Last weekend I took some time off from feeling low for a chance to feel high. My pilot friend Googled his way to my webpage while he was looking for info on the old Raleigh Municipal Airport. Anyhow, he invited me up for a flight and who am I to refuse?

We left from Southern Jet at 9 AM last Sunday. The RDU airport, normally a bustling hive of aircraft activity, was still sleeping. Sunday mornings are quiet at most any airport. The sun was blazing and the sky was dotted with puffy clouds as Justin went through his pre-flight checklist.

Justin is fortunate to own his own plane, a 1963 Piper Cherokee. He’s crammed it with the latest IFR equipment and crammed his brain with the skills to use it. Typical for any subject Justin studies, he’s done in two years what some people take decades to do.

Anyhow, we left the ground and decided that our first stop should be for gas. Justin plugged in coordinates for the Siler City airport and off we went. Once out of ATC airspace Justin turned the controls over to me. Though we were skimming over the clouds at 4000 feet, the air was silky smooth. It made me look like a good pilot or something.

As we approached Siler City the cloudcover got a bit more dense. Justin found a clearing and we touched down at Siler City, a sleepy airport with little in the way of attractions other than cheap AV gas. Justin popped his card into the pay-at-pump gas pump and told me how once he was landing there and nearly smacked into a farmer driving his tractor across the runway. Apparently the airport is so quiet, even the locals don’t know its there.

From there it was off to Sanford, the home of the Wings of Carolina Flying Club and where Justin got his training. At the plane’s 120+ MPH ground speed it didn’t take us long to touch down. Justin ran into one of the club’s flight instructors and traded stories with him for a short time. Like fishermen with their fish stories, every pilot has a tale to tell. I’ve never met a pilot who didn’t love to talk about flying.

After Sanford we made a beeline to do a quick flyover of my home in Garner. Well, it would’ve been a beeline if the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant wasn’t in the way. We passed it in a nice wide arc to keep from getting a not-so-friendly military escort. My GPS led Justin right to my neighborhood and we did a few lazy loops over it while I got some video. Then it was back to RDU for landing.

Justin put the plane gently on the ground again and taxied us back to Southern Jet. When the prop was still again he remarked that he couldn’t remember moving his plane through RDU any quicker than he did that day. It was like we were the only plane around, which helps maximize our flight time.

After a great time flying, I thanked Justin and headed for home. On the highway, I realized that I wasn’t in the euphoric mood I’d been other times I’d been flying. This time around, it almost seemed routine. Maybe this attitude was a signal that I’m really ready to take the plunge and become a pilot myself.

Flying is fun and likely always will be. I just feel now like I belong in the cockpit. And that’s pretty cool.

I read that GM has decided the minivan has an image problem. Twenty years of hauling kids to soccer practice, packing in groceries, and being the ultimate tailgating vehicle have left the impression on some folks that it just isn’t cool to drive minivans.

I suppose after twenty years a makeover may indeed be in order. Minivans have obviously found a niche in society – they’re so darn versatile. And nearly every car maker has their own spin on the concept.

So I found news that GM is renaming their minivan the “crossover sport van” a bit amusing. After all, it’s still a dadgum minivan, and all your friends will still call it a minivan. Heaven help you if you dare try to convince them it’s a crossover sport van. The jokes will never stop.

On the other hand, if a name change is all it takes for people to choose a minivan over a gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoe, then I guess its worth it.

I won’t buy a minivan … but I hear those new “crossover sport vans” are pretty fly, yo.

There have been efforts by legislators to ban spam. These efforts are completely misguided since (for some reason) few lawmakers understand that the internet doesn’t stop at the American border! As a libertarian-minded dude, I also have a problem with banning any speech, even if it is considered spam.

For this reason, I’ve always preferred a technical solution to the problem of spam. After all, geeks invented email. We should be able to clean it up, right?

For a while now I’ve been looking for a good spam filter. Siteseers runs its own mailserver, of course. With that freedom comes the potential for abuse (or another way to look at it is that I own my domain, so I’ve kept the same email address for years). Thus, I’ve been getting enormous amounts of spam.

There are plenty of anti-spam approaches and packages out there. When I ran Qmail, I killed 50% of spam by simply blocking mail connections from Asia. However, I moved to Postfix a week ago, and never got around to figuring out how to use tcpwrappers with it.

That one week of not blocking Asian-originating spam was eye-opening. Fifty to eighty percent of my email has been spam. Since I was considering new ways of battling it, I looked into using Bayesian filtering to filter it for me.

The first Bayesian package I tried was from the open-source luminary Eric Raymond called Bogofilter. After finally putting the parts together to compile it, I fired it up on my mailserver, Maestro.

Boom! It segfaulted. Hey Eric, spend a little less time playing “rock star” and a little more time coding, ‘k?

I looked into other packages, like BMF, but none really did what I wanted. Until I found ASSP.

ASSP is short for Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy. It deals with spam in a unique way – stopping it from ever entering my mailbox. It does this by acting as an SMTP proxy between my mailserver and the outside world. When enough of the message has crossed my firewall to make a judgement on being spam or not, ASSP checks it against its Bayesian filters and scores it. If its determined to be spam, ASSP clips the SMTP session right there. The message never gets delivered. Life is good.

If ASSP really can’t tell (and it’s very good. Bayesian filtering is amazingly accurate), it will score it and send it on, letting me decide. I had two spams in my email box this morning rather than two dozen. And I can easily write a rule to check the spam score and deal with the spam accordingly.

ASSP was designed to simply work. Sure, it takes a little prep time to get it going, namely you have to feed it sample emails. Luckily, I’ve been saving my spams since December so I had lots to provide it. Once ASSP learns spam from nonspam, it becomes smart about new messages. The author claims that ASSP could filter spam for a year without updating. Niiiiiice.

All these features, and it also runs under Windows. That’s because it’s written in the ubiquitous perl. So Windows users can get relief, too.

In short, after only twelve hours of running ASSP, I’m in love. I may just keep an eye on its logfile during the day and chuckle at the hapless spammers being stopped in their tracks.

(as the Soundgarden song goes)

We got back this afternoon from a day trip to Wilmington where I interviewed for a Linux job. By my estimation, I knocked ’em dead. Just dead. They were ready to hire me on the spot.

But I wanted too much money. And I couldn’t tell them I’d move to Wilmington. My wife is not open to the idea at all.

So what I thought would have been a nice compliment – if not a bona fide potential job – turned out to be a bit of subtle torture. I’m finding myself between two places – unable to take a job and unable to refuse one – and it 5uX0rz.

So I’m “Feeling Minnesota” tonight, wondering if the excitement I felt when I got responses from the “good” jobs was misplaced. Running the job gauntlet is no fun, and it’s got me down. I hope I get through it soon.

I’ve been thrilled at the kind of response I’ve gotten in my job search. I’ve gotten more calls in response to my resume than I’ve ever gotten in other job searches. It’s amazing. I seem to get a callback every other day.

One thing I’ve done differently than in the past is to spend an enormous amount of time typing cover letters. I’ve spent at least one hour crafting each letter, and two hours in some cases. My resoning is that this is the first thing employers see. If I can’t make my case in the first three sentences, I’m a goner.

I’ve applied for interesting jobs dealing with Linux and/or LDAP. I have also broadend my location requirements in an effort to see what’s out there. For instance, I had one phone interview in Burlington last week and tomorrow I’m off to Wilmington for an interview. I don’t know if either one is worth moving or a long commute, but its worth a look. At the very least, I get experience in interviewing and can check out how companies are using Linux.

And in tomorrow’s case, I get a fun day in Wilmington. Kelly and Hallie will be joining me, so it’ll be the first time Hallie’s been to the beach.

Life could be worse, eh

I upgraded the server software this weekend which led to some time where I couldn’t post anything. That has obviously since been corrected.

The problem was in a change in how PHP 4.2 handled PHP_AUTH_USER-type (or “superglobal”) variables.

I’ve got a backlog of blogs (would that be a b(ack)log?), so look out!

After only five months of trying, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can feed in digital video to my PC. Apple users would simply plug in their Firewire(tm) cables to their Imacs and be off and running in 10 seconds. But nooooooooo, I have to do it the Linux Way(tm).

I bought the card from Intrex back in December with the thought of putting fresh digital videos up on the web. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the version of Windows I run at home (Win98 1st edition) doesn’t support IEEE 1394. A little websurfing found what looked like a compatible driver, so I installed that and held my breath.

Video appeared on the screen. I shreiked with glee. And then it went blank.

Seems the driver I stuck on my PC wasn’t enough to make Win98 happy. After that fiasco, I put the card at the bottom of my list of to-do’s, occasionally returning to it with no success.

Last month, I began to research drivers for Linux, since that’s what I usually run on my desktop. I would get tantalizingly close, but still hadn’t solved it. About one try in 20 were successful in capturing video – all others encountered bus resets every second. Exasperated, I nearly gave it up.

Yesterday, the tide turned in my battle. I was in the Intrex store and noticed that the 1394 cards they now sold had an updated chip on them, though the manufacturer and part number were the same. Then I looked up the chip on the Internet that night and found that it had some features missing from my current card. “This might work,” I guessed, and made plans to return to the store to swap my older-but-still-like-new card for the updated version.

Around 11:00, I arrive at the Intrex store. I had bought a Creative Labs Audigy the day before, thinking its 1394 port might work better than my old card. So, I had two cards in my hand.

“Can I return this one and swap this one?” I asked the pony-tailed sales dude.

“That one, sold yesterday, yeah. That one from December, no can do,” he replied.

“It’s the same part number as the one on the shelf,” I said. “And it’s like new. Couldn’t you just swap it for the new one?”

“I’m not allowed to make that return,” was the reply, “but I can get my manager.”

“That’d be great,” I answered, proceeding to browse the store while the manager came to the front.

I got the same speil from the manager, though he did offer to test it for me. I heartily suggested he do so, explaining my problems with it. He took it to the back room and went to work.

About 20 minutes later, he returns with the card. “Works fine. Windows loaded up the drivers and it checks out fine.”

“Did you actually feed digital video into it?” I asked. He told me they didn’t have any DV devices to test it with.

I offered to bring in my digital video camera before he suggested that we try a Firewire hard drive instead. I told him I’d be happy to wait again, and so I did.

About 30 minutes later, he calls me back to the back room. I’m watching their tech copy files to the Firewire drive. Their test machine is running Windows 98 Second Edition.

Aha! That’s why mine didn’t work. I thanked them for their time in checking it out and bought the newer card on my way out.

A ten second job turned into five months of nothing, followed by an hour of waiting in a computer store. Sheesh!

All’s well that ends well, however, as the new card works fine, just like I guessed. In the Land of Linux, one little chip part number can make a huge difference in performance.

Aw, man! I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to rockin’ tonight at the Brewery when Camper Van Beethoven takes the stage.

I’ve posted to Cracker’s website a few times, asking them when they’d ever play Raleigh again. While Cracker itself won’t necessarily be here tonight, their redneck cover band “Ironic Mullet” is opening. Ironic Mullet is made up largely of Cracker members.

At any rate, no matter who shows up tonight, its bound to be a good time! Take the Skinheads Bowling!

Not having a job could be worse. After all, I could have a job, uh, “arming cows”