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After more than a year of talking about learning to fly, today I finally got off my rear and spread my wings. Not only was this my first flying lesson, but it was the first time I was ever up in a light plane of any kind.

And the experience was great! Even better than I expected.

Unfortunately I had to arrive at the airport so early this morning that I’m too tired now to write a background on my passion about flying or a play-by-play of my adventures in the air. Describing my wonderful instructor, that quirky little airplane we flew, and the exhilaration from actually controlling it myself will have to wait for later. I just wanted to make sure I had an entry in my blog for this very important day.

Last weekend, while Jess was being challenged by her new dog Bentley, my wife, my son, and I were being trained on how to be dogs. Specifically, how to be alpha dogs.

Let me explain. I’ve mentioned our two pooches before, but what I haven’t written about is the occasional “incidents” we’ve had with Casey, the German Shepherd. For example, the time she lunged at and bit one of our home remodel contractors. Ouch. We’ve never been able to walk her around the neighborhood easily since she’ll lunge at moving cars, moving people, moving leaves, etc. And don’t get me started about her interactions with other animals. The idea of her off leash and outside was really unthinkable.

For a long time, various dog trainers have told us that Casey was “fear aggressive” or had “dependency issues” on our other dog Penny, the Labrador Retriever. Yeah, whatever. What I really believed was, well, that God just made Casey different. Sometimes it seemed as if she had a 110-volt brain plugged into a 220-volt body.

It turns out that Casey simply wasn’t sure who was the boss. And in the absence of an alpha dog, she tried to take over that role. To overcome this problem, we had to be trained so she could then be trained.

For that training, my wife hired Steve Miles of One Day Dog to come visit our home on Saturday. At first, I was skeptical about the whole thing and sort of humoring my wife when I agreed to participate. I figured this was going to be like all those other whacky dog training programs on which we had spent a lot of time and money during the past few years. But at least it was only going to be for the afternoon.

I was so wrong. What Steve did was amazing! With an almost Dog Whisperer-like ease he was able to make Casey submissive and obedient. In fact, before we were halfway through our four-hour training session, Casey was sitting by herself in the middle of our street while cars drove past and children strolled by. It was like having a whole new dog. Steve was not kidding about this being a one-day training session. Really.

Now we’re not a bunch of pushovers, but Steve showed us that while Casey might like us, even love us, she wouldn’t respect us until she really understood that each one of us was her boss. So we all got turns playing that alpha boss. This meant putting Casey in a situation where she could fail and correcting her into submission. Which we did via some very firm snaps of her leash that was now attached to a pronged collar.

Steve explained that while this seems cruel to us, it makes perfect sense to a dog. Correction and submission in a pack is the way of life for a canine. They actually like it. Dogs are kind of natural bureaucrats that way. It’s weird. And the pronged collar was what we used for teeth since, well, biting Casey to cuff her like a real alpha dog was both impractical and nasty.

So now my wife, my son, and I have a very well-behaved German Shepherd because we know how to be dogs. Woof!

How long has Atom actually been a standard? I forget. Jess would know. She’s handy that way at the office. Anyway, I finally updated my Atom feed from crusty version 0.3 to the IETF-sanctioned 1.0 format.

After making the required and silly little tag name changes, I tested my feed with the validator and a few feed readers laying around on my Mac and available on the web. It validated just fine but it seems that some Atom parsers, with the exception of our framework in Safari, can’t figure out a standard date and time with a time zone offset.

NetNewsWire Lite handles the dates and times in my RSS feed just fine but completely drops the time zone offset from those in my Atom feed, moving the time stamps back by seven or eight hours depending on daylight saving time.

Bloglines and Google Reader do better but make odd and different errors due to some of my posts being in standard time and some in daylight saving time.

I’m coming to realize that using anything other than UTC in a weblog is often going to appear wrong in many feed readers. What a pity. At least using Zulu time would complement my interest in aviation.

There’s a reason Safari works so well. I pretty much demanded it using my own blog as the poster child for just this kind of weird time stamp issue. And I can do that since I’m the boss. Just another abuse of power, I suppose.

Also, it appears I exaggerated about the whole “blogging again” thing.

Wednesday night at 9 is a magic hour of television again for me and my family. That time slot, once graced by Angel, the best-written drama of the 2003-2004 era, now cradles the sophomore season of Lost. Forget all the hype about the hatch. Lost really is turning out to be just the kind of character-driven, plot-twisted, weird-ass 60 minutes of glowing light to warm our household. For that hour we can forget about the war, hurricanes, our home remodel, whatever. For that hour, nobody goes to the restroom, takes the dogs out, or answers the phone. We’re in another universe. Maybe not the Buffyverse, but still worth the visit. And I’m sure we’ll return.

Oh! And did I mention that I’m blogging again?

Something I forgot to mention in that last post about all the recent site changes is that blog search is now done via Google rather than implemented with MySQL. Which is a good thing for two reasons:

1. I’m not really using a database for the blog anymore. Well, nothing more sophisticated than the file system on my ISP’s server. So there’s no MySQL-style pre-calculated text index with which to leverage.

2. Everybody uses Google anyway and — let’s be honest — they prefer it because it produces better results. Especially when its index is current. And it looks like Google’s ‘bot crawled these pages within the last 24 hours because a search for “Christmas” finds that last post.

Of course, Google may always lag a bit on updating their index of my site but, lucky for you, I’m not prolific enough here for that to really matter. Just more justification for my laziness.

I’ve read that blog neglect is a common problem. Lucky for me it’s easily treatable with over-the-counter medication. Which means I’m posting again just in time for the holidays. Ho, ho, ho.

But it’s not just this post that’s new. Sure, everything looks the same but behind the scenes it’s all done different. Gone are WordPress, PHP, and MySQL. Did I go back to Movable Type? No, they’ve been replaced by a Perl hack of my own making. Why?

First, blog comment spam. The sheer volume of it forced me to remember that I had a blog. And because it’s not a simple thing to globally disable comments in past WordPress posts, I became disenchanted with the whole system — meaning comments, trackbacks, and WordPress itself.

Second, while I still liked WordPress for other reasons, upgrading to version 1.2.2 was going to be a lot of work considering all the hacks I made to the version I was using. It turned out to be far easier to write my own blogging software. Really. Plus, I could make it work just like I wanted from the beginning, without any after-market expenditures.

Third, I get bored easily. I’m a geek and I find hacking on the site more fun than actually doing anything useful with it. Who knows, I’ll probably switch out the whole system again next year. You would think I had attention deficit disorder or something.

In the short term, a few other things changed. Some functionality and content are also gone.

To combat all that spam, the comment and trackback system I enabled almost two years ago has been removed. Although it won’t appear immediately for the entire blogosphere to read, you can still send me email if you want to comment and I may even include it in a post. Because I’ve written the new software myself, and because I’m exceptionally lazy, I haven’t provided a mechanism to display the older, existing comments. Maybe one day I’ll restore them to the archives.

My blogroll has been downsized as well. Not due to some technical limitation but rather a reduction of the list to those sites authored by friends or acquaintances. My apologies if I’ve left you out.

Anyway, now that I’m using all this sleek new software (the power of Vim at my fingertips!), maybe I’ll post something else in the next six months.

Before Peter Jackson and Co. decided to delight us all with a film version of “The Lord of the Rings,” I had — like so many others — read Tolkien’s books. In fact, for over 20 years I’ve read both “The Hobbit” and the trilogy almost every season.

But since the films premiered I’ve stayed away from the books so they didn’t influence my evaluation of Jackson’s films, for good or ill. To be honest, I didn’t want to be unnecessarily harsh with Jackson’s interpretation. Last week I decided to pick up the books again, starting with only “The Hobbit” to maintain a little of that distance since “The Return of the King” is not out yet on DVD.

And then I heard voices in my head.

I’m certain this has happened to others and it was probably predicted by many, but it was a bit odd nonetheless. As I read the book I could distinctly hear Ian Mckellen’s voice as Gandalf and Ian Holm’s as Bilbo. Even Hugo Weaving as Elrond. It was a bit uncanny — not that it happened at all but that it sounded so appropriate.

Is it simply because I’ve also seen the films so many times? (I’m watching “The Two Towers” as I write this.) Or is it just perfect casting? I think perhaps the latter. At least I hope it is since I wouldn’t want my own imagination to be corrupted so easily. Which means I’ll let my vanity praise those choices.

That was an incredible episode of Angel tonight. Lindsay must be rescued and Gunn takes his place in Hell to atone for what he did to Fred. Plus, Mercedes McNab becomes an official regular player. I agree with Herc’s assessment, five stars and “there ain’t nothing not great in this honey” — bad English but accurate. Sadly there are only five of these gems left before the light goes out of the Buffyverse. I think I’ve made my views on this clear already.

In a day that saw two aces on the 16th maybe it’s no surprise that Phil Mickelson — despite a valiant effort by Ernie Els — finally got the never-won-a-major monkey off his back today at Augusta, winning the green jacket with a rare birdie on the 72nd hole. Which also proves the The Masters is still one of the best shows in sports — drama and history. I never miss it.

My new guitar arrived Monday so I’ve been a bit distracted … and depressed. Let me explain.

After I bought my son a Stratocaster back in September, I picked up his new guitar one evening and was stricken by the feel of the instrument. Smitten, really. That Strat just belonged in my hands. Suddenly I was compelled to play it myself. So I started sneaking around late at night “borrowing” my son’s amp along with his guitar. But after the first week of this he really got annoyed and yelled, “Just buy your own guitar, dad!”

So I did, getting an identical black Mexican Stratocaster with a rosewood fingerboard, plus the same little Fender practice amp. I had to get the same setup or my son would have wanted to “trade” for the better guitar.

Anyway, I started playing “my” guitar. Every day for an hour, sometimes more. I sucked but I was slowly improving. I even employed my son’s guitar teacher to school me as well. And it was working. I got so into the experience I forgot about blogging. And then I wanted a better guitar. Not just a budget Fender but an instrument worthy of my new passion.

Thus began the search for the perfect guitar. It took several months. I played many different Fenders, Gibsons, and other models at guitar stores all over the place. But it was during an episode of the flu in January that I stumbled across the Reverend Musical Instruments company on the web. And in a fit of over-the-counter drug-induced foolishness, I bought one of their Slingshot Custom guitars online without ever playing or even touching a single fret.

Unfortunately I would have to wait for delivery. But before my new guitar would arrive, the tendons between my left and wrist began to throb. And not in anticipation. I had given myself tendinitis from so much practicing. In fact, I had to essentially stop practicing several weeks ago. Just fretting a few bar chords is very painful after five or ten minutes.

It sucks. The pain sucks and not being able practice sucks. And now the Reverend arrived this week and I can’t even play it. Ugh. So I’m letting my son practice on it. It’s only fair, I guess.