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xxmikexx

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  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. xxmikexx
    For the vast majority of you, Flight Simulator is a hobby. These days, because of my involvement with both the FS Flight Training joint venture with FlightSim.com, and with AirBoss, FS is now more of a business for me than a source of recreation.
     
    Most of what I do in FS these is test flying, sometimes with students but usually on my own as I work on both shaping our approach to training, and on refining the human factors of using AirBoss.
     
    So where do I do my test flying? Well, out of Colorado Springs (local), out of Denver (IFR, usually Denver International to Salt Lake City International), and out of a long runway (location doesn't matter) where I can test helicopters and warbird taildraggers.
     
    A good example of what I do was during the night and early this morning when I made several dozen takeoffs and short flights in the FSX Acceleration P-51.
     
    With helicopters the issue is coping with main rotor torque. With high powered taildraggers like the P-51 the issue is "P-factor" which shows up as a) the need to use considerable right rudder during takeoff, and b) the need to constantly change rudder trim during flight as airspeed changes.
     
    I won't bore you with the details at this time but S2 and I have been doing human factors work. He is new to both computers and FS and it has been very interesting seeing what comes easily to him versus what takes time.
     
    Interestingly, he bears out something that many of us believe which is that learning to fly in FS is more difficult than learning to fly a 172 in the real world. (S2 has a PPL, as do I.)
  4. 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++)
  5. xxmikexx
    For many months I had been saying that under no circumstances would I pay more than USD $30 for a payware addon aircraft. Well, like a politician running for office (any political party) my position has ... er ... evolved ...
     
    ... As in "I never said it. But if I said it, it didn't mean what it means. And anyway it was taken out of context, even though what was quoted was a complete sentence. And in point of fact I've been saying exactly the opposite all the time." :D
     
    ... Ahem ...
     
    I'm now willing to pay roughly USD $40 provided the aircraft comes with both FS2004 and FSX versions.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    You see, for most of a year now I've been eyeing the CLS DC-10, wanting it for FS2004, lusting for it ... But my policies of the time argued against buying it. So I waited, figuring that it would go on sale at the Pilot Shop some weekend.
     
    Wrong. Completely wrong. In almost a year of waiting, it never happened. So yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered the download at a price of USD $40 and change. I did it only because I finally noticed that the product includes both FS2004 and FSX versions, important to me since I run both sims regularly.
     
    So there is now a chink in my armor. A vendor can get USD $40 out of me by offering both versions of an aircraft, though it may be as much as a year before I order, and even then I will be very selective about what I buy.
     
    In contrast, Friendly Panels has extracted something like $140 from my wallet over that same one year period -- by tempting me with very nice panel and gauge products priced at around USD $15-20.
     
    This is price elasticity at work, folks, Economics 101. Had CLS reduced the price of the DC-10 to $30 I'd have bought it a long time ago. Similarly I'd love to own the newly announced highly detailed A2A B-377, however, the vendor has not been listening to me.
     
    They want ... Are you ready for this? ... USD $37 for the base package, and then they apparently want an additional USD $25 for the stuff that adds all the detail. That's USD $62 for the aircraft, even though they're trying to make the price seem lower, in my opinion ... And this product is for FSX only, even though FS2004 still represents half the addon market.
     
    I don't think so, A2A. Not me, moi, Mikey. On a similar note I will not be buying Space Shuttle Simulator 2007. (But thanks for the free demo, which may be all I want.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    During the past year I have written many times about "optimum price", another Economics 101 concept. I'm not going to do it again other than to observe that the investment a vendor has in a product has zero to do with what the optimum price is. The fact is, most addon vendors are leaving money on the table -- my money. So they're going to have to work very hard to get it.
     
    They're going to have to work as hard as Friendly Panels does. Those folks clearly understand the concept of optimum price.
  6. xxmikexx
    Yesterday I told Johann Dees that I would do a blog about the capabilities of AirBoss. This is that post ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    AirBoss is a human interface utility. Its original intent was to serve as a "joystick enhancer" as discussed below, though it has been extended in certain ways so as to do important things for keyboard-based shooter/slasher games, that product variant being known as GameBoss. I’m not going to speak further about GameBoss other than to mention that, among other things, it can be used to add joystick support to games that lack it.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    My goal for AirBoss was to allow a $40 joystick to be enhanced to the point where it becomes a “poor man’s HOTAS”, a way to stave off the purchase of even a flight yoke much less a flight yoke with rudder pedals. In particular, I set the technical goal of being able to execute bad weather final approach, landing and rollout of a jet transport without ever taking one’s eyes off the screen for any reason. However . . .
     
    AirBoss also turns out to be very useful in learning to fly a) those propeller-driven aircraft that are subject to P-factor, b) helicopters, and c) carrier landings and other situations where extremely precise flying is wanted, like formation flying. The reasons for this will be made clear elsewhere in this thread.
     
    There are other benefits, such as the fact that it can replace obscure keyboard commands with easier to remember operations, and the fact that to a first approximation it can be used to create a standard human interface to military flight simulators.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Let’s look first at the $40 HOTAS issue . . .
     
    AirBoss can be used to give multiple meanings to joystick buttons through the use of modifier keys like Control and Shift. It can also be used to give additional meanings to buttons and keys through the use of doubleclicks, and modifiers can be used in conjunction with doubleclicks of any key or button. Finally, almost any keys can be used as modifiers, not just Control and Shift.
     
    Not obvious from the simple discussion in the previous paragraph is that AirBoss allows a hatswitch to be treated as a set of buttons. So, for example, in the factory defaults AirBoss setup, we get the following subset of meanings for the hatswitch . . .
     
    No modifier, Hatswitch left,/right/forward/back - - “fly by thumb” pitch and roll control.
    Control+HatswitchForward/Back - - increase/decrease throttle.
    Shift+HatswitchForward/Back - - toggle landing gear.
    CapsLock+HatswitchForward/Back - - lower/raise flaps by one notch.
    DoubleclickHatswitchForward - - full throttle.
    DoublclickHatswitchBack - - zero throttle.
     
    I’m not going to list everything here regarding HOTAS but I will say that 90% of aircraft operations, including all of the ones required for final approach, landing and taxiing, can be accomplished through the use of modifier keys, the hatswitch, the joystick trigger, and nothing else.
     
    Furthermore, these definitions are all contained in cfg files that get loaded at runtime, and these cfg files can be changed by knowledgable users, just as various FS cfg files can be changed.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So while there are other uses as discussed earlier, what we have just seen is a quick look at HOTAS. But who cares about HOTAS?
     
    The answer almost certainly is, Only people who care about hand flying IFR approaches in poor weather.
     
    I estimate this set of people to be only about 5% of serious FS users.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I’ll stop here to see whether anybody wants to comment or ask questions regarding what I’ve presented so far.
  7. xxmikexx

    Alien Civilizations

    By xxmikexx,

    It occurred to me the other day that if intelligent life exists elsewhere, and if that life is civilized, then we are going to have a great deal in common regardless of what they look like or how advanced they are.
     
    For example, I'm quite sure that they have steel. They may have miraculous materials that we would have trouble understanding at first, but they will have steel too just as we still have fire.
  8. xxmikexx

    Alpha Testing

    By xxmikexx,

    Everybody knows the term "beta test" but hardly anybody knows where it came from or what it really means. Well, folks, it's an IBM term dating back fifty years and more. And beta testing was preceded by alpha testing. Let's talk about that.
     
    Alpha was IBM's term for in-house testing. Like Microsoft they made every effort to use their own products in house, and to become dependent on them. This was because the definition of a product -- its capabilities, look and appearance, packaging, etc -- comes only from the real world of use.
     
    So IBM would create a product and then put it into service in-house. This is part of the product definition phase and they called beta because just as beta follows alpha, so does field test follow in-house test.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Many software vendors go directly to beta thinking that they can bypass alpha. What usually happens instead is that beta becomes alpha, and the guinea pig customers become very unhappy because they think they're buying a finished, debugged product when in fact the party is only just beginning.
     
    With FS Flight Training, and with AirBoss , my PC Game Controls company is not going to make that mistake. I've been working with a tester, Michael Blomberg, whose mission in life it is to help me determine what an AirBoss is.
     
    You see, the Golden Midi experience taught me that while you can go through the motions of developing a product, and while you may think that you've got it styled because you don't know of any bugs, the fact is that only your customers can tell you what business you're in.
     
    Michael Blomberg is the first AirBoss customer. When he says "Can you ..." or "Gee, I wish ..." or "I'm getting frustrated ..." or blah blah blah, I have the opportunity to make changes to AirBoss without angering a whole bunch of early adopters.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Michael asked me yesterday whether I have a schedule. "Only a very loose one" I said "because the product will be ready when it's ready, and not before, and it's not ready yet, though I can see it from here."
     
    When I think that AirBoss is ready, and when I think that the FS Flight Training set of products is ready, then and only then will we be going to beta test.
     
    That's right. We're going to pre-announce the products and, as much as possible, work with actual customers who will be told that they are guinea pigs.
     
    Why should they do it?
     
    Because they will have the same opportunity that Michael Blomberg does -- a chance to help shape the product definition to arrive at something that fits them to a T.
     
    Of course by the time we get there I hope it will be more a matter of refinement than of the kinds of outright changes that Michael has been helping me want, but you never know. Here's a story about that ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Early in the product's development I was product manager for DEC's R-80 removable disk drive. This was a revolutionary product -- 500 MB in a package not much larger than a milk crate. :)
     
    The project began in Massachussetts but was moved to Colorado Springs about the same time that the early prototypes were coming on the air. The protos worked fine in Massachussetts, but they died in the Springs.
     
    I made the wild guess that the head flutter we were seeing was because of the thinner air. Maynard, MA is at about 25 feet MSL. Springs is at about 6,000. My guess proved to be correct but that didn't help a lot -- the engineers still had to make the drive work. This was a crisis because the VAX had just been announced, but essentially no VAX machines would ship unless the R-80 had entered volume production.
     
    At just about the time this problem was surfacing, we got a new manager of Storage Systems -- disks and magtapes. I don't remember the gentleman's name but when the following incident occured I realized that he was a Good Guy. (Which meant that he would not last long at DEC, which had become totally political by then.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I'm going to call this fellow "John". The manager of Disk Engineering, Grant Saviers, who now reported to John, came to the Springs every six weeks with his royal entourage in tow -- about thirty people. I mean no criticism of Grant, he's a crackerjack engineer and a brilliant manager. However, by then the DEC culture had changed to the point where sixty people were looking over his shoulder, and thirty of them insisted on coming out to the Springs with him.
     
    Anyway, one fateful day about four months into the problem, with no solution in sight, the newly hired John came out with Grant and his groupies. As the usual 3-day meeting convened, John turned to Grant and asked "When will this drive be ready?" Grant hemmed and hawed and then said "In three months".
     
    "Wrong answer" said John. "It will be ready when Paul Esling, the Project Engineer, says that it's ready."
     
    John then turned to Paul and asked "When will this drive be ready". Paul's answer was, "I don't know".
     
    "Right answer" said John. "Now lets's talk about how to identify and fix the problems. Forget the schedule, as of right now there is no schedule, only hard work."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Predictably, John didn't last long. And when he was fired I realized that the DEC I had known and loved was gone forever. The Wall Streeters had put enough pressure on the company to let the VP of Finance start driving the train that the board, and founder Ken Olsen, had to make concessions to them. The result was the destruction of the company, just like Passport's SOB meant the stillbirth of their MIDI sequences business.
     
    So I became an entrepreneur and, except for the occasional short stint as a wage slave, have been one ever since these events of almost thirty years ago.
     
    Have I been a financial success?
     
    No, but the words of the wife of a detective in one of my True Crime books have some relevance here ...
     
    "He kept us poor but there was never a dull moment."
     
    Exactly.
     
    I might get weak from starvation but what the hey, I was born poor. What I could never tolerate would be to die of boredom.
  9. 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.
  10. 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".
  11. xxmikexx
    In the On-Site And Off-Site Backups thread I mentioned that I had tried Carbonite and found that it did not work for me in my particular situation. Loki asked me to explain so I promised a thread dedicated to that subject. This is that thread ...
     
    (Aside: I can see now that much of this material is going to want to be re-posted to the PC Software Tech forum. Oh well.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    loki,
     
    I have nothing against Carbonite in principle. I think it's a great idea, and I very much like its human interface, which is simple enough for most computer users to be able to use with no difficulty. In fact, since most people don't do backups at all, much less off-site backups, services like Carbonite are perfect because once the system is set up, the average user need not pay any attention to it.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Folks,
     
    Here's how Carbonite works ... (Or at least how it worked when I evaluated it in February of 2007).
     
    You tell Carbonite what parts of your system you want backed up. You do this via checkboxes in a treeview that functions just like Windows Explorer does. This defines what the vendor calls the "Carbonite drive". After that Carbonite lurks in the background, sending to the Great Computer In The Sky the data you said you wanted backed up, which is everything in the Carbonite drive as you earlier specified it.
     
    This inititial data upload phase can take quite a long time depending on how much data is at issue. In our case we can pump only about 100MB per hour offsite. If you are on DSL you probably would find yourself with similar throughput. So if you have, say, 1GB of data that you care about, this would be ten hours of transmission time. However, Carbonite runs at low priority, or can be configured to, so with all of your other normal Internet activity the ten hours might stretch out to twenty, for example.
     
    That's a day, and a day is not too terribly bad, but if you have 5GB of data we're now talking about a working week, and if you have multiple 20GB data sets as I did, each data set could take two weeks to image, as was happening with me. Now ...
     
    At some point Carbonite will have backed up all of your data initially, everything in the Carbonite drive. After that it monitors your file system activity, sending to offsite storage each and every file that you change.
     
    In other words, the "Carbonite drive" tries to be a mirror of that portion of your hard drive that you told it to deal with. Trouble is, unless they have changed the philosophy since I worked with the first release of the system in February of 2007, when you delete stuff it will also get deleted from the offsite mirror. (I know that today they keep back versions of changed files, but I don't know what happens today if you actually delete a file.)
     
    So my first problem was that Carbonite was not an archiving system, simply a mirror. There is a workaround of sorts, -- build the archive locally on hard drive, let Carbonite mirror it, and don't delete anything from it. However, this requires increasing amounts of local hard drive capacity, exactly one of the things I'm trying to avoid. Perhaps the system works differently today but this certainly was a problem for me back then.
     
    My second problem was more serious. Whether it is no longer true I don't know, but at the time I was trying to use Carbonite it was clear that it was mechanizing the process roughly as follows: First it builds a list of files to be sent off-site. Each time it decides to back up a file it makes an entry in the list, and it was clear to me that at the time the system was doing a linear search. Since I was eventually trying to back up 600,000 files, the search times became outrageous. In fact, I was generating changed data faster than Carbonite could update its list.
     
    And this slow upload process resulted in a third problem for me -- it was impossible to tell what had been backed up and what had not. In other words, what Carbonite was sending out was not a system snapshot but rather a rolling backup of uncertain composition.
     
    Once I realized that all three problems existed I abandoned Carbonite. However, just because the system wasn't adequate for me doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been adequate for other people, and it is possible that today the system might do exactly what I would want it to do. I don't know. But I also don't really care. I have my own backup procedures that allow me to do true snapshots, and I have my own way of getting data up to a different Great Computer In The Sky, and I'm satisfied for now.
     
    Carbonite was then and surely is by now suitable for my wife, who has about 4GB of data that changes only very, very slowly, mostly in the form of her evolving email archive. So she could make effective use of it, and I'm thinking about taking out another Carbonite subscription just for her so I won't have to deal with backing her stuff up as well as mine.
     
    And there you have it, loki. You mentioned a competing service. I know nothing about it, and all that I know about Carbonite is the way the system stood eighteen months ago. But I will assert that it is ideal for people who would not otherwise be doing backup, and who have amounts of slowly changing data that are typical of most office and home PC users.
     
    When I realized that this was happening I abandoned the system
  12. 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".
  13. xxmikexx

    Clawdette LaClaw

    By xxmikexx,

    Years ago when our home was bursting with life -- two kids, two dogs, five cats, and a squirrel that like to hang out on our deck to pick up the seeds that the birds visiting the feeder would drop ... Ahem ... Years ago my wife named one of the canines Mildred R. Dog. (Get it?) Ever since then our pets have all had first and last names.
     
    If you're a cat person you will understand when I say that, unlike dogs, cats do not have owners, they have servants. This is especially true of our black cat Clawdette LaClaw. (Get it?) I am her valet. She tells me in no uncertain terms when I am to make a lap for her, and when I do she expects a full body rubdown, becoming huffy and demanding if I don't respond immediately.
     
    Anyway, The Claw (get it?) has taught me a new trick. Having gotten accustomed to sleeping in the hall bathroom sink sometimes, she now tells me when to turn on a trickle of water so she can lap the cool, clean stuff rather than the grungy warm water she would otherwise share with her fellow lifer, Fraidy Cat, aka Freddie. And when The Claw has drunk her fill she lies down outside the bathroom door, guarding it against intruders in the same way that the beautiful statues of the black Nubians once guarded the entrance to the inner shrine of Tutankhamen.
     
    That's the only place she will sleep now, that and the sink. Before this she had a dozen different sleeping places and would rotate among them, rarely sleeping in the same place on two successive nights -- a feline Sadaam Hussein avoiding ... ... well, avoiding boredom, I suppose.
     
    And when I enter the bathroom now, she talks to me. "Turn the water on" she says.
     
    And I do.
  14. 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?
  15. xxmikexx
    In the Backup thread j flanagan brought up the subject of computers manufactured by DEC a long time ago. I said I would open a new thread for that subject. This is that thread ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    j flanagan,
     
    It wasn't all sweetness and light regarding DEC computer system integrity. While our CPUs were very very reliable, our disk drives were not -- could not be -- comparably reliable. The affordable technology of the time simply did not permit it. The reason is that the hard drives of the time were prone to head crashes, something that is encountered today only very infrequently but was a constant concern during the 70s, which was the time frame of my employment at DEC.
     
    The classical head crash happened as follows ...
     
    At some point, for whatever reason a particle would become dislodged from the recording medium. If the particle came from a recording track then the parent sector would go bad. But more likely the particle came from the area between tracks so that the flanking sectors would remain good. However ...
     
    Now we have a particle flying around inside the drive case because it was flung off the recording medium by the fast rotation of the drive. Usually such a particle would bounce around between the walls of the housing and the spinning recording medium, ending up settling at the bottom of the housing. Unfortunately, once in a while the dislodged particle would strike hard elsewhere on the medium, gouging it, and now we have two particles flying around. Most of the time the two particles will settle, but sometimes instead a cascade will build. When the cascade begins, death of the drive is only minutes away.
     
    When a cascade gets going, sooner or later a particle is going to encounter one of the flying heads, trying to fit itself in between the head and the recording medium. If the size of the particle is roughly that of the head flying height the particle is quite likely to induce head flutter, and this flutter inevitably resulted in a literal head crash, with the head impacting the recording medium just like an airplane hitting the ground, with equally catastrophic results.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So the wise customer had data on duplicate hard drives, and the hard drives themselves would be backed up to magtape. Trouble is, with magtape the heads wear and without constant finicky maintenance there can be no guarantee that an tape years or even months earlier will be readable on the drive that created it. Thus multiple tape drives were a good idea, and of course tapes had to go offsite in duplicate if one was to minimize risk of data loss. The head wear issue encouraged the three-generations of tapes backup philosophy of the day.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Let the record show that webmaster Nels Anderson later worked at Prime Computer, who addressed the problem of system reliability by having a pair of computers for a single system, sharing memory, with one computer "shadowing" the other. The result of their very carefully designed system architecutre was that in general no data would be lost even if one of the machines went down.
     
    But of course Nels cut his programming teeth on a high school computer donated by DEC, as so many other later industry professionals did. :)
  16. xxmikexx
    I don't know whether it's made the US national news but Denver yesterday set a record for the most consecutive days with a high temperature of more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet this is the coolest summer I can remember.
     
    Today, 1 August, will be the first day when it will have gone above 100 F. Normally we will have seen at least one 100+ day by late June. This year it will have happened for the first time today and tomorrow -- in August rather than June, and it won't surprise me if it doesn't happen again this year.
     
    Not only are we having a cool summer, we had a cold spring but a warm winter. In fact, this past winter was the first time in 30 years of living in Colorado when I did not need to use a snow shovel. Not once. (And we didn't get much snow, either.)
     
    We have been seeing jet contrails all spring and early summer. Only in the past few days have the contrails gone away. When they return it will be fall, and given what has been happening since the end of winter the coming of fall could happen at any time.
     
    We already have Canada geese passing through on their way south for the winter. The part of Lakewood (suburban Denver) that we live in is on their flyway. The geese officially have the right of way on the roads. In fact, we have goose crossing roadsigns just as a mile or two away we have deer crossing signs.
     
    So even if we end up with several more 100+ days, it looks to be an early winter, though probably a mild one.
     
    Yes, winter arrives early here, or at least it used to. I remember a blizzard on 20 September one year. In compensation we have the "January thaw", which often raises the temperature to 70 F, clearing out all the snow albeit temporarily.
  17. xxmikexx
    Summer ended ten days ago, and winter began yesterday with the first snows in the high country. In a previous blog I suggested an early winter. Now I'm sure of it.
     
    It's been raining for the past two days, almost unheard of for August. I'm not talking about thunderstorms, I'm talking about the monsoon that should have occured in June. When the first REAL blast of polar air collides with this moist air coming up from the Gulf we are going to have ... (and I'll commit my prediction in writing here and now) ... eighteen inches of snowfall sometime in late September.
     
    And if it isn't eighteen inches of snow then it will be four inches of hail. I've seen both though not in many, many years.
     
    That's it, I don't have much more to say. My wife and I had been hoping to get some sun over the past few days but it didn't happen. It's not going to happen till Monday, which is when she starts her new job, so for her the season of the sun is now effectively over.
  18. xxmikexx
    Over in his blog skylab and I had been having a rambling discussion in a single thread. Most recently the subject of digital photography came up, and after that that skylab created a pair of photo albums. It's such a complex and wide ranging subject that I felt a new thread should be opened. This is that thread.
     
     
    skylab,
     
    I hear you regarding the benefits of no film. I too shoot my head off because in the digital world the "film" costs almost nothing if you have a high capacity image capture card in the camera, and if you have a computer for receiving images from the card. However, this approach can be hazardous to photography health ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    In the old days I shot everything on the then-new Fuji 35mm ASA 100 color slide film using an OM-1, and I developed the film and mounted the slides myself. I figured that if slide film was good enough for National Geographic, and since they imposed this rule on all their staff and assignment photographers, I decided to do things the NG way. As a result I became really familiar with that film's response to light and development technique. There was one difference, however. NG used Kodak film excusively. I used Fuji exclusively because it was much lower cost and just as good, though somewhat different in its response to light and color. (But had I been able to afford it, I too would have used only Kodak film.)
     
    Because I couldn't afford either darkroom equipment or a dedicated darkroom I had to develop everything in the kitchen sink using a light-proof bag and a hand-held development tank. This actually worked quite well. I got good and consistent results provided I did a final rinse with distilled water, more consistent results than if I had left the film with a drugstore or camera store to be sent to a consumer film lab for processing.
     
    However, this approach was a royal pain, and anyway the cost of film and chemicals was a burden. As a result, to economize I had to become very selective about what material I shot. Furthermore, because of camera limitations of the day, and because there was no consumer-level digital darkroom software at that time, I became very conscious of composition, depth of field and shutter speed.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Interestingly, as a result of digicams my camera technique has become sloppy. When I compose a shot on camera today it is only an approximation of what the final picture is going to look like because when I shoot I'm conscious of the fact that through software I'm going to be able to rotate, crop and resize the parts of the digital image frame that are of interest. (In the old days a darkroom and enlarger would have given me the same capability, but I was never able to afford these things, so I had to compose on camera very carefully.)
     
    Similarly, except in the most extreme lighting conditions, I no longer bracket exposures and play with shutter speeds. Instead I simply shoot, almost always with flash whether indoors or out, knowing that I will be able to adjust the gamma and the white balance of the image via software. (Except that the colors captured by the CCD are much more true, and with greater dynamic range, than those captured by the old slide films. There is usually no need to correct for white balance.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    It's for these reasons that I'm neither in a hurry to purchase a high end consumer digicam nor bothered by by the fact that I can't afford one. The results I would get with such a camera would be no better or worse than the results I get today with my four year old Lumix. The big benefit would be losing the LCD camera back display in favor of SLR, yet this is more a matter of convenience than necessity. (Another benefit would be the ability to mount high quality lenses of varying focal length. Yet my Lumix has 10x optical zoom, and a macro mode, so my desire for addon lenses is greatly reduced.)
     
    It is these aspects of digicams that comprise the digital revolution, rather than the cameras themselves. It's like the changeover from manual transmission cars to automatics. My wife drives the new, modern car. I drive two ancient clunkers, one of them with a manual transmission. The stick shift car is sometimes fun to drive, but generally manual transmission has become a nuisance. Similarly, thirty years ago I had a lot of fun using the manual controls of my OM-1 in sophisticated ways, but today I don't have to bother.
     
    And you know what? The absolutely best photographic results require an investment of $25,000+ for the kind of equipment used to shoot magazine ads ... and at the high end that stuff is film-based even today, though the writing is on the wall. This is because of the low graininess of high end film, and because of the large film format. For similar reasons, the glass plate photography of the civil war era produced higher resolution black and white images than can be produced today on all but very expensive equipment. (Truth.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Today, like skylab I have essentially every frame I ever shot with the Lumix saved on disk. Therefore I can return to the original images anytime I want, just as in the old days I could return to the original slide images anytime, typically for printing purposes.
     
    However, where in the old days I figured I was doing well if one shot in ten turned out reasonably well in terms of esthetics, today it's more like one shot in twenty-five. Because the equipment encourages you to shoot, shoot, shoot, there are more images to wade through, and to discard. I've always been a ruthless picture editor, today I have to be even more so.
  19. xxmikexx
    Do you know the limits of your knowledge?
     
    I do.
     
    Or rather, I think I do, and I try to behave in ways consistent with that. When I’m wrong I say so. When I don’t know something, I say so. When I know that a given person knows more about a given subject than I do, I request that person's services as a forum consultant.
     
    This approach to life and to technical matters doesn’t make me weak, it makes me strong. It makes me as strong as the combination of all the experts that I know who are willing to work with me.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. xxmikexx
    In the On-Site And Off-Site Backups Thread skylab mentioned that his daughter lived in California, which is constantly plagued by fires. I promised a new thread on that issue, here it is ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    My wife hates Southern California. She thinks it's all like coastal Orange County, or the Valley. Even though I've showed her several times that the population is really simply concentrated in a 20-mile-wide band along the edge of the ocean, she thinks of SOCAL as incredibly overpopulated ... and dangerous.
     
    Fire is a danger out there to be sure, but hey, if you're going to be a person who needs to get away from the coast but then moves into a house built on the side of a ridge, or on the top of one, then you're running a big known risk and you shouldn't complain when disaster strikes.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Skylab was smart -- he moved out of Florida because the hurricanes and the fires are not just a risk, they are a certainty. So it is with fires in SOCAL, and other natural disasters. Get used to it and manage the risk. My wife's risk management plan is, "Move to Southern California? You must be out of your mind." That's too bad for me because when the grandkids go off to college, or if their parents move before then, SOCAL is where I would like to be.
     
    I ain't skeered but I ain't stupid. I remember insisting that my grandfather take ten-year-old me out to Santa Monica one October day. I wanted to swim even though the ocean would be cold by then. There was a fierce onshore wind that morning so I had a great time flying a kite I had built, another activity that I had planned for the day.
     
    While I was flying the kite a fire started nearby in what I suppose must have been Topanga Canyon just east of Malibu, a few miles north of us. The wind whipped the fire into a massive conflagration in very short order. In my mind's eye I can still see the enormous billowing column of smoke, orange and brown and white, bent to the east by the strong wind. My memory of the day stops there so I have no idea what happened next.
     
    How to manage this risk? Answer, don't move to Topanga Canyon, even though it's hip. (And if you do move there, and if you do get burned out, don't whine about it. If you're willing to pay the price for living there, fine, but don't ask the rest of us to pay the price for you.)
     
    <To be continued. Right now I want to play with FS a bit.>
  23. xxmikexx
    In the Backups thread Flargan/John asked how I got into computing. Here's the (long winded) answer ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Along about 1956 or so, when I was 12 and Univac was the only commercially available computer, I saw an ad in Scientific American for a mechanical toy that amounted to a simple binary addition machine. It had a register for holding the current sum (the accumulator), and an input register into which you could, by hand, enter the next number to be added to the accumulator. With a little assistance from your fingers the machine would add the input register to the accumulator and leave the result in the accumulator.
     
    I wanted the toy but couldn't afford it. So I struggled to learn binary arithmetic on my own, and I simply learned how to simulate the workings of the toy on paper. That was the beginning of my interest in computers.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I didn't act on the interest until the fall of 1963. By then (my senior year), I was well into getting an MS in Chemistry as an undergrad (but I never did the thesis). I had so many courses under my belt that 63/64 would be in essence all electives, and one of the courses I decided to take was FORTRAN programming, given at the NYU computer center. (Worth a whole 'nother thread itself.)
     
    You must understand that I really felt ambivalent about Chemistry. In fact, the only reason that I majored in it at all was because Columbia wouldn't admit me till I was 17, but NYU would take me at age 16 and, in addition, would allow me to skip all the freshman chemistry courses.
     
    (Yes, my girlfriend and I started college when we were 16. Not until we got to high school did we realize that far from being dumb we were actually very smart. We finished high school in three years, went to NYU together, got married at 19 in my senior year, and we are still married.)
     
    Anyway, it was a no brainer. I went to NYU as a chem major. However, I was a disaster in labs (another thread) ... Ahem ... After the FORTRAN course I began hanging around the NYU computing center. In fact, while we didn't use the term at the time, I became an unpaid computing intern for both the Chemistry Department and the Computing Center.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So I was doing FORTRAN programming support for one of the chemistry professors. We were doing the first ever molecular orbital calcuations for simple organic molecules. (We certainly were the first to tackle ethane.) Along the way it was necessary for me to take the determinants of various matrices. My reaction to the procedure I learned was "I can do better than this", so I spent a long sleepless night coming up with a formalization of the new algorithm that I could "feel" had to be there. (It turned out that I had independently (re-)invented what is known as the Pivotal Condensation method. Anyway, by morning I realized that I had a real talent for this stuff as well as a real interest.)
     
    And while the ethane modeling stuff was happening, word having gotten around about what I could do, I was approached by a psychology professor who was doing certain kinds of statistical studies and who wanted his numberical results presented in a special way, a way that would require special knowledge beyond that requried to program effectively in FORTRAN.
     
    If I would agree to take the assignment, he would pay me $300 in 1964 dollars. That's like $4500 today, a stunning windfall amount for a newlywed who had been supplementing his wife's pay (she dropped out for a year to put me through) by playing poker and bridge, and by backing a seriously good nine-ball player, and by ... playing rhythm guitar and bass. (Music is another thread.)
     
    To make a long story short, I dropped all other activities and began to work full time on computer stuff. There were no Computer Science courses at that time so I had to teach myself assembler. I sat down in the NYU computer center cafeteria one afternoon with a) a listing of the FORTRAN code and generated machine code for the program I had written for the psych professor, and b) the "machine language" manual for the IBM 7094 that we used.
     
    It took me two full weeks of intense concentration, two weeks in which I cut every class and barely slept, but by the end of that time I understood every instruction that the compiler had generated. I was then able to go back into the FORTRAN code and build in escapes to assembler that allowed me to re-tackle the matter of the psych professor's print formatting problem in a new and different way, details of interest only to me ... and to the lead system programmer of the Computing Center ...
     
    ... Who immediately put me to work making changes to the math subroutine library ... which led to my creating a new kind of computer process timing routine based not on the 60hz clock but instead on using the stream of bytes from a tape drive as a clock ... which got the attention of NSA ... who made me a job offer that I declined ... only to end up working for an NSA contractor after all.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I didn't do any of the NSA work directly, but the people around me all were on NSA stuff, so I had to be cleared regardless. So as a snot-nosed 20-year-old I got a Top Secret clearance. (At the time my TS clearance was second only the the Q clearance required to work on nuclear weapons.)
     
    You must understand that my parents had been card-carrying Communists, very active in the organized labor movement of the thirties. (They knew the Rosenbergs, for example.) Yet when I told the FBI security people about that, and when I told them that I didn't share my parents' political views, it was not a big deal.
     
    You see, it wasn't a big deal because they'd have found it out anyway, and by surfacing the matter before they asked, I was showing myself to be an honest person -- the kind of person that can't be blackmailed. (Which is all they care about.)
     
    Why would they have found out anyway? Well, they asked me for the names of five non-relatives who knew me well. They then spoke with those five people, asking each of them to name five people who knew me. They then asked each of the resulting 25 people for five names. If we ignore duplicates, in the end they talked to 1 (me) + 5 + 25 +125 people 156 people who knew me or knew of me.
     
    Nothing turned up in this background check because there was nothing to turn up other than solid evidence that I was a loyal American citizen who would not be subject to blackmail.
     
    So that's how I got into the biz -- I forced my way in by going with the flow. :D
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    P.S. ...
     
    After I got my TS I had to take a national security oath. (You must understand that at this time it was a federal crime to even mention the name of NSA in public.) Anyway, I've never been released from that oath. As with the Mafia oath of Omerta, nobody who takes one is ever released from it. (This is because you can't unlearn what you learn on the job.)
     
    Anyway, sometime in the 80s I read a certain book about No Such Agency. I was interested for obvious reasons. But at one point I encountered some material that stunned me. There, on a pair of pages, was a discussion of some stuff that was at the heart of NSA's business. Suddenly I understood why some things remain classified for 50 years. I also realized that whoever had passed this information to the author was, in effect, a traitor.
     
    No, I can't tell you what that information was, or what it had to do with. Even though the information is now out in public, it isn't clear that anybody other than those in the know at the time would understand its significance unless somebody in the know called their attention to it. So if I were to even mention the topic of discussion I feel that this would give aid and comfort to our present and future enemies. Somebody else might feel differently (like the leaker, and like the author of the book, and like his publisher, all of whom got into other taboo areas as well), but then I grew up in a different time, in what was in fact a very different country.
  24. xxmikexx
    Yesterday member dobar asked why nobody had told him that a blogging facility now exists on FlightSim.com. I told him I was writing a feature article on that very subject. I sent it off to webmaster Nels Anderson early this morning, but I thought I'd give the readers of my blog a chance to see the article before other people do. I'm particularly interested in feedback regarding the parody song lyrics at the very bottom of the piece ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    In a recent news article located here [Link Expired] webmaster Nels Anderson did a short writeup of the new appearance and features of the revised FlightSim.com web site. I’m now going to write at some length about the blogs feature.
     
    The term “blog” stands for “web log”. A blog is effectively a person’s personal forum, but one that is open to the public. The blog owner (an ordinary forum user like you or me) can make posts which, if readers care to comment, become de facto threads in the blog. Anybody who is registered to the forums can start his or her own blog. That person can moderate the blog. The blog owner also can post comments to the threads in the blog (or to other peoples’ blogs), so each blog truly does behave like a privately manged forum. (Note: As often as not “blog” here will be used in lieu of “post”. So it is perfectly correct Internet technobabble to say that a blogger is someone who blogs to blogs. J)
     
    As one blogger said, “Why on earth would anybody be interested in anything I have to say?” Well, mon ami, all people are interesting, everybody has something important, or educational, or entertaining, to say to the world on many different subjects. Blogs are a terrific way to do this. Blogs let you too be an author, and they let you write articles on essentially anything you want without having to submit them in advance to the Great Webmaster In The Sky, and therefore with no waiting.
     
    Maybe you will write about your job, or your other hobbies, or the feminine curves of your favorite aircraft, or the way your daughter repainted her room. I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that if you write blogs I’m going to read them. And I’ll probably engage you in conversation because I love talking with people about the things that interest them, things about which they feel strongly enough to write. (Sure, once this thing gets going I’ll step back and let everybody talk to everybody else. However, I’m still going to blog on my own, and it would be interesting if other people wanted to talk with me.)
     
    What’s different about blogs? What do blogs do for us that forum private mail or real world email don’t do?
     
    The main difference is that even if you and I don’t know one another – even if we didn’t know that the other person even existed – we can become friends because I can see what you write, you can see what I write. We can make our lives intertwine in this special way if that’s what we would like to do. No form of electronic mail can do this.
     
    Now … While I don’t speak for FlightSim.com I’ve been posting to my own blog under the following self-imposed rules …
     
    1 – No politics, religion, sex or profanity. (Maybe tasteful vague hints but nothing overt.) In general, if I wouldn’t be willing to shout <whatever> through a bullhorn at my work because some people might take offense then I won’t write about <whatever>. Similarly, if I wouldn’t want my nine-year-old granddaughter to hear my shouts about <whatever> then I won’t write it.
     
    Beyond those rules essentially anything goes as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been writing about anything and everything and very little of it has had to do with either aviation or simming. As often as not a certain good friend will chime in with some comment or other and that will get a conversation going between us. The conversation can end up being wide-ranging because in my blog there is no such thing as an off-topic post.
     
    Why don’t we have those same free-form rules for forums?
     
    Because people come to a given forum with the expectation that they’re going to be reading or posting on the subject that the forum name indicates, and while I’m too often an offender, there is a similar expectation that a given thread is going to remain on-topic. (Otherwise it becomes difficult for readers to retrieve information later, or to follow a large and complex thread.)
     
    But blogs are different. They’re off in a corner of the site that does not interfere with the mainstream forum activity so there is less need to restrict or police the content. Anyway, if you go to the FSX forum you certainly won’t want to read my scholarly pontifications about Ancient Egypt there. Conversely, if you go to my blog, located HERE https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?u=17162, you should not expect threads about tips and tricks for FSX. These MIGHT happen, as with a recent thread about the possibility of my writing some articles about nifty modifications to aircraft.cfg files, but for the most part my blog is about …. … …
     
    Well, to be perfectly honest, my blog is about ME, just as your pending new blog inevitably will be about YOU. So give it a try. I love reading just as much as I love writing, and I guarantee you that if nothing else happens -- if nobody else does it --I’ll read what you write and then have the kind of conversation with you that will show the world what an interesting person you really are.
     
    P.S. To create a blog, log into the forums. At the top you will see a toolbar. The link second from the left says “blogs”. Follow it. You will then see on the left four boxes with dark blue headers. The second one down says Options. The process should now be self-explanatory.
     
    Parodying the immortal lyrics of “Paperback Writer”, which John Lennon did NOT write but Paul McCartney did …
     
    Sir or madam won’t you start a blog?
    It’s very easy, just like falling off a log.
    Based on a concept that’s so very clear
    You won’t be disappointed,
    You won’t shed a tear so be a blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    Ten thousand chars is all a blog may be
    But that is not a problem, not for you and me.
    If you need more chars to say what you must say
    Then add a comment blog
    And you’ll be on your way, a famous blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    If they really like it they will tell you so
    ‘Cause everybody likes being in the know.
    You’re someone special and they want to hear
    About what interests you
    So be a sport and try it. Be a blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    Now you can dazzle all those friends of yours
    Who have heard of blogs but don’t see the doors
    Open to them in this new frontier
    But really, that’s okay because
    You have no fear so show them, Blog Writer …
    Blogosphere Writer.
     
    mike@pcgamecontrols.com
    Go Broncos
  25. 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.

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