Rigid FAA Forms

I renewed my medical certificate yesterday. The secretary now uses some
software that guarantees everything is acceptable to the FAA. But it
choked on my hair color. I wrote "WHITE" but that isn't one of the
keywords that are allowed. She changed it to "GRAY" and said that would
get it through.

What do they do with bald people? Maybe I'll get my hair dyed a bit
when I can afford flying again.

In article ,
Stubby wrote:

I renewed my medical certificate yesterday. The secretary now uses some
software that guarantees everything is acceptable to the FAA. But it
choked on my hair color. I wrote "WHITE" but that isn't one of the
keywords that are allowed. She changed it to "GRAY" and said that would
get it through.

just another example of stupid programming.

--
Bob Noel
Looking for a sig the
lawyers will hate

In article ,
Stubby wrote:

What do they do with bald people?

"NONE"

"Stubby" wrote in message

I renewed my medical certificate yesterday.

The Federal mindset at work. When I joined the AF many years ago, many
forms had to be filled out upon arrival at basic training. "You WILL enter
one middle initial in the box labeled 'middle initial'!" Like a naive fool,
I asked -- what if I have 2 middle initials? (which I do). Repeat: "You
WILL enter one middle initial in the box labeled 'middle initial'!" Someone
else asked -- what if you have no middle initial? "If you have no middle
initial, enter the letters NMN in the box!"

So,---- if you have one middle initial, you fit the mold; if you have two,
you're cut short; but if you have none at all, you get to have three.

Remember, life with a bureaucracy is nothing more than live whack-a-mole.

In a previous article, "John Gaquin" said:
The Federal mindset at work. When I joined the AF many years ago, many
forms had to be filled out upon arrival at basic training. "You WILL enter
one middle initial in the box labeled 'middle initial'!" Like a naive fool,
I asked -- what if I have 2 middle initials? (which I do). Repeat: "You
WILL enter one middle initial in the box labeled 'middle initial'!" Someone
else asked -- what if you have no middle initial? "If you have no middle
initial, enter the letters NMN in the box!"

When I enlisted, the guy filling out the form put "NMI" in the form, and
from then on all my official documents including my discharge notice say
"Paul NMI Tomblin". Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now that I'm older and more
cynical I think I should have made up middle names like "Norman Mailer
Issiah" to match the fake initials.


--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
There are mushrooms that can survive weeks, months without air or food.
They just dry out and when water comes back, they wake up again. And call
the helldesk about their password expiring. -- after Jens Benecke and Tanuki

Paul Tomblin schrieb:

When I enlisted, the guy filling out the form put "NMI" in the form, and
from then on all my official documents including my discharge notice say
"Paul NMI Tomblin". Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now that I'm older and more
cynical I think I should have made up middle names like "Norman Mailer
Issiah" to match the fake initials.

A friend of mine always put R in. Asked why, he said "R" as in "required".

Stefan

My dad was a paymaster for the Marine Corps during WWII. He said that there
was a story going around that some poor jarhead only had initials for his
first and last name. He kept getting his paperwork back with notes like
"need full first and middle name before we pay you" so he wrote R.(only) B.
(only) Jones on the form and sent it back in.

He was paid as Ronly Bonly Jones for the rest of the war.

Jim

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 17:00:10 +0000 (UTC),
(Paul Tomblin) wrote:
When I enlisted, the guy filling out the form put "NMI" in the form, and
from then on all my official documents including my discharge notice say
"Paul NMI Tomblin". Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now that I'm older and more
cynical I think I should have made up middle names like "Norman Mailer
Issiah" to match the fake initials.

Even these days, there are some programmers who are so clueless that
when they write the systems, they don't allow for hyphens in names...

In a previous article, Grumman-581 said:
On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 17:00:10 +0000 (UTC),
(Paul Tomblin) wrote:
When I enlisted, the guy filling out the form put "NMI" in the form, and
from then on all my official documents including my discharge notice say
"Paul NMI Tomblin". Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now that I'm older and more
cynical I think I should have made up middle names like "Norman Mailer
Issiah" to match the fake initials.

Even these days, there are some programmers who are so clueless that
when they write the systems, they don't allow for hyphens in names...

My favourite is the programmers who forget to escape single quotes when
they're inserting into SQL databases, so everybody with an apostrophe in
their name like an O'Rielly or O'Hara gets an error. Usually these are
the same web programmers who don't protect against "SQL Injection Attacks" -
they take the name you insert, and stick it into an SQL statement doing a
"insert into user_data values('" + name + "');"
which you can then do major damage by inserting your name as
"a');drop database;" or
"a');delete from user_data;"
or something similarly nasty.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
"This was, apparently, beyond her ken. So far beyond her ken that she was
well into barbie territory." - J.D. Baldwin

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 18:33:16 +0000 (UTC),
(Paul Tomblin) wrote:
My favourite is the programmers who forget to escape single quotes when
they're inserting into SQL databases, so everybody with an apostrophe in
their name like an O'Rielly or O'Hara gets an error.

On my first SQL based system, I did that, but I soon realized my
mistake during testing with real user names...

Usually these are the same web programmers who don't protect
against "SQL Injection Attacks" - they take the name you
insert, and stick it into an SQL statement doing a
"insert into user_data values('" + name + "');"
which you can then do major damage by inserting your name as
"a');drop database;" or
"a');delete from user_data;"
or something similarly nasty.

Hmmm... Interesting... I don't think I tried that one... I tended to
use stored procedures that would get called from the web interface and
the insert would be of this format:

insert MY_TABLE (
FIELD_1,
FIELD_2,
FIELD_3
) values (
@VALUE_1,
@VALUE_2,
@VALUE_3
)