Feb. 11th, 2005 04:31 pm
Temporal Update
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vin_petrolGeneral update with extra musings on plane crash TV.
2005-02-04 Friday
Batfink in Sheffield, which was interesting. They played Supernautthree two times for some reason :-) Needed to scrub in the new tires on Type-R so drove fast and hard.
2005-02-05 Saturday
Football day. Up to Middlesbrough to watch Boro play Blackburn Rovers. Had Boro lost, I had a horrible feeling I would have been making grand gestures like throwing my season ticket on the pitch and stomping off in a huff. Fortunately, they just about managed a victory, in a somewhat unconvincing fashion. Still sixth in the table but it's tight there, and if Boro hadn't squandered so many points recently there could have been a clear gap between 5th/6th and the teams below. It makes Saturday's away game against Bolton a real European Place Six Pointer. Still, being a traditional Boro pessimist, 40 points means we're safe from relegation...
Football tired me out so I didn't make it to The Body Electric. I went to bed early instead.
2005-02-06 Sunday
Trash was off to a craft fair in Horrorgate so I was on Primary Childcare Provider duty. I took Evie out to The Designer Outlet with R and family, which was mellow. R and his wife laughed lots at the general child-unsuitability of the Type-R. Later that afternoon we both went round to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ellenscult's to see her and a slightly worried looking ravenlas.
2005-02-08 Tuesday
Watched some television, which is not something I do much of these days, but I got completely sucked into a program about the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 (a DC-10 in 1979, which I remember happening). I have a morbid love of programs about air crashes. The Discovery Channel shows lots of them. It's the sad but intriguing way that a plane falls out of the sky, and then a whole load of investigators [usually from the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)] have to piece together what exactly happened from chunks of wreckage and the black box. There's nearly always a failure of one or more humans to fully consider the consequences of their actions. Sometimes it's a set of design flaws that in isolation are OK, but when combined together cause problems. In the case of flight 191, the maintenance was carried out in a dubious way which lead to the engine falling off on take-off. Now, engines are actually designed to fall off in extreme circumstances, and the DC-10 has three engines, so it should have still be airworthy. It also had redundant hydraulic systems. But guess where on the plane the two hydraulic systems were routed right next to each other? In the wing above the engine that had just ripped off, rupturing *both* sets of hydraulic lines. Oh dear. Shortly afterwards an uncontrollable aircraft falls out of the sky.
Work has been fiddly this week. I'm clearing out a database of old content. The database is getting a bit full and creaky, which is why we're doing this. Unfortunately, in order to clear it out I have to do some big SELECTs on it - we want to archive the content we're removing into XML files. This makes it creak even more and sometimes causes problems. Argh! In order to make it usable I have to use it, but using it makes it unusable to other people. So that's been a challenge. It's been a kinda "return to the 70s" with me writing batch scripts to run in the early hours of the morning, and coming in the next day to check the log files and see if they worked OK, which they generally did. Unix 'at' has been my friend this week. Anyway, first thing next week I'm going to delete about half the content in the database, so that should help. I think I'll run the DELETEs in small batches though.
2005-02-04 Friday
Batfink in Sheffield, which was interesting. They played Supernaut
2005-02-05 Saturday
Football day. Up to Middlesbrough to watch Boro play Blackburn Rovers. Had Boro lost, I had a horrible feeling I would have been making grand gestures like throwing my season ticket on the pitch and stomping off in a huff. Fortunately, they just about managed a victory, in a somewhat unconvincing fashion. Still sixth in the table but it's tight there, and if Boro hadn't squandered so many points recently there could have been a clear gap between 5th/6th and the teams below. It makes Saturday's away game against Bolton a real European Place Six Pointer. Still, being a traditional Boro pessimist, 40 points means we're safe from relegation...
Football tired me out so I didn't make it to The Body Electric. I went to bed early instead.
2005-02-06 Sunday
Trash was off to a craft fair in Horrorgate so I was on Primary Childcare Provider duty. I took Evie out to The Designer Outlet with R and family, which was mellow. R and his wife laughed lots at the general child-unsuitability of the Type-R. Later that afternoon we both went round to
ellenscult's to see her and a slightly worried looking ravenlas.2005-02-08 Tuesday
Watched some television, which is not something I do much of these days, but I got completely sucked into a program about the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 (a DC-10 in 1979, which I remember happening). I have a morbid love of programs about air crashes. The Discovery Channel shows lots of them. It's the sad but intriguing way that a plane falls out of the sky, and then a whole load of investigators [usually from the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)] have to piece together what exactly happened from chunks of wreckage and the black box. There's nearly always a failure of one or more humans to fully consider the consequences of their actions. Sometimes it's a set of design flaws that in isolation are OK, but when combined together cause problems. In the case of flight 191, the maintenance was carried out in a dubious way which lead to the engine falling off on take-off. Now, engines are actually designed to fall off in extreme circumstances, and the DC-10 has three engines, so it should have still be airworthy. It also had redundant hydraulic systems. But guess where on the plane the two hydraulic systems were routed right next to each other? In the wing above the engine that had just ripped off, rupturing *both* sets of hydraulic lines. Oh dear. Shortly afterwards an uncontrollable aircraft falls out of the sky.
Work has been fiddly this week. I'm clearing out a database of old content. The database is getting a bit full and creaky, which is why we're doing this. Unfortunately, in order to clear it out I have to do some big SELECTs on it - we want to archive the content we're removing into XML files. This makes it creak even more and sometimes causes problems. Argh! In order to make it usable I have to use it, but using it makes it unusable to other people. So that's been a challenge. It's been a kinda "return to the 70s" with me writing batch scripts to run in the early hours of the morning, and coming in the next day to check the log files and see if they worked OK, which they generally did. Unix 'at' has been my friend this week. Anyway, first thing next week I'm going to delete about half the content in the database, so that should help. I think I'll run the DELETEs in small batches though.