Information Echo

Well, how about that, one minute my blog is history, and the next, two posts in the day, this one even being a bona-fide aviation related post!

I was on the road this week (in Montreal at the time if I remember correctly) when I first heard about the now infamous “Kid in the control tower” incident. I was surprised when I checked Google Reader later in the evening to see that this wasn’t a huge topic of discussion in the aviation blogosphere. Yes, there was posts, but not that many.

However, today I came across this blog entry by Brian over at “Grounded Pilot”.

Brian indicates that he doesn’t see it as a big deal, and wow, I couldn’t disagree more. I think that the almost universal condonement of this situation speaks volumes about how most others feel about the situation, but let me rebut Brian’s comments:

All the planes were on the ground

Yes, but history has proven that accidents (and major ones, at that) can happen as the direct result of ground movements - runway incursions being a huge one. When I was a student pilot long before I was licenced the first time I ever touched the radio and broadcasted the first time my instructor was adamant that I realized this was serious stuff. Yes, I wasn’t going to be chastised if I choked on terminology or took a few seconds longer then I should to communicate something, but the fact that it was communicated clearly and effectively was of utmost importance.

Sorry, a child does not have the ability to hold those standards.

The controller could interrupt his child if something was going wrong

Sure, if he catches it. I’d like to believe that the actual controller was watching the kid like a hawk, but it only takes a split second for something to go wrong on the ground or in the air.

The pilots knew ahead of time a child would be transmitting

I’ll admit that I wasn’t aware of this fact, but it doesn’t change my overall opinion that allowing this whole situation to begin with was a huge lapse in judgement.

Perhaps my response there was a little off the wall and some might suggest that my analogy was a huge stretch, but I’m sorry, there are just certain things that children should not be doing no matter how much oversight or monitoring is happening (or not) behind the scenes - air traffic control is one of those things.

Although only a few people actually noticed, my domain was expired (and on a 30 day hold) for the last several weeks. I had seriously considered letting it lapse since I was no longer sure that my blog held a lot of personal or public value, and perhaps it was time to move on.

I have considered for the last six or eight months that my blog had went out of focus and was becoming disinteresting, but since my blog was at one point primarily oriented towards my flying activities (something I’ve drifted away from) I never really thought of much else as being in-focus. Basically, I didn’t want it to become a place where I posted mindless banter about things that I was personally assured 99.9% of the public wasn’t interested in reading.

However, I went back and read a number of my old flying related posts and reviewed the page hits I still receive for man of them, presumably from other student pilots or dreamers, and decided otherwise - even though my current banter is probably of little interest, apparently my old banter still is.

And if my current banter seems uninteresting, well, I sat back and realized that many of the other personal blogs I follow are strikingly similar, and I quite enjoy reading almost all of them. So perhaps my personal viewpoints were wrong. And of course, I’m not forcing anyone to read what I write.

All that said, short of my old aviation related posts that people still routinely find courtesy of Google, I think I’m writing to an audience of about 10.

So, for at least another year, oshawapilot.ca lives on.

Looking back on the last few years worth of blog posts it seems I never made a resolutions post since 2007. That’s probably a good thing considering my results from the last time I did.

A quick roundup of my 2009.

- My job was unstable and in the spring a sense of doom and gloom hung over not only me, but many of my fellow employees. Many of us (including myself) have returned to stable employment once again, but many others are still unemployed, or only working occasionally.

- Total hours flown, zero. I haven’t flown PIC since May 7′th, 2007. Looking back on that and realizing that it’s now approaching 3 years since I unofficially stopped flying it a bit surprising. Do I miss the stress of trying to stay current all the time given the renters policy at my airport? No. Do I miss the cost? No. Do I miss stressing about the weather, hoping it will play nice for when I scheduled a flight? No.

Do I miss flying at all? Yes.

I guess the last answer speaks volumes, but I don’t anticipate the situation changing in 2010 - costs have only gone up, my free time has officially gone down dramatically with changes to my job, and the spare time that we will have this year will be consumed with the horses and RV’ing. My medical is still technically valid from a year standpoint, but probably temporarily invalidated by some medications I’m currently taking, so in the end it’s all rather moot anyways.

- Speaking or horses, we got back into them in a big way in 2009 and both me and my daughter (if not other family members) have enjoyed it immensely. It’s amusing to listen to many people exclaim how expensive horses must be only to compare it to flying in my mind and have a little chuckle about the comparison. Horses are expensive, yes. Flying is vastly more expensive.

- RV’ing will continue to be a primary focus for the summer of 2010, I’m sure. We’ve officially travelled coast to coast now (Vancouver BC in 2008 and Prince Edward Island in 2009) and are now looking for alternative destinations. There’s more coasts, but I don’t have any interest in driving to the Arctic Ocean, so that probably means our next big trip will be south, possibly either early this year, or late fall - nobody wants to drive into the hot weather when it’s just as hot here. Both my wife and I are lucky to have quite a lot of vacation time, so this leaves some flexibility to break it up into one short trip in the summer, and perhaps the longer one in the fall. Time will tell.

So, looking back on things in general, the beginning of 2009 was rotten for reasons I have (and haven’t) mentioned here, but ended on a much more positive note. Lets see how 2010 goes.

I recently purchased a modestly expensive software package for my Mac. It won’t take much hunting on my blogs recent posts to figure out what that application is.

However, it’s simply still not working. I was promised an impending update (which I patiently waited numerous weeks for) would fix the issue, but it didn’t. I was them promised that another point-release would fix the issue, which it didn’t. If anything, it made it worse - the software crashes hours into it’s task now, instead of days in.

Either way, all cumulative work done up to that point is effectively lost each and every time it fails. We’re talking in excess of 100-150 hours of consistent processing and bandwidth consumption.

So what do I do? If I purchased the software at retail I’d probably shove it all back in the box and return it to the retail location. But alas, I purchased this software online.

So, I requested that the developer rescind my activation key and process a refund. I don’t think that asking for a refund on an application that isn’t working as advertised is out of the realm of fair. Clearly this software doesn’t work for me, and likely isn’t going to anytime soon, so it holds zero value for me at this point - I won’t continue to attempt to use something that is broken, especially when I have something so critical and time-consuming involved with it’s use.

However, now the developer is blaming the failures on my FTP host. Failing that, it’s my computer - not enough memory, or two large of a set of source files.

Requirements for excessively gross amounts of system memory, or limitations on the size of source files I could use were not disclosed. My hardware is maxed out on memory, and the suggestion that my source files are too large (when in reality others are likely to attempt MUCH larger amounts) seems asinine.

And in the end, my polite (at this point) request for a refund is being denied.

What do I do?

I’ve had an ICQ instant messenger account since the early days of instant messaging. I remember the day I signed up (and coaxed a friend into doing the same) and thought it was such a cool ability to be able to message someone instantly from computer to computer. Email suddenly seemed so slow in comparison.

Of course, these were the days of dial-up internet so unless your friends were actively online (and had their ICQ program turned on) it was often of limited usefulness, but as the years wore on and always-on internet became a reality I used it more and more. At one point ICQ seemed to be the defacto standard for anyone wanting to instant message.

However, as the years have continued to soldier on, it also became outdated. MSN took over for the PC crowd, and ICQ seemed kludgy in comparison, forcing people to use often hard to remember numeric ICQ numbers instead of simply associating your IM account to your email address like MSN. Along with problematic client programs that for may years didn’t include such basics as the ability to control spammers on the ICQ network, it drew the ire or many, and they left early.

I used AIM for a number of years simply because (at the time) it was the only IM client that my mobile phone supported, but since moving to the iPhone I’ve migrated primarily to Google Chat, along with almost everyone else that I regularly talk to via IM.

Although I use a multi-client IM client (Adium) which allows me to keep all of my legacy accounts online, I’m wondering if it’s time to thin the herd a little. I don’t recall having received a message via ICQ in at least a year now, if not two or more, yet my ICQ account is still always online.

AIM still serves a purpose occasionally, but almost all of my AIM friends are duplicated in Gchat now so I have multiple people who show up on my IM list in duplicate, making it seem unnecessary.

I have only one YIM friend, and they recently got a Gmail account, making YIM effectively useless for me now as well.

MSN? I still have a few stragglers (mainly those in the PC crowd who prefer Hotmail to Gmail and as such don’t have Gchat accounts) that I can continue to justify it.

So, AIM, YIM & ICQ, this might be the end of the road for you.