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xxmikexx

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  1. 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 ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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" ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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
  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 ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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

    Alpha Testing

    By xxmikexx,

    Everybody knows the term "beta test" but hardly anybody knows where it came from or what it really means. Well, folks, it's an IBM term dating back fifty years and more. And beta testing was preceded by alpha testing. Let's talk about that.
     
    Alpha was IBM's term for in-house testing. Like Microsoft they made every effort to use their own products in house, and to become dependent on them. This was because the definition of a product -- its capabilities, look and appearance, packaging, etc -- comes only from the real world of use.
     
    So IBM would create a product and then put it into service in-house. This is part of the product definition phase and they called beta because just as beta follows alpha, so does field test follow in-house test.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Many software vendors go directly to beta thinking that they can bypass alpha. What usually happens instead is that beta becomes alpha, and the guinea pig customers become very unhappy because they think they're buying a finished, debugged product when in fact the party is only just beginning.
     
    With FS Flight Training, and with AirBoss , my PC Game Controls company is not going to make that mistake. I've been working with a tester, Michael Blomberg, whose mission in life it is to help me determine what an AirBoss is.
     
    You see, the Golden Midi experience taught me that while you can go through the motions of developing a product, and while you may think that you've got it styled because you don't know of any bugs, the fact is that only your customers can tell you what business you're in.
     
    Michael Blomberg is the first AirBoss customer. When he says "Can you ..." or "Gee, I wish ..." or "I'm getting frustrated ..." or blah blah blah, I have the opportunity to make changes to AirBoss without angering a whole bunch of early adopters.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Michael asked me yesterday whether I have a schedule. "Only a very loose one" I said "because the product will be ready when it's ready, and not before, and it's not ready yet, though I can see it from here."
     
    When I think that AirBoss is ready, and when I think that the FS Flight Training set of products is ready, then and only then will we be going to beta test.
     
    That's right. We're going to pre-announce the products and, as much as possible, work with actual customers who will be told that they are guinea pigs.
     
    Why should they do it?
     
    Because they will have the same opportunity that Michael Blomberg does -- a chance to help shape the product definition to arrive at something that fits them to a T.
     
    Of course by the time we get there I hope it will be more a matter of refinement than of the kinds of outright changes that Michael has been helping me want, but you never know. Here's a story about that ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Early in the product's development I was product manager for DEC's R-80 removable disk drive. This was a revolutionary product -- 500 MB in a package not much larger than a milk crate. :)
     
    The project began in Massachussetts but was moved to Colorado Springs about the same time that the early prototypes were coming on the air. The protos worked fine in Massachussetts, but they died in the Springs.
     
    I made the wild guess that the head flutter we were seeing was because of the thinner air. Maynard, MA is at about 25 feet MSL. Springs is at about 6,000. My guess proved to be correct but that didn't help a lot -- the engineers still had to make the drive work. This was a crisis because the VAX had just been announced, but essentially no VAX machines would ship unless the R-80 had entered volume production.
     
    At just about the time this problem was surfacing, we got a new manager of Storage Systems -- disks and magtapes. I don't remember the gentleman's name but when the following incident occured I realized that he was a Good Guy. (Which meant that he would not last long at DEC, which had become totally political by then.)
     
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    I'm going to call this fellow "John". The manager of Disk Engineering, Grant Saviers, who now reported to John, came to the Springs every six weeks with his royal entourage in tow -- about thirty people. I mean no criticism of Grant, he's a crackerjack engineer and a brilliant manager. However, by then the DEC culture had changed to the point where sixty people were looking over his shoulder, and thirty of them insisted on coming out to the Springs with him.
     
    Anyway, one fateful day about four months into the problem, with no solution in sight, the newly hired John came out with Grant and his groupies. As the usual 3-day meeting convened, John turned to Grant and asked "When will this drive be ready?" Grant hemmed and hawed and then said "In three months".
     
    "Wrong answer" said John. "It will be ready when Paul Esling, the Project Engineer, says that it's ready."
     
    John then turned to Paul and asked "When will this drive be ready". Paul's answer was, "I don't know".
     
    "Right answer" said John. "Now lets's talk about how to identify and fix the problems. Forget the schedule, as of right now there is no schedule, only hard work."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Predictably, John didn't last long. And when he was fired I realized that the DEC I had known and loved was gone forever. The Wall Streeters had put enough pressure on the company to let the VP of Finance start driving the train that the board, and founder Ken Olsen, had to make concessions to them. The result was the destruction of the company, just like Passport's SOB meant the stillbirth of their MIDI sequences business.
     
    So I became an entrepreneur and, except for the occasional short stint as a wage slave, have been one ever since these events of almost thirty years ago.
     
    Have I been a financial success?
     
    No, but the words of the wife of a detective in one of my True Crime books have some relevance here ...
     
    "He kept us poor but there was never a dull moment."
     
    Exactly.
     
    I might get weak from starvation but what the hey, I was born poor. What I could never tolerate would be to die of boredom.
  4. 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.
     
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    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.
     
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    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."
     
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    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
  5. xxmikexx
    Yesterday member dobar asked why nobody had told him that a blogging facility now exists on FlightSim.com. I told him I was writing a feature article on that very subject. I sent it off to webmaster Nels Anderson early this morning, but I thought I'd give the readers of my blog a chance to see the article before other people do. I'm particularly interested in feedback regarding the parody song lyrics at the very bottom of the piece ...
     
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    In a recent news article located here [Link Expired] webmaster Nels Anderson did a short writeup of the new appearance and features of the revised FlightSim.com web site. I’m now going to write at some length about the blogs feature.
     
    The term “blog” stands for “web log”. A blog is effectively a person’s personal forum, but one that is open to the public. The blog owner (an ordinary forum user like you or me) can make posts which, if readers care to comment, become de facto threads in the blog. Anybody who is registered to the forums can start his or her own blog. That person can moderate the blog. The blog owner also can post comments to the threads in the blog (or to other peoples’ blogs), so each blog truly does behave like a privately manged forum. (Note: As often as not “blog” here will be used in lieu of “post”. So it is perfectly correct Internet technobabble to say that a blogger is someone who blogs to blogs. J)
     
    As one blogger said, “Why on earth would anybody be interested in anything I have to say?” Well, mon ami, all people are interesting, everybody has something important, or educational, or entertaining, to say to the world on many different subjects. Blogs are a terrific way to do this. Blogs let you too be an author, and they let you write articles on essentially anything you want without having to submit them in advance to the Great Webmaster In The Sky, and therefore with no waiting.
     
    Maybe you will write about your job, or your other hobbies, or the feminine curves of your favorite aircraft, or the way your daughter repainted her room. I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that if you write blogs I’m going to read them. And I’ll probably engage you in conversation because I love talking with people about the things that interest them, things about which they feel strongly enough to write. (Sure, once this thing gets going I’ll step back and let everybody talk to everybody else. However, I’m still going to blog on my own, and it would be interesting if other people wanted to talk with me.)
     
    What’s different about blogs? What do blogs do for us that forum private mail or real world email don’t do?
     
    The main difference is that even if you and I don’t know one another – even if we didn’t know that the other person even existed – we can become friends because I can see what you write, you can see what I write. We can make our lives intertwine in this special way if that’s what we would like to do. No form of electronic mail can do this.
     
    Now … While I don’t speak for FlightSim.com I’ve been posting to my own blog under the following self-imposed rules …
     
    1 – No politics, religion, sex or profanity. (Maybe tasteful vague hints but nothing overt.) In general, if I wouldn’t be willing to shout <whatever> through a bullhorn at my work because some people might take offense then I won’t write about <whatever>. Similarly, if I wouldn’t want my nine-year-old granddaughter to hear my shouts about <whatever> then I won’t write it.
     
    Beyond those rules essentially anything goes as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been writing about anything and everything and very little of it has had to do with either aviation or simming. As often as not a certain good friend will chime in with some comment or other and that will get a conversation going between us. The conversation can end up being wide-ranging because in my blog there is no such thing as an off-topic post.
     
    Why don’t we have those same free-form rules for forums?
     
    Because people come to a given forum with the expectation that they’re going to be reading or posting on the subject that the forum name indicates, and while I’m too often an offender, there is a similar expectation that a given thread is going to remain on-topic. (Otherwise it becomes difficult for readers to retrieve information later, or to follow a large and complex thread.)
     
    But blogs are different. They’re off in a corner of the site that does not interfere with the mainstream forum activity so there is less need to restrict or police the content. Anyway, if you go to the FSX forum you certainly won’t want to read my scholarly pontifications about Ancient Egypt there. Conversely, if you go to my blog, located HERE https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?u=17162, you should not expect threads about tips and tricks for FSX. These MIGHT happen, as with a recent thread about the possibility of my writing some articles about nifty modifications to aircraft.cfg files, but for the most part my blog is about …. … …
     
    Well, to be perfectly honest, my blog is about ME, just as your pending new blog inevitably will be about YOU. So give it a try. I love reading just as much as I love writing, and I guarantee you that if nothing else happens -- if nobody else does it --I’ll read what you write and then have the kind of conversation with you that will show the world what an interesting person you really are.
     
    P.S. To create a blog, log into the forums. At the top you will see a toolbar. The link second from the left says “blogs”. Follow it. You will then see on the left four boxes with dark blue headers. The second one down says Options. The process should now be self-explanatory.
     
    Parodying the immortal lyrics of “Paperback Writer”, which John Lennon did NOT write but Paul McCartney did …
     
    Sir or madam won’t you start a blog?
    It’s very easy, just like falling off a log.
    Based on a concept that’s so very clear
    You won’t be disappointed,
    You won’t shed a tear so be a blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    Ten thousand chars is all a blog may be
    But that is not a problem, not for you and me.
    If you need more chars to say what you must say
    Then add a comment blog
    And you’ll be on your way, a famous blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    If they really like it they will tell you so
    ‘Cause everybody likes being in the know.
    You’re someone special and they want to hear
    About what interests you
    So be a sport and try it. Be a blog writer …
    FlightSim blog writer.
     
    Now you can dazzle all those friends of yours
    Who have heard of blogs but don’t see the doors
    Open to them in this new frontier
    But really, that’s okay because
    You have no fear so show them, Blog Writer …
    Blogosphere Writer.
     
    mike@pcgamecontrols.com
    Go Broncos
  6. xxmikexx

    Clawdette LaClaw

    By xxmikexx,

    Years ago when our home was bursting with life -- two kids, two dogs, five cats, and a squirrel that like to hang out on our deck to pick up the seeds that the birds visiting the feeder would drop ... Ahem ... Years ago my wife named one of the canines Mildred R. Dog. (Get it?) Ever since then our pets have all had first and last names.
     
    If you're a cat person you will understand when I say that, unlike dogs, cats do not have owners, they have servants. This is especially true of our black cat Clawdette LaClaw. (Get it?) I am her valet. She tells me in no uncertain terms when I am to make a lap for her, and when I do she expects a full body rubdown, becoming huffy and demanding if I don't respond immediately.
     
    Anyway, The Claw (get it?) has taught me a new trick. Having gotten accustomed to sleeping in the hall bathroom sink sometimes, she now tells me when to turn on a trickle of water so she can lap the cool, clean stuff rather than the grungy warm water she would otherwise share with her fellow lifer, Fraidy Cat, aka Freddie. And when The Claw has drunk her fill she lies down outside the bathroom door, guarding it against intruders in the same way that the beautiful statues of the black Nubians once guarded the entrance to the inner shrine of Tutankhamen.
     
    That's the only place she will sleep now, that and the sink. Before this she had a dozen different sleeping places and would rotate among them, rarely sleeping in the same place on two successive nights -- a feline Sadaam Hussein avoiding ... ... well, avoiding boredom, I suppose.
     
    And when I enter the bathroom now, she talks to me. "Turn the water on" she says.
     
    And I do.
  7. xxmikexx
    Summer ended ten days ago, and winter began yesterday with the first snows in the high country. In a previous blog I suggested an early winter. Now I'm sure of it.
     
    It's been raining for the past two days, almost unheard of for August. I'm not talking about thunderstorms, I'm talking about the monsoon that should have occured in June. When the first REAL blast of polar air collides with this moist air coming up from the Gulf we are going to have ... (and I'll commit my prediction in writing here and now) ... eighteen inches of snowfall sometime in late September.
     
    And if it isn't eighteen inches of snow then it will be four inches of hail. I've seen both though not in many, many years.
     
    That's it, I don't have much more to say. My wife and I had been hoping to get some sun over the past few days but it didn't happen. It's not going to happen till Monday, which is when she starts her new job, so for her the season of the sun is now effectively over.
  8. xxmikexx
    From the intro to "Make It Funky" ...
     
    Bobby Byrd: What you gonna play now, JB?
     
    James Brown: Bobby, I don't know. But whats'ever I play, it's got to be funky.
     
    So ...
     
    Me: What you gonna write about tonight, Mikey?
     
    Myself: Mike, I don't know. But whats'ever I write, its got to be a) different, and b) something I feel strongly enough about to motivate me to want to write instead of running the next round of AirBoss carrier landings tests, or taking a nap, or watching Wings Of The Red Star.
     
    Something like ... ... ...
     
    ... ... ... Ancient Egypt
     
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    I've gotten fairly deep into Ancient Egypt, deep enough that on and off for the past two years I've been trying to learn to read hieroglyphics. I haven't succeeded yet but the effort certainly has been educational. For example, I now know enough about the culture to be able to compose a perfectly plausible tomb protective magic spell ...
     
    "He who enters my tomb will be torn apart by babboons and then eaten by hippopotamuses. Crocodiles will feed on his entrails."
     
    This may seem comical to you but in reality this would give pause to even the most greedy tomb robber. You see, all Ancient Egyptians, whether of royal blood or simple peasant commoners, could expect continued existence in the afterlife, but only if their bodies were intact. Pharoahs were buried in fantastically costly elaborate tombs, because they could afford it. Commoners might simply be buried in sand, not even wrapped in a shroud. But whatever the manner of burial, the body would usually be preseved somehow and the soul thereby protected. Thus to tell a person that they are going to have their body torn apart and eaten (by animals no less) is to condemn their ka (roughly their soul) to annihilation, a very harsh punishment indeed.
     
    I can also compose a perfectly plausible magic spell to be recited to Osiris regarding whether the petitioner should be granted an afterlife ...
     
    "I am a good person. I fed the poor and I gave clothing to the naked. I was kind to the crippled old man and I gave much beer and bread to his family. I gave money to the temple priests."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I've been interested in things Egyptian for fifty years, but it's only in the past ten years that the interest has become intense. Now ...
     
    Three years ago I re-established contact with a girlfriend of my pre- and early teens. Shortly after that discovered a mutual interest in Egyptology. In fact, it turned out that she had a grandfather who was Egyptian, with a Parisian grandmother who was an Egyptologist. Well-to-do, the grandparents split their time between Paris and Cairo.
     
    (Aside: Not until three years ago did I learn that my girlfriend had been born in Switzerland, and that French was her first language. We were both products of dysfunctional families and we lived in the present, not the past, so we knew very little about each other's backgrounds. It was simply too painful for each of us to bring that stuff up, and anyway none of it mattered. We accepted each other for who we were, caring nothing about who we had been.)
     
    So my girlfriend, the infamous wealthy RGB about whom I sometimes write because we came very close to becoming a permanent item, sent me the most wonderful postcard. The card has to do with Ancient Egypt, it was a prized heirloom of hers, yet she gave it to me as a token of what had existed between us so many years before.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I had the card laminated to arrest the ravages of UV light. As I write this piece the card is mounted on the spine of a very wide notebook, where it has been for two years, so I can look at it several times a day. The front of the card is an excellent picture of the famous Tutankhamen death mask on display in the Cairo Museum. (I consider the mask to be the most beautiful art object in the world. I had the privilege of seeing it at the Fields Museum in Chicato thirty years ago when the traveling Cairo Museum exhibit wended its way there.) While I display the card with the artwork side out, it's really the back of the card that holds my interest -- because the card, purchased from the Cairo museum, was sent by RGB's grandmother to RGB's mother in NYC in the spring of 1955. The handwritten inscription says, simply and in French (which I speak too) ...
     
    ... Cairo, the 19th of March, 1955.
     
    RGB had asked her mother for the card because she loved the picture on the front, and she kept it through all these years, only to give it to me. When she did she wrote several things on it that are of interest only to me, the most important thing being
     
    "Michael, this card spans our time ..."
     
    And it does. I had known RGB for only about a year when the card was written. (We were ten when we met.) Now I am its custodian, the card sent to me by the RGB I had not laid eyes on since 1957, when we were thirteen and had to go our separate ways as we left the boarding school where we had spent 3.5 years together. Now we were in contact again after a radio silence of almost 50 years.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I met my wife after boarding school, when we were 13, and we've been going steady :) since we were 16. As my feelings for her grew, the enormous hole in my heart that the separation from RGB had caused began to heal. But the hole never fully closed. As I said to RGB three years ago, I had thought of her at least weekly over all these years. As I said to my wife, under only slightly different circumstances I would now be married to RGB instead of to her.
     
    You see, my wife knew about RGB. She has always known that RGB existed, but she didn't know the depth of my feelings for RGB because I rarely mentioned her. But when RGB and I began to correspond after all these years she (RGB) invited my wife and I to visit her at her east coast home. (RGB has homes on both coasts. She winters on the seashore near a city in Southern California and she summers on the mid-Atlantic seashore.) I decided to risk explaining to my wife what the real situation had been with RGB so she would be able to understand our conversations, and so she would not feel left out somehow.
     
    We spent a wonderful week with RGB, the two women getting along really well, which came as a pleasant surprise because for many women this visit would have been a potential marriage-breaker. When we got there I immediately spotted a piece of Egyptian tourist kitsch, a rectangular beige rug with embroidered hieroglyphic writing. As usual with such things, the arrangement of the words is just as important as the content of the words. In fact, just as there are many different words in English that one can use to express an idea, so were there many different words in Ancient Egyptian that could be strung together in different ways to achieve the same meaning.
     
    So a scribe, or a tomb painter, had a lot of latitude in the specifics of the texts he created, and the best of them created visual poetry at the same time that they were creating sequences words to be spoken aloud. Anyway, this rug seemed to be a good example. The modern artist had arranged the symbols attractively and in a way that was entirely plausible. RGB and I agreed that the rug had to be saying SOMEthing, expecially because it too came from her grandparents.
     
    I then assigned myself the mission of deciphering the writing on the rug. After six months of casual Internet-based study I hadn't made any headway. I then sent a jpeg of the rug to a couple of scholars, including the famous Zahi Hawass, Director of Egyptian Antiquities, but I never heard back from either of them.
     
    Okay, it was time to take by the horns the bull, an animal almost as sacred to the Ancient Egyptians as the cat. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a number of books about learning to read hieroglypics, and I spent a good part of the summer of 2007 sitting out by our condo pool trying to make sense of what I was seeing on the rug.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    It finally dawned on me that the reason I couldn't read the rug was because it was gibberish. For example and oversimplifying, prominent at the top of the rug is an oval cartouche containing the name of, presumably, a pharoah. (The oval cartouche symbol means simply "name" so in principle it can be that of a noble or high commoner, but that would be unlikely.) I searched for the name very carefully in every Egyptology book that I own. It is not the name of any pharoah known to Egyptologists today. Not only could I not find the name listed anyplace, I couldn't identify a single word in any of the inscriptions. Not one.
     
    As single characters the symbols have meaning. For example, a figure of a bent-over person hobbling along with a cane with a curved handle means "old person", or sometimes "wisdom". There are several dozen different characters that make up the rug artwork, and they are all legitimate root words with known meanings ...
     
    But I couldn't identify any two-symbol words, or any three-symbol words, and I stopped trying there. You see, one of the books I own is a dictionary of written Ancient Egyptian, organized exactly like Modern Chess Openings, as in ... "Here's an initial symbol. Here are all the second symbols that could follow the first one if we are talking about a two-symbol word, and here are the meanings of all those two-symbol words. And if you consider three-symbol words, here are all the possibilities." ... And so on. I was not able to link any part of the text to any part of the dictionary, or to anything in any of the other books.
  9. xxmikexx
    The full story of my pioneering company Golden Midi Music And Software is for another day. Here it is sufficient to note that we were the first, and the best, to create cover music sequences that were note-for-note faithful to the original recordings, the business having opened its doors to the public early in 1988.
     
    A number of well-known bands used our sequences as intermission music, including Aerosmith, Steve Miller, the German group Kraftwerk, and the mid-west perennial group Hat Trick, but our bread-and-butter business was working two-man bands that wanted to sound like 6-8 man bands, plus amateur "closet record producers", in a ratio of about five to one.
     
    There are many technical problems in constructing sequences that will work across a wide variety of sequencers and tone generators, and the issue of drum machine incompatibilities is a big one, but I don’t want to talk about that stuff today either.
     
    What I want to talk about instead are the musical aspects of a cover music sequence, and the impact this has had on the way I listen to music even today, twenty years later.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Again compressing a lengthy presentation, one of the things I found is that most musicians – the overwhelming majority of musicians – are deficient in one respect or another when it comes to musical hearing. Now you can’t sequence what you don’t hear, so to make a long story short, I found that only one musician in twenty could hear what I needed to be heard, and therefore only about one in twenty sequence creator wannabes could do what I needed done.
     
    This all surprised me because it turns out that I have what are known as “golden ears”, and until starting the business I assumed that everybody else did too, which 'tain't so.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    As a kid in NYC, every day I rode the subway to a prep school, and later to NYU. As often as not I would entertain myself by playing music in my head. This was a lot of fun because I would be able to play entire records note-for-note, the only difference being that the playback in my head is being run through a notch filter so that it all comes out sounding like it would on an AM radio, which was effectively my only source of music at the time.
     
    You see, I didn’t own more than a half-dozen carefully selected LPs, and I owned almost no 45s. Only if I felt the need to hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity would I spend my money on recorded music. Most of the time the recording was right there in my head with sufficient frequency response to satisfy me, my interests being in rhythm, harmony and melody in that order, with sonic quality being a very distant fourth. (I spent my money instead on my girlfriend. We are still married, having been joined at the lip since age 16.)
     
    Note what I said in the preceding paragraph – “hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity”. When it comes to music that I really really really like, sonic quality suddenly becomes important, and listening to the music over and over and over again also becomes important, because I want to hear everything that the producer put in the recording, and I want to enjoy all the hooks that I’m hearing whether or not the original producer was conscious of them.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I thought everybody was like this, except that they simply spent more money on records than I did. Yet the signs of trouble were already there. As I mentioned elsewhere I played semi-pro rhythm guitar for many years while I was a student. But I also worked as an arranger for the bands I was in, and for other bands too.
     
    You see, people were constantly coming to me and saying things like “I can play the chords for ‘The Wiggle Wobble’, but somehow the second chord in the progression doesn’t sound right. What’s right here?’ Whereupon I would show the questioner what the correct chord voicing was or, in some cases, what the correct chord was.
     
    That’s right. Most working bands, especially frat house bands, have to be Top 40 cover bands. That’s what you need to do if you want to get paid for playing, which was fine with me because I loved Top 40 stuff. In fact I loved all of it, and I knew most of it note for note.
     
    So I was the go-to guy for what was going on in the various Top 40 records of any given moment in time. On more than one occasion I was called in on an emergency basis to teach a band how to play a new record that was just breaking out because they would be working a wedding that weekend, or they were playing at some frat party that night, or whatever.
     
    So I was an arranger in the sense that I could tell every musician how his part needed to go. I couldn’t play drums, but I could hear them and I could tell the drummer how to play his part. Ditto for bass (which I do play), and for rhythm guitar (which I do play), and for lead parts (which I don’t play), and for keyboard stuff, and horn riffs, and horn section chords, and on and on and on.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I hear it all, and I hear most of it simultaneously. I had a very interesting experience a few years back reading an interview with Henry Mancini. He got his start the same way I did, by showing people how to reproduce what was on recordings. He said that he could take a set of 78 rpm disks for the recording of a big band piece and track each of the horns through the mix with no problem at all. Well, of course. I can do that too. Can’t everybody?
     
    No, not everybody can. In fact, as I learned at Golden Midi, hardly anybody can. The ones who can are the arrangers and the producers. They may or may not also actively play, but they all have golden ears. You have to.
  10. 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 ...
     
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    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
    Do you know the limits of your knowledge?
     
    I do.
     
    Or rather, I think I do, and I try to behave in ways consistent with that. When I’m wrong I say so. When I don’t know something, I say so. When I know that a given person knows more about a given subject than I do, I request that person's services as a forum consultant.
     
    This approach to life and to technical matters doesn’t make me weak, it makes me strong. It makes me as strong as the combination of all the experts that I know who are willing to work with me.
  12. 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.
     
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    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 ...
     
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    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.
  13. xxmikexx
    In the Alien Civilizations thread I suggested that we would be able to talk meaningfully with aliens only about mathematics and science. (I should also have said engineering.)
     
    This is because physics, and engineering (which is applied physics) are both rooted in mathematics. So the question on the floor is whether the mathematics of an alien civilization would be different from ours.
     
    My answer is, Yes but ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Since I expect most alien civilizations to be more advanced than we are, I would expect their mathematics also to be more advanced. However, advances in mathematics don't invalidate previous advances, they add to them.
     
    So aliens' ideas about number theory are likely to be more advanced than our own, and they may very well be able to explain why prime numbers tend to cluster in integer number space, for example. But all numbers that are prime for them will be prime for us, and vice-versa.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Some people, including some mathematicians, believe that mathematics is a creation of the human mind and is not a set of objective truths waiting to be discovered. The development of Riemannian (non-Euclidean) geometry is often cited as an example by non-mathematicians.
     
    But Reimannian geometry falls naturally out of the axioms if you remove the Euclidean geometry assumption that parallel lines can never meet. Now some people will say "They can't both be true. The world is either one way, or it is the other."
     
    Well, the world "is" in fact Riemannian as best we know today, but Euclidean geometry is equally true even though it no longer applies to the real world. You see, the truth content of mathematics is simply logical consistency. There can never be a world in which the integer one, when added to itself, produces some integer other than two.
     
    So what is invented is the correspondence between mathematics and the real world, and not the mathematics itself, which is objectively true and lies before us, a vast and in fact infiinite ocean of mathematical truth that we do not and never will fully explore.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    What do I mean by the correspondence between mathematics and the real world?
     
    Take Newtons laws. Two hundred years ago they appeared to be self-evidently "true", with no possibility of their being "wrong". Yet along came Riemannian geometry, which served as the basis for General Relativity.
     
    But Newton's laws aren't "wrong" today, they are simply a special case of General Relativity -- the case where spacetime is flat.
     
    Every major advance in physics contains the earlier physics as a special case. But the earlier mathematics were never "wrong", they are simply seen as inapplicable in the general case. The mathematics are always "right" because they are always internally consistent.
     
    Goedel showed that there is no way to prove that in the general case a system of mathematics (a set of axioms and the consequences that flow from them) results in mathematical consistency, but to me this is like saying that there is no way to prove that pi will never terminate with a repeating sequence -- so what?
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    An issue that is more interesting to me is whether so-called proof by computer is valid. For example, there are theorems in mathematics for which no proof exists, but for which there has been exhaustive exploration of the solution space without counterexamples ever being found.
     
    This is a revolution in epistemology -- the science of how we know what we know -- because it makes statements similar to those of thermodynamics. For example ...
     
    It can easily shown mathematically that it's possible that one hour from now all of the air in the world will suddenly escape to outer space, asphyxiating us all. But so what? Our behavior does not change just because this event is theoretically possible.
     
    Similarly, if a theorem has been shown not to be violated in one billion samples of its solution space, then for all practical purposes we ought to behave as if the theorem is true even though we do not know this.
     
    This is definitely an area in which aliens might have a great deal to teach us. Their sciences may be based in part on theorems, and therefore on physics, which are unknown to us today and which may never be shown to be "true" or "untrue".
     
    My own guess is that the disconnect between quantum mechanics and general relativity is going to be resolved in exactly this way -- new mathematics which will not be proved in the traditional way but which will be so overwhelmingly likely to be true that we should behave as if it is true.
  14. 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.
  15. xxmikexx
    Twenty years ago I pioneered the business of MIDI cover sequences for computer bands. As a music producer (albeit a strange kind of producer), I hereby declare this, my favorite music video, to be excellent sequenced hip hop ...
     

     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I've written about music before and no doubt I will do so many times now that we have blogs. This post you are reading now was motivated by an email I sent to a friend an hour ago, telling him about all the interesting versions of Get Down Tonight that are up on YouTube ....
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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    Hi Matt <Matt Lee, a friend who is an Internet DJ>,
     
    A riff about Get Down Tonight ...
     
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    Original recording synced to a concert video. You can see that they're all having a lot of fun with it. This will have been the long version (7.5 minutes), which they here cut off in the middle of the lengthy horns bridge that everybody edits out ...
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qEyWm3UNK1Y&feature=related
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Apparently in concert ...
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YE26BGdzRfw&feature=related
     
    To play the strum guitar part non-stop is a killer on the left wrist. (I should know, I play rhythm guitar.) In the original recording they probably punched it in in sections but obviously you can't do that live.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Here's a very nice dance remix. The horn samples start earlier, the vocal begins at 1:07. This cover at least has the decency to run for 5 minutes.
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qddHjPjkj6w&feature=related
     
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Here's another concert video, this time with live music, the FULL horns bridge at 1:51 followd by a funk guitar breakdown, followed by the horns part of the outro. (I love horns.) But then they go back into the guitar breakdown again, this time really long, during which the video cuts off. It wouldn't surprise me if this performance had actually run 15 minutes.
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OGRwZ8OeycM&feature=related
     
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Here's a strange, creative but vaguely disturbing animated video, synced to the music, starting at 0:32 ...
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ucUTicF8zSk&feature=related
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    If you're going to do a cover you should either a) cover the original note for note, or b) bring your own radical interpretation to the party, as Shriekback has done here. Be sure not to miss the hip hop breakdown beginning at 2:00 ...
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nZo2fMmXzOo&feature=related
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I had never heard of Shriekback before tonight. I found that they did some interesting stuff, like this piece ...
     
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=svnnUTpCLFc&feature=related
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    YouTube is a wonderful thing.
  16. xxmikexx
    In the On-Site And Off-Site Backups Thread skylab mentioned that his daughter lived in California, which is constantly plagued by fires. I promised a new thread on that issue, here it is ...
     
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    My wife hates Southern California. She thinks it's all like coastal Orange County, or the Valley. Even though I've showed her several times that the population is really simply concentrated in a 20-mile-wide band along the edge of the ocean, she thinks of SOCAL as incredibly overpopulated ... and dangerous.
     
    Fire is a danger out there to be sure, but hey, if you're going to be a person who needs to get away from the coast but then moves into a house built on the side of a ridge, or on the top of one, then you're running a big known risk and you shouldn't complain when disaster strikes.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Skylab was smart -- he moved out of Florida because the hurricanes and the fires are not just a risk, they are a certainty. So it is with fires in SOCAL, and other natural disasters. Get used to it and manage the risk. My wife's risk management plan is, "Move to Southern California? You must be out of your mind." That's too bad for me because when the grandkids go off to college, or if their parents move before then, SOCAL is where I would like to be.
     
    I ain't skeered but I ain't stupid. I remember insisting that my grandfather take ten-year-old me out to Santa Monica one October day. I wanted to swim even though the ocean would be cold by then. There was a fierce onshore wind that morning so I had a great time flying a kite I had built, another activity that I had planned for the day.
     
    While I was flying the kite a fire started nearby in what I suppose must have been Topanga Canyon just east of Malibu, a few miles north of us. The wind whipped the fire into a massive conflagration in very short order. In my mind's eye I can still see the enormous billowing column of smoke, orange and brown and white, bent to the east by the strong wind. My memory of the day stops there so I have no idea what happened next.
     
    How to manage this risk? Answer, don't move to Topanga Canyon, even though it's hip. (And if you do move there, and if you do get burned out, don't whine about it. If you're willing to pay the price for living there, fine, but don't ask the rest of us to pay the price for you.)
     
    <To be continued. Right now I want to play with FS a bit.>
  17. 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
  18. xxmikexx
    In the Backups thread Flargan/John asked how I got into computing. Here's the (long winded) answer ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Along about 1956 or so, when I was 12 and Univac was the only commercially available computer, I saw an ad in Scientific American for a mechanical toy that amounted to a simple binary addition machine. It had a register for holding the current sum (the accumulator), and an input register into which you could, by hand, enter the next number to be added to the accumulator. With a little assistance from your fingers the machine would add the input register to the accumulator and leave the result in the accumulator.
     
    I wanted the toy but couldn't afford it. So I struggled to learn binary arithmetic on my own, and I simply learned how to simulate the workings of the toy on paper. That was the beginning of my interest in computers.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I didn't act on the interest until the fall of 1963. By then (my senior year), I was well into getting an MS in Chemistry as an undergrad (but I never did the thesis). I had so many courses under my belt that 63/64 would be in essence all electives, and one of the courses I decided to take was FORTRAN programming, given at the NYU computer center. (Worth a whole 'nother thread itself.)
     
    You must understand that I really felt ambivalent about Chemistry. In fact, the only reason that I majored in it at all was because Columbia wouldn't admit me till I was 17, but NYU would take me at age 16 and, in addition, would allow me to skip all the freshman chemistry courses.
     
    (Yes, my girlfriend and I started college when we were 16. Not until we got to high school did we realize that far from being dumb we were actually very smart. We finished high school in three years, went to NYU together, got married at 19 in my senior year, and we are still married.)
     
    Anyway, it was a no brainer. I went to NYU as a chem major. However, I was a disaster in labs (another thread) ... Ahem ... After the FORTRAN course I began hanging around the NYU computing center. In fact, while we didn't use the term at the time, I became an unpaid computing intern for both the Chemistry Department and the Computing Center.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So I was doing FORTRAN programming support for one of the chemistry professors. We were doing the first ever molecular orbital calcuations for simple organic molecules. (We certainly were the first to tackle ethane.) Along the way it was necessary for me to take the determinants of various matrices. My reaction to the procedure I learned was "I can do better than this", so I spent a long sleepless night coming up with a formalization of the new algorithm that I could "feel" had to be there. (It turned out that I had independently (re-)invented what is known as the Pivotal Condensation method. Anyway, by morning I realized that I had a real talent for this stuff as well as a real interest.)
     
    And while the ethane modeling stuff was happening, word having gotten around about what I could do, I was approached by a psychology professor who was doing certain kinds of statistical studies and who wanted his numberical results presented in a special way, a way that would require special knowledge beyond that requried to program effectively in FORTRAN.
     
    If I would agree to take the assignment, he would pay me $300 in 1964 dollars. That's like $4500 today, a stunning windfall amount for a newlywed who had been supplementing his wife's pay (she dropped out for a year to put me through) by playing poker and bridge, and by backing a seriously good nine-ball player, and by ... playing rhythm guitar and bass. (Music is another thread.)
     
    To make a long story short, I dropped all other activities and began to work full time on computer stuff. There were no Computer Science courses at that time so I had to teach myself assembler. I sat down in the NYU computer center cafeteria one afternoon with a) a listing of the FORTRAN code and generated machine code for the program I had written for the psych professor, and b) the "machine language" manual for the IBM 7094 that we used.
     
    It took me two full weeks of intense concentration, two weeks in which I cut every class and barely slept, but by the end of that time I understood every instruction that the compiler had generated. I was then able to go back into the FORTRAN code and build in escapes to assembler that allowed me to re-tackle the matter of the psych professor's print formatting problem in a new and different way, details of interest only to me ... and to the lead system programmer of the Computing Center ...
     
    ... Who immediately put me to work making changes to the math subroutine library ... which led to my creating a new kind of computer process timing routine based not on the 60hz clock but instead on using the stream of bytes from a tape drive as a clock ... which got the attention of NSA ... who made me a job offer that I declined ... only to end up working for an NSA contractor after all.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I didn't do any of the NSA work directly, but the people around me all were on NSA stuff, so I had to be cleared regardless. So as a snot-nosed 20-year-old I got a Top Secret clearance. (At the time my TS clearance was second only the the Q clearance required to work on nuclear weapons.)
     
    You must understand that my parents had been card-carrying Communists, very active in the organized labor movement of the thirties. (They knew the Rosenbergs, for example.) Yet when I told the FBI security people about that, and when I told them that I didn't share my parents' political views, it was not a big deal.
     
    You see, it wasn't a big deal because they'd have found it out anyway, and by surfacing the matter before they asked, I was showing myself to be an honest person -- the kind of person that can't be blackmailed. (Which is all they care about.)
     
    Why would they have found out anyway? Well, they asked me for the names of five non-relatives who knew me well. They then spoke with those five people, asking each of them to name five people who knew me. They then asked each of the resulting 25 people for five names. If we ignore duplicates, in the end they talked to 1 (me) + 5 + 25 +125 people 156 people who knew me or knew of me.
     
    Nothing turned up in this background check because there was nothing to turn up other than solid evidence that I was a loyal American citizen who would not be subject to blackmail.
     
    So that's how I got into the biz -- I forced my way in by going with the flow. :D
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    P.S. ...
     
    After I got my TS I had to take a national security oath. (You must understand that at this time it was a federal crime to even mention the name of NSA in public.) Anyway, I've never been released from that oath. As with the Mafia oath of Omerta, nobody who takes one is ever released from it. (This is because you can't unlearn what you learn on the job.)
     
    Anyway, sometime in the 80s I read a certain book about No Such Agency. I was interested for obvious reasons. But at one point I encountered some material that stunned me. There, on a pair of pages, was a discussion of some stuff that was at the heart of NSA's business. Suddenly I understood why some things remain classified for 50 years. I also realized that whoever had passed this information to the author was, in effect, a traitor.
     
    No, I can't tell you what that information was, or what it had to do with. Even though the information is now out in public, it isn't clear that anybody other than those in the know at the time would understand its significance unless somebody in the know called their attention to it. So if I were to even mention the topic of discussion I feel that this would give aid and comfort to our present and future enemies. Somebody else might feel differently (like the leaker, and like the author of the book, and like his publisher, all of whom got into other taboo areas as well), but then I grew up in a different time, in what was in fact a very different country.
  19. xxmikexx
    In the Backup thread j flanagan brought up the subject of computers manufactured by DEC a long time ago. I said I would open a new thread for that subject. This is that thread ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    j flanagan,
     
    It wasn't all sweetness and light regarding DEC computer system integrity. While our CPUs were very very reliable, our disk drives were not -- could not be -- comparably reliable. The affordable technology of the time simply did not permit it. The reason is that the hard drives of the time were prone to head crashes, something that is encountered today only very infrequently but was a constant concern during the 70s, which was the time frame of my employment at DEC.
     
    The classical head crash happened as follows ...
     
    At some point, for whatever reason a particle would become dislodged from the recording medium. If the particle came from a recording track then the parent sector would go bad. But more likely the particle came from the area between tracks so that the flanking sectors would remain good. However ...
     
    Now we have a particle flying around inside the drive case because it was flung off the recording medium by the fast rotation of the drive. Usually such a particle would bounce around between the walls of the housing and the spinning recording medium, ending up settling at the bottom of the housing. Unfortunately, once in a while the dislodged particle would strike hard elsewhere on the medium, gouging it, and now we have two particles flying around. Most of the time the two particles will settle, but sometimes instead a cascade will build. When the cascade begins, death of the drive is only minutes away.
     
    When a cascade gets going, sooner or later a particle is going to encounter one of the flying heads, trying to fit itself in between the head and the recording medium. If the size of the particle is roughly that of the head flying height the particle is quite likely to induce head flutter, and this flutter inevitably resulted in a literal head crash, with the head impacting the recording medium just like an airplane hitting the ground, with equally catastrophic results.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So the wise customer had data on duplicate hard drives, and the hard drives themselves would be backed up to magtape. Trouble is, with magtape the heads wear and without constant finicky maintenance there can be no guarantee that an tape years or even months earlier will be readable on the drive that created it. Thus multiple tape drives were a good idea, and of course tapes had to go offsite in duplicate if one was to minimize risk of data loss. The head wear issue encouraged the three-generations of tapes backup philosophy of the day.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Let the record show that webmaster Nels Anderson later worked at Prime Computer, who addressed the problem of system reliability by having a pair of computers for a single system, sharing memory, with one computer "shadowing" the other. The result of their very carefully designed system architecutre was that in general no data would be lost even if one of the machines went down.
     
    But of course Nels cut his programming teeth on a high school computer donated by DEC, as so many other later industry professionals did. :)
  20. 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 ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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 ...
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    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.
  21. xxmikexx

    Yay Pilot Shop

    By xxmikexx,

    Please understand up front that I'm involved in a joint venture with FlightSim.com. So in the story below you must consider whether I'm biased, though really I assure you that I'm not. When it comes to the Pilot Shop I'm just another customer, like you.
     
    Anyway, I placed an order with the Pilot Shop on 11 July. It finally arrived yesterday, on 2 August ... And yet I'm going to say "Yay, Pilot Shop"?
     
    Absolutely. Because during the time when the package was hung up in the US Postal Service, long overdue, the Pilot Shop people assured me that if the package truly did not arrive, they would replace the shipment at no cost to me. They asked only that I allow the advertised full two weeks for the delivery.
     
    At the end of the two-week period the package still had not arrived. Even though USPS had never listed any detail about the shipment, which had been originated by the Pilot Shop as a tracked shipment, they did not give up hope. When I called again after two weeks and a weekend they checked the USPS tracking website one more time ...
     
    ... And this time the shipment was listed, with its status as being in Jacksonville, Florida. My wife, who has family in Florida, immediately said "The Post Office must have tried to deliver it to Lakewood, Florida instead of Lakewood, Colorado". It took almost another week for the package to get here (suburban Denver), but I was now able to wait patiently because now I had confidence that it had not been lost in transit.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The problem was not of the Pilot Shop's making. They had put the package in the hands of USPS, just as my order had said that they should. In a legal sense they would have been within their rights to say "Under the USA's Uniform Commercial Code, title to the product passed to you the moment USPS picked it up. You are on your own, good luck."
     
    But they didn't say that. They said instead "Let's give it a little more time. If it still doesn't arrive, let us know and we'll replace it."
     
    So the issue is only partly whether the vendor has a problem -- all vendors do. The issue is what the vendor does about your problem, and in this case I was entirely satisfied with the Pilot Shop because of their statement of policy. You see, the FlightSim.com Pilot Shop clearly understands what business they are in ... They are selling customer satisfaction, and they delivered customer satisfaction.
     
    They have joined the ranks of vendors of whom I am now a customer for life, vendors who have no-questions-asked return/refund policies. While there are many such vendors in the USA, the two I'm talking about in particular are Best Buy and Jewelry Television.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    I like to tell vendors when they're doing a good job, not just when they're doing a bad job. So here's another positive story ...
     
    A few weeks ago I was having an order rung up in our local chain supermarket, a Safeway store. There had been a customer load spike so I was being served by the manager himself, a gentleman I had seen around the store but had never spoken with.
     
    As he was checking me through I said "You run a great store, thank you." He looked up, startled. "Why do you think it's great?" he asked. Having had some long ago experience in retail sales I was able to tell him exactly why.
     
    "Your store is brightly lit, the aisles are wide, and it is always clean, not dark and dingy and cramped like the local King Soopers. In addition, you are almost never stocked out of any item that I want. Finally, your staff is hard working and unfailingly helpful."
     
    "Yes", he said. "I have a terrific staff. Look, we almost never get favorable comments. Do you mind sending in a courtesy card so you can tell my boss what you just told me?"
     
    I was happy to do it. About a week after I sent in the comments card I got a phone call from their regional office in Phoenix, hundreds of miles away. "We just wanted to make sure that these comments actually came from a customer."
     
    Two weeks after that I was being checked through, this time by one of the assistant managers, a gentleman I have come to be friendly with over the years. He mentioned to me that the regional manager had just finished a tour of all their stores in the Denver area, and that the store I shop at was the only one about which he had zero complaints.
     
    In our various subsequent encounters the store manager began saying things like "How's it going today, Boss?" and "Can I help you find anything today, Boss?" Always with a warm smile.
     
    Finally one day, when he was again the one checking me through, I said "It's 'Mike', not 'Boss', okay? So please call me 'Mike' and I'll call you 'Greg'. And so it has been.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    The Safeway in question is a large store, large enough that its manager would be within his job description if he stayed in his office. But instead Greg goes out on the floor and pitches in, helping his staff out in any way he can when they're overloaded.
     
    I had told the regional HQ people that they should do whatever they had to do to retain Greg, and that they should promote him to District Manager someplace. I like to think that I have helped him out though really, his work speaks for itself, as does the loyalty and efforts of his staff.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So tell your vendors how they're doing. Good vendors will want to hear even the negative comments because it's the only way for them to know what aspects of their operations they need to fix.
     
    But when positive comments are justified, please make them. We all work for pay. However, in the end we work for psychic gratification, and hearing good things from customers is an important aspect of job satisfaction for the management and employees of any retail operation.
  22. 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.
  23. xxmikexx
    I don't know whether it's made the US national news but Denver yesterday set a record for the most consecutive days with a high temperature of more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet this is the coolest summer I can remember.
     
    Today, 1 August, will be the first day when it will have gone above 100 F. Normally we will have seen at least one 100+ day by late June. This year it will have happened for the first time today and tomorrow -- in August rather than June, and it won't surprise me if it doesn't happen again this year.
     
    Not only are we having a cool summer, we had a cold spring but a warm winter. In fact, this past winter was the first time in 30 years of living in Colorado when I did not need to use a snow shovel. Not once. (And we didn't get much snow, either.)
     
    We have been seeing jet contrails all spring and early summer. Only in the past few days have the contrails gone away. When they return it will be fall, and given what has been happening since the end of winter the coming of fall could happen at any time.
     
    We already have Canada geese passing through on their way south for the winter. The part of Lakewood (suburban Denver) that we live in is on their flyway. The geese officially have the right of way on the roads. In fact, we have goose crossing roadsigns just as a mile or two away we have deer crossing signs.
     
    So even if we end up with several more 100+ days, it looks to be an early winter, though probably a mild one.
     
    Yes, winter arrives early here, or at least it used to. I remember a blizzard on 20 September one year. In compensation we have the "January thaw", which often raises the temperature to 70 F, clearing out all the snow albeit temporarily.
  24. xxmikexx
    For many months I had been saying that under no circumstances would I pay more than USD $30 for a payware addon aircraft. Well, like a politician running for office (any political party) my position has ... er ... evolved ...
     
    ... As in "I never said it. But if I said it, it didn't mean what it means. And anyway it was taken out of context, even though what was quoted was a complete sentence. And in point of fact I've been saying exactly the opposite all the time." :D
     
    ... Ahem ...
     
    I'm now willing to pay roughly USD $40 provided the aircraft comes with both FS2004 and FSX versions.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    You see, for most of a year now I've been eyeing the CLS DC-10, wanting it for FS2004, lusting for it ... But my policies of the time argued against buying it. So I waited, figuring that it would go on sale at the Pilot Shop some weekend.
     
    Wrong. Completely wrong. In almost a year of waiting, it never happened. So yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered the download at a price of USD $40 and change. I did it only because I finally noticed that the product includes both FS2004 and FSX versions, important to me since I run both sims regularly.
     
    So there is now a chink in my armor. A vendor can get USD $40 out of me by offering both versions of an aircraft, though it may be as much as a year before I order, and even then I will be very selective about what I buy.
     
    In contrast, Friendly Panels has extracted something like $140 from my wallet over that same one year period -- by tempting me with very nice panel and gauge products priced at around USD $15-20.
     
    This is price elasticity at work, folks, Economics 101. Had CLS reduced the price of the DC-10 to $30 I'd have bought it a long time ago. Similarly I'd love to own the newly announced highly detailed A2A B-377, however, the vendor has not been listening to me.
     
    They want ... Are you ready for this? ... USD $37 for the base package, and then they apparently want an additional USD $25 for the stuff that adds all the detail. That's USD $62 for the aircraft, even though they're trying to make the price seem lower, in my opinion ... And this product is for FSX only, even though FS2004 still represents half the addon market.
     
    I don't think so, A2A. Not me, moi, Mikey. On a similar note I will not be buying Space Shuttle Simulator 2007. (But thanks for the free demo, which may be all I want.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    During the past year I have written many times about "optimum price", another Economics 101 concept. I'm not going to do it again other than to observe that the investment a vendor has in a product has zero to do with what the optimum price is. The fact is, most addon vendors are leaving money on the table -- my money. So they're going to have to work very hard to get it.
     
    They're going to have to work as hard as Friendly Panels does. Those folks clearly understand the concept of optimum price.
  25. xxmikexx
    Six years ago my wife was hired as a project manager by Transgenomic here in Denver, a leading maker of DNA sequencing equipment. She was fired because she insisted on prioritizing her group's work whereas management wanted everything done all at once, an impossible task. Somebody had to take the fall for the system that customers were hardly able to use, the system that was built and shipped before she arrived. She was elected, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it hurt because she had been making a high salary.
     
    She had come to Transgenomic from Qwest, where she had been a well-paid technical lead in a telephony switch software development group. That job lasted two years -- until Qwest decided that all the old US West people had to go. Fortunately for us she was in the last group of people to be offered salary/retirement buyout packages. The remaining old timers after her were simply layed off with two weeks severance pay, as I recall.
     
    She found the Qwest job only after nine months of looking. You see, she had earlier been layed off from a high paying software team lead position at MCI, where she had worked 3.5 years -- and it had taken her six months to find that job.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    Do you see the pattern emerging here? You spend months and months and months looking for a high tech job, then you spend a year or two or three with the company, then you get shown the door. When she came home from Transgenomic at noon one day five years ago without having called ahead I knew immediately what had happened.
     
    "They fired you, right?" I asked.
     
    "Yes" she said, "And I've had it. I'm not going to look for another high tech job. Instead I'm going to do something I wanted to do as a little girl, which is to become a nurse. The health care field is crying for people, I'll be layoff-proof."
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    She was 59 when she made that statement. She already had an MBA but she put herself through a nursing program that took five years to complete. Six weeks ago she finally graduated from University of Phoenix with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. One year into that program she was qualified to work as an LPN -- Licensed Practical Nurse -- and she subsequently worked full time while going to school to pick up the BSN.
     
    As an LPN she made half as much money as she had been making in high tech. As a result we now have student loans to pay off, loans well into the five-figure range, because we had no other way to get her health care education accomplished.
     
    This morning she went on an interview at Denver Health, the city-owned-and-operated hospital that treats all comers regardless of ability to pay, formerly known as Denver General Hospital. Based on a phone call of two weeks ago she thought she was being interviewed for a position in the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and she expressed to me that she would find that assignment depressing, though she was willing to do it.
     
    Instead the interview turned out to be for the MICU, the Medical Intensive Care Unit, the job offer made on the spot. This is a prestige nursing position, right up there with Operating Room. Her new boss has a PhD in nursing and immediately understood what a valuable find she had made. (In fact, the only reason my wife won't be an OR nurse is because she doesn't want to be standing in one place all day. At our age she needs to be moving around a lot.)
     
    And here's another important job benefit: As a MICU nurse she will be caring for only 1-2 patients at a time. "I'll finally be able to give my patients the care they need" she said, her current place of employment being deliberately understaffed by new management, and under-supplied and under-equipped as well. (And this place refused to let her work as a nurse, perhaps because they would have had to pay her a lot more.)
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    So my wife was able to make her vision of five years ago come true even though we are in our 60s. She has always been a trouper, and we have been going together :D since we were 16, so I've been seeing her in action for a long long time.
     
    I hope that as a nation we can avoid truly massive rounds of layoffs during these difficult times. However, I'm greatly relieved that my wife will not be hurt regardless of what happens in the economy at large. Furthermore, after a couple of years in the MICU, and given her MBA, even more doors are going to open up if she wants them to, regardless of the state of the national economy.
     
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     
    P.S. When she starts her new job in 2.5 weeks she will be making about 50% more in base pay than she had been making as an LPN. Given bonus pay for night and weekend work the result will actually be fairly close to what she had been making as a technical manager when you consider the time required to find new high tech jobs ... And the job satisfaction will be much higher for her.
     
    She will be working nights for the next year or two, and she has volunteered to work every Saturday night along with her fair share of Sunday nights. This is fine, we're used to it. In fact, it will be much better than the period when for two consecutive years she worked "only" on weekends -- two brutal 16 hour shifts so she would have weekdays free for school.
     
    You make your own luck.

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