• Yesterday I took another step in my flying career. I completed my second supervised solo. This now means that I can go practice without having my instructor around. Of course, I’m subject to many limitations, on weather and other things. But still, I’m very happy.
• Bloglines continues to gain momentum. I’m getting an amazing amount of great feedback. Everyone who uses it seems to really like the service. I just need to continue to focus on getting the word out, and continue to roll out new features.

Today, after two months of flying lessons, and dozens upon dozens of supervised take-offs and landings, I soloed for the first time. I did 3 take-offs and landings on my own at Palo Alto, in Citabria N5054B. Below is a picture of the plane and I after the flight. Right after that picture was taken, as per tradition, the back of my shirt was cut off and marked up to commemorate the event. On the shirt now is a drawing of a pig landing at an airport. It now graces a wall in West Valley’s Palo Alto office. I’m probably about half-way towards my private pilot’s license. This flying thing is pretty fun.

Some bits:

• The Forbes article that I’m mentioned in appears in print this Friday, so I’m told. There might even be a picture of me in it, so hide the children.
• I’ve noticed with Bloglines that a sizeable percentage of users use a tagged email address. This is a special purpose email address, usually with the word ‘bloglines’ in it. While tagged addresses are an interesting attempt to thwart spammers, it really shows how badly the war against spam has been going. People should not have to make up special email addresses for every site they register with. That’s insane.
• Bloglines appeared in a Lockergnome issue last week as a recommended site. Thanks Chris!
• Speaking of which, Chris Pirillo is a smart guy. He sees the damage being done by spam to email newsletters. I agree with him that RSS syndication is the future for email newsletter distribution.
• I passed my Pre-Solo Phase Check on Friday. This means that very soon now I’ll be flying around Palo Alto Airport solo. Hide the children! Lock the dogs!

On Saturday, my other site, Trustic, was Slashdotted. It was the top story for 3 hours or so, I’m told. Fantastic. You always hear about the ‘Slashdot effect’, of how it funnels so much traffic to linked sites, that they go down in a steaming pile of dead server hardware. Well, that didn’t happen to Trustic. Between Saturday evening and 11:59pm Sunday night, Trustic served about 36,000 pages. Not hits, pages. And the vast majority of those were database driven, not static. Served without a hitch. I was even in Santa Cruz, away from the computer, when it happened. Am I a genius? Some super server architect? I doubt it, although I do have some experience in that area with groups. I get the impression that the majority of sites that Slashdot links to are run off of DSL or modem lines. It does take a certain amount of bandwidth to deal with a slashdotting. But bandwidth is getting very, very cheap these days. I used to say that hardware was free but bandwidth was expensive. That’s no longer the case. There are definite advantages to working in the ‘post-bubble’ world.

Trustic was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday. Hundreds of people have signed up for the service because of the mention, and we’re grateful. The service handled the load fine, which is good because I was away from a computer almost the entire time. Please also visit Bloglines, my other service. Bloglines is a web news aggregator. You can stay up to date with Slashdot and thousands of other sites easily with Bloglines. And because Bloglines is a service, you don’t have to download or install any programs.