Pilot's Log

...For those who set archive files into other archive files.

Just before New Year's weekend, I caused a circuit to overload on Rather Manor's box and it took down the hard drive on Precious.  It took a week to get my computer back, and the shop installed a new hard drive with some data recovered from the old one.  Today I bought an external case for the old drive; Precious can recognize that something is plugged in, but not what it is, so that doesn't sound like a good sign to me.  I think I'll need professional help, but I can't afford to get any at this time.

Using my Smartphone to access the 'Net a few hours ago and for some reason it cuts out and goes through a restart.

And just a moment ago I had to do the same rebooting work with Precious.

Something is rotten in that nation between Germany and the Scandinavian Triad.

I'm a net two meals closer to Revolution than I was this time yesterday.

The refrigerator ruined a better part of a pound of sausage overday. We have a problem with condensation or ice crystals that melt then refreeze.

Anybody know a good refrigeration techie on the East side of Tennessee who makes house calls?

With the new wireless system some habits are changing. I'm not using the Internet as often as I was, but I'm more at liberty to keep logged in for longer than I used to...even though I'm still worried somewhat about reliability and the monthly limit AT&T has in place. As I type this, I've just passed 700 Meg on a 5 Gig quota. This is the sixth day of the billing cycle and I haven't even made it to the fifth day budget yet, so I think I'm in good shape to avoid an overage.

I'm on the second try of downloading a movie I've talked about before on this blog. The first try, I went to an Asian website because it's an Asian movie. Bad move. A foreign virus defense program installed itself on Precious and immediately a war broke out between it and the pre-installed antivirus programs already in operation. Had to take some drastic action, including removing the interloper programming, to re-establish peace and tranquility. Second attempt: a torrent. Better move, although I had to shut off a Malware defense program to keep it from blocking seeds from connecting. So far I've got 2.3% of the movie. I'm in no hurry. If it takes me a week or two to get it, that's fine.

My webhost is dropping their dial-up service next week and we've already lost some serviceability today. I'm sending this from the Public Library. Dunno if we'll have a reprieve or some other option soon.

Today was taxi practice, and I got behind the yoke of an operational aircraft for the first time in eighteen years. Took the instructor and myself from the school hangar parking area to the fuel tank farm about two-thirds of the length of the runway away, so the plane could be refueled for all the other students in my class and their practice. And then I taxied us back to where we started after fill-up was done. Probably all of two or three tenths of a Hobbs meter hour.

This autumn has been the season of breakdowns at the school. Before break two weeks ago, the tug tractor got sidelined with contamination of the brake fluid and it's still being fixed. Meanwhile, the vehicle door to the hangar also malfunctioned, and so it had to be repaired today as well.

Tomorrow/thursday is the 101st ("tenthy-first"?) birthday of Evelyn "Mama Bird" Johnson, the founder/still-current CEO of the Morristown airport and a living legend in the world of aviation. The school hangar is hosting her birthday party, so in addition to all the fixing up and learning, we students had to do a lot of tidying of the hangar space nearest the taxiway/runway. We hid the broken tug behind a very large sign; since all four wheels had been removed it would have been impossible to put it anyplace else. Chairs and tables were brought in and moved, the floor soaked and squeegied, the trash cans emptied and re-bagged, loose pieces of aviation hardware relocated to locker rooms and closets. We'll finish the job early in the morning...

...And probably take a test on all the stuff we should have been learning this week. The scholastic life.

Just making sure that you can Now Hear This!--Klinger on M*A*S*H after he repaired the camp's PA system.

Just got the phone lines back. A cable somewhere burnt out in the switching unit that serves Rather Manor, so the repairman from AT&T told us.

Mum's computer is on an enforced vacation, thanks to Microsoft. Because of a hardware glitch/incompatibility issue, I had to re-install the compy's WinXP OS a couple weeks ago. Tried to activate it, and evidently not only did the activation fail, so did my further attempts to work around it. Now the OS is locking us out and we can't even boot her computer in Safe Mode. Tonight I pulled out the hard drive, piggybacked it into my own compy, and saw that the data is safe (so far) but I still don't know how I'm going to adjust Mum's hard drive so the computer can boot again. I won't do any more work on the problem tonight because, well, it never is a good idea to do tech support after midnight if you have the choice. I'll probably do some more piggybacking, pulling data out, putting data in, and trying other methods.

If we had the money, we'd have upgraded BOTH computers to a more modern version of Windows and not have these problems.