July 2007 Archives
The other day I asked my daughter, who turned 4 a few weeks ago, what 1 + 1 was. She promptly replied "Two!!!" This surprised me because I wasn't even sure she knew what "plus" meant. But she also knew what 2 + 2 was, and we made it through all the combinations up to 2 + 5 before I stopped. I'm always surprised when my kids learn new words or say things in a conversationally adult way, but this new skill shocked me. I have no idea whether she's been practicing at school, or whether at a certain age kids suddenly know how to do arithmetic. Either way, pretty cool!
Today was my first full flight as PIC (pilot in command). Technically it's my second solo, but the first one doesn't feel much like a solo -- it's just the tail end of a flight with your instructor, and you're not allowed to leave the traffic pattern. Today was the first flight where my instructor wasn't standing at the edge of the runway with his fingers crossed, and it's the first time I ended communication with the tower ("Frequency changed approved. Good day!").
My office's annual picnic is today, and I finished the work I needed to do, so I took an off-campus lunch hour and drove to SQL. Winds were a bit of a concern -- 10 degrees @ 6 knots, but that was within the limits of my solo endorsement, and in any event I figured I needed to get used to the normally windy conditions during the day at San Carlos (as opposed to my usual early-morning flights, which are almost always zero-wind). Preflight fine, ATIS Uniform, runway 30 in use. My plan was to take off, do a Bay Meadows departure, fly over OSI, and come back in for pattern work.
That's pretty much what happened. Before departure I tuned in the nav for OSI, and during my climbout after turning past Bay Meadows I dialed in the right heading in the OBS. I climbed to 3,500 feet and saw OSI, but I decided not to fly over it because fog was beginning to creep over the hills, and I didn't want to come anywhere near violating the FAR student-pilot requirement of maintaining ground reference at all times during solo flight. So I called back in to SQL Tower and began my flight back. I didn't ask for closed traffic because I was concerned about crosswinds. In addition the pattern was quite crowded, so I didn't want to add midair collisions to my list of things to worry about (at least, any more so than it always is).
I crossed 101 at 1,400 feet but was descending too quickly, so I had to push in the throttle to comply with the Tower's mandate of crossing the field at or above 1,200 feet. Entered right downwind, told to wait for departing aircraft. Then cleared to land on 30.
As I turned to final I asked for a wind check. 340@8. Very quickly looked up the crosswind component: 5.5 knots, just a hair under my endorsement. Yikes! I could go around and hope for calmer air in 5 minutes, or just give it a try. I decided to press on.
My landing was fine except for the crosswind. I landed left of centerline and didn't remember to hold the ailerons to compensate for the wind from the right of the plane. So as I tapped on the brake there was a bit of a screech, but not enough to leave a flat spot (as I later checked back at parking). Next time remember: climb into, dive away! I should have had the yoke pulled all the way back and turned right. (I also should have landed on the centerline, of course.)
While taxiing back to parking I realized it was VERY hot in the cockpit. I'm still not sure what percentage of that was ambient temperature and what was stress.
0.6 hours logged. 4.0 more to go before I complete the non-cross-country solo part of the private-pilot requirements to take the checkride. I'm not quite ready to call this fun; I'm still thinking too much. But I suppose this is what it was like when I was 15, learning to drive. I'm sure it'll get better.
The iRiver Clix2, a.k.a. Clix second generation, is a 4GB MP3 player that also plays MPEG-4 movies. The screen is a 320x240 OLED display, and the moment I saw the hardware supported 30 fps, I wanted it. I picked one up a few weeks ago, and so far I'm very happy with it.
As I've written before, my previous MP3 player was a Sandisk Sansa e260. The Sansa wins on form factor (it's smaller), but the Clix wins on features and implementation. The UI is so responsive it makes my Series 1 TiVo look like a turtle. The typefaces look nice, the colors are vivid but not distracting, and the animations are subtle and helpful. The Sansa's typefaces, by contrast, look blocky and primitive, and its animations are slow enough that they hurt the experience.
Others have claimed that the sound on the Clix is noticeably better than that of other devices. I haven't done an A/B comparison, but my MP3s do sound brighter.
The best feature by far is the video. Yes, it really does play 30 frames per second, and yes, it's possible for various encoding utilities on the market to produce compatible video (compared to the Motion-JPEG format on the Sansa, which is wasteful in size and not supported by any third-party converters I know of). The open-source iRiverter is an excellent program; it handles batch videos nicely and always produces compatible video. Fast-forward and reverse work just as well as your run-of-the-mill DVD player, and the OLED display is easy on the eyes; I've watched one-hour TV episodes on it without fatigue.
My complaints are few. Obviously, I want 1TB of storage on the device rather than 4GB, but meanwhile 8 or 16GB would be nice (an 8GB version has been announced). As far as I can tell, the hardware is incapable of line-level outputs, so there will never be a cradle or dock worth buying -- though this also means that iRiver had no incentive to create yet another annoying proprietary connector, so I can use any of the dozens of mini-USB cables I have around the house for charging or loading the device. And finally, it's overpriced by about $50. The 4GB Meizu M6 is only around $100, and the 4GB iPod Nano is less than $150, but the Clix is $190. I'm sure the OLED adds a bit to the price, but the fact is that the top-selling device in the category costs less than the Clix, and as long as the iPod remains dominant, competitors will have to beat it both on features and on price.
Apologies to those of you getting 404s on the blog archives. I've migrated to Movable Type 4 and all the old links changed. Give the search engines a few days to catch up and things should be findable again.
Update: Apologies for the lack of space between paragraphs, too. Seems to be a bug in MT4.
Second update: Fixed the MT4 bugs; paragraph spacing should be correct now. I'm writing a new entry about how to fix yours.
One more item ticked off on personal Things To Do Before I Die list: "Score one million or more on Robotron: 2084 set on difficulty 10."
Today's GPS devices remind me of CD-ROM encyclopedias.
If you were living on the cutting edge of technology in the early 1990s, you remember the excitement of being able to look up anything on your computer and, after a short delay and maybe swapping a disc or two, seeing a few paragraphs about it.
Then along came the web in the mid-1990s, and suddenly CD-ROMs looked like dinosaurs nearing extinction. Not only didn't you have to pay $99.99 for a static copy of one company's encyclopedia, but the web version was actually better. You got a dozen different viewpoints on the topic. The information was fresh. If you didn't like how someone had organized a web page, that's OK; search engines would help you find specifically what you wanted.
Today, of course, we have Wikipedia and search engines with contextual ads, all of which nicely align business interests with data freshness. If you're looking for something on the web, many forces come together to make sure you find it.
But GPS devices act like CD-ROM encyclopedias from 1992. Buy a Garmin GPS and you get a static copy of maps from many months ago. Unless you pay for map updates, your GPS device will never know about the new overpass constructed along your daily commute. Some trim lines of the Toyota Prius include a GPS, along with the privilege of getting to pay $200 for each map update.
"Point of Interest," or POI data, make this problem even more frustrating. It's possible to ask a GPS device to tell you where the nearest Peet's Coffee is. And it will tell you where the nearest Peet's Coffee was, as of September 2006. Unless you pay for map updates (around $100 from Garmin), your GPS will never tell you about the closer one that opened in May 2007.
Don't you think Peet's Coffee would be willing to pay a few cents to get your map data updated to tell you about its newest stores? Don't you think Starbucks and Peet's and Coffee Bean would be willing to compete for placement on my GPS device when I pressed the "coffee" icon on the screen? In other words, shouldn't the people being mapped get to be in charge of making sure the maps are accurate? If there's an error in a map, who's more likely to fix it: the store that's invisible because of the error, or the would-be customer who never knew the store existed?
No doubt, existing technology explains why the wrong people (users) instead of the right people (advertisers) are being asked to pay to keep the advertising medium up to date. GPS devices generally don't have any sort of networking capability. So they physically can't update themselves.
So build a WiFi chip into each GPS. Let it associate with your home network to trickle map updates each night while the car's parked in the driveway. In communities with public WiFi, let it connect. And let it connect promiscuously to any open WiFi network while you're parked elsewhere. (Security issues? That's exactly what SSL is for. In fact, with appropriate security in place, GPSes can connect by P2P to share authentic map updates.)
At this point GPSes are capable of updating their map data daily, and I'd be happy to trust my GPS manufacturer to be sensible about updating the data frequently with hotlinks between every retail chain in the country that's interested in letting drivers know that they just opened a new store down the road.
But why stop there? Now that my GPS is on the web, can't it subscribe to RSS feeds listing local weather and traffic? How about weekend sales at Fry's Electronics and my neighborhood grocery store? Or how to get to the gas station within 2 miles from my current location with the lowest prices for unleaded? How about downloading my Google Calendar for the day and planning my route for me (reminding me that I am driving by Home Depot between two points and have been meaning to pick up a new trash can)?
GPSes are incredibly useful. They have fundamentally changed the way I drive around town, especially in unfamiliar towns. But they're isolated islands in a connected world, and GPS manufacturers are leaving a lot of money on the table as a result.
