Scheduled 10 hours in a Citabria with a CFI in August. FINALLY going to have a chance to get my tail dragger endorsement :).
Hoping that I have enough time left after doing the tail dragger stuff to do some spins. That would be most excellent.
Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Painless upgrade, nice changes to the dashboard.
Integrated My Flickr page into the website using a Wordpress plugin called Slickr.
The results can be seen here on the Photo Gallery Page, so far I’m happy with the results. The only thing I’d like to see different is the ability to define a ‘default’ photo set to display when the page is loaded. Maybe if i get board I’ll add that in.
I also updated the theme to be widget aware, and added the slickr widget to the sidebar.
Oh how I hate email. Ken posted the following to twitter:
Man, I have a crapton of email. Is it healthy to carry around this much baggage?
and
Consolidating inboxes for a Google Apps for Your Domain migration. My spam folder has 13,000 messages over the last five years!
Twitter has its place, but discussion isn’t one of them. For those didn’t have the misfortune of twitter texting them about this, here is a quick recap:
Michael Bond @kenwalker treat email like postits. Read it, delete it. Move useful information to ical, yojimbo, etc. try to keep email to 50 msgs or less
Ken Walker @mbond I get the GTD angle of keeping the inbox clean, but do you keep messages for up to a specified period of time? I mean deleted and sent items
Michael Bond @kenwalker Email is a communication tool like a phone call. Do you record and archive your phone calls? I delete sent/deleted items daily.
Ken Walker @mbond Fair point. I keep everything indexed and searchable at work, which has saved me from ti… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/yo8lkh
To be more verbose:
Email has its place, but it hasn’t evolved much since the first email message was sent. Its still a simple file that has a series of headers, a body, and possibly a mime attachment. Thats it. You can’t assign meta data to it. Searching and sorting is limited to headers, which may or may not exist depending on where it is from, and the actual content of the email. Some basic meta-data has been hacked on by adding more headers, but different email programs handle them in different ways.
Email, at a quick glance, is a great way to store a lot of information. You can sort it out into folders, based on header information, and you can search for information based on the content of the email. Apple’s Mail.app even takes it a step further and introduces smart folders. All of this is just a brute force effort to keep an aging system in place.
Please for the love of god, stop.
Read the email, if it has information that is worth saving the information is worth moving to another location. If it contains phone numbers, put it in your contact software (Address Book). If it contains dates and appointments, put it into iCal. If it contains action items/todo’s move it to your todo list (Things). If you have documents, put them on your hard drive. If you have receipts, serial numbers, notes, and anything else worth keeping drop it into Yojimbo. Then if you need to search for something later on, use Spotlight searching to find it. You have access too all the Metadata goodness then.
We live in a word where people Twitter all day long, IM each other, Blog, Spend hours cataloging their music, dvd’s, books, and games with metadata off Amazon so its ‘just right’. Their photo’s and home videos get the same treatment of not only tags but geo-tagging and linking to google maps. Yet people are content having their daily lives be completely metadata-less by keeping all of their information in email instead of moving it to specialized databases.
This is just one of my pet-peeves about email. The list goes on, including using email for the wrong reasons. Much like twitter is the wrong place to have a discussion email is the wrong place to send tweats. 2 word “thank you” or “OK” or “I’ll get right on that” emails are a complete waste. PLEASE don’t send them.
Oh, how i long for a true communication solution. 1 Address to send me tweats, emails, instant messages, SMS text messages. A nice XML Format that is easy to parse and use, with lots of future expandability, meta-data out the arse, links out to external applications (think, highlight->right click->send to) and the file system (for attachments). Threaded conversations that involve multiple people. The technology is there, its just that the world is wedded to the aging email and brute forcing new ideas into an old system that was never designed to handle what people want it to do.
Who’s the idiot that decided to disable php.ini’s SMTP variable on linux and assume that everyone can use sendmail off the local box? Apparently, its a windows only setting. So its not that PHP can’t support using an SMTP server, its that they specifically disable that feature on linux. Brilliant.
Enter smtp_mail.php a php class that works similar to mail() but honors what you have set in php.ini. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.
We just launched the redesigned website at WVU Libraries, check it out: http://www.libraries.wvu.edu
That site has taken a significant portion of my time for the past 3 or 4 months, looking forward to starting something new next week.
Back in October there was a slight problem with my shower. It developed a crack in the bottom that was shaped strikingly like my heel. That weekend I tore the shower and carpet out of my bathroom and installed a new shower. The shower, it turned out, was the easy part. Getting a new floor and shower doors proved to be the more difficult aspects of it all.
6 weeks later, my shower doors FINALLY arrive. I installed them Friday night (12/7/2007) and today took my first shower in my brand new shower stall.
3.4 more to go to reach the 100 hour mark.
Since I got my PP Ticket I’ve learned that backups are as important there as well as on my computers. On one of my first flights after my check ride i had an electrical system failure. What I learned from that is that I should be carrying a hand held radio with me when I fly. Picked up the one from Sporty’s with the build in VOR, just in case it happens at night I thought the hand held VOR would be handy in a pinch. I also carry extra batteries for it and my flashlight.
Got me thinking, and I realized I didn’t have a backup of some of the most important data that I have. My Log Books. I don’t want to just photocopy them, I want something kept off site (in case of fire), something that I can print out (so i don’t have to photocopy them), something that will help me keep track of currency, something that i can tag and search, cross platform (windows, mac, linux), and something that I can view from anywhere.
Enter Zululog.com. I’ve had some minor trouble with how their system updates hours, but their support was quick to address those problems. Other than that its seems like the best bang for the buck with online log books. SSL, RSS, Aircraft logs, instructor logs, currency checks, email reports, flight logs, xml/pdf/excel exports.
Zululog’s free account limits you to entering 20 aircraft and only 2 flight instructors, but for most private pilots that is probably enough. If you have a one time rental on an aircraft, and it isn’t for a currency requirement, you don’t have to define it.
This weekend I learned …
- Flying first class is better than flying coach.
- Flying left seat in a Cessna is better than flying first class
- Where my pocket knife has been for 3 months
- Its really easy to get a pocket knife through security at a major airport
- I care about my girlfriend much more than I realized
- I get cranky when I’m tired
- Working out of state from a hotel network isn’t fun
- Colorado is brown, mostly flat, and boring. Looking at the Rocky Mountains was kinda neat though.
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