metaruss

Today’s lesson started off normal enough.  Then I somehow dropped my pen after I made the call to ground and had no way to write down the instructions, which were complicated enough that I couldn’t remember all the clearances for the read-back.  After I botched that, we got some sort of hint from the tower that I missed to get out on the runway and step on it.  Then on the rotation, I was so focused on what I was doing with the rudder that I released back pressure on the yoke and we sat in the ground effect before I figured out what was going on.

Luckily, things got better after that.  We practiced slow flight in the clean configuration once and then went on to the dirty configuration.  First we wallowed around with various flap settings to give me a feel for it and then he demonstrated slow flight in the landing configuration.  My first try was messy, second try was better but I still couldn’t hold my heading or altitude during the transition.  The turns were awkward, but not a disaster.  I nailed the altitude on the third try and my turns were better, but still lost my heading during the transition due to poor management of the rudder.  Apparently though, I did well enough that he showed me power on and power off stalls and gave me a stab it at.  We always recovered before the stall started, but it was still a challenge as I hadn’t studied the procedures beforehand. I didn’t do them very well, but now I know what I’m in for next time.

He said my landing was good…if you say so Mr. CFI! It was a blur to me. I need to relax more. That is a big part of my trouble with the rudder. I’m pushing on both pedals so hard that I can barely stand when I get out of the plane.

I started flight training today with a CFI from Boraam Aviation at KPWK.  Since I’ve only flown once before for any length of time, there are a lot of new experiences happening all at once.  Learning basic maneuvers while still getting a feel for flying in the first place makes it easy to forget things and difficult to relax.  Relaxing is important to get that feel in the first place.

He showed me the pre-flight process (which I will have to do next time).  Then I did the start-up, taxi, and run-up.  Taxiing is a real struggle.  Managed to do the take-off, but I was all over the place.  Did some basic level flight, turns to a heading, climbing and descending turns, and (with a lot of instruction) the landing.  I was pretty burned-out by the end.  Next time it’s slow flight.

The 152 is down for maintenance, so I flew in N9831G today.  It’s also a 1979 Cessna 172N like the one I did my discovery flight in.  Neither airplane is pretty, but they seem to be well maintained.  They do the job.

Took a discovery flight with the CFI that I think I will be using. He’s professional and laid-back. The flight school is Boraam Aviation at Chicago Executive Airport (KPWK).  They are down-to-business, no-frills school which works for me.  This flight was in one of their two 1979 Cessna 172N airplanes, though I would probably use their 152 for training.

I’ve been using Linux Mint for years now. Like a lot of people, I switched around the time that GNOME and Ubuntu set out to gaslight the world about how everything about their workflows have been wrong for all this time. I tried GNOME Shell, but with each passing release they stripped more and more useful functionality from it. Linux Mint kept the GNOME 2 torch lit and eventually offered both MATE (a GNOME 2 fork) and their own Cinnamon (GNOME 3 based) desktop variants. I liked what Cinnamon had to offer, but it was a bit buggy and I so stuck with MATE instead.

Cinnamon continued to improve and at some point I decided to switch over to it. I was able to recreate most of my workflows, but one thorn in my side was that at some point they replaced the workspace names in the switcher with these useless numbers. It was either that or a tiny thumbnail of the desktop. I use workspaces in a very specific way that helps me keep my trains of thought in order and the naming convention is a big part of that. Thinking this was just temporary, I modified the JavaScript to bring back the names instead of numbers and kept reapplying the patch every time Cinnamon got upgraded.

Here we are years later and the silly thing is still broken! I sent the patch to dev that made the original change, but they didn’t take it because it has a one major flaw: the width of the buttons is hard-coded. I suspect this is the real reason behind why the simple view only shows the number. It’s tricky to know how to set the width, as it depends on the font being used, DPI, etc. I assumed there was some “proper” way to do this, but I guess not?

Anyway, I’m posting the patch here in case anyone wants it. If you want wider/narrower buttons, just change the constant at the top.

• workspace-switcher@cinnamon.org.patch

Things changed with our previous data center such that it is no longer a viable option. Thanks again to iMav for hosting me previously. It was great while it lasted.

I’ve moved everything again to my own virtual private server over at 1&1. I’m done with shared virtual web hosting, as the database performance is horrid and the setup limitations are annoying (I need to host several sites). So far, it has been working great….

Some reading while I’m on the mend.  This book is more about the physics and mechanical aspects of flight.  It does have some procedural stuff, but it is more of a fun read than some of the other books.

It can be downloaded for free at the FAA website.

The CSX has been up on jack stands for about 8 years.  Life has a way of rearranging priorities.  However, I was either going to cobble it back together or haul it off on a trailer.  Either way, it had to move.  I aborted all upgrade plans, slapped my only spare working head and turbo on there and drove it.  It still burns oil, so at least I know that the bottom end is truly done.  Poor thing.  Some day, I hope to give it the attention it deserves….

After almost 8 years of daily driving service, the Daytona was taken off the street for some badly needed attention.  The motor had been having oil system problems for a while: low pressure and was losing oil into the coolant and other places rather rapidly.  The body is also showing its age.

I’ve since swapped the motor for the original 2.2L Turbo I motor from my old 1988 Shadow.  It still runs as smooth as I remember.  I’m not sure how the Mitsu will behave with that giant, triple-core intercooler.  I had some interesting issues with boost oscillation in the Shadow when I was using a Conquest intercooler.  I am confident that a grainger can be used with a mixed pressure signal from the manifold (which causes oscillation) and turbo outlet (which causes creep) to keep the boost steady.  The cal is a stock 1987 CSX cal right now and the trans is a stock 1990 A523 with the OEM Turbo II clutch that held well in the Shadow.

I had upgraded my MythTV back and front ends recently from version 0.24 and ran into some annoyances:

• The MediaMonitor has a new dependency on the udisks daemon, even if you don’t use the Media Monitor feature.  Without it, Myth had very poor behavior when trying to eject optical media.  The eject option in the menu would just display a dialog saying “No devices to eject.”  Also, the physical eject button would get disabled after playing the disk even though I could eject it from a terminal with “eject” as the mythtv user.  The fallback in MediaMonitor::ejectOpticalDisk() seems to be useless.
• My carefully-crafted channel lineup for Comcast became non-functional.  This is such a tedious process that i still haven’t gotten around to fixing it.  Right now, my digital tuners are recording programs that can’t actually be tuned.

Thanks to the generosity of iMav at geekhack.org, I now have some real hosting for my sites.  So long, GoDaddy.

In other news, the new version of WordPress breaks an old plugin that I forgot I was using (PhotoJar).  I relied on its shortcode quite heavily, so many of my embedded photos no longer show up.  I will probably have to write some PHP glue to restore old posts.