Went flying today.

Back from Christmas in Syracuse with the family. I got lots of good new music and tons of books. Certainly enough media to keep me busy for the next twelve months.

It was nice to get away from things for a few days as well and hang out with some good friends that I hadn't seen in far too long. I was careful not to pack my laptop or much of anything that was work-related.

Tomorrow I'm going to check out another flight school to see what they have to offer. Oh - I can fly.

Today I'm using the web as it should be: as a learning tool. I'm absorbing as much as I can about how airplanes work. I've leard about the lift coefficient of wings and the Magnus Effect (see also: Flettner's Rotorship or Jacques Cousteau's turbosail.) Wings actually work a little differently than I was expecting. I'm glad I went looking for more information.

I also wanted to know what in the hell the left and right magnetos were on the ignition switch were and why I had to test them before takeoff on my test flight. Turns out that I knew what they were, I just hadn't seen that term used before. They are just a reliable way of producing the voltage for firing the spark plugs in the motor. They are used in lawn mowers and other small motors, mostly. They are also apparently used in the stone-age Cessna 172 that I was flying in. Reliability is key here, of course, and I remember replacing many a coil in cars when I worked on them. I would hate to have to do that in a plane at 2,000 feet.

By the way, the next time that you need to fly into the San Fransisco area, think about this image.

One of the things that I got for my birthday is a weight bench. Still, I don't think that I'll ever look quite this good.

Asked by agents if he had anything else to tell them, Cusack responded: "Yes, I've got monkeys in my pants."

"I just buy it for the articles."

Last night I fixed a bug that's been bugging me for a long time. Now plugins work with the development version of Gtk (usually referred to as Gtk 2.1.) Looking at the fix, though, it's amazing that this code ever worked at all.

I also went to see the latest star trek movie last night with a bunch of the Ximian guys. (We even went with the other half of the Ximian guys heckling us for doing so, pretentious bastards that they are.) Anyway, it wasn't a bad movie. Certainly not as bad as, say, Star Trek V, but not as good as, say, Star Trek II. I had a lot of fun, and that's what really counts.

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Screenshot of the day:

Found on Warren Ellis' webblog:

Robert A. Heinlein was killed by dance music.

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Excellent spinsanity on inflammatory rhetoric in politics and how lies spread through the media.

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Alternative Web Browsers: Revenge of the Lizard

I sound almost sane in this article.

Jimmy Carter's Nobel Prize speech is wonderful.

Tastes like Cardboard

I'm living some sort of strange middle class pseudo-life. Today: Sleep in. Watch a couple of backlogged episodes of Sports Night. Kind of hack some code. Read email. Admire Mozilla's spam filters. Watch some more TV. Fall asleep on the couch in the wife's armpit. Wake up. Find Ryan. Eat indian food. Come home. Putter aimless on the internet. Not exactly what I would call exciting. Certainly not as exciting as some people's lives. Or even some other people's lives.

The sun china team sent me a beautiful book filled with paper-cut art. I might be compelled to frame some of them and put them on the walls of my small apartment to remind me of exotic, far off and beautiful lands.

I haven't been reading too much recently. The Federalist Papers are still riding my nightstand. I pick it up and read one of the essays in it every couple of days. Even though I find them to be really interesting, they are still in a good run with nyquil in their natural ability to put me right to sleep.

I've also got the O'reilly book on Mozilla sitting there. When I do read it I blast through it pretty quickly since a lot of is really familiar to me. There is some stuff to learn, though. I've never really worked wih XUL/XBL or any real JS or CSS so I'm hoping that it will have something to teach me in that area.

Please sir, can I have some more?

I had an extremely productive day today. I got lots of Mozilla related stuff done including working on a couple of patches, reviewed some other patches, did a lot of triage work, did some driver-related things, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it's going to take to get the Calendar properly built and integrated with the Mozilla builds and various other related items. Whew. I'm ready for a vacation.

The snow outside is quite beautiful, even if it kept scaring the crap out of me as it slid off the roof.

Neat Stuff

An excellent speech by John C. Bogle. When reading this a few things pop into my head:

• I'm glad that I own property instead of large numbers of stocks and bonds. (In fairness I do own a bit of RHAT stock, but not too much.)
• I would have used a much more unfriendly phrase to describe a return on investment based on equity growth as opposed to dividends, namely "pyramid scheme."
• The section titled Ignorant Individuals Lead Expert Professionals . . . into Trouble applies to government as well as to the investment experts.
• Even though some of his theories proved to be wrong, Keynes was still a pretty smart guy.
• That corporate values and methods are a more important investment than those that affect short term stock valuations.
• Numbers are not the final measurement, just a tool.

Hacking

The Mozilla tree is closed for 1.3a. This is going to be the first release with decent gtk2 and xft support. Lots of crashes and bugs have been fixed in the last few weeks since the 1.2 release was cut from the trunk.

I wish I could reproduce this damn focus problem, though. That's a real show stopper.

Holy shit, get your war on no. 17 rocks. "Didn't he get suspicious when he saw Kissenger and John Poindexter licking the blood off each other's hands?"

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Happy thanksgiving from beautiful and sunny Syracuse, New York!

It was nice to take a few days off from work to go see family for thanksgiving and to go to a wedding. I swear, I didn't read a single piece of email even though I did end up looking at the tree once or twice while I was really bored.

The snow (see above) was nice to see for a change. I had forgotten how snowy Syracuse can be and how pathetic snow in Boston really is in comparison. I actually got to slide around with the four wheel drive car a bit. Finally, I've gotten my money's worth.

Driving around I noticed a slight sea change in the way that I view the place that I grew up. Previously, I had always thought of it as returning to a place that I would call home. This time I felt strictly like a visitor. I just happened to know the roads really well, that's all.