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xxmikexx

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  1. xxmikexx

    Ungrateful

    By xxmikexx,

    It's hardly the end of the world but Phil Taylor announced early today that he would be leaving ACES studio and that tomorrow would be his last day.
     
    I was hoping that the people of the wolf packs on the various major FS-related websites might stop feeding on the entrails of living creatures long enough to pay tribute to the man who has helped so many thousands of us enjoy FSX. They could, for example, have said things like "Well, Phil, I may hate you but you surely did give me many hours of the pleasure of barking at you, and I'm grateful for that."
     
    Such is not to be. As of a few minutes ago, about twelve hours after his announcement, the number of in memoriam posts on the various FS sites was ...
     
    FlightSim.com --- 5 for, 1 against
    Avsim -----------16 for, 1 against
    Sim-Outhouse --- 24 for, 0 against
    SimFlight -------- 0 for, 0 against
     
    That's it. Period, end of subject. The result of his having held down an extremely demanding job, with product manager of Flight Simulator being just part of that job, and of his having voluntarily given hundreds of hours of his personal time to helping thousands of people ... ahem ... The psychic reward for having done all this product support directly by the product manager himself was a grand total of 45 "Thanks, Phil" posts.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    One of the reasons Phil and I have become fast email friends is that we each noticed that the other does not back down when the wolf packs attack, that we each defend helpless underdogs, and that we each stick to our guns when we know that one plus one equals two rather than a traditional value of three, for example.
     
    You see, forum decorum requires that even the heavy hitters, if they are to avoid being boiled in oil, say things like "Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. One plus one equals three is just as valid a viewpoint as any other, and it goes a long way toward explaining why you're convinced that [insert attacker technobabble here]."
     
    Dat's a fact, Jack. Those things plus our each having the habit of sticking up for underdogs when the schools of pirhana fish attack, hoping to strip their victims of flesh in public, aided and abetted by moderators who also won't tolerate anything but mediocrity.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Phil hasn't said so -- would never say so -- but he has been driven from the forums several times and now has decided to leave even the Major Leagues FS Development community -- ACES Studio -- perhaps because no amount of positive stroking at ACES can make up for the horrible way he and his (and my) kind get treated on the forums.
     
    Phil is not the first person to say "That's it, time to go do something else." I don't want to furnish a long list of names and details. Instead I'll simply cite the example of Mike Stone, a builder of low-fps airframes that run well on dinosaur computers.
     
    (to be continued)
  2. xxmikexx
    I went grocery shopping yesterday afternoon. (Call Sixty Minutes!) While I was being checked through, the bagger, a young man named Matt, stepped behind me in the line and unloaded the remaining groceries in my cart onto the checkout conveyer belt.
     
    "In all my years of grocery shopping nobody has ever done that for me before", I said to him. "Keep it up and you'll make manager."
     
    "I don't want to make manager" he said. "I'm in college to make petroleum engineer -- it pays a lot better."
     
    "Well", I said. "That's a great career. You'll never get laid off, you'll have your choice of working indoors or outside, and you'll get to travel the world if you want to."
     
    He finished bagging my order and I then headed for the door. Tim Smith, an assistant manager who I've come to know over the years, flagged me down. "Mike, I heard what you said to Matt. That was nice. Very nice."
     
    We do work for money, folks, but we work even harder for attaboys that have real meaning.
  3. xxmikexx

    Theories Of Lift

    By xxmikexx,

    In mathematics there is a proof strategy known as "proof by exhaustion". It works like this:
     
    First you prove that the only possible answers are, for example, A, B, C and D. It being, say, very difficult to treat case D on its own, you could still prove it is true simply by proving that A, B and C are false. This is called proof by exhaustion because at that point you've exhausted all possibilities. D simply MUST be true whether or not the detailed workings of D are immediately obvious.
     
    My point here is that mathematical reasoning can lead to correct conclusions regarding situations about which we know nothing at all. In physics this is called "dimensional analysis" -- because all we have to do is to make the units (the dimensions) on the left side of an equation match the units on the right side of that same equation. You will see this in action below.
     
    Note that D having been proved to be true, any assertions by others that D is false, or that a proof exists that D is false, or that D can be shown probably to be false by virtue of [whatever] -- these "facts" can be rejected out of hand, just as perpetual motion machine designs and circle-squaring proofs can be rejected out of hand.
     
    Note also that on the forums, proof by exhaustion usually means something quite different. It means that a claim-counterclaim dispute goes on till one or the other party drops out because he/she has become exhausted, leaving the last man standing to crow his victory as signifying the truth of his position. :D
     
    Let's call these people "A" and "B", and let's have the dispute go as follows ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Let Person A make a non-obvious but nevertheless correct assertion, such as "All theories of lift must reduce to the downward acceleration of air, since F=mA and there is no reason to suspend Newton's Laws Of Motion for purposes of aerodynamics studies".
     
    By this he means, "At a suitable angle of attack an airfoil will generate an upward force we call "lift". (The F part of F=mA.) By Newton's Laws this upward force must be counterbalanced by the downward acceleration of air. (The mA part of F=mA.)There are no other possibilities."
     
    The key point here is that the downward-acceleration-of-air viewpoint must be true for ALL theories of lift. The mathematics of Newton's Laws compels this. This is not a matter of opinion, or of design preference, or of wisdom of the ancients, or of forum courtesy, or of somebody's possessing all kinds of advanced degrees in aerodynamics. It is inescapable mathematical truth.
     
    Worse still, Person A's assertion will be true regardless of whether Person A knows anything at all about airfoil theory. He could know zero about aircraft yet still arrive at the correct conclusion solely through the combination of dimensional analysis and Newton's Laws.
     
    In other words, whatever theory of lift Person B may present, in the end it must reduce to the case just proved using dimensional analysis. This will be true regardless of whether Person A is willing -- or even able -- to show where the downward-momentum-of-air fairy is hiding in Person B's theory of lift.
     
    (Note that this often results in Person B believing Person A to be very unfair because Person A usually will not want to take the time and trouble to track down Person B's lift-by-momentum fairy.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Person A may then go on to make another outrageous statement that also simply MUST be true ...
     
    If there is any benefit to having curved airfoils, it can only be for purposes of drag reduction, i.e. for delaying the onset of turbulent airflow, hopefully to past the trailing edge of the wing.
     
    We will prove this one not by means of dimensional analysis but instead by exhaustion. Our having earlier proved that the shape of the airfoil has nothing to do with lift, we now note that either the shape of the airfoil has to do with drag reduction, or it does not. There are no other possibilities. So ...
     
    If the shape of the airfoil has nothing to do with drag reduction, we should prefer flat plate wings since, even though turbulent flow sets in immediately behind the leading edge, the flat plate wing is trivially easy to manufacture.
     
    But this immediate onset of drag-creating turbulence makes the flat plate wing inefficient, so we don't prefer it.
     
    Therefore the shape of the airfoil must in fact have to do with drag reduction, and only with drag reduction, whether or not the airfoil designer chooses to adopt this viewpoint.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Person A may then go on to make the most outrageous statement of all, which is ...
     
    I don't have to give you a detailed theory of lift, and I don't have to give you a detailed theory of airfoil shape drag analysis. I only have to give you Newton's Laws, and I don't have to prove those either. :D
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Exactly this happened in Outer Marker during the Winter/Spring of 2008, with me being Person A and two dozen other people being Person B. I stuck to my guns and was roundly criticized for Refusing To Play Fair, and for Refusing To Respect The Opinions Of Others, and for Arrogantly Believing That He Is Always Right, and for the comission of a half dozen other Forum High Crimes And Misdemeanors That Ought To Result In The Expulsion Of This Terrible Person.
     
    With that background in hand, let's now summarize the forum dispute ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Person A presents his proof by dimensional analysis that all theories of lift must reduce to downward acceleration of air.
     
    Person B then says "Person A cannot possibly be right because everybody knows that wings are sucked up into the sky by the Bernoulli effect. This is because wings are curved on the top and flat on the bottom, and the air pressure is lower on the top, sucking the wing up."
     
    Person A will then point out that a flat plate wing will exhibit lift, deflecting air downwards just as required by Newton's laws, even though the plate is flat on top and flat on the bottom..
     
    Person B may then say "Sorry, Bernoulli's equation clearly shows that wings are sucked up into the sky. This is because the air is flowing faster over the curved top of the wing than it is over the flat bottom of the wing."
     
    Person A will then point out that symmetric airfoils are curved on top and curved on the bottom, and that they exhibit Bernoulli flow on both their upper and lower surfaces, so by Person B's reasoning these wings must be being sucked both upwards and downwards, resulting in zero lift, which clearly is not the case.
     
    Person A might then even point out that aircraft with wings that are curved on top and flat on the bottom are capable of inverted flight which, from the Bernoulli viewpoint, ought to result in the aircraft being sucked downward to earth instead of upward to the sky.
     
    Person B may then say "You are dead wrong, Mister A, because I've believed all my life that wings are sucked up into the sky" ...
     
    ... Which is proof only of an unwillingness to process new information.
  4. xxmikexx
    In this blog post we saw that lift derives from the downward acceleration of the relative wind, which has mass. Thus for any given value of indicated (repeat indicated) airspeed, the angle of attack must be the same regardless of altitude.
     
    This is because indicated airspeed is a direct measure of the ram air pressure -- of the rate of air mass flow over the wings. Some confirming experiments in FS will be found here.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Now ... Proof by simulator generally doesn't count as a proof at all. However, the results do support my argument. They make the chief assertion more believable in the eyes of those who are unwilling or unable, for whatever reasons, to follow the mathematics of the proof.
     
    So let's say that you know nothing of the lift-as-momentum assertion, and that you know only about the simulator results.
     
    If you're willing to accept those results at face value, you would be able to DERIVE the origin of lift from the angle-of-attack-versus-indicated-airspeed results alone ... Because the mathematics of the situation again are inescapable.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    If lift is a function only of angle of attack and indicated airspeed, as the simulator results say, this can only mean that lift is a function of angle of attack and the rate of air mass flow over the wing. There are no other possiblities.
     
    So one is then compelled to investigate the reason that lift relates to air mass flow. One is then led immediately to F=mA and the proof is trivial to complete.
  5. xxmikexx

    The Who And The Whom

    By xxmikexx,

    That's how Lenin put it -- "The world is divided into the 'who' and the 'whom'."
     
    As a speaker of Russian I must say this: One of the things that fascinates me about this remark is that it means EXACTLY the same thing in Russian as it does in English. "Ktaw ee ktawm" has the very same sense that "who and whom" does. Translation neither adds nor takes away from this meaning. (Indeed the phrases are linguistically related, though you have to go all the way back to the Indo-European mother tounge to see this.)
     
    (to be continued)
  7. xxmikexx
    In a post in the FSX forum I said that good art is whatever good artists say is good art, and that good music is whatever good musicians say is good music.
     
    alexm responded by saying ...
     
    No way, no how! I mean this in a friendly way... but you've crossed way over a line with me with that statement! Music and art are so incredibly subjective, I don't see any way to defend that, although I will respect that many will attest to its veracity. Even good musicians/artists will disagree on what is "good." Music happens to be my area of expertise, btw.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    alexm,
     
    I was paraphrasing what I really meant in order to make my point to Herk. What I really mean is ...
     
    Art is whatever good artists say is art. Music is whatever good musicians say is music.
     
    Now ... I disagree that the terms "good art" and "good music" are 100% subjective. They are largely subjective but far from 100% subjective.
     
    Before moving on to the subject of music, I will say that I'm not an artist in the normal sense because I lack the mechanical skills. I can't even draw stick figures. Even if I had the technical skills, I don't have the mind's eye ability to hold a vision in front of me as a layer superimposed over reality so I could paint the vision.
     
    But I know good art when I see it, just as I know good music when I hear it.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I'm a former musician and a former producer of cover music for computer bands. If you scrounge around in my blog here you'll find relevant threads. However, I can only talk about oldies.
     
    This is because I basically stopped listening about 1985 or so when the record companies began hyping the likes of Rick Astley, and when early hip-hop and rap, both of which I love, began their descent into the degenerate filth of gangsta music.
     
    My professional experience taught me that there is a difference between "good" and
    "like", and between "bad" and "dislike". So as I wrote elsewhere in my blog, there is plenty of bad music that I love (like "Shotgun"), and plenty of good music that I hate (like "Every Breath").
     
    Yet in the end all music is, at some level, good. It all has some kind of redeeming quality. If it didn't, it would be cacaphony and not music. So even though I detest "Walkin' On Sunshine", which is dreadful music, there is a level at which it's not dreadful. It's the arrangement that was dreadful, and the recording was badly produced on top of it all. I could do a slow light jazz arrangement of this song that would be okay. Not great, but okay, and certainly much better than what hit the airwaves.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Anyway, I'll turn the floor over to you now, and then we'll talk, yes?
  8. xxmikexx

    9/11

    By xxmikexx,

    It's only the 10th, but while driving back from Safeway the urge -- the need -- the demand that I write, and write today, struck with high impact. I was furious that day in 2001, fighting mad -- so mad that I called the Israeli Embassy in San Francisco to offer my services in any capacity they might see fit. But I couldn't get through. Their switchboard was jammed, and by the next day I had calmed down a little.
     
    I suddenly understood what the attack on Pearl Harbor had meant to the people of the USA of that time. I'm fighting mad today, all over again, even though today is only 9/10 and not 9/11.
     
    It had taken six of these seven years for the nightmares to stop. Are they now going to start again? Is that why I have to write about this stuff? So I won't have to dream about it?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Yes ... There it is ... Right on time and 3,000 feet below lower than we are. Hell's Gate, the junction of the East River and the Harlem River, just as in the simulator. I'll roll the aircraft into a gentle descending left turn. After all, I don't want to upset the passengers any more than they're already upset. We still have 25 miles and four minutes to go. Let's not give them any ideas ...
     
    There we are, lined up on Fifth Avenue. I don't know anything about New York, but in the sim I was easily able to identify Central Park off in the distance to the southwest, and Fifth Avenue runs right along its eastern edge. Passing a sports stadium I continue my descent, now tracking straight down Fifth. But I'm going to level off at 1500 feet before I reach the Empire State building so I can't possibly hit it -- because that's not the plan for the day.
     
    ... ... There it is, the big antenna mast on top of the building. Here it comes, there it goes, just below me off the right wing. Get the nose down now, way down, because I have to get down to 700 feet before I can do the will of ... ... No. No time for that now ...
     
    As I near Union Square I pull the nose up sharply to stop my descent. I can hear the shrieks of the passengers as they experience a G-force that is supposed to be felt only in roller coasters, not in airliners. But I don't care about them. Actually, I do care. I don't want them to panic but I do want them to suffer. Because they deserve it. They all deserve it. The people in the North Tower, the people in the South Tower, they all deserve it. So do the people in the Pentagon, and in the White House.
     
    Full power now, jam the throttles all the way forward as we pass the next-to-last waypoint, the arch at the north entrance to Washington Square Park. Even from the cockpit I can hear the terrible whine of the turbines as the blades go supersonic. What must the children and college students in the park be thinking? Have they ever seen anything like this before? Will they now acknowledge the righteous might of ... ... No. No time for that now either.
     
    There is only time to wrack the aircraft around in a tight right turn and then to roll it steeply left again, pulling it around the AT&T headquarters building, the final waypoint, in a climbing left turn that takes me directly to the North Tower exactly as we planned, my nose at the level of the 85th floor, aimed upwards, my wings steeply banked so as to involve as many floors as possible in the fires of vengeance that will now cons
  9. xxmikexx

    The Z Store

    By xxmikexx,

    After closing our Golden Midi Music And Software business I spent 1.5 years in an unsuccessful search for a well-paying high tech job. It finally dawned on me that being 40++, and having been an entrepreneur, I had become an Untouchable.
     
    I moped around our remotely located property for another few months till the cold weather of late Fall set in and it was no longer fun to go for walks with my favorite cat. It was actually the cat who took ME for walks, the same route every time. She would get about fifty feet ahead of me, then wait for me to catch up, then walk another fifty feet, and so on, periodically turning her head to make sure I was following her. (When she died a year later I was absolutely devastated.)
     
    Came the day when I made a fateful decision. I was out of the computer industry. Now I would go into retailing, and I would go as far as I could, as fast as I could. It being early November, I assumed that with the approach of the Christmas selling season there would never be a better time to break in.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I drove twenty miles to the largest Radio Shack store in the Metro Denver area, the flagship store of the local district, located inside the large Southwest Plaza shopping mall. I asked to speak with the manager. Why? "Please tell him that I want a job." He's not here. "Fine, I'll wait."
     
    I killed two hours during which time I wandered throughout the store, seeing it for the first time not simply as a customer but also as someone who might actually end up working there at Southwest Plaza. The manager finally came back from his errand, led me to a table at a fast food restaurant, and asked me a few questions. I answered them, giving him a 25-word summary of why I wanted to get into retailing. "Okay" he finally said. "Do you have a Social Security card?" I explained that it had been lost. "Get another one and then come back and see me."
     
    He asked me to do something else as well, I don't remember what. The replacement SS card came about ten days later. My having already done whatever the other thing was, I took myself back to Southwest Plaza and had another sit-down with Big John, as I later would learn he was called. "Fine" he said. "Now I want you to go down to the district office and fill out some paperwork", whereupon he immediately got up and returned to the store before I had a chance to ask him where the office in question was.
     
    It didn't take long to find out, and by three hours later I had filled out the papers and returned to Big John's store. He sat me down for the third time. "I'm sorry about the runaround" he said "But I needed to see what your work ethic is like. You're hired, but you can't work here. You'll be working at Villa Italia. Tell Pete Bulmer that I sent you."
     
    I didn't know at the time that Southwest Plaza had satellite stores, that in effect those stores reported to the flagship store, and that Big John effectively was the manager of a district within an even bigger district. Rather, I felt that I had been sentenced to Siberia, especially because the Villa Italia store was even further from home and was located in a shopping mall whose clientelle had deteriorated to the point that there was actually a police station located within it.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Pete put me to work immediately, putting stock out on the retail shelves and piers, and in the stockroom. Cardboard boxes of random stuff arrived daily and, for a few days, it was my job to get everything unpacked and put away. At first, in the interests of saving time I had to go to Pete and ask where things should go. (The other employees were scornful and I tried not to have to ask them.) But gradually the store layout began to clarify in my mind, and after about a week I more or less knew where event the tiniest items were likely to be located.
     
    All the while the Christmas shopping traffic in the store was building. You could see the increase from one day to the next, and things were starting to get a little hectic. I realized that my playing stock put-away was actually good training for what I could see was the coming battle. As I became more efficient at restocking the store I began to have time to work with customers.
     
    Actually, I had worked with my first customer on the day I started at Villa. Somebody walked up to me, asked me a question, and I did my best to answer it. The customer then walked away for whatever reason, and the assistant manager approached me. "That's my customer" he said. "And I don't want you talking to my customers."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Rick (that was his name) and I became friends, but not at first. The significance of the "my customer" business was that regardless of what the customer bought, and regardless of which salesperson closed the sale, credit for the sale was supposed to go to the "owner" of the customer, which meant that either a) he got to ring it up under his log-in name, or b) the other salespeople were to log in as him and ring it up for him.
     
    This was important because Radio Shack employees made minimum wage and were limited to working 35 hours per week so that there wouldn't be any overtime (or benefits). So sales people had a strong incentive to sell as much as they could as fast as they could in order to "make commission" -- in order to sell more than the weekly thresshold amount required to begin earning commissions for that week.
     
    Well, I never made commission. Not once. I hadn't come for the minimum wage job, I had come to get noticed by store and district management. I simply gave the best customer service I could, having decided that either a) Radio Shack would appreciate this and reward me in way other than commissions, or b) I would leave and find some other retailing home.
     
    And I was in fact rewarded. As the shopping crowds continued to build it became necessary to hire additional seasonal help. (I was seasonal.) But sometimes there were delays in the hiring process. At other times people would start but not be able to take the job and quit.
    So as the Christmas sales volume expanded, Pete began asking me to work extra shifts (I always said yes) and frequently extra days (I always said yes).
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Because I always said yes, two things happened: First, I started working a lot of overtime -- at time-and-a-half. So most weeks my take-home pay was 50-100% above 35-hours-at-minimum wage. (Story resumes at this point per Luis' request.) The second thing that happened was that I was now getting requests from Big John to work extra shifts at his flagship store in Southwest Plaza.
     
    You must realize the importance here. This said something about how much I had learned because Big John's store did a sales volume five times that of the next biggest store, which was Pete's store in Villa Italia, my home base. Yet Southwest Plaza ran with a very small staff, only three people more than Villa, sometimes two. So for Big John to ask that I come down to his store meant that I was already viewed as a skilled Radio Shack employee -- someone who was capable of standing the pace at the Southwest Plaza store, even though I had only been with Radio Shack for a little more than a month.
     
    Mind you, this wasn't because I possessed any special retailing skills (I don't), it was simply because I had been determined to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, my work showed it, and I began to get noticed just as I had hoped would happen.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Anyway, Thanksgiving came and went, and by two weeks before Christmas every store was always full of customers. I often started mornings at Villa Italia and then, in mid-afternoon, would go down to Southwest Plaza to finish out their business day. So except for the time required to travel between stores (20 minutes) I was on the job (and on my feet) from 9AM (by then I was helping to open the Villa store) till 10 PM, when Big John began his close. (I wasn't yet trusted to help with store closings. If I had been, I'd have been working till 11 PM.)
     
    By a week before Christmas I was doing this every day, seven days a week. It was baptism by fire, a crash course in high volume retailing, a test -- and I was passing the test simply because I never said no and always worked my butt off.
     
    By a couple of days before Christmas two of the other seasonal people quit from Pete's store. They simply didn't show up for work, presumably because they couldn't take the pressure any more. Anyway, that bolted me to Pete's store. We (the district, I was already beginning to think that way) -- we needed me to be at Pete's store 100% of the time ....
     
    ... Because the store was jam-packed with customers and the sales volume was very very high. People were buying anything and everything -- and they continued to buy right up till 10PM on Christmas Eve when we closed the doors with a sigh of relief. (Even then people were pounding on the doors demanding to be let in, but the policy of the shopping mall management was that all stores had to close their doors at 10PM, period end of discussion.)
     
    So we all went home to our families, our girlfriends, our pets, depending on how lucky we had been in life. But it wasn't over yet because we only got Christmas morning off. The store re-opened at 1 PM -- not to sell anything but rather to deal with the flood of merchandise being returned by customers who had bought stuff in the last few days simply to have things to put under their Christmas trees -- but who couldn't afford to do without refunds for that very same merchandise.
     
    That flood went on till well into the evening. The next morning we opened Pete's store as usual -- and everything was finally quiet. There had been perhaps twenty seasonal employees taken on across the district, which encompassed six or eight stores, I don't recall the exact number. Only one of these people was invited to stay on with Radio Shack as a full-time employee. That person was me, and I had d*** well earned it.
  10. xxmikexx
    My bit about surface tension caused me to mention physics conservation laws. (In the title of this blog, kindly append an "s" to the word "Law".) I want now to say more on that subject. It will also, remarkably, be an opportunity for me to wax poetic about the joys of Julian's, the NYC pool hall at which the movie "The Huster" SHOULD have been shot.
     
    While I was at NYU my best friend was a guy named Karl Erb. Karl's father was an aeronautical engineer who had designed the nose gear of the YB-47 flying wing prototype. That impressed the heck out of me though it meant nothing to Karl, who had a less than zero interest in aviation. No, Karl was interested only in physics ...
     
    ... And in the game of pool, pocket billiards to you UK/continent people, which he taught me to play in the NYU student center. I didn't play all that well -- typical runs of 5-6 balls, but Karl wasn't bad, on the order of 10 balls per run. Nevertheless, one thing led to another and I ended up having a pool cue custom-made for me at a shop down on Radio Row, later to be the site of the Twin Towers. It was a standard unscrews-in-the-middle top-of-the-line cue but I had them add weights and position them till it was just the way I wanted -- heavier than most players are comfortable with by about four ounces, but so perfectly balanced that I could shoot with my right thumb and index finger closed into an O so I would be able not to grip the cue the way so many players do. The added weights gave the cue a lot of momentum, helping me with straight follow-through, which was one of my weak points.
     
    Karl and I played straight pool. No eightball. No nineball. Just as we each preferred straight poker, another story for another day. But as conservative as we were about pool, we were thrilled the day the legendary Willy Mosconi came to the student center to put on an exhibition.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Mosconi did his incredible trick shot show, a small portion of which you see in The Hustler, passed off as normal pool playing. Well, it's not. Hardly anybody can do a masse (pr. "mass-ay") shot the way Mosconi could, making the cue ball leap over an object ball and then come back toward the shooter, knocking the object ball into the pocket in front of which the shooter is standing. No, when most people tried something like that they would simply tear the billiard cloth. As a result, essentially every pool hall that plans to make a profit forbids masse shots.
     
    Sometimes, as part of his exhibition, Mosconi would play an entire game by himself, against the clock. That is, he would break and then run rack after rack till he had reached 125 balls. Sometimes he would miss, and maybe most of the time he would miss a single shot, or perhaps two, but to a first approximation Mosconi was one of a small number -- a very small number -- of players who could do that.
     
    Mosconi was so good that his face was known to all pool players, and he would no longer be able to get a game for money, not that he needed it. He made a very good living traveling around the USA putting on his exhibitions.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Our show took place early in the afternoon. Everybody who cared at all about pool, about 25-30 of us, cut all our classes and attended. Karl and I, and everybody else, watched in awe as Mosconi did his thing. Then, at the point in the show where he would normally wrap the exhibition by putting on his run-nine-racks-AQAP demo, he did something very unusual. He offered to play the best player in the house provided that he, Mosconi, would be allowed to break.
     
    He didn't say so but most likely he was thinking along the lines of "My opponent will miss at some point. When he does I'll run 125 balls and that will be the end of him."
     
    So Mosconi broke ... And his opponent began to shoot. Mosconi probably didn't know it but the opposition was the New York State collegiate straight pool champion. I don't remember his name so let's just call him Dave. Dave did something very unusual for him -- he missed his third or so shot. This must have gotten Mosconi's sympathy because a rack or two later Mosconi missed a shot that clearly he could have made while asleep on his feet. He probably thought he was making it a fair and interesting game. However ...
     
    Dave proceeded to run the table. And then he ran another rack. And another. And another. And when he reached 125, the game was over and Dave had defeated the great Willy Mosconi in a fair fight. Mosconi, ever the gentleman, complimented Dave on his excellent shot-making skills, and most especially Dave's skill in leaving himself in good position to shoot the next ball. You see, an experienced player will size up the table after the break and in a matter of ten or twenty seconds will forumulate a plan for running the table. He will know which ball he will sink first, leaving him in position to sink the second ball, and so on.
     
    This was what was so remarkable about Mosconi's run-125-balls demonstration. Somebody would rack the balls for him, then he would break, and then he would simply start shooting -- he didn't need to evaluate the whole table, he would do that on the fly. He was such a good shotmaker that he would soon be in an optimal position to run the rest of the rack. During each rack he FLEW around the table, making a shot perhaps every five or so seconds. This meant that he would run a 15-ball rack in about a minute and a half. Allow a minute to get the next rack set up and he would be playing at the rate of 15 balls every 2-3 minutes, an astonishing accomplishment.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Karl and I got married at roughly the same time, and we ended up living in the same apartment building on East 13th Street, right next door to what a few years later would become the world-famous Electric Circus discotheque, among the first clubs of its kind.
     
    Just a couple of blocks from where we lived was Julian's Billiards on 14th Street. I don't recall the name of the pool hall where The Hustler was shot but it was at Broadway and 89th or thereabouts, an out-of-the-way location. They chose itfor theatrical purposes because, judging by the movie, it was small and clubby. (I never played there.)
     
    In contrast, Julian's was the Big Time, known far and wide. When players from elsewhere in the country wanted to make their mark they came to Julian's. I suspect that the only reason The Huster wasn't made there is because Julian's was HUGE and would have made the characters seem insiginificant. Julian's had actual staggered rising bench seats from which onlookers could watch the action, like the bleachers at a baseball field, except here the stands were quite close to the first row of tables, like the seating in a teaching hospital classroom, though straight rather than curved. (I seem to recall three rows of tables in all, each containing about ten tables. As I said, HUGE.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Karl and I would often meet at Julian's after classes. Sometimes we would even cut classes to be there. Sometimes our wives would let us out for the evening so we could go there. Yet we didn't play there very often because it was embarassing for pikers like us to do so. No, we came to watch and to learn. If we played there at all it would be in the morning while all the real players were still asleep.
     
    And what a treat it was to watch. Not only were there terrific players, ones who could have eaten Mosconi for breakfast, there were genuine movie-type characters ... Because people who play pool for a living, or for whom pool is the dominant factor in their lives, are just as colorful as chess players.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    But wait! you ask. What on earth does this stuff have to do with conservation laws in physics?
  11. xxmikexx

    Surface Tension

    By xxmikexx,

    Today I had a chance to see, close up, a yellowjacket swoop down and then hover to get a drink from the waters of our condo development's swimming pool. Unfortunately it made the mistake of doing it into a trough between shallow waves, resulting in its failing to rise as fast as the side of an approaching swell was rising. Then the creature was no longer hovering but instead was in the water, trapped by surface tension.
     
    Surface tension is also responsible for the beautiful sheen on the gentle waves in the swimming pool -- the water appears to have a tight-fitting skin. And indeed it does, again due to surface tension. The surface of the water is quite literally attracted to the body of water beneath. With no counteracting attractive force from the air above, a thin region of high viscosity is formed -- and the yellowjacket is pulled down into the water and trapped there.
     
    What's the source of this force?
     
    It has to do with the fact that a molecule of water is polar -- weakly charged positively at the oxygen end, weakly charged negatively at the two hydrogens that bend away from the oxygen like a deeply curved banana. This polar effect is not the ionic bonds between the hydrogens and the oxygen -- the net charge across the molecule is precisely zero and therefore cannot by itself be a source of attraction between water molecules. (The zero net charge issue is another story for another day)
     
    Rather, what we are talking about here is the distribution of the net charge -- a greater than nominal electron density around the hydrogens, a less than nominal electron density around the oxygen. So while the oxygen does in fact become weakly positive, the hydrogens actually become less positive than nominal. There is a small but computable and measurable tendency for the hydrogens of water molecule A to stick to the oxygen of water molecule B.
     
    And now for a not-so-obvious fact: To a chemist (I was trained as one), water is a neutral aqueous solution of solvated protons. The protons have a tendency to drift away from their parent oxygens and stick briefly to a different oxygen. Because protons are positively charged, this phenomenon causes the approaching proton to tend to pull electrons away from the receiving oxygen and toward the proton.
     
    The result is a proton surrounded (solvated) by a very weak cloud of negative electric charge, and an oxygen ion that has had its negative charge reduced slightly. This causes a bias in the distribution of the electric charges, resulting in a net attractive force between what we think of as ionically bound molecules of water.
     
    But at the surface there is nothing to counter the net attractive force between the water molecules immediately beneath the surface -- and the skin of surface tension forms. Anything sticking down in this skin -- like the dangling legs of the unfortunate yellowjacket -- will be attracted to the underlying water, dragging the creature down into the water with such force that it is unable to escape, its struggles serving only to get itself wet, deepening its plight.
     
    The yellowjacket's only way out of the situation is for a force majeure -- my hand -- to sweep it out of the pool and onto the adjacent concrete, where the water will evaporate, once again allowing the creature to fly.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The example just cited is one of three categories of force known collectively as Van der Waals forces, named after a Dutch scientist who identified two of the three categories.
     
    Van der Waals forces are residual forces, far far weaker than the parent forces giving rise to them ... and what we call the strong nuclear force is actually the equivalent of Van der Waals attraction between quarks, resulting in a tendency of neutrons and protons to stick together even though there is no ionic bond between them. This should give you some idea of the strength of the quantum chromodynamic force between quarks -- unbelievably strong, far far stronger than the unbelievably strong nuclear force they give rise to.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Footnote: Not only is there no ionic bond between the protons and neutrons of a nucleus, the protons are repelling one another very strongly because they are all positively charged.
     
    You can get an idea of the strength of the electric force as follows: Place a piece of paper on the floor. Now run a comb through your hair a few times and hold it just above the paper. The comb will then lift the paper, that small amount of charge overcoming the gravitational pull of the entire earth.
     
    And now imagine the strong nuclear force, as relatively more powerful than the electric force as the electric force is than gravity.
  12. xxmikexx
    None of us was born knowing FS. And as we learn stuff and perhaps become apparent experts, we should all recognize that a) every one of us has gaps in his knowledge, and b) most of what we know about FS has come from the collective wisdom of the forums. Thus there is nothing for arrogant active forum people to be arrogant about. To a first approximation most of them have invented nothing and have created nothing. Their arrogance is the way they deal with their own feelings of inadequacy, or so it seems to me. They are nothing more than schoolyard bullies.
     
    Anyway, I know a lot about operating system theory, and about simulated IFR operations in the FS world, and I know more than I thought about FS flight dyamics engineering, and much more than I thought about how to code panels. I understand how complex propeller engines work and what the controls for them do ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    ... But I know nothing about scenery. I know nothing about the creation of aircraft 3D models. I know nothing about weather utilities. I know nothing about AI aircraft. I know nothing about making FS videos (though I do know something about making attractive screenshots). And on and on and on.
     
    In fact, even though I am one of the most prolific posters on this site, and even though I seem to be fairly effective at answering questions, in terms of reputation it's all an illusion. What i DON'T know about FS greatly exceeds what I do know about it, and the questions i CAN'T answer greatly outnumber the ones I can.
     
    So to compensate I generally get involved only in response to questions regarding areas that I do in fact know something about. I push to the edges of my knowledge, but I try always to be aware of the limits of my knowledge and behave accordingly, an important aspect of which is calling in consultants in the form of expert members whose specialized skill sets I'm familiar with. Usually I don't know what they know (though I learn from them), which is the whole point of yelling for help when a discussion gets me in over my head.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Don't get me wrong -- I have an ego as big as all outdoors -- but I've been involved in computer software, hardware and firmware, and in engineering management, and marketing, and sales, and customer support ... er ... down bad grammar! Down!
     
    What I'm trying to say is, I've been around the block so many times that I recognize my REAL skill lies in separating the Technical Solid Citizens from the BS Artists.
     
    I'm a subject matter expert (SME) only in a small number of areas. However, I have a general purpose brain and very quickly learn enough about a new subject to see who is and isn't a SME in that area. In fairly short order I'm able to identify the speakers of bafflegab -- which often annoys them to no end because I don't hesitate to call them out.
     
    And I go further than that. What it has become clear to me that someone is in fact a SME, in subsequent posts I try to make it plain to the readership that the person in question is a Solid Citizen whose word is to be listened to very carefully. That way the less knowledgable people in the readership will have some idea of whom to believe in the event of the kinds of endless he-said-she-said debates that do tend to crop up in the forums.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Yet all is not for the best in this best of all possible worlds -- because my memory is spotty these days and getting worse.
     
    Yesterday, for example, I explained to a poster how it was most unlikely that FSX aircraft would be runnable in the environment of the next version of FS, which will be based on a whole new general purpose simulation platform unrelated to the FS of today. This is spite of the fact that I knew better -- but had forgotten -- that the product manager himself had said that anything built for FSX that conformed to the latest rev of the SDK would be guaranteed to run in the upcoming new environment.
     
    When this kind of thing happens I look like a fool but I 'fess up anyway. I do this because we want the readership to see the best information available, and part of that information is stating publicly that I've changed my position so that it coincides with that of the person who called ME out.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    In the end, if you're going to take the initiative in the FS community and help people, or educate them, or give them confidence in themselves, you must be prepared to be wrong in public sometimes.
     
    Sometimes it's better to give a newcomer an answer that might turn out to be incorrect just in order to make him realize that his request for help was timely heard. Someone more knowledgable will come along soon or later and in the end more good is done than harm.
     
    It's like a surgeon having his track record reviewed by his surgeon peers -- too few deaths means that he is not being agressive enough. (Not being agressive enough means that some people died unnecessarily because the surgeon unreasonably didn't want to chance operating on them.)
     
    So ... There is such a thing as an optimum death rate in surgery, and there is such a thing as an optimum embarassment rate in trying to be a community resource.
  13. xxmikexx

    Answer Songs

    By xxmikexx,

    This post is, effectively, a continuation of an earlier thread dealing with rock shows in the NYC of the 50s. That thread is here ...
     
    https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=62
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The music business was very different in the 50s. Back then there were no giant recording companies (though there were a couple of sizable publishing companies). There were many independent small record labels, but only a few large ones like Atlantic, who were late arrivals and really didn't hit their stride till the 60s.
     
    At that time pop music could be anything. Typical of the transition from the 40s to the 50s was this piece by Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford, "Mockingbird Hill", every line of which rhymes with "hill".
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCoZE_7b-_A&feature=related
     
    Incidentally, Les Ford invented multi-track recording -- except he did it with broadcast recording disks, bouncing tracks from one disk to another as the next track was played live and mixed in.
     
    Les Paul had been in an automobile accident in 1944 I think it was. Anyway, it shattered his right arm -- his picking/strumming arm. Not a problem. He told the doctors to install the requisite metal plates in such a way that his elbow would be locked at the proper angle for playing his guitar.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Here we have a classic that you've probably never heard before because no radio station would play it today -- it would not fit in with any playlist-driven FM station. Therfore I will have to bring it to you. Ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages, without further ado, Jack Blanchard and Misty Moore performing their original number one hit, "The Tennesee Birdwalk" ...
     

     
    That was not the original recording -- I can't find the original -- but it's the same song and it's close enough.
     
    Here's a live version by the author/performers, featuring a fascinating solo by Misty Moore on what looks to me like a Moog 2 ...
     

     
    It's possible that this song actually dates back to the 60s rather than the 50s. My memory is uncertain on this point, and I'm not able to establish the release date via the internet. But if it is of the early 60s it simply reinforces my point because it is even more out of place than it would have been in the 50s.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    In a time like that it was easy for Little Richard to come on the scene and blow everybody away with a kind of music that had never been heard before, "Long Tall Sally" ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBTakXapwiE
     
    As I've said elsewhere, I don't buy much music because I have a tape recorder in my brain that captures most of it and that allows me to play it back on demand. However ...
     
    The flip side of this piece, "Slippin' And Slidin'" was (and is) my favorite Little Richard piece. (I think it was the B-side of "Long Tall Sally".) So I bought the 45 and proceeded to wear it out on my friend David Novak's 45 record player. (I didn't own one.)
     
    See? Even then the future producer in me was emerging. I probably listened to that record 200+ times, 50 of them in the first week that I owned the record. Within 2-3 months I had worn it out but did not replace it. (No need then, no need now.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Well, the answer song for "Long Tall Sally" was, of course, "Short Fat Fannie" by Larry Williams. (The music has a delayed start, be patient.) ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb9-h2M9D1U&feature=related
     
    That song became a hit, in part because it mentioned a large number of other hit songs.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    "Short Fat Fannie" having gone to Number One, Williams decided to come up with a sequel -- an answer to his own answer song, this one entitled "Boney Maronie", which also went to Number One ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfFl3c7g0FM&feature=related
     
    My wife and I met when we started prep school at age 13, the year that song was popular. A dear friend of the time, and a dear friend today, was a young lady named Carolann Mulroney. She was in fact thin and, in the cruel way of kids everywhere, inevitably became known as "Boney Mulroney". Under only slightly different circumstances I would have married Carolann instead of Evalyn. We all know it, recognize this for what it is, and laugh about it.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Whereupon Bill Haley weighed in with "Skinny Minnie" ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO35d9LZtHE&feature=related
     
    I went to a rock show where Haley and company performed this piece before it had even been released as a record. I cannot describe the impact of hearing it live, or the thrill I felt when I first heard it on the radio.
     
    This is just about the only Haley piece that can't be considered Western Swing though I can't be sure because I never heard any of his minor stuff.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Annette Funicello of "Mickey Mouse Club" fame later joined the party with "Tall Paul" ...
     

     
    Oddly enough, my wife's and my close friend, the aforementioned Boney Mulroney, had a brother who was 6'2". Can you possibly guess what his nickname was?
     
    Paul also was a musician -- singer and sax player. Years later, his having won a gig at the Spring Valley NY VFW or some such place, he asked me to come along and back him up because so-and-so had cancelled.
     
    It was raining -- pouring -- that night. We set up on the stage, which had a brass strip that ran the full width, about five feet back, that was grounding me -- and therfore grounding my Strat. So I did the whole evening getting occasional big shocks because of my damp shoes coming in contact with that brass strip. (As I've said elsewhere, I'm a trouper. The show must go on.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    As for answer songs, I don't remember what happened after "Tall Paul".
  14. xxmikexx

    Why I Like The 727

    By xxmikexx,

    It was January? of 1965. I was employed by Applied Data Research in Princeton, NJ ...
     
    I had conceived, designed and written some software to control flatbed plotters in a way that was independent of the details of the devices. (Today we would call that aspect of my code a "class driver".) And then I was able to make a sale of the software to Shell Oil Company.
     
    This was pioneering software that knew how to do 3D projection and perspective. So the user could move a virtual pen through 3-space and my software would project the result, scaled, translated, rotated and perspectivized, onto the 2-D plane of the plotter bed.
     
    You could condition the virtual pen to leave trails behind it -- dashed lines, dotted lines, blah blah blah. The software even had scaleble fonts that I had programmed myself, the pioneering equivalent of what we would call today a TrueType font. The only thing my software lacked was a hidden lines elimination feature, an algorithm that I struggled for two years to invent but could not.
     
    Anyway, a big user of the software was Shell Oil in Houston. (I had closed the sale with some Shell folks in NJ but it was Houston that ended up being the main user.) Something came up during the winter of 64/65, I forget what. I had to fly down to Houston on short notice, planning to stay only a day or two.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Instead the visit stretched out to almost a month. Shell had been prepared to fly me back and forth so I could spend weekends with my wife and infant daughter. But I'm a trouper, Shell was in a world of hurt, and my wife agreed that I should stay in Houston till Shell was up and running again. So I worked 18x7 until the job was done, taking only short meal breaks and the occasional long dinner break, sometimes sleeping at Shell, sometimes sleeping at my hotel a few blocks away. (But the blocks on Fannon were LONG blocks, as I recall.)
     
    I'm not sure that my stuff had bugs. I think it may have been an emergency requirement for some new features. At any rate they needed the software modifications to print well geology maps derived from data gathered in the field by their prospecting teams.
     
    It was mid-winter in Princeton but in Houston ... Ah, in Houston ... It was sunny, and warm, and I saw a helicopter land right next to the Steak By Weight restaurant on Fannon Boulevard. Out stepped two men wearing large Stetson hats. (Stetsons are made in Brooklyn, by the way, or at least used to be.) Winter in Houston came as a stunning surprise. But we never moved there. We didn't move because it never occurred to me that we could.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Anyway, came a day when Shell and I agreed that everything that needed to be done had been done, tested and found to be in good shape. That was around 10AM of my final day there. I expressed a desire to get on a Newark-bound flight as early as I could.
     
    I wandered away to get a soda or whatever while the responsible group manager, a gentleman named Dewey Kibler (a typically Texan name to conjure with), called the Shell travel department office there in the Shell HQ building, which is where I had been working.
     
    I returned to Dewey's office. "It's all set up" he said. "If you get right down there they'll have your ticket ready and will run you out to the airport so you can catch the next flight east."
     
    "Bye Dewey, I've really enjoyed being here. Thanks for your hospitality."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Color me gone. I went down to the travel department, who handed me a ticket for an Eastern Airlines flight. I didn't look at it, mostly because they rushed me downstairs ... and into a limousine ... and whisked me off to Hobby ... where Shell had asked that the aircraft be held ... for little old me ... apparently for fifteen minutes.
     
    You see, Shell could make this stuff happen because Eastern was their biggest customer, and Houston was Shell headquarters.
     
    I boarded the plane, a brand new 727-100, and headed back to coach, suitcase in hand. (That's how it could be done back then if you didn't have time to check luggage through, or if you didn't want to check it through.) While looking for an open seat (that's how it was done back then) a stewardess asked for my ticket (which was sometimes how it was done) ... and then turned me around and led me to ... first class ... to the frontmost seat on the right. (Must have been 1B, I don't recall a seat next to mine.)
     
    She went back to coach. Another stewardess then asked whether I would like a cocktail. At 11 AM? Hm-m-m-m ... Why not? ... I didn't drink much, and usually not till evening, but this was a special occasion. I was exhausted and hoped that a drink would knock me out for the flight home.
     
    Wrong. Completely wrong.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I had ridden 727s a couple of times before but never up front. It was like riding at the end of a telephone pole that was being pushed from behind. I could feel every movement of the aircraft and for an aviation buff like me it was wonderful. It was also QUIET, something I had never before experienced in an airliner. All I heard was the thump of the nose gear coming up and locking, and of the nosewheel doors closing. That and the sound of the slipstream, the quiet white noise building in intensity as the aircraft accelerated.
     
    So there I was, riding a magic carpet with a vodka martini in my right hand as I watched Texas fall away. I've done so much flying that very few flights stick in my mind, but this one certainly did.
     
    Once we were at cruising altitude a sumptuous lunch was served to those of us who were flying POSH. (Port out, starboard home.) Heck, even the coach meals were really good back then, and the meal in First was even better. I don't remember what I ate but whatever it was, it was wonderful.
     
    I didn't sleep at all. I was too excited by the experience. And ever since then I've equated the 727-100 and then the 727-200 with grace and comfort ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I've equated the 727 with the Golden Age of air travel, when aircraft almost always departed and arrived on time. When luggage was almost never lost. When traveling men wore suits and ties, and traveling women wore dresses or women's suits, and when traveling children were dressed in their Sunday best. When the stewardesses were young and pretty and still happy in the fun jobs that they would quit as soon as they had met Mister Right, or that would end when the airlines asked them to step down so they could be replaced with even fresher young faces.
     
    That era will never return. Suffice it to say that today I drive whenever this is at all practical. If I start at 2AM I can make Denver to Malibu in 20 hours. I've done it three times. I can make NYC in 42 hours and Boston in 46, including a stop in a motel. I've done this probably twenty times.
     
    I have zero interest in riding in a cattle car, or in being treated as a piece of cargo, despite the fact that deregulation has resulted in fares that are low as dirt. If I can't fly in comfort -- if I can't afford First -- I simply won't fly again.
  15. xxmikexx
    I saw my first rock show, at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, in ... 56? ... 57? I can't remember the year precisely and Google isn't helping me, but I'll pledge 56. Remarkably, I can't find a single reference to the day when the show in question first opened its doors and an excited crowd of kids, fighting to get in, caused a stampede that left one kid trampled to death and several others injured.
     
    Aware of all the advance hype and excitement, and figuring that 'Tings Might Happen, I wasn't there that day. No, I was there a week later, seven days into the show's ten day run. But kids were still dancing in the aisles to this, that and the other act, and the balcony was still swaying, a danger that the theatre management apparently elected to ignore because the show was breaking box office records.
     
    To my knowledge that was the first rock show in NYC. It had been produced by Alan Freed, the Cleveland DJ who came to NYC and made it big. Deeply involved in payola, and in making movies that featured the acts he owned large pieces of, and paying the required monetary tributes the NYC mob, who owned him, Freed became a legend ... and he remained one until his station, WABC, fired him because he refused to say whether he had ever accepted payola.
     
    Before that show there had been Vaudeville, dying a lingering death. After that show Vaudeville was mainly to be seen only in a) the Ed Sullivan TV show, and b) the Academy Of Music theatre on East 14th Street, right next to Julian's, a legendary pool hall that also must be the subject of a story for another day.
     
    As I recall, Freed was succeeded by "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, a DJ who did then and does today make me cringe. I caught him last winter emceeing a show paying homage to Disco. He was just as smarmy and patronizing and ... well ... think of screeching chalk on a blackboard. Anyway, Morrow drove me to seek part-time shelter at WLIB, at the time a low power "race music" station, nothing remotely resembling its status of today as Number One in the NY/NJ/CT Tri-State area. (At least that's how things stood several years ao. I don't really know what's happening today.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    At the time WLIB really had only one thing going for it and that was the seminal DJ Jocko Henderson, not yet a legend but soon to become one. Here's a typical Henderson on-air rap. Maybe I've made it up, maybe not, but Jocko would have been right at home saying it, and playing percussion under it using his stiffened fingers on a table top ...
     
    Ee-tiddly-ock
    This IS your man Jock
    And I'm back on the scene
    With the record machine.
    The time right now?
    Eleven nineteen.
     
    In the immortal words of Steve Allen, I kid you not. As I recall Henderson did six hours, from 9PM to 3AM, all filled with his unique ad-libbing, all filled with the records HE wanted to play. He would take requests, but only if they coincided with his own tastes.
     
    Like Freed, Henderson began packaging shows of his own, these put on at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. People think that Bootsy Collins invented the rocketship landing on the stage, but they're wrong. It was Jocko, who sometimes stepped out of the machine dressed like Cab Calloway -- in a blindingly white tux with top hat and cane. So, folks, there's nothing new under the sun. Bootsy is rooted in Jocko is rooted in Calloway is rooted in, most likely, Mister Bojangles.
     
    I can't go further back than Bojangles but the lineage must have been known to the people of that time. Bojangles, by the way, is the subject of the song by The Byrds, "Mister Bojangles". Apparently one of them came across Bojangles living in a trailer, impoverished and forgotten. Well, Roger McGuinn may not have heard of Bojangles before that but I had, though I can't tell you when or where.
     
    Being a night owl I often caught long stretches of Jocko's show on WLIB, but not always, because he had competition. Yes, folks, the main thing going down on the NYC airways of the time at that hour was the legendary Jean Shepard, who single-handedly invented talk radio, complete with seven-second delay on the playback. But before introducing call-ins as a feature of the show, Shepard had always done six hours of non-stop monologue, interrupted only by ads and station breaks that he did himself as I recall. (I think this was WOR, quite a big station, but not at night.) And he never repeated himself, never. He invented characters who would tell stories, and some of his characters were regulars, so to speak, but the stories never repeated. A truly astonishing performance.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    As it happens I was in ground school with Shepard in ... 67? Also in our class was the man who would later become known as Big Ed Mahler, the famed airshow aerobatic pilot, though at the time he was simply Eddie Mahler, son of a wealthy car dealer. This was all at Princeton Airport, another story for another day. But I digress ... ...
     
    ... ... And I digress to another digression :D ...
     
    I don't think he ever complained but Cab Calloway was sentenced to spend the rest of his days performing a single song -- "Minnie The Moocher", just as Bobby Pickett had to perform "The Monster Mash" in supermarket parking lots till he dropped dead, and as Jimmy Buffet will have to perform "Margaritaville" in the bar he owns till the day Key West is wiped out by a hurricane. (I don't wish Buffet dead but I do wish that this song be six feet under. Which reminds me :) ... Television pioneer Art Linkletter, today 95, recently observed that "It's better to be over the hill than under it". :D)
     
    (Hey Sherm! I know that constructs like "under it". with the period following the quotation mark are a no-no. However, you have no choice but to agree that the English language is whatever educated people say that it is. I say that the trailing period looks better, just as I Like To Capitalize All The Words In A Title Includiing The Minor Ones. So there.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Ahem ...
     
    As I had been about to say, my rock show attendance career began with Alan Freed. It also continued with Alan Freed and the Brooklyn Paramount until the fall of 57, when it came to an abrupt end.
     
    It came to an abrupt end because I had made a friend at summer camp -- a friend whose uncle just happened to be the manager of the Brooklyn Fox Theatre. And Freed didn't put shows on there, competing DJ Murray Kaufman did.
     
    Yes, folks, Jesse Kligman and I got to go backstage at the Brookly Fox for probably every "Murray The K" show produced betweent the fall of 57 and the fall of 60. All we had to do was to go up to the stage door alongside the theatre, knock, and tell Whoever that we had Uncle's okay, and that they should check with Uncle if they didn't believe us. (Nobody ever checked. I mean, how many fans know the name of the manager of the theatre they want to invade?)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Aside: Like my prep school, the summer camp had the children of a number of famous people, or kids who later became famous.
     
    Like Vicki Wilson, who later achieved notoriety as Whatever. Vicki was one of the daughters of Sloan Wilson, the guy who wrote "The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit". The book and the movie had been hits in the USA, but it faded off the radar screen here. But not in Russia.
     
    That's right folks, TMITGFS sold like hotcakes in Russia for many, many years. Now the Russians were reasonable people back then. They paid royalties. Trouble was, they didn't allow the royalties to leave Russia. So every year, after summer camp, Vicki and her parents would go off to Russia for a vacation, their goal being to spend away whatever royalties had accrued in their absence.
     
    Another friend of mine there was a girl named Georgia Godowsky. Not a very impressive name. In fact you've never heard it before. But Georgia's uncle was (drum roll) the legendary composer Irah Gershwin brother of George Gershwin, after whom Georgia had been named. (Georgia's mom's sister married Irah. No, I never met him though I certainly do wish I had. You will note that they HAD to name her Georgia. I mean, whoever heard of the feminine version of Irah?)
     
    Another was Sue Kolker, who appears in Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" as someone who persistently stood in the way of progress regarding Whatever in White Plains or some such place.
     
    We also had Dave Wyler, heir to the Wyler Watch fortune. Dave wasn't stuck up or anything, he was simply obnoxious, so I did not hang out with him. But I did hang out with Peter Rutter, later a congressman from Cincinatti.
     
    And oh yes ... My counselor for two years in a row was a certain Albert Shanker, a schoolteacher who would later found the National Teacher's Union. I will make no further comment about him because I don't want to get into politics in the FlightSim.com blogosphere. However, he was a really nice guy, very patient with we hormone-laden little male warriors.
  16. xxmikexx
    You know all the A sides, I'm not going to repeat them. But here are some terrific Chuck Berry pieces that you may not have heard ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    First, "Havana Moon". The author of "Louie, Louie" says he was inspired by this piece, which can be heard here ...
     

     
    In this piece you can hear Berry's preferred bottom accompaniment -- a string bass. (Even after electrics came on the scene he continued his love affair with the upright.) Another interesting thing about the orchestration of this piece is that there are no drums, no piano, as would be normal for a Chuck Berry recording.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Here's a piece featuring the normal Chuck Berry lineup of drums, bass, piano, and a second guitar, "Little Queenie" ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Be_ioAYtU&feature=related
     
    However, if you watch it through to the end you will have it confirmed, as I did, that this is a lip-synced scene from an Alan Freed rock movie. (I think it was "Don't Knock The Rock".) You see, Chuck Berry's piano player was a black gentleman named Johnny Johnson, not the white guy you see in the background.
     
    Similarly, while I don't know the name of Chuck Berry's regular session drummer (it will have been the Chess Records house drummer), i DO know the name of his session backup guitarist -- Bo Diddley.
     
    That's right, folks. On essentially every Chuck Berry record you have ever heard, if there's a second guitar running it will be Bo Diddley. Listen to this, "Memphis" as rendered by the author himself, Chuck Berry. (And you thought it had been written by Johnny Rivers, didn't you.) ...
     
    ... D-word ... I can't find the original recording, but if you hear it you'll see (gr?) that Bo Diddley was playing backup rhythm guitar in Berry's unique style.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    In the late 50s I used to go to many of the rock shows in NYC so I got to see Chuck Berry several times. He never played a song the same way twice. The take of "Maybelline" that we're all familiar with was in fact Take 37, and you can be sure that it was recognizably different from (and better than) all the takes that preceded it.
     
    Let's see ... Thirty-seven takes. If we assume that some of the takes were abandoned half way through, we're probably talking about 2x37 = 74 minutes of time. Most likely they had a tape machine running and they simply kept it running through the whole session, which probably lasted four hours if you count breaks, maybe going to 60 takes in all. That would have been heaven for me -- listening to all those interpretations by by the author himself. Here's a typical live concert variation ...
     

     
    You will recall, of course, that Take 37 sounds like Take One, as completely fresh as if he had just walked into the studio. Berry loved to play, and he loved his own songs. Take this live performance of "Johnny B. Goode" ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEq62iQo0eU&feature=related
     
    and this one ...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0YUA3yTUss
     
    His enthusiasm was infectious, kids would always be dancing in the aisles, and he was such a dynamite performer that he would always close the show. Nobody repeat nobody ever dared to follow him.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    It was Chuck Berry who converted me to rhythm guitar. Before him I had been copping Scotty Moore riffs (Elvis), but the first time I heard "Roll Over Beethoven" (56?) I was immediately transported to the rhythm section where I remain to this day. (And you thought that John Lennon wrote that song, didn't you.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    And now for something completely different ...
     
    "Maybelline" was Take 37 but Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" was Take One. Yes, for her first recording session ever, this 16-year old girl from central NJ walked into the famous Atlantic Records studio on West 57th street with her mom, listened to Quincy Jones' runthrough of the arrangement with the band, and then laid the whole thing down in one take. As I recall, Jones ended the session right there. What would have been the point of continuing?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Finally, when I began to write this piece I had intended to present what is perhaps my favorite Chuck Berry original recording, "Around And Around". However, the original is not up on any of the usual sites. But a number of covers are because this, ladies and gentlemen, is a piece that musicians love, like "In The Midnight Hour".
  17. xxmikexx

    Larry And Paul

    By xxmikexx,

    Larry And Paul are my cousins, Paul being my age, Larry two years older. Paul's best friend in grade school and high school was ... George Petaki ... who later became governor of the State of New York. (I must have met George many times because I spent as many weekends at my cousins' place as I could, but I'm drawing a complete blank.)
     
    My cousins' father was George, a Vienna-trained Ear, Nose and Throat doctor who fled his native Hungary during the late 30s, came to this country, and ended up marrying my mother's sister. Till the day of his death forty years later George spoke rapid fire English with an accent as thick as that of his countryman Edward Teller.
     
    Yet by the early fifties George spoke good colloquial English. And by the early sixties he had become the equivalent of a native speaker, making up jokes like the following ... "I've invented two new prescription drugs for Catholic priests" he said to me one day. "Really, Uncle George? What are they?"
     
    Noassitol
    Celiba-C
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Larry and Paul were born into that happy house. Larry became a ham radio equipment builder and operator at the age of nine, as I recall. To this day, having spent many hours in his room listening to him on the air, I know his call letters as well as I know my own name -- K2TIO. (A ham friend recently looked it up and found that his license is still active.)
     
    Larry was a good kid but Paul was always getting him in trouble ...
     
    Like the time they took my Aunt Ruth's zinc laundry tub out onto the back lawn, filled it with water, strapped an M-80 to a brick, lit the fuse, and dropped the brick into the tub. When the M-80 went off, there was a huge gusher of water, and the tub split its sides not just along the main seam but also somewhere else. I know this story is true because I was there.
     
    But here's something I only heard about, because I was at home in NYC when it happened ...
     
    Larry had purchased a used US Army mortar shell from a war surplus store. The shell had, of course, been emptied of its explosives, and the primer had been removed, and the back of the cavity had been plugged with lead.
     
    No problem, not for my cousins. Egged on by Paul, Larry drilled out the lead plug. Then, working cooperatively, they filled the mortar shell with the heads of wooden matches -- from many boxes of matches -- hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of match heads.
     
    Then they build a simple X-frame launcher, stuck an M-80 fuze into the back of the drilled-out hole, leaned the mortar shell against the X-frame, and aimed it toward downtown Peekskill, about half a mile away and three hundred feet lower. And then they lit the fuse ...
     
    Well, by some miracle the mortar shell did not explode. Instead it rocketed up off the launcher and was last seen flying a beautiful parabolic arc toward downtown, with the stabilization fins doing a perfect job. The odd thing is, nothing was reported either on the radio or in the newspaper. As far as the good people of Peekskill were concerned, nothing at all had happened.
     
    Today I'm horrified by what they did, yet as I write this the incident has me snickering and chortling just as much as when I first heard the story.
  18. xxmikexx

    Yellow Jello

    By xxmikexx,

    I’m not mad about saffron
    Even on a chicken curr-y.
    I’m not mad about saffron.
    It’s yellow and it goes right through me.
     
    Yet I like yellow jello. (That’s right.)
    Yes, I like yellow jello. (That’s right.)
    I like yellow jello. (That's right.)
     
    Bop doit doit bop
    Doit bop bop bop
     
    We lick pickled bananas.
    They’re the bee’s knees to me.
    We lick pickled bananas.
    You know, they grow on green pickle trees
     
    Yet they are always yellow. (That’s right.)
    When fresh they're always yellow. (That’s right.)
    And you’re a lucky fellow (That's right.)
    When rotten, not in jello. (fade)
    Because black isn't yellow. (faint)
    You'd really hate the smell-o. (fainter)
    'Twould be a crime to sell-o. (very faint)
    .
    .
    .
     
    (For heaven's sake, stop me before I compose again. :D)
  19. xxmikexx

    The White Pages

    By xxmikexx,

    Earlier today I asserted that anybody can write well enough to make any subject interesting simply by coming at it from an angle that would interest the author himself, his enthusiasm in turn affecting the rest of us. Here’s the promised example, me rising to the challenge of making the Telephone Book interesting …
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The telephone book known as the “White Pages” has many uses. For example, if I wanted to generate a name for a character in a novel I might open the phone book at random, poke my finger at an entry and come up with a first name, in this case “Chet” (truth). By the same procedure I might come up with a last name of “Webster” and, finally, a middle initial of “O.”
     
    And there we have him, folks - - Chester O. Webster, a/k/a “Chet”.
     
    What do we know about the mythical Chet? Well, for one thing we know he lives in Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Denver. How do we know this? Because the cover of the (local) book says Lakewood, Golden, Wheat Ridge, but he doesn’t strike me as a resident of Lakewood (where my wife and I live) or Golden (where my daughter and her family live).
     
    No, Chet Webster lives in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a pleasant looking community that has some unpleasant surprises in store for non-residents, see later in this post.
     
    But for the moment let’s look at something other than using the White Pages as a name generator for Great American Novels ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Believe it or not the White Pages, or indeed any thick edition of any phone book, is often used by people who want to investigate or demonstrate the stopping power of a handgun or rifle.
     
    As when Bill Whoever fired a Winchester 30-30 into the Manhattan phone book in the confines of his bedroom in his parents’ apartment in the same Queens apartment building where I and my parents lived. (Truth. And I say “Whoever” because that’s the way I like to represent a name that my failing memory refuses to retrieve.)
     
    My ears were in agony even though I had pressed the flaps closed with my index fingertips. Bill and I were 15 at the time and he had -- are you ready for this? -- a carry permit for firearms and ammunition valid anywhere within the five boroughs of NYC. (Truth.)
     
    You see, Bill shot competitively, or at least that’s what the carry permit said. So it would make perfect sense for him to be walking around one of the most crime-ridden cities in the USA, carrying a Winchester Model 95 in a case.
     
    Aw c’mon, Bill. How does a 15 year old kid living in Forest Hills get to be a championship shooter? I mean, I can see a kid from 110-45 Queens Boulevard maybe being a tennis star, but a crack pistol shot? And anyway, who ever heard of competition shooting matches on Staten Island using deer rifles? It simply doesn’t happen, right? So how’d you get the permit, Bill?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    (I mentioned the possibility of Bill's being a tennis star because he and I, along with several other friends, used to play stickball in a vacant lot right next to the world famous Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. We never had to buy any balls, they were hit out of the stadium to us with sufficient frequency that all of us had large supplies of them. We would defuzz them on the cooking rings of gas stoves, which most apartments had back then.
     
    I was a pitcher, and while hardball did and does terrify me, I was a very good and very aggressive stickball player. I had a sidearm slider/sinker pitch that was difficult to hit, and a knuckler that would travel to up close to the batter and then drop like the Space Shuttle on final.
     
    You see, defuzzed tennis balls offer a pitcher incredible control. But I digress, so let’s ask him again ...)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Bill, is that permit real?
    Yes.
     
    Not forged?
    No.
     
    Will it stand inspection by members of New York’s Finest?
    Yes, it has done so a dozen times.
     
    Where’d you get it, Bill?
    From the office of the Chief of Police. They handle this stuff.
     
    Well, Bill, who do you know? I mean you must have some kind of pull, right?
    I only know my mother.
     
    Okay, Bill, I’ll come out and play. Who does your MOTHER know?
    Well, she knows Judge FamousName. She knows him because she’s his mistress, and he comes to visit a couple of times a week. One day I asked him if he could get me a carry permit and he said “Yes, of course. Have your mom call this guy <gave the name> and tell him I said to issue the permit, and to call me if he has any questions.”
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    And so it came to pass that Bill and I were sitting around in his bedroom that very interesting day. The conversation had somehow turned to guns, whereupon Bill said
     
    I have an idea. Would you like to see my 30-30?
    Well, sure. You mean you have an actual deer rifle right here in this room?
     
    Yes, it’s in the closet ... <Rummages around.> ... Here. Want to hold it?
    Well, yes. <Handles the rifle expertly.> It’s not loaded is it?
     
    No, but we’ll fix that. Give it over. <Feeds a single round in the chamber.>
    What are you going to do, Bill? You’re not going to shoot me are you?
     
    No, I’m going to shoot the Manhattan telephone book. Only the rifle is so powerful that the shot is probably going to go right through it. So let’s put the Manhattan Yellow Pages behind it. And some pillows behind that.
     
    And that’s what we did, folks. We got a bunch of pillows and lined them up at the head of his bed. Then we leaned the Yellow Pages against the frontmost pillow. Then the White Pages against that one.
     
    Now ... These are not your ordinary phone books. They are each six inches thick even though they cover only Manhattan. (Yes, everybody got the books for their own borough. I can’t recall whether people had to buy the Manhattan books as opposed to getting them for free, but everybody had them.) So between them the books provided a foot of heavy-duty stopping power, more impenetrable than an equivalent thickness of wood because of the many layers.
     
    I sat alongside the bed and held my fingers to my ears. Bill went to the foot of the bed, levered the action to cock the rifle, took aim, and fired ...
     
    ... And the round went all the way through the White Pages. And all the way through the Yellow Pages. And all the way through something like two pillows before stopping in a third, ruining all three of them.
     
    Isn’t your mom going to mind?
    No.
     
    And she didn’t.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    But let’s get back to Chet Arnold or whatever his name is. I promised to tell you about his hometown of Wheat Ridge, and so I shall.
     
    Two years ago I got my first traffic ticket in fifteen years, and I got it at the intersection of Something and 44 th by virtue of a badly planned hasty left turn out of a T, resulting in my tapping the side a truck that had been speeding through the top of the T from left to right.
     
    I had to wait around for the police to arrive, my bladder rapidly filling. It took them an hour. At one point the admittedly lovely Officer Ramirez said “Let me see your proof of insurance.” I couldn’t find the paperwork. “Look” I said to her. “Please just call the Bill Alexander agency. They’ll confirm that I have coverage.”
     
    She did but there was no answer. She then wrote me two citations, for Vehicle Turning Left and for Uninsured Motorist, promised to call the agency again later and then let me go, whereupon I ducked into the adjacent ... ... beauty salon, the only building immediately at hand, and asked to use the men’s room. (Just kidding, folks. There was no men’s room, only the one used by the women. They agreed simply because I told them what was inevitably going to happen to the salon floor if they didn’t agree.)
  20. xxmikexx

    The F-86 Spoolup

    By xxmikexx,

    The first time I was close to an operating jet aircraft engine was when my grandfather arranged for us to visit the F-86 production line in El Segundo in 1952 while the Korean war was still going on and there was still a need to crank out these fighters as fast as possible. (By the way, the site is today the southern part of LAX.)
     
    My grandfather knew one the F-86 project engineers, who gave us a guided tour of the production line himself. The compact and jammed final assembly line flowed from east to west, completed aircraft being towed out by handtruck through large hangar doors that faced the Pacific Ocean.
     
    As we were walking out of the hangar onto the apron where the completed aircraft were parked, I heard the magical sound of an F-86 to the south of us spooling up. After the engine was up to speed, and after a short wait, the aircraft moved out, turned north and taxiied right by us not fifty feet away.
     
    The noise was deafening but wonderful. I closed my ear flaps with my fingers, my eyes riveted to the bright red helmet of the test pilot. He taxiied the aircraft to the runways that North American shared with the civil airport, turned east, and I don't know what happened after that because we went back into the hangar and up into one of the production offices, where we couldn't hear much.
     
    Oh yes ... I forgot to mention the wonderful odor of burnt kerosone.
     
    It's interesting to me how we don't know at the time that certain images -- visual, tactile, aural -- are going to stay with us for life. This is one of the most vivid ones. I was ten at the time but I still think of this happy afternoon every time I look at the 1/144 scale model of an F-86H on the shelf of a bookcase behind me.
  21. xxmikexx

    Yay Denny's

    By xxmikexx,

    I like to praise vendors in public when they do the right thing, as I did with the FS Pilot Shop a couple of weeks ago ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    A few days ago my wife and I intended to eat breakfast at a local Denny's, a locally owned franchise where we spend roughly $1,000 per year, I estimate. When we walked in there was a young child in a high chair shrieking and crying very loudly. All the mother was doing was shush-ing the child. We sat down, placed our orders and waited for someone on the staff to ask the mother to step outside till the child had calmed down. Nobody did anything.
     
    So after we had been in the restaurant for about five minutes I took the law into my own hands, walked over to the mother and told her that she would have to leave the restaurant with the kid till the kid was behaving properly. The mother did as I asked, and as she was heading out the door I sat down again at my wife's and my booth table.
     
    Well now ... I heard one of the waitresses go over to the father and apologize for my "rude behavior". She did it several times. So when she returned to the coffee prep station I confronted her. "Did I just hear you telling the father that I had been rude?"
     
    "Yes" she said. "You were VERY rude." A second waitress chimed in with "That's OUR job, not yours."
     
    Whereupon I told them "But you weren't doing your job, somebody had to, and that somebody is me. You have just lost a customer". They probably thought that I meant we were walking out on this particular meal but I meant that we would not be back to the unit ever -- not as long as they are employed there. (These were weekend staff and we rarely eat there on weekends. I knew them but they didn't know me.)
     
    So we went to a nearby working man's cafe that I had been meaning to try and had a much better breakfast at a noticeably lower price.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Mind you, I'm not a complainer and I'm not a cheapskate. I always tip 20% regardless of the quality of the service because waitstaff depend on it -- it's an essential part of their income. I wouldn't want my daily pay to depend on what some customer thought of how I happended to feel that day, and I'm not going to do that to anybody else.
     
    I've never complained about service before but in this case I sent an email to Denny's headquarters explaining both sides of what had happened, asking them to forward the information to the unit owners. In my email I made it clear that I would not return to the unit unless and until I had been assured that the two employees in question had been dismissed. I pointed out to them that while normal restaurant policy is to wait for a customer complaint, this particular case was a no-brainer, just as it would be a no brainer to ask a flasher to leave before a customer complained.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I have just received a letter from Denny's national headquarters agreeing with my position and stating that they had forwarded the information to the appropriate parties on the very day that I had written in (which was a Sunday).
     
    I don't know what the local franchisee is going to do. As with most franchise operations Corporate probably can't do much more than jawbone the owners. But I'm delighted to see that Corporate is not saying that the unit staff should have slavishly followed a reasonable policy to an unreasonable limit.
     
    So ... Yay Denny's.
     
    Regrettably for Corporate my wife and I really like the new cafe and we might not go back to the Denny's in question regardless of whether the offending employees are let go.
     
    But we certainly will not hesitate to patronize other Denny's units.
  22. xxmikexx
    This is another post copied from elsewhere in the site, put here so I will be able to retrive it easily in the future. I'll edit the post tonight, it's in rough shape ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    If you read the Gauges&Panels Software Tools thread you will find the beginning of a discussion of coding techniques. In there I basically claimed that maintainability is more important than performance because with proper system design even loose code will perform acceptably. When it doesn't, the correct solution usually is a design change and not clever tight code.
     
    Now I want to turn to the subject of notation, which is one of the key aspects of maintainability. At first most of you are going to think that I'm crazy, but a few of you will come to understand what I'm driving at.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Let's begin with a code fragment taken directly from the AirBoss sources. You will have to forgive the use of xxxx's because without them the forum software would delete the multiple spaces that the xxx's represent ...
     
    GBS_Txt2BtnNdx ( xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // See if it's a
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx kDevTyp_PovBtn, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // hatswitch"button".
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx apszBtnNam,
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx &iBtnNdx,
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx &fHit
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ) ;
    if (fHit)
    xx { xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // We did get a match
    xx *apiDevTyp = kDevTyp_PovBtn; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // so report the
    xx *apiBtnNdx = iBtnNdx; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // device type and
    xx break; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // the position of the
    xx } xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx // button in the array
     
    Even when you ignore the xxx stuff it looks like total gibberish, right?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The first thing to look at is the call to the GBS_Txt2BtnNdx function, which begins with a function name "header", GBS.
    The "GBS" part of the function name means that it is an GameBoss (GBS) function call. (GameBoss is the original name for the AirBoss/GameBoss product pair.) If I wanted to have a different "Txt2BtnNdx" function somewhere else in a different system, I would be able to have both functions coexist in the same program because their headers would be different, thereby guaranteeing function name uniqueness. (Yes, I do know C++ but so what.)
     
    If there are more than two arguments to a function call, and if the function is not something standard like a call to memcpy, I spread the arguments of the call over multiple source lines. This means that the eye can quickly see the various arguments.
     
    If you look closely at the code you will see that variable names generally take the form of a prefix such as "api" (discussed later below) followed by a stream of three-character name fragments. These three-character fragments have standard meanings:
     
    Txt -- text.
    Btn -- button.
    Ndx -- index.
     
    Thus, once you know the notation, the function name GBS_Txt2BtnNdx will be immediately understood to mean "The GameBoss function that translates a text string to a button index." The use of mixed upper and lower case makes the separate name fragments easy to read.
     
    Why three-character name fragments? Well, what better way to name this function. If the name were composed in the conventional way, to achieve the same clarity we would have to rename the function to be
     
    gameboss_translate_text_to_button_index
     
    which certainly is easy to read. However, it takes longer to read than the stylized GBS_Txt2BtnNdx, and it would force all the function arguments and comments way off to the right, probably off the right hand end of the source code editor screen, necessitating scrolling the window to the right just so the arguments and comments can be cleanly formatted.
     
    Furthermore, the name fragments approach allows a lot of logic to be expressed on a single source line instead of having that logic uselessly be spread over several source lines. (We make an exception for conditional expressions and function calls because in those cases we want the clarity that one-name-per-line provides.) Also, the eye can take the variable name in at a glance, and since each name fragment has a standard meaning, the overall meaning of the name can be understood at a glance. This may strike you as weird but electrical engineers have the same three-character convention for signal names, and nobody is bothered by this. In fact, they like it because it keeps schematics from being visually dominated by lengthy signal names.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So now let's consider some of the other standard name fragments. (There are about fifty, I've never counted.)
     
    Ndx - Index, as in the index into an array. Runs 0..N
    Cnt - Count. Unlike an Ndx, a Cnt runs 1..N
    Src - Source, the origin of a move of some kind.
    Dst - Destination, the destination of the move.
    Dev - Device.
    Rpt - Report.
    Typ - Type.
    Pov - Point of view.
    Str - String or structure.
     
    and so on. There is no need for me to list them all here because you get the idea, even if you don't like the idea.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Now let's move on to the subject of name prefixes. Here I've generalized the concept of "Hungarian Notation". In the standard Hungarian Notation a standard string would have a name prefix of "sz" meaning "zero-terminated string", so a typical string name would be
    "szName_Of_The_String". In my notation this becomes "szStrNam".
     
    So I've kept "sz" as a prefix, and it retains its standard meaning. I also use the standard "i" to mean "integer", as in "iBtnNdx" which means "an integer that represents an index into the buttons array."
     
    The idea behind the Hungarian Notation prefixes is that it becomes unnecessary to look at the top of a function listing to see how variables were declared. The prefix says it all, and all that I've done is to expand the set of prefixes to include some conventions of my own.
     
    For example, in the code fragment above we find the name "apszBtnNam", which is not standard Hungarian. Well, the "sz" part of it is, but the "ap" part is not. In my extended notation the "a" of "ap" means "argument of the parent function", and the "p" of "ap" means pointer.
     
    Thus apszBtnNam means "the parent function argument that is a pointer to the zero-terminated string that designates the name of a button." This is a complicated idea, but apszBtnNam gets the idea across much faster than does the English translation. Not only that, its appearance in the call to GBS_Txt2BtnNdx trivially shows that this argument is being passed to the daughter function without modification.
     
    By the way, "Hungarian" is a reference to the prefix notation inventor, a Microsoftie named Charles Szymony. Since nobody can pronounce his last name (he is from Hungary originally), it was decided to call the idea simply the pronouncable "Hungarian Notation" instead of the unpronouceable "Szymony Notation". Presumably everyone at Microsoft knows who "The Hungarian" is. :)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Now let's consider the variable name "kDevTyp_PovBtn". Here the prefix "k" means compile-time constant. This is just as informative and much less distracting than the industry-standard capital letters "DEVTYP_POVBTN" would be.
     
    Finally, here's the difference between an Ndx and a Cnt: for (iBtnNdx=0; iBtnNdx<iMaxBtnCnt; iBtnNdx++)
  23. xxmikexx

    Key West ... Almost

    By xxmikexx,

    This is a continuation of some comments in the Fright Stimulator thread located here ... https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=44. That thread had been taken so far off-topic by me that I decided to start a new one. Here it is ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    My wife and I did our PADI scuba diving training in Key West in 1987. (Skylab, you HAVE heard what follows, I'm simply parking the story where I can get at it more easily in the future.) We originally planned to stay a few days, maybe a week, the trip being for the specific purpose of getting our PADI certificates.
     
    Well, we loved Key West so much that we stayed a month. During that time we talked seriously about staying there permanently but we didn't do it because a) our family was rooted in Colorado, and because b) we had a consulting business that had us traveling between NYC, Denver and Colorado Springs, but that could not have been conducted out of Key West.
     
    Had I known that our consulting business was going to crash at about the same time that Golden Midi failed, and that our subsequent graphic arts and printing business would also fail, this time pushing us into bankruptcy, we definitely would have stayed in Key West and the h-word with the big money we thought would continue forever. (Even if you ignore inflation our income now is about 25% of what it was then. It would not have been difficult for us to manage staying on had we been willing to set our sights much lower the way we subsequently learned to do.)
     
    So while I don't regret Golden Midi, or consulting, or the graphics/print operation, the fact is that if I had known what was going to happen I'd have said "The heck with it all, let's go camp out on Mel Fisher till he gives low paying jobs doing exploratory diving in return for becoming investors". Or whatever. Had we really wanted to stay we'd have found a way ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Just as our daughter's best friend from high school later found a way. She went to Key West on vacation, reacted the same way we did, stayed, waited on tables till Fisher said "yes", and then worked for him for a year as a wreck diver.
     
    She left only because she's a road runner. Determinedly single, since leaving high school her life has followed a set bachelorette pattern. She moves someplace, starts an accounting business, makes a decent living from it for a year or two or three till she gets bored with the local scene, and then she moves on to some other place she's been curious about, opens a new accounting business, etc etc etc.
     
    So it wasn't unusual for her to decide to stay in Key West. The only difference was that for once she decided not to open an accounting business (too much local competition) and decided instead to become a wreck diver, supporting herself by waiting tables in the meantime.
     
    So, Lisa, hats off to you. In the best tradition of the USA you took charge of your own life and made things happen your way.
     
    Lisa got the entrepreneur genes from her father who, when laid off from a high tech management job in the Springs, became a dealer of sunglasses in the regional flea markets. Over the next couple of years he built the business to a point where it was providing far more income than his management ever had, with more job satisfaction, and with much less stress. I don't know what happened after that but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he discovered franchising and is a multimillionaire. Such is the USA, where many people become entrepreneurs by accident, not because they wanted to but because life circumstances FORCED them to.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    But our diving instructor was the one who came and stayed. A highly paid advertising exec on Mad Ave in NYC, he had been working on an ulcer and decided to take an extended vacation in Key West. The vacation had lasted 17 years by the time we met him. :)
     
    So he came down on vacation, started diving lessons the next day, loved it and continued to dive till he had his instructor's certificate, living off savings from his job on Madison Avenue. Once he was certified as an instructor he started paid instructor work immediately and never stopped, for the same reasons that some CFIs choose to remain CFIs -- meeting people and seeing/helping their students to grow.
  24. xxmikexx

    Fright Stimulator

    By xxmikexx,

    As I was discussing with a friend yesterday, I sometimes refer to FS as "Fright Stimulator". This is because a bad weather instrument arrival and approach is quite capable of confusing me to the point of panic.
     
    You see, my headwork is very bad. It's why I gave up flying in the real world. I can keep up with the workload of hand flying my vintage 727-200 in IFR conditions as long as everything is going well, but if I'm flying on VATSIM, for example, and the controller pulls a last minute change of runway on me, my game plan goes out the window because my radio frequency setup has gone out the window.
     
    So I need to consult the charts in order to retune the vintage radios, all while maneuvering the aircraft per the controller's directions or, worse, while trying to execute a new arrival that the controller may very well have tasked me to execute on my own.
     
    So folks like my good friend skylab have my deepest respect. What is very difficult for me -- avoidance of overload while under stress -- comes easily to them. They remain calm even in complex situations whereas I will predictably panic when the workload passes a certain threshhold.
     
    A similar thing happens when I play games like ATC 2. I can manage a certain workload, but add just one more aircraft and I will saturate, go into panic mode, lose the picture and blow the scenario.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    As my friend observed, it's amazing that a game can be so immersive as to incite actual fear in me.
  25. xxmikexx
    Conclusion first, then the background ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    PPLs,
     
    If you're going to fly in the mountains, get some instruction first from an experienced mountain flyer, preferably a CFI. If you're not willing to pay for instruction, or to take time out for instruction, then at least read about the subject and talk to people who've done a lot of it.
     
    If you don't, the following story from a few days ago could easily happen to you. The accident details have not been reported in the daily press, and they won't be because the story is now yesterday's news. (If I want the details I'll have to wait for an NTSB general aviation synopsis report.)
     
    Here's the deal ...
     
    Texas businessman flies his immediate family -- wife and kids -- to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in a Cessna 172, in good weather. (Field elevation roughly 6900 feet MSL.) Presumably they had a good time in one of the great vacation spots in this state. (Or any other.)
     
    So they head for home ... 172 ... wife and kids, presumably they all have baggage ... presumably they fill the tanks, because they're going to Texas ... and it's bad weather ... and the man of the family doesn't even file a flight plan.
     
    Predictably the airplane failed to arrive at their home airport. A search revealed nothing. Then, three days ago, some hikers found the wreckage of the aircraft, with all aboard killed in the accident, remains not immediately unidentifiable.
     
    Don't let it happen to you. Flying at 6800 feet in a grossed out aircraft in bad weather over even (especially?) the summertime Rockies is simply asking for trouble ... And to put your whole family at risk the way this guy did is simply unconscionable.
     
    Maybe he had an instrument ticket, maybe he didn't. But mountain flying can be very unforgiving, and he came from Texas, which is not exactly the best place to learn about flying the Rockies in underpowered, overloaded SEL aircraft.

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