My flight review

Yesterday (well, it will be 2 days ago by the time this gets published), I had my flight review.  For those who don't know, private pilots in the US are required to have a flight review with a flight instructor at least every two years in order to continue to fly (to maintain an ATP requires more frequent recurrent training).  With the thunderstorms the night before, I had difficulty sleeping (and more importantly getting up when the alarm went off), so I was afraid I was going to be late.  It turned out, the instructor's power went out overnight, so his alarm didn't go off.  I ended up actually arrive right at the time that I had scheduled the review for, but the instructor ended up being about 30 minutes late.  That was okay, though, I had blocked out 4 hours for the 1 hour of ground instruction and 1 hour of flight instruction required by the FAA.  I actually had hoped to make this both a flight review and instrument proficiency check, but we ran too late to actually accomplish the latter (I'll try to schedule some time with the instructor next month to get that done).  I did finally fly a complete GPS approach (the GPS27 @ KVTA).  It actually was extremely hazy and we encountered the base of the clouds at about 2700 feet (MSL), so I might as well have done nearly the entire flight under the hood given how little I could actually see.  While doing some of the touch and goes, I was able to see some of the flooding in the area (we got 5" of rain overnight).  We got another 2+ inches last night and the radar is looking like we'll get a good bit more tonight.

Firefox 3 has arrived

I've been a big fan of the Firefox browser since (probably before) v1.0. Yesterday, they finally officially released v3.0. I had heard that sometime last week the last release candidate started reporting itself as v3.0 (not v3.0RC3), so several hours before the start of their well documented attempt to set a new "Guinness world record" for downloads in a 24-hour period, I went and grabbed RC3 and installed it (I later compared the MD5 with the "official release" and they were identical, so I guess I beat the rush). As I had anticipated, given all the hype, when the magic hour of 10:00PDT (13:00EDT, 17:00UTC), their servers melted down. My first thought was that all the hype was monumentally stupid if they hadn't planned for a huge spike in traffic at the appointed hour. To their credit, after a few hours, they managed to get their servers stable enough that people could actually reach them consistently. The thing that I was most looking forward to was that FF3 is faster and uses fewer resources than 2.0.0.14 (which introduced a memory leak that was getting really annoying). I don't really care that much for the new features, I just wanted my old reliable FF to run faster and not cause my laptop to start swapping after an hour or so. FF3 accomplishes that, so if you're looking for a faster, smaller browser head over to getfirefox.com. Now my only question is will the linux version be able to do the MLB Gameday thing for the Reds games. For some reason, lately it hasn't worked for me on my Ubuntu laptop (I could have sworn it worked at the beginning of the season, but...).

Father's Day, family, and traveling

Happy Fathers Day!!! Today has been a beautiful day, sunny, barely a cloud to be seen, high in the mid-80s. As I stated on twitter a few hours ago, today I "celebrated" Father's Day by mowing the lawn and vacuuming the pool. Okay, to be fair, Erin did finish the yard, and Sherry wanted to learn how to use the new mower (a zero turn), but we decided we'd do that another day. I did get in the pool after I finished vacuuming. The water temp is 86°F, so it is quite pleasant. I'm home again after spending last week in PA and NJ. I got to spend a couple of days with my baby sister (okay, she just turned 40, so she probably shouldn't be called a baby anymore, but...), her husband and my nephews, and spent 3 very productive days in NJ at the annual Cyber Security conference and spending face-to-face time with some of the other members of the team. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire week. The older of my nephews is at a big invitation-only showcase for high school junior baseball players being held at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. It wraps up today, I believe. I also had the opportunity to have dinner on Tuesday evening with a few of my friends from my days with Monmouth Civic Chorus. It is hard to believe it is 16.5 years since I moved back to Ohio from NJ. I drove out because the company isn't paying for much of anything these days. I did manage to pay less than $4.00/gallon of gas, but I saw a number of stations on the way where the price was over $4. That said, our gas prices are still cheaper than most of Europe. Ah, well.

Renewed Third Class Medical

Well, I'm legal to fly again (as I noted on twitter). My medical had expired on Saturday, but I had my appointment with the AME this morning and am legal again. Alas, from now on, I must carry my glasses with me for near vision (I wear them all the time, so that isn't really a big deal). I asked the doctor what the difference was between a third class and a second class since I'm considering pursuing my commercial license in the next year or so. He told me it was all about vision. With my glasses, I actually met the standards for a second class. Of course, for the training (and checkride) I don't need the second class, only to "exercise the privileges" of the certificate.