Ornoth

Wow. I’m alive. I would have put money against that not too long ago.

It’s really funny how most flights are fine, and then some flights are just cursed.

Case in point: Tuesday’s American Eagle 5162 from San Juan to St. Thomas.

The boarding process went pretty normally. Once everyone was seated and ready to go, the flight attendant (male) came on to tell us that we’d be delayed because only one of the two pilots had reported. The missing crewman arrived after about fifteen minutes.

We finally got out onto the runway for takeoff, but we never got up to speed and wound up aborting the takeoff. Apparently an indicator light had gone off, and the pilots decided to abort and tinker with it a bit before going on.

After another 15 minutes or so, we did successfully get off, but from then on it was a 30-minute roller coaster ride, as our little ATR 72 prop plane got tossed around in the wind. The airport at St. Thomas recorded sustained 25 mph winds and 35 mph gusts, and it was much worse aloft, with the wind coming over the island’s high ridge and directly across the airport’s one runway.

Making our approach, the little commuter plane was tossed twenty feet in a random direction every few seconds. Everyone knew we were going to crash: some swore, some assumed the crash position, and others—myself included—had a death-grip on their seats. The flight attendant (male) who was seated facing us mouthed the words “OH MY GOD!” We somehow managed to get within about ten feet of touching down, but we were traveling sideways above the runway at 200 miles per hour, and the pilots gave it the gas and thankfully aborted the landing.

However, even climbing out of the area was a terrifying ride, as the plane was thrown around in the crosswinds. It didn’t seem to be getting any better when the pilot announced that we were going to swing around and try again. It was at this point that I accepted the idea that we were 90 percent likely to die.

So we turned and made another approach, and it was just as horrific as the first. Thankfully, we didn’t get within 1000 feet of the ground before the pilots waved off again. Within a couple minutes, they announced that we were headed back to San Juan. That was a relief, although I was concerned about the winds in San Juan.

That was a bit prescient, because the approach and landing in San Juan were pretty rough, although nothing like the imminent death that landing in St. Thomas had been. I had chills and was shaking from head to toe as we deplaned, and I was looking forward to a long break in the terminal while the airline waited for the weather in St. Thomas to improve.

Just ten minutes later, American Eagle had us re-board that death trap. As I stepped onto the stairway, I thought for sure that it would be the last time I would touch the Earth alive.

And then we waited. Eventually the flight attendant (male) announced that a party of four had left the flight, having missed their connection (in St. Thomas???) to Las Vegas. But that meant the airline had to unload all the luggage, retrieve the departed people’s bags, re-weigh the remaining bags, and load it all back into the aircraft. Wait, wait, wait; for about an hour. The only good thing was that it delayed my certain death, and gave the weather more time to (dear god please) improve.

We left San Juan, and the 30-minute flight to St. Thomas was noticeably smoother, although it might have been a bit rough by normal standards. Everyone’s nerves were on edge as we made our approach, and everyone prayed and assumed the crash position. It was really rough, but there seemed to be a 50 percent chance of our getting down safely.

The rear wheels touched down and one of the more religious women started clapping. Her friend shushed her immediately, knowing that getting two wheels down hardly equated with safety. We stayed on the rear gear for an uncomfortably long time while we waited for the gust that would push our wing over and flip the aircraft, but it never came. The pilot eventually slammed the front gear down and we stayed down. Then, after another long moment of waiting for them to activate the air brakes, the flaps came up and we started to slow.

It might tell you something that the first sound to be heard after we touched down was the sound of our flight attendant (male) clapping over the airplane’s intercom.

The flight, which was supposed to land at 12:12pm, got in at 3:05pm. And even on the ground, outside the airport, the wind was blowing a gale.

Sadly, I’ve got at least two more of those flights to go, and you have no idea how much I’m dreading them…

Work rant. Only interesting to geeks.

I’m working at a client site. Last week I had to ask the person who runs their testing team whether they test a particular feature before releasing their software.

The staffperson figured the best way to find out would be to do a text search on the files they use for testing. Nothing could be simpler, right?

Well, not so fast! This person was a unix weenie. So she opened up a commandline window and entered a find command and piping that into grep. Not so simple, but I guess it works for some.

Well, not really. See, those files had spaces in their names, which causes unix to gag unless you know how to deal with them. Our heroine didn’t. I continued to stand around, waiting for an answer, while she dorked around in a laborious attempt to enter random command options in hopes that something would work.

After several minutes of watching this farce, I suggested she consider using Windows’ find utility, which would have done the job in less than fifteen seconds, without having to rely on her all-too-fallible monkey brain’s recollection of unix’s intentionally difficult-to-use command set. My comment wasn’t even given the honor of a grunt.

After a few more minutes, our erstwhile heroine looked at me and mumbled, “I guess I’m going to have to write a perl script.” Yeah, you’re going to recreate an entirely new text search utility from scratch, when there’s a perfectly good one built into Windows, and when a little RTFM action might allow you to perform the function in the precious unix you apparently don’t know as well as you think…

But then the topper came. “I wonder if Eclipse has anything that would do this?” Yeah. I imagine a full, bloated Java IDE would have a search function built into it. Of course, that’s a bit like using a Boeing 747 to deliver your pizza, when there’s a perfectly good car standing nearby.

This is why it’s important to be technology agnostic. Your favorite tool may be great at one thing, but it’s not the only tool there is, and often other tools will do a better or faster job at solving your problem. A carpenter whose toolkit only includes one belt sander is pretty stupid, and it’s downright pathetic when he doesn’t even know how to use that properly…

Not to open up the whole OS wars thing, but I’ve never seen the appeal of unix, and I’ve worked on it a fair amount. Its editors suck, and its command syntax sucks. Not that Windows is much better. It’s incredibly inefficient bloatware, and is ludicrously susceptible to system hangs and crashes. And Macs remain an oddity, never anything more than a footnote in the personal computer’s evolution.

I stopped using IBM’s VM/CMS mainframe operating system back in 1994, but there are things I still miss about it. It was stable. Its commands were powerful *and* intuitive at the same time (OMG!!!). And in the two dozen years that I’ve been coding under other operating systems, I’ve never found another editor that could hold a candle to Xedit. In fact, I’m composing this very article in Kedit, an excellent Windows port of Xedit. It rules, although I'm also thinking about checking out THE

And while I’m ranting about work, how about this one? After struggling with mysterious database connection issues and seemingly resolving them, I was asked to walk some of the client’s clients through part of the system. In the middle of the demo, the system starts having database connection issues. I have to abandon the demo in shame and attempt to triage the issue.

What did I find out two hours later? The client’s client’s IT people were in the server room, physically moving the server around, and kicked the power cord, dropping the entire database machine. Great. They have all kinds of siloed testing and formal processes to move programs from testing through production, but they pay a generous salary to a big hairless ape who randomly takes the server boxes out for constitutional strolls around the server room! Gee, what are we gonna do today, Brain?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than a decade of consulting, it’s that no clients (and certainly no client’s client) should ever be allowed to touch a computer.