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xxmikexx

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  1. xxmikexx

    The White Pages

    By xxmikexx,

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

    Song Lyrics Parodies

    By xxmikexx,

    A few months ago I discovered that I have a talent for writing parody lyrics to popular songs. For example, here's one that I posted to the Dreamfleet 2007 forum at that time.
     
    The situation was that a new user of Paul Golding's magnificent 727 had complained that thus-and-such didn't work and that as a result he could not use the aircraft, which he considered to be total garbage.
     
    The problem was a simple one to solve, something like putting the elevator in the green range prior to beginning the takeoff roll. But whatever the problem was, consulting (not even reading) the manual would have given the poster the required information.
     
    Without further ado, here's what I posted ...
     
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    As long as I’m on a song parodies roll, an ode to Paul Golding’s commitment to customer support and product excellence. With apologies to Ray Davies of The Kinks ...
     
    When he gets up in the am, ‘fore he buckles down to work,
    He scans the DreamFleet forums, to see if there’s a jerk
    Who didn’t R-T-F-M and has really gone berserk.
     
    And he’s oh so good, and he’s oh so kind,
    And he’s oh so patient with the folks of hostile mind.
    He’s a well respected de-vel-op-er making planes of
    High fidelity.
     
    He castigates the poster but decides to help him out
    Because Paul knows that his Good Karma will damp down an angry shout
    And make a happy cus-tom-er - - that’s what it’s all about.
     
    And he’s oh so good, and he’s oh so kind,
    He does in-house tests and beta to kill bugs that folks might find.
    He’s a well respected de-vel-op-er making planes of
    Such high quality.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    One thing that did and does startle me is that the basic form of a parody takes shape very quickly. In the above case I had the essence of the whole thing down in about ten minutes. I spent another hour refining the parody lyrics but that's all it was, refinements.
     
    I take no credit for this stuff. It's simply genes passed down to me from my anscestors -- most definitely a luck of the draw. But while I'm just getting going with this new "career" in song lyrics, i WILL take credit for having cultivated the remainder of my musical talents.
     
    I was born with the ability to learn musical instruments without lessons. (Fine, lots of musicians are.) But the determination to do it -- to spend six years learning to play rhythm and jazz guitar really well, and to play well enough to get paid for playing -- was something I generated on my own. My goal had been to replicate all the R&B and Pop stuff I was hearing on the radio plus all the jazz stuff on the records that my sister owned. I succeeded. And even though I can't play lead guitar, I can COP it.
     
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    Speaking of jazz, one of my high school friends was the son of the maitre d' at NYC's then premier jazz supper club, the Upstairs At The Downstairs. My friend, Jimmy Hernandez, played tenor sax quite well, and he sometimes sat in with the "name" musicians who would perform at the club. But I didn't know any of this till after we became friends, and he heard me play, and he invited ME to sit in.
     
    No, Jimmy, absolutely out of the question. How am I, me, moi, Mikey going to sit in with the likes of Ahmad Jahmal, or the Modern Jazz Quartet? How would that work?
     
    Oddly enough, Ringo Starr has the same reactions. When asked to sit in with <whoever> he will usually reply something like "No, I couldn't possibly do it. Those are REAL musicians up there."
     
    I was never really satisfied unless I was playing with people who were better than I was and who therefore were people I could learn from, but c'mon Jimmy, those are REAL musicians up there.
  3. 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?
     
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    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
  4. xxmikexx
    In the Digicam thread skylab and I got off onto the tangent of data backups. I said I would open a new thread for this stuff. This is that thread ...
     
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    skylab,
     
    I'm like you -- paranoid about the possiblility of data loss, so I have everything backed up locally multiple times. However, for me this kind of approach is no longer sufficient to make me comfortable. I'm going to write about this subject again in the PC Software Tech forum, but for completeness you really should consider some kind of off-site backup storage. I was wiped out by an office fire once even though I was fully backed up so I'm sensitive to this issue. It can happen to you.
     
    Until a few months ago I used to create a set of fire storage CDs in duplicate every 3-4 months and give them to my son for safekeeping. At the time this was about 12 GB of data. Even in compressed form it took a dozen CDs to hold everything. Today it's about 20GB of data, and I really don't want to monkey with the 20 CDs (plus 20 duplicates) that would be required.
     
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    So these days I'm going to be doing offsite backup differently. Having tried the Carbonite service and having found it to be inadequate for my wife and I (watch for an upcoming blog), I decided to implement an electronic offsite backup service of my own. My FS Open Components web site has a large disk storage quota, mostly unused, and I'm now uploading my offsite backups to it.
     
    However, I'm gong to tackle this problem in stages. This is because the compressed version of the 20GB of data takes up roughly 10GB. I can upload only about 100 MB per hour to the fsOC ftp site, so even the 10GB version would take about 100 hours to upload. This is simply not practical, even if done only every three months. So I'm tackling the problem in stages ...
     
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    The first stage is currently underway. In particular, for the time being I'm reducing the offsite stuff to the essentials -- data that simply could not be reasonably be reconstructed from any source other than the offsite backups themselves. This means the photo images (irreplaceable), the latest AirBoss source code (irreplaceable), the course materials I'm developing for the FS Flight Training aspect of the joint venture with FlightSim.com (irreplaceable), and all of my downloaded payware (very costly to replace).
     
    The second stage will be to upload, in compressed form, the less essential data. Most of this data is also irreplaceable, but little of it is vitally important so it can come after the irreplaceable data. The interesting thing about this data is that it doesn't change -- it is an archive. Things get added to the archive, but once in the archive they don't change and they don't get deleted.
     
    Now ... Couldn't I simply put all this stuff on a third removable hard drive and give that to my son? Yes. In fact, I will be doing this because it will be the best way to hedge against our webhosting service, GoDaddy.com, going out of business or suffering some kind of unrecoverable catastrophe. But that approach will require a pair of fire storage external drives, one that will be currently in my son's possession, and another located at our condo, to be loaded with data and then exchanged for the one my son will be holding.
     
    Isn't all this expensive? Yes. In fact, by the time I have the final system in place I will have as large an investment in removable drives as I would in another computer. But it's worth it to me -- computers are easily replaced but 20GB collected and organized of data is not.
  5. xxmikexx

    Saxman

    By xxmikexx,

    EDIT added later: I should never have posted this. However, given that I did I'm going to let it stand, warts and all ...
     
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    Writing the parody lyrics for "Paperback Writer" got me to thinking about another Beatles song that has stood the test of time, "Taxman".
     
    I thought you might be interested in my parody lyrics, and I thought you might be interested to see such a parody while it was under development.
     
    Without further ado, the evolution of "Saxman" ...
     
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    Let me tell you most musically (Saxman)
    About lead reed
     
    No, let’s reboot.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Blah blah blah blah blah blah you see. (Saxman)
    He plays heart out for you and me. (Saxman)
    Cause he’s the saxman …
    Ye-ah he’s the saxman.
     
    No, that’s not right either …
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    No bass guitar or horns, you see. (Saxman …)
    He blows lead reed for you and me. (Saxman …)
     
    Cause he’s the saxman …
    Ye-ah he’s the saxma-a-a-an ...
     
    Not baritone. Not alto sax. (Saxman …)
    He only blows the tenor axe. (Saxman …)
     
    Cause he’s the saxman …
    Ye-ah he’s the saxma-a-a-an ...
     
    If you listen loud he’ll hurt your ears.
    If you listen live -- he’ll calm your fears. < ------ Awful, just awful. Please fix.
    If you play behind poor Britney Spears
    If you blah blah blah as blah blah nears.
     
    Saxman!
     
    And he's playing for you and for me.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    This one is really tough so it may be a few days before it freezes. I'm not proud of what I've got so far but it's a least a plausible start, and I'll post below with revisions as they occur to me.
     
    In the meantime, anybody who would like to rescue what I've done here should feel free to post their own "cover" version of my parody. :D
  6. xxmikexx

    The Z Store

    By xxmikexx,

    After closing our Golden Midi Music And Software business I spent 1.5 years in an unsuccessful search for a well-paying high tech job. It finally dawned on me that being 40++, and having been an entrepreneur, I had become an Untouchable.
     
    I moped around our remotely located property for another few months till the cold weather of late Fall set in and it was no longer fun to go for walks with my favorite cat. It was actually the cat who took ME for walks, the same route every time. She would get about fifty feet ahead of me, then wait for me to catch up, then walk another fifty feet, and so on, periodically turning her head to make sure I was following her. (When she died a year later I was absolutely devastated.)
     
    Came the day when I made a fateful decision. I was out of the computer industry. Now I would go into retailing, and I would go as far as I could, as fast as I could. It being early November, I assumed that with the approach of the Christmas selling season there would never be a better time to break in.
     
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    I drove twenty miles to the largest Radio Shack store in the Metro Denver area, the flagship store of the local district, located inside the large Southwest Plaza shopping mall. I asked to speak with the manager. Why? "Please tell him that I want a job." He's not here. "Fine, I'll wait."
     
    I killed two hours during which time I wandered throughout the store, seeing it for the first time not simply as a customer but also as someone who might actually end up working there at Southwest Plaza. The manager finally came back from his errand, led me to a table at a fast food restaurant, and asked me a few questions. I answered them, giving him a 25-word summary of why I wanted to get into retailing. "Okay" he finally said. "Do you have a Social Security card?" I explained that it had been lost. "Get another one and then come back and see me."
     
    He asked me to do something else as well, I don't remember what. The replacement SS card came about ten days later. My having already done whatever the other thing was, I took myself back to Southwest Plaza and had another sit-down with Big John, as I later would learn he was called. "Fine" he said. "Now I want you to go down to the district office and fill out some paperwork", whereupon he immediately got up and returned to the store before I had a chance to ask him where the office in question was.
     
    It didn't take long to find out, and by three hours later I had filled out the papers and returned to Big John's store. He sat me down for the third time. "I'm sorry about the runaround" he said "But I needed to see what your work ethic is like. You're hired, but you can't work here. You'll be working at Villa Italia. Tell Pete Bulmer that I sent you."
     
    I didn't know at the time that Southwest Plaza had satellite stores, that in effect those stores reported to the flagship store, and that Big John effectively was the manager of a district within an even bigger district. Rather, I felt that I had been sentenced to Siberia, especially because the Villa Italia store was even further from home and was located in a shopping mall whose clientelle had deteriorated to the point that there was actually a police station located within it.
     
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    Pete put me to work immediately, putting stock out on the retail shelves and piers, and in the stockroom. Cardboard boxes of random stuff arrived daily and, for a few days, it was my job to get everything unpacked and put away. At first, in the interests of saving time I had to go to Pete and ask where things should go. (The other employees were scornful and I tried not to have to ask them.) But gradually the store layout began to clarify in my mind, and after about a week I more or less knew where event the tiniest items were likely to be located.
     
    All the while the Christmas shopping traffic in the store was building. You could see the increase from one day to the next, and things were starting to get a little hectic. I realized that my playing stock put-away was actually good training for what I could see was the coming battle. As I became more efficient at restocking the store I began to have time to work with customers.
     
    Actually, I had worked with my first customer on the day I started at Villa. Somebody walked up to me, asked me a question, and I did my best to answer it. The customer then walked away for whatever reason, and the assistant manager approached me. "That's my customer" he said. "And I don't want you talking to my customers."
     
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    Rick (that was his name) and I became friends, but not at first. The significance of the "my customer" business was that regardless of what the customer bought, and regardless of which salesperson closed the sale, credit for the sale was supposed to go to the "owner" of the customer, which meant that either a) he got to ring it up under his log-in name, or b) the other salespeople were to log in as him and ring it up for him.
     
    This was important because Radio Shack employees made minimum wage and were limited to working 35 hours per week so that there wouldn't be any overtime (or benefits). So sales people had a strong incentive to sell as much as they could as fast as they could in order to "make commission" -- in order to sell more than the weekly thresshold amount required to begin earning commissions for that week.
     
    Well, I never made commission. Not once. I hadn't come for the minimum wage job, I had come to get noticed by store and district management. I simply gave the best customer service I could, having decided that either a) Radio Shack would appreciate this and reward me in way other than commissions, or b) I would leave and find some other retailing home.
     
    And I was in fact rewarded. As the shopping crowds continued to build it became necessary to hire additional seasonal help. (I was seasonal.) But sometimes there were delays in the hiring process. At other times people would start but not be able to take the job and quit.
    So as the Christmas sales volume expanded, Pete began asking me to work extra shifts (I always said yes) and frequently extra days (I always said yes).
     
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    Because I always said yes, two things happened: First, I started working a lot of overtime -- at time-and-a-half. So most weeks my take-home pay was 50-100% above 35-hours-at-minimum wage. (Story resumes at this point per Luis' request.) The second thing that happened was that I was now getting requests from Big John to work extra shifts at his flagship store in Southwest Plaza.
     
    You must realize the importance here. This said something about how much I had learned because Big John's store did a sales volume five times that of the next biggest store, which was Pete's store in Villa Italia, my home base. Yet Southwest Plaza ran with a very small staff, only three people more than Villa, sometimes two. So for Big John to ask that I come down to his store meant that I was already viewed as a skilled Radio Shack employee -- someone who was capable of standing the pace at the Southwest Plaza store, even though I had only been with Radio Shack for a little more than a month.
     
    Mind you, this wasn't because I possessed any special retailing skills (I don't), it was simply because I had been determined to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, my work showed it, and I began to get noticed just as I had hoped would happen.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Anyway, Thanksgiving came and went, and by two weeks before Christmas every store was always full of customers. I often started mornings at Villa Italia and then, in mid-afternoon, would go down to Southwest Plaza to finish out their business day. So except for the time required to travel between stores (20 minutes) I was on the job (and on my feet) from 9AM (by then I was helping to open the Villa store) till 10 PM, when Big John began his close. (I wasn't yet trusted to help with store closings. If I had been, I'd have been working till 11 PM.)
     
    By a week before Christmas I was doing this every day, seven days a week. It was baptism by fire, a crash course in high volume retailing, a test -- and I was passing the test simply because I never said no and always worked my butt off.
     
    By a couple of days before Christmas two of the other seasonal people quit from Pete's store. They simply didn't show up for work, presumably because they couldn't take the pressure any more. Anyway, that bolted me to Pete's store. We (the district, I was already beginning to think that way) -- we needed me to be at Pete's store 100% of the time ....
     
    ... Because the store was jam-packed with customers and the sales volume was very very high. People were buying anything and everything -- and they continued to buy right up till 10PM on Christmas Eve when we closed the doors with a sigh of relief. (Even then people were pounding on the doors demanding to be let in, but the policy of the shopping mall management was that all stores had to close their doors at 10PM, period end of discussion.)
     
    So we all went home to our families, our girlfriends, our pets, depending on how lucky we had been in life. But it wasn't over yet because we only got Christmas morning off. The store re-opened at 1 PM -- not to sell anything but rather to deal with the flood of merchandise being returned by customers who had bought stuff in the last few days simply to have things to put under their Christmas trees -- but who couldn't afford to do without refunds for that very same merchandise.
     
    That flood went on till well into the evening. The next morning we opened Pete's store as usual -- and everything was finally quiet. There had been perhaps twenty seasonal employees taken on across the district, which encompassed six or eight stores, I don't recall the exact number. Only one of these people was invited to stay on with Radio Shack as a full-time employee. That person was me, and I had d*** well earned it.
  7. xxmikexx

    Key West ... Almost

    By xxmikexx,

    This is a continuation of some comments in the Fright Stimulator thread located here ... https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=44. That thread had been taken so far off-topic by me that I decided to start a new one. Here it is ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    My wife and I did our PADI scuba diving training in Key West in 1987. (Skylab, you HAVE heard what follows, I'm simply parking the story where I can get at it more easily in the future.) We originally planned to stay a few days, maybe a week, the trip being for the specific purpose of getting our PADI certificates.
     
    Well, we loved Key West so much that we stayed a month. During that time we talked seriously about staying there permanently but we didn't do it because a) our family was rooted in Colorado, and because b) we had a consulting business that had us traveling between NYC, Denver and Colorado Springs, but that could not have been conducted out of Key West.
     
    Had I known that our consulting business was going to crash at about the same time that Golden Midi failed, and that our subsequent graphic arts and printing business would also fail, this time pushing us into bankruptcy, we definitely would have stayed in Key West and the h-word with the big money we thought would continue forever. (Even if you ignore inflation our income now is about 25% of what it was then. It would not have been difficult for us to manage staying on had we been willing to set our sights much lower the way we subsequently learned to do.)
     
    So while I don't regret Golden Midi, or consulting, or the graphics/print operation, the fact is that if I had known what was going to happen I'd have said "The heck with it all, let's go camp out on Mel Fisher till he gives low paying jobs doing exploratory diving in return for becoming investors". Or whatever. Had we really wanted to stay we'd have found a way ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Just as our daughter's best friend from high school later found a way. She went to Key West on vacation, reacted the same way we did, stayed, waited on tables till Fisher said "yes", and then worked for him for a year as a wreck diver.
     
    She left only because she's a road runner. Determinedly single, since leaving high school her life has followed a set bachelorette pattern. She moves someplace, starts an accounting business, makes a decent living from it for a year or two or three till she gets bored with the local scene, and then she moves on to some other place she's been curious about, opens a new accounting business, etc etc etc.
     
    So it wasn't unusual for her to decide to stay in Key West. The only difference was that for once she decided not to open an accounting business (too much local competition) and decided instead to become a wreck diver, supporting herself by waiting tables in the meantime.
     
    So, Lisa, hats off to you. In the best tradition of the USA you took charge of your own life and made things happen your way.
     
    Lisa got the entrepreneur genes from her father who, when laid off from a high tech management job in the Springs, became a dealer of sunglasses in the regional flea markets. Over the next couple of years he built the business to a point where it was providing far more income than his management ever had, with more job satisfaction, and with much less stress. I don't know what happened after that but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he discovered franchising and is a multimillionaire. Such is the USA, where many people become entrepreneurs by accident, not because they wanted to but because life circumstances FORCED them to.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    But our diving instructor was the one who came and stayed. A highly paid advertising exec on Mad Ave in NYC, he had been working on an ulcer and decided to take an extended vacation in Key West. The vacation had lasted 17 years by the time we met him. :)
     
    So he came down on vacation, started diving lessons the next day, loved it and continued to dive till he had his instructor's certificate, living off savings from his job on Madison Avenue. Once he was certified as an instructor he started paid instructor work immediately and never stopped, for the same reasons that some CFIs choose to remain CFIs -- meeting people and seeing/helping their students to grow.
  8. 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.
  9. xxmikexx
    I told webmaster Nels Anderson yesterday that I would like to write a series of short How To ... articles regarding making simple changes to Aircraft.Cfg for the purpose of overcoming common nuisances. He likes the idea because he would like to see more of the technical kind of How To ... articles.
     
    But how did I come to be able to make such changes? After all, the common perception is that when it comes to FDE, only experts can make such changes because "Everything interacts with everything else."
     
    Yes and no.
     
    Yes, to a certain extent everything does interact with everything else, see below. But no, for many common problems and annoyances you don't have to be an FDE expert. All you really need is an understanding of basic arerodynamics, which will be covered by the first article in the series.
     
    In advance of the article I'll give a short summary and a simple example ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    You will be way ahead of the game if you understand that, in straight and level flight at constant airspeed, lift must precisely equal the weight of the aircraft, and engine thrust must precisely equal the sum of all the drag forces acting on the aircraft.
     
    If lift didn't equal weight the aircraft would either climb or descend. If thrust didn't equal total drag the aircraft would either speed up or slow down. Common sense, nothing more. No requirement for wearing a beanie with a twirly thing on top.
     
    Now let's talk about drag. It isn't immediately obvious, but when you think about it there must be basically two kinds of drag actiing on the aircraft. The first kind is obvious -- so-called "form drag".
     
    Form drag results simply from the aircraft moving forward through the air. The aircraft has to force the air aside as it flies. The higher the airspeed the more air needs to be shoved aside per unit time -- and therefore the greater the retarding force. Thus form drag clearly must depend on airspeed -- very high at Mach 3, nearly zero at taxi speeds. Again, common sense.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The other kind of drag is "induced drag". As you already know, to generate lift the wing must maintain a non-zero and positive angle of attack. Remember sticking your hand out the car window when you were a kid? Edge on and there was relatively little drag. But when you tilted your hand it would climb -- and be forced back.
     
    The rearward acting force is induced drag. It comes about because the airfoil has a positive angle of attack when it is generating lift -- and this positive angle of attack causes the lift vector to be tilted away from the vertical. The result is that the vertical component generates the lift while the rearward component generates the induced drag. You can't have the one without the other.
     
    Now ... If you think about it, to maintain constant lift a fast-flying aircraft will need a shallower angle of attack than it would at low airspeed. As the angle of attack becomes lower with increasing airspeed, the reardward component of the lift vector becomes smaller. That's right -- as airspeed increases, form drag decreases, and conversely.
     
    And now for the part that is a bit less obvious but just as easy to understand ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Clearly the total drag on the aircraft must be the sum of form drag and induced drag. Again, common sense. But what isn't immediately obvious is that if you were to make a graph of total drag versus airspeed you would find it to be shaped like a U or a bathtub -- it would have a minimum value at some particular airspeed.
     
    And now you will just have to take my word on something. (If you don't want to take my word on it you will have to study fluid dynamics.)
     
    At faster than that minimum airspeed, the form drag component of total drag will increase somewhat rapidly at the same time that induced drag is gradually decreasing. At slower than that minimum airspeed, induced drag will increase somewhat rapidly while form drag slowly decreases. Therfore total drag will be higher on BOTH sides of the minimum drag airspeed, and this is why the graph of total drag versus airspeed is bathtub-shaped.
     
    And that's almost everything we need to know about aerodynamics to be able to solve problems like the following ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    When I inherited the Erick Cantu 727-200 airframe with the Charles Fox FDE I found that the aircraft, when slowed at cruising altitude from .81M to .60M in preparation for descent, was taking about 10 nm to slow. I happen to know that real 727s are "slippery" and require more nearly 20 nm to slow than 10 nm. So the question on the floor becomes, How do you make the aircraft take more distance to slow down?
     
    Well, in principle you could artificially increase engine flight idle thrust, somewhat lessening the effect of total drag on the slowdown process. There is a parameter in aircraft.cfg that would allow you to do exactly this. Trouble is, it would increase thrust in all other situations too. ("Everything interacts with everything else.")
     
    So we're not going to do that. Instead we're going to think about the problem ... ... ??? ... ... ... ?!? ... ... !!!.
     
    Go to the head of the class if you said that we need to decrease the form drag. This will allow us to leave the engine thrust parameter alone, and it will have little effect on the low-speed handling characteristics of the aircraft, where the drag forces are dominated by induced drag rather than form drag.
     
    So if we make a modest reduction in form drag, something like five or ten percent, we should find the aircraft slowdown distance increasing ... And so it does.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    But now we have created another common sense problem. The lower form drag means that at cruising airspeed the aircraft will require less thrust to maintain airspeed. Less thrust means lower fuel consumption, and it also means an artificially lower reading of the fuel flow gauge.
     
    But those are the only important interactions. It isn't EVERYthing that is interacting with EVERYthing here, it's form drag interacting with thrust and therfore fuel consumption.
     
    The situation is actually very simple when you think about it, and all that we needed was an understanding of basic aerodynamics in order to see which aircraft.cfg parameters need to be modified ...
     
    form drag
    engine thrust
    fuel flow
     
    So that's what these articles will be about. Not about how to achieve the utmost in realism in all parameter behaviors in all flight regimes, but instead HOW TO MAKE THE SIMULATED AIRCRAFT DO WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO.
     
    Once more, common sense prevails. It's not black magic and we don't have to be beanie-wearing propellerheads to make the right things happen.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Gee ... I guess I just wrote that first article, didn't I? :D That's fine, when I want to release it I'll know exactly where to find it, and in the meantime almost nobody will have read it, except perhaps for my good friend skylab.
  11. 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.
  12. 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
  13. 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.
  14. xxmikexx
    I don't want to get into the issue of climate change. Suffice it to say that I believe the sun to be a variable star on several different time scales, and that average global temperature can therefore be expected to fluctuate on several different time scales.
     
    Colorado is on roughly a 44-year climate cycle though this too is subject to a lot of variation. We have been locked into a severe drought for many years now, and while I thought for a short time that we were emerging from the drought, now I have to say that I'm not so sure anymore.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    When we moved to Colorado in 1978, that year's winter was among the coldest and snowiest on record. For example, in early 79 it reached -37 F on the deck of our then house in Colorado Springs. (That same night Leadville recorded -60 F.) There was so much snow that piles of it persisted in the supermarket parking lots into late July. (!)
     
    Denver's weather is milder than that of the Springs. Nevertheless, because we've been living around Denver since 1990 or so, I can tell you that the past few winters have been mild even by Denver standards.
     
    In particular, last winter was the first one in which I never had to use a snow shovel. The mountains got plenty of snow but down here in Flatland we did not, and there were very few days of significant cold.
     
    So I'm going to count that winter as the mildest one I've ever seen out here. Yet the mildest winter hung on the longest of any that I can recall. In fact, this past spring was the coldest ever as far as I know.
     
    Of course it's summer now. Denver set a record last week for the longest string of consecutive days when the temperature went above 90 F, something like eighteen of them. Yet it's only broken 100F on two days that I can recall, where normally by this time we'd have had a dozen of them.
     
    So I'm going to count this as the coolest summer I can recall, the recent record notwithstanding. Not only that ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I think that when last week's string of 90+ F days ended, summer ended. I very much doubt that we're going to see 100 F again this year even though August is usually our hottest month.
     
    In fact, it's become cloudy. Combine that with the fact that the Canada geese seem to be starting their southward migration and I am led to predict an early winter, but a mild one again.
     
    We shall see what we shall see.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Oh yes, another sign of regional temperatures this year ...
     
    We have not stopped seeing contrails from the jets flying high over BJC, the Jefferson County VOR. Normally contrails are gone by late May and are not seen again till late August. This year I've seen them every day, another first for the area.
  15. xxmikexx

    Why I Like The 727

    By xxmikexx,

    It was January? of 1965. I was employed by Applied Data Research in Princeton, NJ ...
     
    I had conceived, designed and written some software to control flatbed plotters in a way that was independent of the details of the devices. (Today we would call that aspect of my code a "class driver".) And then I was able to make a sale of the software to Shell Oil Company.
     
    This was pioneering software that knew how to do 3D projection and perspective. So the user could move a virtual pen through 3-space and my software would project the result, scaled, translated, rotated and perspectivized, onto the 2-D plane of the plotter bed.
     
    You could condition the virtual pen to leave trails behind it -- dashed lines, dotted lines, blah blah blah. The software even had scaleble fonts that I had programmed myself, the pioneering equivalent of what we would call today a TrueType font. The only thing my software lacked was a hidden lines elimination feature, an algorithm that I struggled for two years to invent but could not.
     
    Anyway, a big user of the software was Shell Oil in Houston. (I had closed the sale with some Shell folks in NJ but it was Houston that ended up being the main user.) Something came up during the winter of 64/65, I forget what. I had to fly down to Houston on short notice, planning to stay only a day or two.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Instead the visit stretched out to almost a month. Shell had been prepared to fly me back and forth so I could spend weekends with my wife and infant daughter. But I'm a trouper, Shell was in a world of hurt, and my wife agreed that I should stay in Houston till Shell was up and running again. So I worked 18x7 until the job was done, taking only short meal breaks and the occasional long dinner break, sometimes sleeping at Shell, sometimes sleeping at my hotel a few blocks away. (But the blocks on Fannon were LONG blocks, as I recall.)
     
    I'm not sure that my stuff had bugs. I think it may have been an emergency requirement for some new features. At any rate they needed the software modifications to print well geology maps derived from data gathered in the field by their prospecting teams.
     
    It was mid-winter in Princeton but in Houston ... Ah, in Houston ... It was sunny, and warm, and I saw a helicopter land right next to the Steak By Weight restaurant on Fannon Boulevard. Out stepped two men wearing large Stetson hats. (Stetsons are made in Brooklyn, by the way, or at least used to be.) Winter in Houston came as a stunning surprise. But we never moved there. We didn't move because it never occurred to me that we could.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Anyway, came a day when Shell and I agreed that everything that needed to be done had been done, tested and found to be in good shape. That was around 10AM of my final day there. I expressed a desire to get on a Newark-bound flight as early as I could.
     
    I wandered away to get a soda or whatever while the responsible group manager, a gentleman named Dewey Kibler (a typically Texan name to conjure with), called the Shell travel department office there in the Shell HQ building, which is where I had been working.
     
    I returned to Dewey's office. "It's all set up" he said. "If you get right down there they'll have your ticket ready and will run you out to the airport so you can catch the next flight east."
     
    "Bye Dewey, I've really enjoyed being here. Thanks for your hospitality."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Color me gone. I went down to the travel department, who handed me a ticket for an Eastern Airlines flight. I didn't look at it, mostly because they rushed me downstairs ... and into a limousine ... and whisked me off to Hobby ... where Shell had asked that the aircraft be held ... for little old me ... apparently for fifteen minutes.
     
    You see, Shell could make this stuff happen because Eastern was their biggest customer, and Houston was Shell headquarters.
     
    I boarded the plane, a brand new 727-100, and headed back to coach, suitcase in hand. (That's how it could be done back then if you didn't have time to check luggage through, or if you didn't want to check it through.) While looking for an open seat (that's how it was done back then) a stewardess asked for my ticket (which was sometimes how it was done) ... and then turned me around and led me to ... first class ... to the frontmost seat on the right. (Must have been 1B, I don't recall a seat next to mine.)
     
    She went back to coach. Another stewardess then asked whether I would like a cocktail. At 11 AM? Hm-m-m-m ... Why not? ... I didn't drink much, and usually not till evening, but this was a special occasion. I was exhausted and hoped that a drink would knock me out for the flight home.
     
    Wrong. Completely wrong.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I had ridden 727s a couple of times before but never up front. It was like riding at the end of a telephone pole that was being pushed from behind. I could feel every movement of the aircraft and for an aviation buff like me it was wonderful. It was also QUIET, something I had never before experienced in an airliner. All I heard was the thump of the nose gear coming up and locking, and of the nosewheel doors closing. That and the sound of the slipstream, the quiet white noise building in intensity as the aircraft accelerated.
     
    So there I was, riding a magic carpet with a vodka martini in my right hand as I watched Texas fall away. I've done so much flying that very few flights stick in my mind, but this one certainly did.
     
    Once we were at cruising altitude a sumptuous lunch was served to those of us who were flying POSH. (Port out, starboard home.) Heck, even the coach meals were really good back then, and the meal in First was even better. I don't remember what I ate but whatever it was, it was wonderful.
     
    I didn't sleep at all. I was too excited by the experience. And ever since then I've equated the 727-100 and then the 727-200 with grace and comfort ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I've equated the 727 with the Golden Age of air travel, when aircraft almost always departed and arrived on time. When luggage was almost never lost. When traveling men wore suits and ties, and traveling women wore dresses or women's suits, and when traveling children were dressed in their Sunday best. When the stewardesses were young and pretty and still happy in the fun jobs that they would quit as soon as they had met Mister Right, or that would end when the airlines asked them to step down so they could be replaced with even fresher young faces.
     
    That era will never return. Suffice it to say that today I drive whenever this is at all practical. If I start at 2AM I can make Denver to Malibu in 20 hours. I've done it three times. I can make NYC in 42 hours and Boston in 46, including a stop in a motel. I've done this probably twenty times.
     
    I have zero interest in riding in a cattle car, or in being treated as a piece of cargo, despite the fact that deregulation has resulted in fares that are low as dirt. If I can't fly in comfort -- if I can't afford First -- I simply won't fly again.
  16. xxmikexx

    Theories Of Lift

    By xxmikexx,

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

    Surface Tension

    By xxmikexx,

    Today I had a chance to see, close up, a yellowjacket swoop down and then hover to get a drink from the waters of our condo development's swimming pool. Unfortunately it made the mistake of doing it into a trough between shallow waves, resulting in its failing to rise as fast as the side of an approaching swell was rising. Then the creature was no longer hovering but instead was in the water, trapped by surface tension.
     
    Surface tension is also responsible for the beautiful sheen on the gentle waves in the swimming pool -- the water appears to have a tight-fitting skin. And indeed it does, again due to surface tension. The surface of the water is quite literally attracted to the body of water beneath. With no counteracting attractive force from the air above, a thin region of high viscosity is formed -- and the yellowjacket is pulled down into the water and trapped there.
     
    What's the source of this force?
     
    It has to do with the fact that a molecule of water is polar -- weakly charged positively at the oxygen end, weakly charged negatively at the two hydrogens that bend away from the oxygen like a deeply curved banana. This polar effect is not the ionic bonds between the hydrogens and the oxygen -- the net charge across the molecule is precisely zero and therefore cannot by itself be a source of attraction between water molecules. (The zero net charge issue is another story for another day)
     
    Rather, what we are talking about here is the distribution of the net charge -- a greater than nominal electron density around the hydrogens, a less than nominal electron density around the oxygen. So while the oxygen does in fact become weakly positive, the hydrogens actually become less positive than nominal. There is a small but computable and measurable tendency for the hydrogens of water molecule A to stick to the oxygen of water molecule B.
     
    And now for a not-so-obvious fact: To a chemist (I was trained as one), water is a neutral aqueous solution of solvated protons. The protons have a tendency to drift away from their parent oxygens and stick briefly to a different oxygen. Because protons are positively charged, this phenomenon causes the approaching proton to tend to pull electrons away from the receiving oxygen and toward the proton.
     
    The result is a proton surrounded (solvated) by a very weak cloud of negative electric charge, and an oxygen ion that has had its negative charge reduced slightly. This causes a bias in the distribution of the electric charges, resulting in a net attractive force between what we think of as ionically bound molecules of water.
     
    But at the surface there is nothing to counter the net attractive force between the water molecules immediately beneath the surface -- and the skin of surface tension forms. Anything sticking down in this skin -- like the dangling legs of the unfortunate yellowjacket -- will be attracted to the underlying water, dragging the creature down into the water with such force that it is unable to escape, its struggles serving only to get itself wet, deepening its plight.
     
    The yellowjacket's only way out of the situation is for a force majeure -- my hand -- to sweep it out of the pool and onto the adjacent concrete, where the water will evaporate, once again allowing the creature to fly.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The example just cited is one of three categories of force known collectively as Van der Waals forces, named after a Dutch scientist who identified two of the three categories.
     
    Van der Waals forces are residual forces, far far weaker than the parent forces giving rise to them ... and what we call the strong nuclear force is actually the equivalent of Van der Waals attraction between quarks, resulting in a tendency of neutrons and protons to stick together even though there is no ionic bond between them. This should give you some idea of the strength of the quantum chromodynamic force between quarks -- unbelievably strong, far far stronger than the unbelievably strong nuclear force they give rise to.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Footnote: Not only is there no ionic bond between the protons and neutrons of a nucleus, the protons are repelling one another very strongly because they are all positively charged.
     
    You can get an idea of the strength of the electric force as follows: Place a piece of paper on the floor. Now run a comb through your hair a few times and hold it just above the paper. The comb will then lift the paper, that small amount of charge overcoming the gravitational pull of the entire earth.
     
    And now imagine the strong nuclear force, as relatively more powerful than the electric force as the electric force is than gravity.
  18. xxmikexx

    Larry And Paul

    By xxmikexx,

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

    Ungrateful

    By xxmikexx,

    It's hardly the end of the world but Phil Taylor announced early today that he would be leaving ACES studio and that tomorrow would be his last day.
     
    I was hoping that the people of the wolf packs on the various major FS-related websites might stop feeding on the entrails of living creatures long enough to pay tribute to the man who has helped so many thousands of us enjoy FSX. They could, for example, have said things like "Well, Phil, I may hate you but you surely did give me many hours of the pleasure of barking at you, and I'm grateful for that."
     
    Such is not to be. As of a few minutes ago, about twelve hours after his announcement, the number of in memoriam posts on the various FS sites was ...
     
    FlightSim.com --- 5 for, 1 against
    Avsim -----------16 for, 1 against
    Sim-Outhouse --- 24 for, 0 against
    SimFlight -------- 0 for, 0 against
     
    That's it. Period, end of subject. The result of his having held down an extremely demanding job, with product manager of Flight Simulator being just part of that job, and of his having voluntarily given hundreds of hours of his personal time to helping thousands of people ... ahem ... The psychic reward for having done all this product support directly by the product manager himself was a grand total of 45 "Thanks, Phil" posts.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    One of the reasons Phil and I have become fast email friends is that we each noticed that the other does not back down when the wolf packs attack, that we each defend helpless underdogs, and that we each stick to our guns when we know that one plus one equals two rather than a traditional value of three, for example.
     
    You see, forum decorum requires that even the heavy hitters, if they are to avoid being boiled in oil, say things like "Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. One plus one equals three is just as valid a viewpoint as any other, and it goes a long way toward explaining why you're convinced that [insert attacker technobabble here]."
     
    Dat's a fact, Jack. Those things plus our each having the habit of sticking up for underdogs when the schools of pirhana fish attack, hoping to strip their victims of flesh in public, aided and abetted by moderators who also won't tolerate anything but mediocrity.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Phil hasn't said so -- would never say so -- but he has been driven from the forums several times and now has decided to leave even the Major Leagues FS Development community -- ACES Studio -- perhaps because no amount of positive stroking at ACES can make up for the horrible way he and his (and my) kind get treated on the forums.
     
    Phil is not the first person to say "That's it, time to go do something else." I don't want to furnish a long list of names and details. Instead I'll simply cite the example of Mike Stone, a builder of low-fps airframes that run well on dinosaur computers.
     
    (to be continued)
  20. xxmikexx

    Yay Denny's

    By xxmikexx,

    I like to praise vendors in public when they do the right thing, as I did with the FS Pilot Shop a couple of weeks ago ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    A few days ago my wife and I intended to eat breakfast at a local Denny's, a locally owned franchise where we spend roughly $1,000 per year, I estimate. When we walked in there was a young child in a high chair shrieking and crying very loudly. All the mother was doing was shush-ing the child. We sat down, placed our orders and waited for someone on the staff to ask the mother to step outside till the child had calmed down. Nobody did anything.
     
    So after we had been in the restaurant for about five minutes I took the law into my own hands, walked over to the mother and told her that she would have to leave the restaurant with the kid till the kid was behaving properly. The mother did as I asked, and as she was heading out the door I sat down again at my wife's and my booth table.
     
    Well now ... I heard one of the waitresses go over to the father and apologize for my "rude behavior". She did it several times. So when she returned to the coffee prep station I confronted her. "Did I just hear you telling the father that I had been rude?"
     
    "Yes" she said. "You were VERY rude." A second waitress chimed in with "That's OUR job, not yours."
     
    Whereupon I told them "But you weren't doing your job, somebody had to, and that somebody is me. You have just lost a customer". They probably thought that I meant we were walking out on this particular meal but I meant that we would not be back to the unit ever -- not as long as they are employed there. (These were weekend staff and we rarely eat there on weekends. I knew them but they didn't know me.)
     
    So we went to a nearby working man's cafe that I had been meaning to try and had a much better breakfast at a noticeably lower price.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Mind you, I'm not a complainer and I'm not a cheapskate. I always tip 20% regardless of the quality of the service because waitstaff depend on it -- it's an essential part of their income. I wouldn't want my daily pay to depend on what some customer thought of how I happended to feel that day, and I'm not going to do that to anybody else.
     
    I've never complained about service before but in this case I sent an email to Denny's headquarters explaining both sides of what had happened, asking them to forward the information to the unit owners. In my email I made it clear that I would not return to the unit unless and until I had been assured that the two employees in question had been dismissed. I pointed out to them that while normal restaurant policy is to wait for a customer complaint, this particular case was a no-brainer, just as it would be a no brainer to ask a flasher to leave before a customer complained.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I have just received a letter from Denny's national headquarters agreeing with my position and stating that they had forwarded the information to the appropriate parties on the very day that I had written in (which was a Sunday).
     
    I don't know what the local franchisee is going to do. As with most franchise operations Corporate probably can't do much more than jawbone the owners. But I'm delighted to see that Corporate is not saying that the unit staff should have slavishly followed a reasonable policy to an unreasonable limit.
     
    So ... Yay Denny's.
     
    Regrettably for Corporate my wife and I really like the new cafe and we might not go back to the Denny's in question regardless of whether the offending employees are let go.
     
    But we certainly will not hesitate to patronize other Denny's units.
  21. xxmikexx

    The Urge To Write

    By xxmikexx,

    Most writers take pleasure in the act of writing. A known readership is nice but at least for me the risk that somebody might actually read my stuff is reward enough.
     
    I often write for audiences of one as various email friends will attest. While I certainly can't put myself in his league, T.S. Eliot did the same thing with poetry. In fact, "Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats", http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Summer97/SemGS/WebLex/OldPossum/oldpossumlex/ is simply a collection of cat-related poems that he sent to friends supposedly anonymously. (This collection, by the way, served as the basis for the hit musical "Cats".)
     
    Anyway, the post I'm writing now is a perfect example of what I like to do. I have no idea whether anybody will read it but that's fine -- it's sufficient to know that somebody might read it ... because art is largely about taking risks.
     
    A certain forum member who accused me of writing just to hear myself talk is only partly correct. Another forum member was annoyed that I edit and re-edit my posts. "Writing as art? Surely you jest" they probably would say.
     
    But yes, to me it's art. I edit and re-edit and re-re-edit my posts partly to fix spelling and improve grammar, partly for editorial content and partly for appearance. In the latter respect I'm like the scribes and tomb painters of Ancient Egypt. The form of their hieroglyphic writing -- the esthetics -- was just as important as the content.
     
    Chinese poets wrote under the same constraint -- the writing had to look good as well as having meritorious content. However, the Egyptians took this a step further. Even if you were a tax collector (a common duty of Egyptian scribes), your tax records had to look good.
     
    So ... My writing has to look good to me when displayed in public. That's why I capitalize the first letter of every word in the title of every thread I start, or in the titles of other things. I also put periods after quotations at the ends of sentences. I simply like the way the result looks, and the heck with those aspects of grammar. (Good grammar is whatever educated people agree is good grammar. More and more literate people are doing what I do.)
     
    It's irrelevant to me whether other people appreciate the layouts because I only have to please the man in the mirror. I hope that people will like the result. However, the risk that they won't is fine too. In art as in life overall, it's the journey that's important, not the destination.
     
    P.S. My favorite writer, John McPhee, a New Yorker contributor who has been writing for the magazine for almost forty years, once remarked that at the start of every day he forces himself to sit down and write for four hours. I don't recall his exact words but the sense of them was "I don't allow myself the luxury of 'writer's block' just as a plumber can't allow himself the luxury of 'plumber's block'".
  22. xxmikexx

    It's In Stereo

    By xxmikexx,

    I was forced to close down Golden Midi after about 20 months of operations. I offered the catalog to Passport Designs, a California company that makes sequencing software. Their having asked me a year earlier "How can we get in on this?", they agreed that we should talk. That phone conversation took place just a few minutes before the La Prieta earthquake of 1989, the epicenter of which was not far from the company's location in Half Moon Bay.
     
    I flew out there the next morning, driving south from SFO through areas that clearly had been hit hard by the quake. When I arrived at the company we got right to work. No socializing, just bitter coffee. The receptionist had expressed surprise that I hadn't cancelled the trip but I explained that, having spent considerable time in SOCAL as a kid, I was not put off by earthquakes.
     
    The receptionist was the only person there who treated me like a human being. They had me over a barrel, they knew it, and they intended to exploit their top dog position for everything it was worth. After all, if they didn't buy the catalog, who would?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    There's nothing wrong with that other than its furthering a reputation that, in my opinion, was for being ruthless not only with competitors but also with the stores and end users who were their customers. (To avoid the possibility of a lawsuit even after these 20 years, from time to time I'm going to say "in my opinion" here. This removes all grounds for possible legal action since the things I will be saying are in fact my opinions. :))
     
    Greed is legal, and crushing the competition is also legal within limits. They had just hired a "mergers and acquisitions" flunky and I was this guy's first case. In my opinion he was determined to acquire the Golden Midi catalog at the absolute rock bottom price he could force me to accept.
     
    Anticipating that something like this might happen, I had brought along a deal sweetener -- a demonstration of some remarkable postproduction software that they could also buy from me if we could come to terms that I would like. Anyway, the demo took the form of two stereo studio recordings of our magnificient sequenced version of Les Elgart's "Bandstand", which you know as the theme of the American Bandstand TV show.
     
    The first stereo recording was of a quantized version of our master sequence. Quantization is a software proceedure that places all the notes and other musical events on precise time markers. So, for example, if you have a keyboard chord that was played in live and whose notes occurred within a 30 millisecond time span, quantization will cause all those notes to occur within about one millisecond.
     
    The result is dead music, a complete loss of whatever live feel existed in the original. You've heard this kind of music before. You call it "elevator music", and this is exactly why we did as many instrument tracks as possible as live takes.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Being a combination programmer, musician and entrepreneur, it occurred to me one day that I could write software that would take a dead, quantized, sequence and bring it to life. By the time that idea had occured to me I already knew more than I ever dreamed possible about how to arrange notes in time and space. So I put on my thinking cap, made reasonable extrapolations of what I knew, wrote software to implement those extrapolations, and the result was nothing short of miraculous.
     
    I'm not going to reveal the techniques here because at some point I may want to patent the process. Suffice it to say that experiments confirmed what I believed I had finally figured out -- exactly what makes live music sound live. Certainly nobody has done anything like what I built, which amounted to back-end production software driven by our master sequences. At first I was simply "sparkling" (as I called it) our already live feel masters, but as I gained experience with the technique I built a quantizer right into the upstream end of the sparkler and then turned the algorithms loose on the quantized version of the sequence.
     
    This meant that the software could take quantized sequences built by my competitors and make them sound live. I believed, incorrectly, that Passport would want the technology since it would allow them to create sequences using musicians of a lower calibre than Golden Midi had been using.
     
    So the second tape of the demo was of the "sparkled" version of Bandstand. Note that both recordings featured the identical tone generators rendering the identical musical events, set to standard volumes and standard voices, and with identical arrangement of the instruments in the stereo field.
     
    The only repeat only difference between the two stereo recordings was that Tape A was quantized whereas Tape B had been sparkled.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Before the negotiations got seriously underway I said to the company president (also a musician/entrepreneur) and the M&A guy "Look. I've brought a demo along of our postproduction software. What it can do may be of interest to you. I'm not going to tell you what it does unless you agree to buy it. Instead I'm simply going to play Tape A and then Tape B and let you decide whether there's anything to this technology."
     
    So I played the tapes, the quantized Tape A followed by the sparkled tape B. As B got underway the company president had to leave the room to take a phone call. After a few more seconds the M&A guy said "Big deal, this one's in stero."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I was disappointed, of course, but not surprised. Why should a numbers guy be expected to have anything more than a tin ear? I think that the company president might have understood the difference between A and B, but he was out of the room by then, and anyway experience had taught me that people are aware of this stuff mainly subliminally. If he was one of the many musicians who really didn't hear music consciously then the importance of the B tape would be lost on him.
     
    But it didn't matter because the president had delegated complete authority for the deal to the man I will call SOB because, in my opinion, that's exactly what he was and probably still is. When the president left the room he did not come back, and it was SOB and me mano a mano.
     
    SOB asked me what I wanted for the catalog. "Fifty thousand" I told him. "I'll give you twenty" he said.
     
    No way. No f-wording way. Being a pretty fair salesman I talked about the kind of success that Golden Midi had enjoyed, and I tried to show him how this catalog would allow them not simply to jump start their planned entry into the sequenced music business (which is why they wanted the catalog) but also why there was every reason for them to expect that the catalog would allow them to have an instant sizeable sales volume.
     
    No deal. We went around and around for two hours, with him never budging from twenty thousand.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Now you must remember that not only do I have Celtic Writing Genes, I also have Celtic Anger Genes. There was no way I was going to give these folks the satisfaction of launching a big time business using me as a low-cost booster stage.
     
    So I told SOB that the deal was off, asked to use a phone, called my wife and told her to expect me for a late dinner, and that I would be taking the next available flight to NYC, which was where I had moved our studio. I told her what had happened and she agreed that we should not conclude the deal. Her pride was as strong as mine.
     
    Meanwhile, the phone I was allowed to use was in an office with no door, so SOB was able to overhear my conversation with my wife. When he realized that I was completely serious and was just about to walk out on him he said "Okay. I'll come up to twenty-five but I want your customer list, I want you to write a report for us about how we should enter this business, and I want you to agree never to enter this business again.
     
    "Close" I said, "But no cigar. I'll give you a one-year non-compete agreement but that's it. And while I'll be giving you our new master sequences, I'm going to keep derivatives of them in case I do decide to start a competing business."
     
    "Okay" he said. We shook hands on the deal. He never understood that what I delivered was the newly-quantized masters, and that the derivative versions I held back were the live feel versions (from which the quantized masters could be reconstructed anytime I wanted).
     
    So that's what they got -- quantized sequences -- and they never understood why they weren't able to sell stuff in anything like the quantities I had discussed in my report, which was 100% honest.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  23. xxmikexx

    The F-86 Spoolup

    By xxmikexx,

    The first time I was close to an operating jet aircraft engine was when my grandfather arranged for us to visit the F-86 production line in El Segundo in 1952 while the Korean war was still going on and there was still a need to crank out these fighters as fast as possible. (By the way, the site is today the southern part of LAX.)
     
    My grandfather knew one the F-86 project engineers, who gave us a guided tour of the production line himself. The compact and jammed final assembly line flowed from east to west, completed aircraft being towed out by handtruck through large hangar doors that faced the Pacific Ocean.
     
    As we were walking out of the hangar onto the apron where the completed aircraft were parked, I heard the magical sound of an F-86 to the south of us spooling up. After the engine was up to speed, and after a short wait, the aircraft moved out, turned north and taxiied right by us not fifty feet away.
     
    The noise was deafening but wonderful. I closed my ear flaps with my fingers, my eyes riveted to the bright red helmet of the test pilot. He taxiied the aircraft to the runways that North American shared with the civil airport, turned east, and I don't know what happened after that because we went back into the hangar and up into one of the production offices, where we couldn't hear much.
     
    Oh yes ... I forgot to mention the wonderful odor of burnt kerosone.
     
    It's interesting to me how we don't know at the time that certain images -- visual, tactile, aural -- are going to stay with us for life. This is one of the most vivid ones. I was ten at the time but I still think of this happy afternoon every time I look at the 1/144 scale model of an F-86H on the shelf of a bookcase behind me.
  24. 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.
  25. 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".

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