When I was a kid, my father spent a lot of time at an airport. Later on he started a business, ‘Bond Aviation’ and became the manager of the airport. In 1986 they closed Flanders Valley Airport to develop on the land.

When I was 14 I began taking flying lessons (the earliest age you are allowed). When I turned 16 I solo’d for the first time. About a year later I took my FAA written test and failed. The last flight in my log book is a cross country solo from Somerset Airport to Atlantic City.

I missed flying and being around an airport. a lot.

May 1st 2007, I walked into flight source at the Morgantown airport and signed up for lessons. Three weeks later I got my solo endorsement, on June 15th I did my first Solo cross country in 10 years. 1.5 hours of night, 1.5 hours of simulated instrument, and 1.2 hours of solo cross country is left to do (and probably a little more practice on my steep turns).

That, and pass my FAA written test. I’ve been reminded why I hate school so much … I REALLY hate studying. I want to be up in the air, not at home in front of the computer taking practice tests or reading about weather and airspaces in my book. I think I’m almost ready to take the written test, I have a list of ground school items I want my CFI to go over with me. After that I just have to do it.

Apparently I am late to the game on this, but …

Last night I discovered a terminal for Linux called Tilda. Its a drop down console, that slides in from the top of the screen. Neat little applications that I immediately fit into my work flow while on Linux. I assigned the hot key to ctrl+` (the default is F1).

I live in the terminal on both Linux and MacOS X, and my usage falls into two categories.

1) Light : i need to type something quick to do something or grab some output. usually a 1 liner, sometimes a couple 1 liners strung together.

2) SSH and Compiling : I have a terminal window open for an extended period of time, to watch the output of a compile or while i’m ssh’d into a remote box.

Tilda fits #1 perfectly. I’m always opening another terminal to type something real quick, then closing it. I generally have 5 or 6 terminals open, ssh’d into various boxes or running something that I need to check on from time to time, so I close the ‘light usage’ terminal when i’m done with it to reduce desktop clutter.

So, I started searching for something like Tilda for OS X. after 15 minutes of searching I came across Visor. Visor is a SIMBL hack that does almost the same thing as Tilda (minus a couple features, like tabs).

Success! Almost. It has a couple of problems.

1) It doesn’t honor color settings from terminal.app … Work around: quit terminal.app; open terminal.app; activate visor; right click in visor and open ‘Window Settings’; adjust everything in there but DO NOT set as default (you don’t want your normal terminal windows to span the screen).

2) Every time you launch terminal.app visor’s height grows by 1 line. There are a couple work arounds out there for this problem, but I wasn’t happy with any of them so here is mine:

• Download visorfix.sh (does the same thing as the little C application off macosxhints.com, but in a shell script.)
• Move it into /usr/bin (so its available to all users)
• Modify your ~/.bash_profile to include the following alias (replacing 25 with the size of your choice):
• alias resetvisor=’defaults write com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal -dict-add Rows 25;visorfix;killall Terminal’
• open a new terminal and type “resetvisor”

Its a bit of a hack, but it seems to fix the problem. Chances are if you find this useful you don’t close terminal.app very often anyway, so you shouldn’t have to run it very frequently.

You’d think there would be an easy reference to this somewhere, but it is spread all over the place. So, here it is for easy reference.

Linking AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Skype from a webpage … the following goes into the href attribute on the anchor tag.

AOLIM : aim:goim?screenname=AIMScreenName

MSN : msnim:chat?contact=PassportID

Yahoo! : ymsgr:im?user=YahooIDHere

Skype : skype:SkypeUserName

*Note: the MSN link only works in the newer versions of the client.

If you know how to link to screen names on other services shoot me an email and I’ll add it.

Concerning Karate …

I’m testing for my brown belt this coming Saturday (April 14th). I’m in the best physical shape that I have been for years. I’m almost 20 pounds lighter than I was 3 months ago, my endurance/stamina is where it was when I was in high school. I have no doubt in my mind that I will still be standing at the end of the test (not something I can claim at the end of my green belt test).

That isn’t to say I’m not worried about the test. It’s one thing to make it through the ordeal, its another to pass it. I know all the material; drills, katas, judo, akido, etc …. I know I know it, but I’m not convinced my technique is good enough to earn a brown belt. I know there is a lot of room for improvement still, and this is blatantly obvious every time I watch the person leading class how much more I can improve.

To say I’m nervous about the test would be an understatement of epic proportions.

Concerning AOLIM …

I was creating new AOL Instant Messenger accounts for librarians yesterday (something I’ve been doing almost weekly for a while now) and noticed that you can now use your existing email address as a AOLIM user name. This is something i’ve been after for a very long time, and was my biggest reason for not using AIM.

I still prefer googletalk over AOLIM, but you can now get a hold of me with AOLIM using ‘mbond@the-forgotten.org‘

Concerning Web Development …

I learned about FireBug today … if you do web development, go get it now. Its crazy cool.

I’ve also been spending time working on a new web page for the Dojo, http://greatmartialartist.com/. As you can see I am not a graphic artist … but the web page is coming along nicely, with a lot of nice features for students when it is done.

Concerning Television …

TV sucks these days. There is hardly anything on to watch … but if you are going to watch TV try to do it in High Def, it really makes a difference.

The new Chiller channel on DirecTV is probably the best channel ever, even if it isn’t in HD.

I’ve been wanting to do more with my website, but lack the motivation to finish all my template software write now to make it possible to do it exactly as I would like. So … i decided to move back to wordpress.
A couple of changes have taken place as a result:

1. Left navigation now seperates Internal (Wordpress Pages) and External (Everything else) links
2. Random links on the top right are gone and replaced with the titles of the last 10 posts. Didn’t like the random links anyway
3. Internal Pages now work the way I originally envisioned them 2 years ago but never got around to doing till now

The changes to the home page, are relatively minor and will continue to get better as I hack on the WP code and refine my template.

The one major disadvantage to word press is that not everything works exactly as I’d like it too, which means hacking code, which means upgrading is more of a pain than it should be. Oh well. I’ve already made about 5 changes, I have another 6 to do before I’ll be happy with it. Other than that the rest will be adding content, particularly to the tech pages.

The blog part of the site will become second to the content on the other pages. Most of what I’ve written in blog posts previously will now be Site pages.

Enjoy.

[update 11/30/2006 : Added a couple more apps to the list.]

Recently received a new Intel PowerMac Pro at work … fast machine. I finally finished getting everything setup on it and feel compelled to share my everyday software list with the world, if for no other reason to than to get the previous blog entry off the main page.

AdiumX : Chat Client, with tabs.

DockStar : Notes email totals in your dock for Mail.App. It can show up to 5 counts on your Mail.App icon at one time. Very handle if you track multiple email accounts.

FileMaker Pro : Database software. Kinda like Microsoft Access, but Filemaker Pro sucks a little less.

Firefox : Best Web Browser out there for ANY operating system. Get it. Now.

Flip4Mac : Windows Media Player plugin for Quicktime. Microsoft no longer develops media player for the Mac, but this is their ‘official’ work around. Seems to work well.

iCliplite : Clip Board tool that sits on your dashboard. Very useful when i’m coding to store multiple passages of code that I may frequently use.

Menu Calendar Clock : This is what the clock in the Mac Status bar should have been. Best part is all the useful features are in the free version.

Microsoft Office 2003 : The only ‘really good’ software Microsoft has ever developed.

Missing Sync : Syncs my palm with iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, iTunes, etc …

NetNewsWire : RSS News Reader

Overflow : Application Launcher. Hit a hot key (user configurable) and up pops the launcher on your screen. Beats having the Application folder in your dock.

Parallels : Just started using this software when I got the new mac. Lets you run a virtual install of another OS in a window, much like VMWare. This means I can have windows running at the same time as MacOS X for those couple Admin tools (user/computer management) that I need at work.

Photoshop : I wish the gimp ran better on OSX than it does. Still requires X11, which really puts me off.

StuffIt Expander : Apparently this free app is no longer included in MacOS X, and MacOS X cannot uncompress .sit files natively. So you get to sign up for spam (they email you a download link) to get this … Or you can click just click here to grab it :-P.

Synergy : iTunes interface. There is lots of software which does this now, I bought this one way back when there were less options so I continue to use it.

TextMate : Best text editor on MacOS X … this is the one that pulled me away from using Emacs on my Mac. I basically live in my text editor (22 textmate windows open right now), i highly recommend this one.

Transmit : sftp/ftp client. Nice client that handles editing with external editors really well. Needed a replacement for Emacs Tramp when I moved to textmate.

VirtueDesktops : Virtual Desktops on MacOS X. Previously I used Codetek’s Virtual Desktop Pro, but it is not yet available in a universal binary and has trouble on Intel Macs. VirtueDesktops lacks some of the features, but seems to do the job well enough until Leopard is released, which will include ‘Spaces’

Yojimbo : Information management. Stores Serial Numbers, passwords, notes, web pages, printed PDFs, and book marks. Lots of software out there that does this, but I think Yojimbo has the best interface … its dead simple to use. I have this open several times a day to retrieve information.

So, I’ve been messing with this site called MacHeist.com. Its a bit of a game, where you solve various puzzles and get some free mac applications and discounts on the final bundle of software (no idea what it is). Currently we are in Week 2, and have had 3 heists (puzzles) to open the vault hiding the free software.

One of the programs to come out of this weeks heist is called 1Passwd. At its roots it is a password manager, but includes things like auto complete on web forms and .Mac sync between multiple computers. Give it a try.

(This message has been brought to you by a possible mini-heist. I don’t endorse or use 1Passwd myself, and i feel really dirty about mentioning something that I don’t use, but it MIGHT get me some free software … everyone has their price, apparently mine is free software –Mike)

UPDATE: Hubert visited and left a link to http://whoishubert.com/ It appears that different people are getting different clues left in their blog comments for the next heist (mini-heist?).

Features I’d love to see on the iPod in the future.

1) Currently pressing the button during a song play back cycles through ratings, length and another length view. To me this is a waste.

Pushing the button should bring up a user definable menu. Here is what i would put on it:

• View Album : Takes you to the track listing for the album that the current song is from
• View Artist : Same thing, but to the artist listing
• Shuffle Toggle : turn shuffle for the play list on and off
• Share Song : See below

2) Volume normalization. Keep the volume the same for all the music automatically. Neuros did this wonderfully. You can do it manually in iTunes, but that kinda sucks.

3) Social Listening. This is the one and only feature of the Zune that I like. It would be great if you could share the current song with someone else. They get to listen to it a couple times then it locks up and they have to buy it from iTMS or whatever.

Got some photos up from our scene at the haunted house this year:

Flickr Set Halloween 2006

Not very many props this year, especially for such a big room, but we don’t need them. Half the people coming through probably don’t even see the props. This year our scene is a complete assault on your senses, then confusing the hell out of them to get the scare.

We’ve gotten more screams and caused more people to cry in terror this year (of ALL ages!) then ever before.

Wanna know more? Come see the show in the Stepping Stones building at Mylan Park every Friday and Saturday during October. Only $6 a person to get in, and it all goes to Stepping Stones.

Crazy Rodent Lady

Hey … she said she wanted to be known as the Crazy Rodent Lady. I felt a strong urge to help out on that one for some reason.

In that regard I encourage everyone to link to http://katiecook.us/blog/ with a Crazy Rodent Lady label.

… Far too many caged rodents in that blog …