April 1st was my last blog entry… been too busy doing things to write about them, or something.
J.L. (Les) Canty, 1925-2008
Not all of the last couple months have been good, either. My grandfather passed away very unexpectedly at the very end of March, fine one morning and gone less than 48hrs later after a short hospital stay. Later in April, we had a lovely service for him, with a hall full of family and old friends, and incredible live music during the service from two friends of his.
Flying
Personally, I’ve finally started another stage of flight training — just started my Flight Instructor training a few weeks ago. My reading list is suddenly a mile long again, all air regulations and teaching techniques on top of the usual flying material! The next few months are going to be a great, exciting (and yes, slightly nerve-wracking!) personal & professional challenge! One personal regret: Grandad would have been fascinated by the discussion of teaching techniques in my instructor’s manuals. He spent his entire professional life in education, and remained interested even after he retired. I keep thinking I should mention something to him, and then remembering I can’t anymore…
Ubuntu Things…
I’m not as involved as I used to be in the whole Ubuntu project, but I still drop into IRC a few times a week, do some moderating there, follow a number of mailing lists, and the Planet Ubuntu RSS feed is part of my daily reading! I installed a new 500GB harddrive in this machine just as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was released, so did a nice clean install onto the new drive to replace the old, much-upgraded, crufty Ubuntu install that was on the old drive. A clean install made a huge difference – Compiz works now, the whole thing is much faster, and dozens of old dotfiles and configs have been consigned to the bit bucket where they belong!
There are a few 8.04 issues I’m facing, which have been the subject of several of my usual irritated bug reports on Launchpad, but they can wait for another post. I really should do the blogthing more often…
A random just-because-it’s-cool airplane shot to close. This is the front office of a CAF CF-18 fighter that was parked out at our local airport this weekend.
