Random thoughts about late afternoon flights from PHL in August

Last night I flew from Philadelphia to Seattle on what was scheduled as a late afternoon flight.

Being an experienced traveler, I knew this was a dicey proposition. In late August and early September, Philadelphia (PHL) can take a pounding from thunderstorms. This means a traveler should prepare for delays.

When I arrived at the airport, the weather looked pretty good. Unfortunately the weather deteriorated and a thunderstorm entered the area the flight controllers care about. What this means is the airport would not allow planes to take off until 10 minutes after the last recorded lightening strike. Kind of random.

What this means is we passengers got to sit on the ground for two hours. First we could not get pushed back from the gate, then we were pushed back but got to sit some more, and then when the right runway was open we had to wait for our turn. By the time the flight was airborne and the flight attendants were able to start their food and beverage service, the passengers on the plane were famished. One European guy was raving about how he'd never fly on that airline again.

Lucky me, on this flight I was sitting in the very last row of the plane. Good old Row 31. By the time the food service arrived, all that was available were cans of Pringle's chips. (Now, don't get me wrong. Since the 1970's I have appreciated Pringles as being right up there with Slim Jims as necessary precursors to the introduction of Soylent Green). Some of the more popular flavors of soft drinks were gone, too.

This is where I, as a seasoned traveler, was able to shine. For a drink I asked for ginger ale, and I pulled food out of my backpack. No problems.

So, as an experienced traveler, what are you expected to bring on a flight these days:

• Sanitizing hand wipes / or hand sanitizer (e.g. 62% ethyl alcohol)
• Toilet paper
• Enough food for 12 hours
• Your personal meds

I debate with myself about bringing my own water. My last flight at Dallas convinced me I should always take water with me. But in the higher latitudes that might not be so necessary.

Anyway, if you bring sanitizing hand wipes you are covered if the plane's water supply is exhausted. Same for the toilet paper. As for the food, you have to be smart about what you bring. Don't bring something salty, or really smelly, or something that requires a lot of space.

That's it for this blog. I am not out of material to write about, but I am out of time.

Buck Fusion, signing off.

Dubious Achievement Award – The Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

In the song “Wanted Man,” Johnny Cash sang

I've had all that I wanted of a lot of things I've had
And a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad

Sounds to me like Mr. Cash could have been singing about Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulbs.  You might say that the spark of inspiration for this blog entry occurred when two CFLs (pictured below) burned out within a day of each other.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that the longevity of CFLs is uneven. Manufacturers claim a CFL can last up to 9 years.  This is true. At the Fusion household we have five working CFLs I purchased way back at the turn of the century.  On the other hand, since that time I think I have replaced enough CFLs in other fixtures to fill a box car. Or, maybe a landfill.  I don’t know.

It is this nagging thought that I am wasting money on CFLs that I find annoying.  I need to perform a cost/benefit analysis.  My solution is to start marking the CFLs with an in-service date.  After a while I will have enough data to see if a pattern exists.  Maybe the average life span of a CFL is only 6 months, maybe 12. Since I am using about 20 bulbs in the house, I figure that in a year or two I’ll have enough data to whip out a Google chart that visually presents a stunning revelation.

Meanwhile, I am going to read up on LED bulbs and their total cost of ownership.

Eventually, I think we will all look back at the mass deployment of CFLs as a dubious achievement.  I am not sure that a net savings in energy was achieved.  CFLs cost more than incandescent bulbs, cost more to dispose of, and appear to have a low duty cycle.

It is apparent to me that CFLs are a transitional technology.  As a consumer I can only hope that over time LED light bulbs prove a better buy.

24 hours with an inadequate camera

So I found myself in Richmond, British Columbia with my trusty Blackberry 8100.  Not much to write about, really, but what an opportunity to explore the outer limits of a 1 megapixel camera.

I arrived around dusk and the first thing I did after checking into the hotel was take a picture.

As you can tell, a leaden sky combined with dusk made for tough imaging with this camera.  But that was nothing compared to full blown night:

The following day the light was a lot better.  I placed the old Blackberry in about the same place at about the same time in the evening and snapped a picture:

Sometimes the right amount of sunlight and a little bit of work with Picasa can make an iffy picture tolerable.

The key to taking pictures with a crappy camera is to get as close to the subject as possible and use the best possible light.

Range Day!

If the day starts with black coffee and really terrible tasting home-made sourdough bread, then range day has arrived on Bainbridge Island.

Sometimes range day does not involve shooting.  Oh, sure, most of the time range day involves shooting, but sometimes it involves swinging a hammer or lending a hand to improve the range.

For example, the Bainbridge Island Sportsmen’s Club (BISC) is in the middle of a huge number of improvements. This grand old club was founded in 1929 and has roared along in good times and bad.  Over the last 80 years, the club has configured and reconfigured its ranges.  The club’s membership has always pulled through by donating time, money, and labor.

For decades the BISC had “blue sky” rifle and pistol ranges.  Then, in 2003, someone shot a little too high and send a bullet into a neighbor’s garage.  Oops.  That little lapse in skills and etiquette resulted in major improvements to the pistol range and rifle range.  The pistol range, in particular, was re-designed to act as a giant bullet trap.

Fast forward to 2009.  The BISC is improving the facilities again.  One of the facilities getting a facelift is the pistol range.

This time the walls of the shooter area are being filled with rocks and dirt.  This will act as a bullet stop in case someone has an accidental discharge while pointing a firearm at a weird angle relative to the range.  As you can see, there is a lot of work yet to be accomplished.

Everyone who belongs to a shooting range ought to help maintain it.  If that means writing a check or buying materials or swinging a hammer, do it.  You might pick up new skills, forge new business relationships, make new friends, and have fun!

Yet another way to format a thumb drive

Every now and then I really need to format a thumb drive on my Asus 701.  It occurred to me that someone else might need to know how to do this, and so I decided to write the procedure down in my blog.

As you know, the Asus 701 is ancient (it was made in 2007). I figure it has a few good years left though, especially since I put Easy Peasy 1.0 on it. Easy Peasy is just a freshened and lightened version of Ubuntu 8.10.  

The objective of this post is to format a thumb drive that will work with Windows.

For this experiment, I chose to use a 2GB thumb drive.  The reason for this is partially technical, and partially for convenience.  I plan on formatting the thumb drive with FAT32, and that limits me to using a smaller thumb drive.  To format a USB thumb drive (and make it bootable), the first thing to do is open a terminal window and enter on the command line:

tail –f /var/log/messages

Then plug in the USB stick.

After the USB stick is inserted, a number of lines will be added to the log.  In this case, you will want to look for a line that says something like:

Aug 8 14:01:11 mongo-laptop kernel: [8719.929102] sdc: sdc1

(Although depending upon your system the line may just say “[sdc]” or “sdc” or “sdb: sdb1”).

I usually break out of this by pressing ^C.

Next up: read how to control the fdisk command.

info fdisk

man fdisk

Now we unmount the drive:

umount /dev/sdc1

and then get serious about nuking the partition geometry:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc

At the fdisk prompt you access the built-in help library by entering “m” (don’t ask me why, it isn’t intuitive to me, either). Oddly, the built-in help commands are not listed in the info or man pages.

So, the bits of information we will glom onto are:

a toggle a bootable flag
p prints the partition table
d deletes partitions
n creates new partitions
w write table to disk and exit

Now we are going to wipe out the previous partitions on the thumb drive.  We press p to print the partition table. This returns:

Disk /dev/sdc: 2002 MB, 2002747392 bytes
32 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1940 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 = 1032192 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3d260674

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id System
/dev/sdc1   *           1        1940     1955488+   6 FAT16

Now that we know the layout of the thumb drive, we delete all the partitions.  Press d to delete the partition.

To verify the partition was deleted, press p to see the partition layout.

The time has arrived to add a new partition.  This is accomplished by pressing n, then p (for primary partition), then entering a 1 to assign the partition, then entering a 1 to set the location of the first cylinder, then press the Enter key to accept the default end cylinder.

We aren’t quite done with the layout of partitions.  Now we type a to toggle the boot flag and then enter 1to make the thumb drive bootable.

Now we enter w to write all this to the thumb drive.

The operating system re-reads the partition table and syncs the disks.

Again, unmount the thumb drive:

umount /dev/sdc1

Now we add a file system.  This involves using the mkfs.vfat utility: 

sudo mkfs.vfat –F 32 /dev/sdc1

(But remember that my system likes “sdc1” but your system might use a different identifier).

(Hey, if you want to format the thumb drive for use under Linux, try this: sudo mkfs.ext3 –b 4096 /dev/sdc1 )

Now unplug the thumb drive and insert it into the system.  This will cause the file manager to display the drive.  Right click on the drive and select properties to see the volume name, location, free space, etc.

You are done!

Asus 701 / EasyPeasy Printer Madness

The time arrived for me to format a USB thumb drive on my Asus 701 running EasyPeasy 1.0.  Naturally, this caused me to veer off into installing a new printer on the system.  Sigh.  Being easily distracted does have its drawbacks.

Task: Install Epson WorkForce 600 printer & queue on an Asus 701 running EasyPeasy 1.0.

Driver location:

http://linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Epson-WorkForce_600

Process:

First, Read instructions on installing drivers at www.linuxfoundation.org Web site. 

Then…

Open the Synaptic Package Manager to install the Linux Standard Base 3.2 support package (LSB).

After the packages are downloaded, installation occurs.  The first question to answer is about the system mail. I selected “no configuration” to leave the mail system unchanged.

After this, add the OpenPrinting.org repostitory to the Synaptic Package Manager.  To do that, click on Settings > Repositories > Third-Party Software > Add; then add the following APT line:

deb http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/debian/ lsb3.2 main

and close the dialog box. 

This triggers the “Repositories changed” dialog box to open. The dialog box informed me that I needed to click on the “Reload” button.  After that completed, I…

Performed a search for “foomatic-db-gutenprint” and marked the package for installation. I then marked the additional required changes (addition of ijsgutenprint) and clicked Apply > Apply to download the two extra packages.

At the www.LinuxPrinting.org Web site, I navigated to Home > Database > Printers > Epson > WorkForce 600 and clicked on the driver “x86 32 bit (DEB for LSB 3.2)” link.  This caused FireFox to ask me if I wanted to open the file with GDebi Package Installer.  I said to save the file. This triggered the downloading of a 17.7 MB GutenPrint project file.

I navigated to where the file was saved and right clicked on it to install with GDebi.  This triggered the opening of the software installer, and that presented a dialog box saying “Same version is available in software channel. You are recommended to install the software from the channel instead.”  In this case I closed the dialog box and clicked on Install Package. 

After the drivers were installed, that triggered the Update Manager to wake up. I clicked on the “Update” button.   The Update Manager decided the Asus 701 was up-to-date.

So, the time arrived to really, really, install the printer.

To install the printer, starting from the Easy Peasy main menu I went to Administration > Printing > Server > New > Printer > “Select Connection” Devices Epson WorkForce 600 > Forward.  This causes a search for drivers to occur.  When the search completed, the “select printer from database” radio button was selected and the “Epson” make was highlighted.  I clicked on the Forward button.  The WorkForce 600 model was selected for me and I chose the driver for “Epson WorkForce 600 - CUPS+Gutenprint (OpenPrinting LSB 3.2) v5.2.3 Simplified [en] (recommended)” and clicked on the Forward button.

I gave the short name of the printer as “epson_wf600” and made the Description as “Epson WorkForce 600” but left everything else the same.  Then I clicked on the Apply button.

Lo and behold, a printer named epson-wf600 appeared!

I right clicked on the printer icon, clicked on Properties, then clicked on “Print Test Page.”  The test page printed without incident.

Now, what was I doing before I started this task? Oh yeah, formatting a thumb drive…

NOAA ship base to move to Newport OR

This afternoon I nearly spit my snack of flatbread and olive tapenade across the table when I read that NOAA is moving its ship base from Seattle to Newport, OR.

“Oh, that’s just great,” I thought. “Scoop and Warren must be spinning in their graves.”  I mean, Secretary Locke, the guy who runs the Department of Commerce was a two term Governor of Washington.  Senator Maria Cantwell “chairs the Senate subcommittee overseeing NOAA.”  Can Olympia, Seattle, and the big kahunas in D.C. ever get their act together?

I mean, hello!  This is not the first time Washington State lost something unique and irreplaceable. Does anyone remember Boeing relocating its HQ to Chicago?  What about the Sonics leaving?  Now, because Seattle can’t figure out how to rebuild and improve a burned up pier, Oregon gains a fantastic facility and loads of glory.

Why does ol’ Bucky even care about the move of the NOAA ship base to Newport?  A long time ago I worked for NOAA and worked aboard the MILLER FREEMAN.  The boat is mostly devoted to fisheries research.  In plain English, this means the MILLER FREEMAN is a fishing trawler.  No, not like a Russian “fishing trawler,” the MILLER FREEMAN really does catch fish.

Personally, I understand NOAA’s decision completely.  Food wise there isn’t much around the Seattle ship base except a Thai restaurant, an Azteca Mexican restaurant, and Hooter’s of Lake Union (a long, walk too).  In short, the location of the ship base sucks.  And that was before the pier burned down to the waterline.

Now, compare that with the facilities around Newport, OR.  What’s going to be near the new NOAA ship base?   Brewer’s on the Bay, that’s what! So, yeah, considering the indifference on the part of Washington’s elected pols, I can see NOAA moving its ship base to Newport.

Well done, Oregon!