Thanks to Paul Tomblin for pointing out that I managed to break comments with a clumsy attempt at customizing Spam Karma. They should be working again now, if you wanted to say anything about recent postings.
I’m going to be grounded for a long time — possibly a few months — so I might not be posting much to this blog. After reattaching my overhauled and tested propeller, the shop was unable to complete a compass swing with either of two different compasses. It turns out that my plane has become heavily magnetized from the lightning hit (which I am now fairly certain happened while the plane was parked). A compass will deflect heavily towards the front part of the plane anywhere a few feet of it.
The good news is that Cherokees are mostly aluminum (and the firewall is stainless steel), so the problem is localized. Planes with steel frames, like the Mooney or most rag-and-tube planes, are extremely difficult to degauss, and are sometimes scrapped after become magnetized. In my plane, the main steel structures that could be magnetized are the engine mount, the crankshaft, and the nose strut, so the plane is probably repairable, though the insurance company may still decide to write it off.
More importantly, though, since the plane is unusually heavily magnetized, it’s almost certain that a strong electrical current passed through the engine block. That means that the engine has to be removed from the plane, shipped to Toronto, and completely disassembled and magnafluxed. Depending on how busy the shops are, I might not see my plane for a few months. I’m grateful right now that I have a helpful insurance broker who’s dealing with the adjuster on my behalf, and I’m also grateful that I took the picture of the prop that I published here earlier.
I’m starting a new category in this weblog, canada-us. Postings added to this category will talk about how flying differs between the two countries, including regulations, culture, and so on. Vive la différence!
Even a relatively patient person like me eventually gets tired of deleting comment spam. I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1, and installed the highly-recommended SpamKarma plugin. Hopefully, this will allow legitimate comments to appear immediately, without waiting for moderation, while filtering out all of the Online Poker ads. Please let me know (somehow) if your comments are being blocked incorrectly.
I’ve been a bit overwhelmed dealing with comment and traceback/pingback spam on my two blogs, sometimes having to delete up to 50 a day (mostly in the moderation queue, fortunately). My first impulse was to ban comments completely, since most people who leave comments already have their own blogs, and can carry on discussions that way.
However, I do think that comments and pingbacks are valuable, so I’ve come up with a compromise: I will allow comments for all postings in the current and previous month, but close older postings to comments. I’ll still have to deal with a bit of spam, and you won’t be able to comment on very old postings, I think that this approach will work for everyone.
How do people on commercial services, like Blogger, deal with comment spam? Do you spend a measurable amount of time every day deleting it?
[Updated: Bloglines OK] At the request of a couple of users, I’m going to experiment with switching this weblog to a fulltext RSS feed. I had been reluctant to do that because some of the posts are fairly lengthy, but it won’t hurt to try. Please leave a comment to let me know about any problems you may have.
I just noticed that WordPress is putting the full content for the RSS 2.0 feed into an RSS 1.0 encoded element, while the RSS 2.0 description element still contains only a summary. That is not what I expected — Bloglines, for example, seems to still be showing summaries, though I haven’t tried updating an old, longer posting to see what happens. Liferea on my desktop is showing the full text now.
I guess I’ll have to mess around with some WordPress PHP templates to put the full text into description, where (I think) it belongs.
Update: Bloglines is showing full text for new postings, but not for older ones. That’s probably OK.
Land and Hold Short has just moved from a hacked-up homemade system to WordPress, an excellent Open Source weblog manager. The new system has search, trackbacks, pingbacks, user comments, and many other features, so it should make reading the blog a lot more fun. I’ve done some .htaccess work to make sure that old permalinks keep working: please leave a comment if you find anything that’s not working or if you have any configuration suggestions. I’ll work on coming up with a custom theme later — just moving the old postings over was enough work for one Saturday afternoon. I’d also be grateful for category suggestions.
Note, too, that all old posts are (at the time of writing) commentless, because user comments were not possible until today.
While the readership for this blog is still…shall we say…extremely modest, the blog has somehow crawled its way up to the #1 result on Google for the search phrase “land and hold short,” ahead of more worthy targets such as the AOPA brief on land and hold short operations (perhaps my link will help push AOPA’s page back up). If there are any air accidents because pilots clicking on I’m feeling lucky got my page instead of the AOPA bulletin, well, I guess they weren’t so lucky after all.
It’s always fun to see a specialized use of a common word or phrase make it to the top of Mt. Google, as is the case with the Simple API for XML, beating out the common short form of “saxophone” for a Google search for “sax“, and Tim Bray’s Ongoing blog, topping out the Google results for “ongoing“. No points, of course, for coining something new, like “Slashdot” or “Kazaa”. Similarly, it’s to be expected that Cessna would have the top hit for the search “cessna“, but the fact that The New Piper, perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, has the top Google result for “piper” is probably leaving a lot of bagpipers seething and stomping in their kilts.
If you are reading this feed in an RSS feed reader/amalgamator, please change the syndication URL to http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso.xml. The previous URL, lahso.rss, is not getting the right MIME type from my provider, and I haven’t made much progress getting them to fix the problem. Just about everyone will serve out a *.xml file as application/xml, and that should keep all of the amalgamators happy. Apologies for the trouble. The old *.rss file will stay available for a short while to give people time to change over.
Welcome to Land and Hold Short, a weblog dedicated to light aircraft and general aviation. I’ll be writing both for other pilots and owners, and for aviation-curious members of the general public who’d like to escape their desks for a few minutes and come on up into the clouds.
I am an instrument-rated private pilot with 350 hours in my logbook as of September 2004. That makes me a relative newbie, and certainly not someone in a position to start preaching to other pilots about how they should fly. I am also finishing my second year of aircraft ownership, flying a 1979 Piper Warrior II (a member of the Piper Cherokee PA-28 family). Fortunately, since I’m self-employed, I do get a chance to fly a lot, and I will include trip reports, airport reviews, and pictures among the postings.
If this is not the ugliest weblog you’ve ever seen, then you have my pity: I cannot imagine what else you might have endured. My first goal is to get this weblog online and make it easy to update, using a homegrown hack of XSLT and make on a Linux box. I’m always going to concentrate on content before beauty, but I will try to find time to throw together a decent CSS stylesheet and make these pages a little easier to look at. Please bear with me.
Update (2004-10-18): I’ve started adding clumsy CSS styles.
The title of this weblog comes from the Land and Hold Short Operations (LAHSO) used at busy airports with intersecting runways: the control tower is allowed to use two runways at the same time as long as one of the pilots agrees to land and stop before reaching the intersection. Big jet airliners cannot usually accept these because they burn a lot of runway, so it’s the small planes — the subjects of this weblog — that usually land and hold short.
I plan to post new entries at least weekly, and more often when I have the chance.