📓 Captain TX filed this under operational truth-adjacent history

Captain TX Log Entry

2026-05-01

A fresh entry from Captain TX has been filed for review by the Department of Questionable Airworthiness.

Another day, another round of tinkering with the Southwest of Sanity site. Nothing too dramatic today, which is usually how trouble introduces itself before hiding behind a stack trace.

I fixed a few smaller issues, poked at a few others, and continued my ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the dates and times. They are still a little wonky, but I am not entirely convinced anyone will notice unless they are the kind of person who reads UTC offsets for pleasure.

The larger addition today was the new Pilots section. It now finds your main OnAir avatar and builds a little statistics page around it. I also took the liberty of asking AI to create the first profile image, because every proper aviation organization eventually reaches the point where it lets a machine invent someone’s face and calls it progress.

This has been a genuinely fun project to build. It has also made me question, once again, the wisdom of anyone letting AI build too much of their base code without supervision, adult leadership, or at least a fire extinguisher nearby.

Case in point: I had made a few touch-ups and then asked the AI to apply an important security change. It made the change. Everything looked fine. The clouds parted. The birds sang. Somewhere, a developer briefly believed in hope.

Then I got home and noticed the data was no longer updating, even though it had been working most of the day.

So I handed the script back to the AI and asked the only reasonable technical question available under the circumstances:

What did you screw up?

To its credit, it figured it out quickly. Somewhere during the process, it had reverted the site code back to the older non-SQL version, which meant the newer changes had quietly departed the aircraft without filing a flight plan.

I rolled everything back to the earlier correct version until the new security patch could be applied properly to the newer model. After a few more iterations, several suspicious pauses, and a fair amount of muttering at the screen, the AI finally got it right and we were back in business.

There are still a few code snags giving me fits. The extra fun part is that the debug log occasionally stops working at exactly the moment it would be useful. That is not a bug. That is software developing a sense of dramatic timing.

Still, I like a good mystery. Especially one that does not involve an actual aircraft, a mechanic with a clipboard, or the words “we found metal shavings.”

Meanwhile, the weather around Houston and Galveston has been ugly all day. The thunder boomers have been rolling through, the sky has been wet and irritated, and the whole Gulf Coast has been giving off that classic “maybe stay inside unless your truck floats” energy.

In other words, it is a fine evening to order a pizza, fire up the sim, and do some flying.

I left the 737-800 parked in Atlanta, but I think it may need to head back to Houston and enjoy some of this classic IFR weather. Nothing says relaxing weekend quite like flying a passenger jet through soup while pretending dispatch had a plan.

For all of our airline pilots now appearing on the new Pilots page, feel free to send over a photo or image of your choosing. If you would like a custom bio published, add a text file with whatever you want displayed and I will update your personal page.

Cheers, have a great weekend, and remember: if the airplane loads, the page renders, and nobody calls the FAA, we call that progress.

— Capt TX

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