keep the cost for everone cheap.
The club that I joined is $600 to join. You get $300 back when you leave. Dues are $45 per month. The club owns three aircraft, the cheapest of which is a Cessna 172 which rents for $60/hour. Instructor's fees are from $20 to $30 per hour, so I'll be able to get instruction for less than $100/hour, which is a pretty good rate. Renting a 172 at a regular rental place would be significantly more expensive than that; perhaps 80 or 85 an hour.
I'm not starting to fly yet, but it only costs me the 45 per month to stay a member. That way, when I choose to start, I know what the hourly rate is.
Right. Saturday. Lots to do.
The day has gone pleasantly from cold to cool to sunny to almost too warm to be outside. Spring has sprung.
I just got a new prescription for my glasses and contact lenses, and so I sat out on the deck this morning in the sun, reading Taking Flight and breaking in the photogrey on the new glasses.
Am I the only person in the world who was confused by what "pipe cleaners" really were (other than to make cute crafty things out of)? I'd always wondered how one cleaned out (water/sewer) pipes with things that small. I thought that they weren't long enough, and you'd really frankly need things that were much stiffer, and I would think larger diameter. My father in law was cleaning out the barrel of a pipe (the kind you smoke tobacco in) this morning and I had a revelation.
It's the sort of thing where you think "Am I the only one who's this misguided?".
There's been a rock sticking up in the middle of the driveway coming down to the cabin bothering me. I don't think it was really seriously in danger of hitting the bottom of our car, but it's hard to tell. So I grabbed a sledge hammer and cracked off enough pieces that it's basically level with the road around it. The rock was pretty heterogeneous, so it broke much more easily than I anticipated. It's some igneous rock with streaks of iron oxide. Some of the fractures look to be the first time that those surfaces have seen sunlight in tens of thousands of years. I saved a couple of the smaller pieces for a geologist friend of mine.
I've updated the cats page, and edited a couple of earlier blog posts to have cat links in them. Being on the end of rural dial-up is always a gentle reminder to not overpopulate pages with big photos. If you have a lot to say, and digital pictures are a big part of it, then split the pages and navigate through them with "next page" buttons.
Lying in bed, updating my web site. :-) As Wierd Al says: "Such a thrill just to be me, This is the life!"
Am sitting in front of a fire at my parent-in-laws' retirement cabin. The NCAA tournament is on the TV in the background. West Virginia vs. Wake Forest, just went to wva 98, wake 94.
This place is relaxing to incredible degree. With the help of my mother in law, I convinced my wife to come down to spent this coming week (spring break) here to take a serious, much needed break.
I'm writing this on my iBook, sitting by the fire via the wireless that I installed on the cabin's computer. Ah...this is the life. The wireless was a present to the parents in law, but (I admitted it to them) it was at least as much a present to me as them. Now I can do stuff on-line, and read and write e-mail on my own machine while I'm here, and I don't have to wait in line for the one computer that has the modem.
I'm almost to the Wright brothers in Taking Flight. It's interesting reading about Samuel Langley. I've always known that he was famous for failing to acheive flight with his Great Aerodrome. However, he was the head of the Smithsonian, and a very accomplished scientist. I think that lots of people expected it to succeed. He and those on his team had some excellent ideas, and they had an excellent engine. He just didn't understand structural scaling.
Hmm...not doing much, so not much to write about. I should probably stop before I get boring.
Oh; I expect I'll be writing a bit on shell permission bits at some point soon. I recently saw a presentation on bash shell scripting tied a lot of things together about it.
Have a good weekend/spring break/whatever.
Well, that's about all the work I'm going to do on the front page tonight. The site went from over 900 files to 221. Once I've downloaded a new dump of the current state, I will fix the front page, and add a link to this blog.
So as of Today, March 14, 2005, this blog is "official" (that is, it's linked from a real live web site). Well, Ok, but it made me happy.
I tore out most of the old, derelict pages. I left the cats page, though. That needs to be restructured, so that it's not so painful to load over a modem.
Ok, downloads finished. Back to fixing the front page.
Hmm...I just realize that I had sort of a milestone last Wednesday, but due to my thinking about other things, I haven't blogged about it. It even has to do with flying. That, in a day or two.
Suddenly...New York City makes sense. Patricia Neilsen Hayden makes the analogy that living in a city is like an expert system. That is, there aren't necessarily the protections that exist elsewhere, and it's assume at all times that everyone knows what they're doing. I'd never thought about living in a large or large-ish city as that, but it helps explain that concept. Hmm...interesting. [Note to my wife: this doesn't mean that I'm all keen to live in New York. I would 1) have to get rid of 3/4 of my stuff, 2) there would be absolutely no way that I could ever build an airplane and 3) driving would not be fun any more.]
One more link, and then that's all for now. I can quit any time. :-) I read this at work last week, and it had me laughing so hard tears were running down my face. I've had some personal issues going on recently, and the emotional release of this page was actually very theraputic.
I've been putting off updating this until I got some stuff done, and some more DVDs burned, and more of the basement tidied up. That's coming along as soon as Godot the basement-cleaning elf, so this entry, which has been a draft for the last 5 days, is going out the door.
I came downstairs to spend some time with Ripley, and to get my front page updated. I'm doing the first, but while I type this, I can't do the second. So off I go.
Forgive me for slightly mis-quoting Opus here, but I would just like to say that I have the very best wife in all of explored space.
Am finishing an evening filled with leftovers from my wife's wonderful split pea soup and the last of the birthday cake. Spent it reading Patricia Neilson Hayden, who is very fun and cool.
One of her links I ran across which has always interested me is a page about the anatomy of a Denial of Service Attack. I mention it here for completeness, and that it makes it much easier to find in the future.
Spent some time stuffing ballots yesterday. When I first read Wil's post on WWDN about it, Wesley was tied for "most annoying character" in Star Trek.
I'm happy to report that the power of the WWDN market segment has spoken. Q has now overtaken Wesley for 5th most annoying character. Will monitor the situation as it progresses.
The reason I kept the test messages recently was due to my training, I hate throwing away original material. Making a mistake, and having a record of what it was so that you don't make it again is often very valuable. It comes from my physics background; measurements that are wrong are often extremely valuable, because that way, others can learn from your mistakes without having to repeat them.
So I kept the test messages; just as I keep digitial photos even though I take better ones. It's a record of the process of taking the photos.
The reason that I bring this up is that some of the messages that I sent to the e-mail-to-blog feature of blogger did belatedly show up on my blog page. However, they were spread out over yesterday, and without context, they were a bit confusing. So I got rid of them.
So maybe the blogger FAQ was right, that the posts just take a very long time. I still think there's something else to the problem though.
Right. Monday morning. Get ready for work. I think spring is finally here for real. Yay!
My birthday today. I don't feel any older.
A pretty low-key day, on the scale of birthdays. We just had a couple of our really great friends over; we had pizza, wine, and chocolate cake. My wife got me what looks like a very very cool book: Taking Flight by Richard P. Hallion. It's about the invention of flight, going all the way back to its intellectual conception, and including such things as rockets (missile weapons) and helicoptor toys as steps along the path. I'm past Leanardo DaVinci so far; very cool.
And our friends got me a kite, a 3 foot wingspan, that's shaped like an airplane with a flame paint job on the wings. It is tres cool. I haven't flown a kite since I was like 6 years old or something. We'll definitely have to take it out this spring. This will be a second reason to keep a close eye on the weather; to look for kite-flying days.
I think I'll go play a little flight simulator, and then head to bed.
So, the morning routine.
Get up. Feed cats. (There are 3, all segregated when eating, so it's a little complicated). Sit on couch, fire up laptop. Check personal and work e-mail. Read on-line comics. Check my-ebay. From now on, I expect I'll do my blog posting at this point.
The reason that I bring this up is that over the last few weeks, I've rolled my sleep schedule around that I'm getting up much earlier in the morning that I used to. My goal is to be getting up at around 5am, having gone to bed 9 or 10pm. This gives me time to do stuff in the mornings. When I begin taking pilot's lessons, this means that I can fly in the mornings before work. I'm hoping that this will mena that I won't have much contest for scheduling the club's airplanes. I'm thinking that 6:30am on weekday mornings isn't a prime time for people doing pleasure flying.
My plan for renting airplane time is to join a flying club in Decatur. A flying club is an arrangment where a bunch of people own one or more airplanes. That way, the fixed costs (maintainance and such) are spread out over many people. The way it works is that you pay monthly dues, and then you have a certain cost per hour to fly the airplane. The nice thing is, the cost per engine hour is typically less than you can rent a comparable airplane at just a regular FBO. (FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator. Basically a company at an airport that sells fuel, rents aircraft, and provides services to pilots, like being able to check the weather. People refer to them by those initials constantly; it took me months before I figured out what they meant. They're the airplane equivalent of a gas station).
My other plan for the mornings is that on mornings that I don't fly, I can get other stuff done. So I need to go do that now. Going to try to get things tidied in the basement somewhat, to get a start on re-organizing bookshelves.
Er...Sorry about the noise posts. I've been trying to get the e-mail-to-blog feature to work in blogger, and it really doesn't seem to at all. I reported the problem on their "help: report your problem" line, and the confirmation e-mail send me to a page of known problems. That page seems to indicate that they know there are issues with the mail service, but didn't list my problem. The tone of that page is that there are multiple problems with mail, but they are complicated enough that there are more important issues right now.
The reason that I have all the goofy posts was that I was trying to characterize the very narrow set of circumstances where it did work, and trying to duplicate the conditions reliably. It seems that if I send in a message, go to the settings->e-mail page, then unclick and click again the "publish" box under the e-mail part, then save settings and re-publish right away, then the message makes it in. Otherwise, it doesn't.
I sent 17 test e-mails in numerical order. The ones that you see made it through. What I assume is that there's some conflict on the server end with a spam blocker, which is masking the real problem.
It'll be interesting to see if it ends up working eventually.
2nd of 3, and then one more right after. After the thir message, will unclick and re-click publish (under e-mail), then save and republish.
this time, will uncheck and recheck the publish box, save, and publish. -- craig@craigsteffen.net public key available at http://www.craigsteffen.net/GPG/ current goal: use a CueCat scanner to inventory my books career goal: be the first Vorlon Time Lord
publish is on; will hit save and republish after the next one -- craig@craigsteffen.net public key available at http://www.craigsteffen.net/GPG/ current goal: use a CueCat scanner to inventory my books career goal: be the first Vorlon Time Lord
test 6, will do normal "publish all" after this. -- craig@craigsteffen.net public key available at http://www.craigsteffen.net/GPG/ current goal: use a CueCat scanner to inventory my books career goal: be the first Vorlon Time Lord
publish is on.
Will hit "re-publish" right after sending this.
Another post without formatting. This one is going out after changing the secret word to all lower-case, and setting publish back to true. We'll see...
Ok, so I have to admit: this isn't actually a blog yet. That is, the
only person who's reading it is my wife, and that's because I sent her
a link. It's on my web site, but it's in a directory with no links
from the front page, so it's sort of in a web-site kind of limbo.
(That's Ok, actually, because I haven't updated the site in 6 months
anyway.)
Lots of stuff to do this weekend. If I'm good, I'll maybe do some
re-vamp of the front page, and include a link to this blog. That way,
people can actually see it.
Ok, off to do dishes...
-- craig@craigsteffen.net public key available at http://www.craigsteffen.net/GPG/ current goal: use a CueCat scanner to inventory my books career goal: be the first Vorlon Time Lord
I'm very priviledged in that, like Erst Stavro Blofelt the James Bond film villian, I can actually sit in my lair, scratch a baleful looking white cat's head, and contemplate the havoc that I'm going to wreak on the unsuspecting world.
I should qualify this just a little bit, however. My "lair" is my papasan chair in my basement. I am stroking (from time to time) the head of a white (and calico spotted) cat. The havoc that's going to be wreaked on the world is the re-modeling of the upstairs bathroom, which has a problem with the floor, and that's actually going to be done by my wife through the agency of a plumbing contractor. :-) When I'm not ministering to the cat, I'm typing this on my iBook (which runs Debian, of course).
So I suppose I'm rambling on here mostly because this is my first time in a very long time really writing anything that someone is might someday read. Hmm...what shoud I write about? What is the purpose of this blog, anyway? (In my mind's eye, I hear the children's special where Charlie Brown is saying "What am I doing here? What happened to the real watch dog? What is the purpose of liiiiiife?").
This is a web journal, a snapshot of my life, I suppose. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I wasn't doing something slightly different and might interest the occasional person. The thread that's going to hang the thread of this journal together is flying and airplanes. I've been kind of an airplane nut for longer than I can remember. Probably somewhat prompted by my Uncle, who flew B-52s (and EC-47s and I expect other aircraft too) in the Air Force. When in middle school and high school particulary, I was very much interested in being a fighter pilot, and I applied to the Air Force Academy when the time came. I didn't get in, and so I ended up going to Gustavus Adolphus College instead, and in 2001 became a physicist. I then jumped out of academia, and now I'm a computer programmer...more or less.
Alert readers are asking: what about the flying then? Well...some friends gave me a gift certificate to a book store a couple of years back as a birthday present . I picked up a guide book to becoming a pilot again, which I hadn't really thought about in years (graduate school tends to repress expensive hobbies).
However, I got to thinking. My wife and I live in Champaign, Illinois. Her parents live 5 hours drive away. My mom and dad live 9.5 and 8 hours drive away respectively. We can visit her parents for a weekend (even without taking off work time on Friday), but it's a short weekend. However, it's really not worth it to visit either of my parents for a weekend. You have to spend Sunday driving back, and drive up Friday night and Saturday morning. You end up with Saturday afternoon. The upshot is you have two days driving for half a day there. It's never worth it to drive up for a weekend, which means that I have to take days off. That means that really, the best way to do it is to go for an entire week, take two weekends, and visit everybody. However, that means that the vacations we tend to take are big long road trips, which get tiring.
So...being able to cut down the travel time would be very valuable. Being able to Yankton, SD (where my Mom lives) in 4 hours rather than 9 would all of a sudden make it a palatable vacation. Fly up on Friday afternoon/evening. Be there all day Saturday and most of Sunday, and fly back Sunday afternoon. Visit Mom, and the grandparents, and when we get back it won't feel like we've been beat with a stick.
So...ever since then, I've been gearing up to get a private pilot's license. I've bought books (a lot of books). I took ground school at the local community college. Next week I am going to join a flying club, which will give me cheap rental access to airplanes. My plan is that sometime during this calendar year, I will begin (and hopfully finish) flight lessons and have a pilot's certificate.
That's what this blog is about; me getting a pilot's license. Well, probably not totally. The hope is that part will be done less than a year from now. There'll always be flying to write about, but I don't know that it will be enthralling enough to keep something like this going for an audience. I'll continue to write, and hopefully, eventually, I'll write about building an airplane. :-)
(I'm also kind of...ok very much...a computer weenie. There will be computer stuff here too.)
more to come...
Wow, this really is as easy as it's supposed to be. I applied for and set up a blogger account this morning, while sitting with my cat Jasper who was apparently feeling cuddly, before going to work. I can see why Neil Gaiman uses it.
I'd like to give a big shout out to Wil Wheaton, whose blog got me interested in the idea in the first place. \m/
Back to work.
Was going to do laundry this morning before work...but Jasper climbed into my lap and is being cute.
So I created a blogger account instead. We'll see how this goes. Must get on a bus in 20 minutes to make it to a doctor's appointment on time.
Cheers,
Craig