September 2007 Archives

I wish I could be involved in more "abandoned" projects like this:

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both Republicans, championed the project through Congress two years ago, securing more than $200 million for the bridge.... Under mounting political pressure over pork projects, Congress stripped the earmark -- or stipulation -- that the money be used for the airport, but still sent the money to the state for any use it deemed appropriate.

In other words, Congress writes a check to the State of Alaska for $200 million and writes "For Bridge To Nowhere" in the memo section. People scream "pork!!!" and Congress responds by crossing out the memo before dropping the check in the mail. Sigh.

Mary and I are keeping a list of funny or whimsical things the kids say while they're still tots. I'm not going to publish the list yet because most of them are "you had to be there... for two years straight"-kinds of things, and I want to test the staying power of their humor before sharing them with the world. But one's worth writing about now, because it's just plain weird.

About a year ago Emily began insisting that we "gotfor" various things. "Dad, you gotfor your keys!" "You gotfor me! Wait for me!" We applied our usual corrective method: stopping the conversation and asking "Emily, is it 'gotfor' or 'forgot'?" After about 400 repetitions of this drill she broke the habit, and since then we're accused only that we "forgot" something.

End of story? Not quite. Along comes Thomas, 17 months younger, and about two months ago he independently invents "gotfor," which he's been diligently using ever since. A quick search shows we're hardly alone. There's a small contingent of the blog-o-web that believes this is clear evidence of dyslexia, but for now I'm just going to find it amusing and leave it at that.

This morning was exhausting. I just took a two-hour nap and feel like I've slept for a week.

Phase checks aren't graded, and they aren't pass/fail either. They are what they're called; a "check" at this "phase" of flight training that the student is moving in the right direction. But they certainly could be graded like school exams, and if they were, I'd have passed with a C+ grade.

The ground review section was fine. As usual I had to think for a few seconds before coming up with the right answers for some airspace questions, and there was an interesting question about a new kind of emergency (stuck throttle). I didn't know a few answers (What does HIWAS stand for? What is the cause of an overvoltage problem?), but there weren't any chronically deficient areas.

We got in the plane and flew off to our imaginary destination, a desolate spot in Nevada. In spite of my examiner's proper concern that error induced from the unpredictable liftoff from SQL (runway 12 or 30 plus various traffic conditions can lead to quite a different heading toward a waypoint), I got lucky and arrived at the Sunol Golf Course VFR waypoint right on time. However, I had to make things more interesting than that. I looked down to my left and confirmed we were over the lake, but the golf course was up ahead to the left, so I waited until we were overhead it, and then a minute longer to get to SUNOL, then turned onto the Victor airway toward Sacramento.

Unfortunately, I was about to learn that I had identified the wrong golf course: one that was about six miles past the one that constitutes the informal visual checkpoint west of SUNOL. We'd turned a significant distance north of our course.

Ever the optimist, Patti turned the situation into a genuine version of the lost procedure, and asked me to look out the window (as opposed to using GPS or the VORs) to figure out where we were. Although I quickly identified the lake near Byron, I didn't have enough of a sense of scale to quickly turn that into a fix on our position. I had to circle for quite a while to decide that we were right between Tracy and Modesto, close to the north side of Tracy. I got the right answer, but it just took too long.

Next, Patti asked me to divert to New Jerusalem. I got this essentially right: heading 140, about eight nm away, arrive in four minutes, use 0.6 gallons of gas. I put us on course for the airport and sure enough saw a lonely runway below us at the expected time. However, it took me far too long to convince myself that it was the right airport; I didn't have the A/FD in the front seat, and that was the only way to tell that New Jerusalem's runway was indeed 12/30. So I had to reach into the back seat and fumble around for the book. But eventually it worked out, and when I announced my answer, Patti said it was correct. Again, right answer, just too long to get it.

We talked through the entry and landing pattern, and unfortunately Patti was satisfied, because she skipped straight to a simulated engine-out emergency. I went through this procedure correctly, but my spiral downward wasn't lined up properly such that I could exit right onto final. Instead, my entry into the spiral was on the centerline. So on exit, I had to turn to get on final. This led to a sequence of problems: getting on centerline late caused me to be late to adjust the glide slope, which caused me to be too high, which gave me too little time to get my approach speed correct. I was too fast, too high, and too close to the runway. About halfway down the runway I decided to go around, which I did. This was the right decision in the situation, but I shouldn't have gotten into the situation. I clearly failed the engine-out emergency.

Next was hood work and navigation to a VOR. This was fine. Coming home to SQL was fine. There was a 7-knot right crosswind on the soft-field landing that I handled OK, but I fell into an old habit of relaxing the controls on touchdown and didn't keep the ailerons pushing against the crosswind, so we drifted off centerline on the post-landing roll.

Something new: it turns out that Tower can hand you to Ground without saying "taxi to parking, monitor ground point six." What he actually said was "Contact ground point six" but didn't clear me to taxi. I would have failed this on a checkride because I misheard this as clearance to taxi and started rolling before Patti kindly pointed out the mistake.

And finally, I let my mind distract myself in the parking area. While running through all the mistakes I'd made during the phase check, I skipped pulling the mixture full lean and just shut off the mags. I didn't notice the problem right away because this particular plane sometimes takes a while to sputter to a stop with the mixture full lean, and the behavior was identical to that. Patti quickly figured out the problem, though, and all was well. We later joked that we needed a new section on the phase check for how to shut off an airplane.

Wow, I'm a dork. For the next few weeks, at least, I'll be wearing a wristwatch. Not only that, but it is set to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). More details to come (the title of this post is a hint).

After a false start, both my kids have the knock-knock joke template down pat:

Speaker 1: Knock knock!
Speaker 2: Who's there?
Speaker 1: [set of words]
Speaker 2: [set of words] who?
Speaker 1: [set of words combined with other words in a way that is designed to make Speaker 2 laugh]

Emily sometimes says "What, [set of words]?!?!?" instead of "[set of words] who?", which can ruin the gag. But otherwise they get great amusement from them. Unfortunately, their appetite is as voracious as their memory is strong. If I'm driving them anywhere in the car, they demand knock-knock jokes incessantly. Not recycled ones from yesterday, but new ones. And let me tell you, it's hard to come up with new knock-knock jokes every 30 seconds.

But occasionally it's worth it. One of Emily's best friends at school is involved in the joke below. See if you can guess her name:

Dad: Knock, knock!
Emily: Who's there?
Dad: Mad!
Emily (concerned): Mad who?
Dad: Madison!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I tell you, if Emily hadn't been in her car seat she'd have laughed herself right onto the road. I think there were three factors leading to this success. First, it was a genuine, simple play on words. Second, the tension of hearing me say "mad" (usually bad news) was palpably eased by turning it into the name of her friend. Yep, funny joke.

Oh, the third thing? Ah yes, the third thing: my daughter is four years old and still thinks anything I say that is supposed to be funny actually is funny. Good times. Enjoy them while they last.

Updated 9/19/7 to fix joke template. I knew something was wrong but couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Today's theme: verbs that have become nouns for no good reason, threatening to replace perfectly serviceable preexisting synonyms.

Invite (pronounced as the made-up word that it is: 'in-vite): "Dude, my invite arrived yesterday and I'm, like, so psyched." Perhaps the speaker meant "invitation."
Reveal: "Dude, she was totally, like, 'wow' after the reveal." I know that "revelation" sounds too important for these situations; "unveiling" fits nicely, and has the nice extra feature of actually being an English word.
Ask: "Dude, like, what exactly is your ask?" In the words of another true believer, this is a terrible, terrible grammar plague that has infected the corporate world. Although there is a noun form (the "ask," which is short for "asking price" in securities trading), it's a term of art that is understood to be shorthand.

Standard disclaimer: yes, I'm sure you can find a dictionary that defends the other position. Yes, I still understand what these speakers were trying to say. Yes, I'm tremendously judgmental and my complaining about these linguistic nits is no doubt symptomatic of various deeper problems with my personality.

For my loyal readers, if any, I'd like to squish a nanomeme that is thriving amid the Steve Fossett search. Here's an example:

"The search has been complicated by the fact that the 63-year-old veteran of numerous record-breaking solo airplane and balloon flights failed to file a flight-plan for what was supposed to be a routine three-hour jaunt."

This is flat-out wrong. A flight plan for an area flight (that is, one where the origination and destination airports are the same) would not specify anything other than the name of the airport and how long the flight was expected to be. Here's how the phone call would go:

"Hello, I'd like to file a VFR flight plan. Tail number N240R. Decathlon slant golf. 100 knots, leaving from Flying M Ranch near Smith Valley. Cruise altitude 2,500 feet AGL. Destination Flying M Ranch. Time enroute two hours. Five hours of fuel. One person onboard. Contact telephone xxx-xxx-xxxx. Aircraft is blue with yellow. OK, thanks, bye."

This helps explain why he didn't file a flight plan -- because it would be nearly useless. Flight plans don't help rescuers when your route is imprecise. The purpose of Fossett's flight was to scout out ground locations for a car, so the route was necessarily imprecise.

At this point, all we know is that the plane is probably within a circle of radius 500 nautical miles (5 hours of fuel @ 100 knots), centered at the Flying M Ranch (only "probably" because of the chance of winds, UFOs, and government coverups). That is unfortunately over a million square miles, and the area wouldn't have been any smaller if Fossett had filed a flight plan.

If you resize my browser, I close your window. Do you hear me? Zero-percent conversions! Negative ROI!

According to the web, and informally confirmed by my personal observation: an uncovered pot of water takes 50% longer to boil than a covered one. In other words, if it takes $1.00 of energy* to boil a covered pot of water, you'll pay another fifty cents for the luxury of leaving the cover off (in addition to having to wait 50 percent longer).

And this should be obvious, but if you boil twice as much water as you need, such as two cups of water for one cup of tea, then you're paying twice the going rate for boiling a cup of water for absolutely no reason at all.

*Today it costs less than that. I'm using a round dollar for the sake of simplicity.

Quick rundown of thoughts/observations/babblings:

• We never saw any of the friends we planned to see unless it was by accident, or for specific appointments. Not especially surprising in a city of 47,000.
• Only in Black Rock City: you're awakened to the sound of an enormous explosion and hundreds of people screaming, and your first thought is "oh, cool, they blew up the oil rig."
• I'm still not convinced the monkey installation was anything more than a mass hoax. I went out there three times and it never did anything but gather dust.
• LED technology has really become dirt-cheap and common in the five years since I attended Burning Man. At night, it was weird to see a person not wearing at least three blinking lights.
• I estimate the number of kids at Burning Man to have increased about 90% since 2002. Of course, my awareness of kids has also increased about 90% since having two of my own.
• Didn't miss TV or computers. Did miss the internet as a news/research tool (queries would have been [burning man arson] [ultralight trike] [burning man suicide] [crude awakening] [adds] [canopy shade]).
• The movie theater project worked out great. We had about a dozen kids visiting each night, with deep expressions of gratitude from about a dozen sets of parents the next morning.
• I blew up my charge controller when I first hooked up the whole circuit. On the inverter the terminals had come loose and shorted. The charge controller bore the brunt of the amperage and died a few seconds later. It still charged the batteries but couldn't regulate the output load at 12 volts anymore. So I had to charge one battery during the day and then run the inverter directly off the other battery at night. No big deal, especially since my maximum power consumption turned out to be little more than 60 watts, meaning I pretty much could have run the whole project all week from a single battery charge and skipped the solar part entirely.
• Emily and Thomas each learned how to ride a tricycle. Thomas also proved adept at skateboarding!
• Yes, the weather sucked, just as everyone said it would. It was humid most of the week and we had three dust storms. Two were routine but one was severe, turning the sky dark orange for about 10 minutes. The playa surface fragmented very easily, so that it was like walking on the beach after a few days. It's hard to bike through those kinds of conditions.
• I was a UNICOM operator for two days at the spaceport. That was a lot of fun, and I met many cool folks. For various reasons the work meant I woke up before dawn every morning, and it was very nice to get such an early start on the day.
• My shade structure was adequate for adults but no good for the kids. They didn't look at it as part of our home (it had no walls and just camouflage netting for a ceiling) so they didn't see the point of spending time there. If I could do that over I'd have just bought one of those structures that they advertise as portable garages for cars.
• Real-world food didn't taste as good as I'd expected upon our return to civilization. Nor did showering feel as good. This is undoubtedly because we were able to shower in our RV, and because Mary made all sorts of good food when we were on the Playa.
• My favorite art car was gigantic and made out of a segmented bus. Great music.
• I was neutral about the early burn. Though I was sure that the guy who did it was an ass, I was also sure that I'd basically agree with his reasons (which I more or less correctly speculated were that the event had lost its spontaneity). That said, there are other less illegal ways to express yourself (but probably none as effective).
• I never saw a single one of the 1,000 donated community bikes. I did hear they were being stolen (to the extent it's possible to steal anything in BRC without leaving).
• Coffee quality varied wildly day by day.
• I saw nothing that shocked me.
• Emily was scared by a group of people who had painted themselves entirely red. But if seeing Mickey Mouse in person was a 10 on the kid fright scale, this was only about a 6.
• I'm undecided about the RV. Great to have the storage space, but I think the rest of it (shower, refrigerator, stove, comfy bed, maybe even air conditioning) could be reproduced in an appropriate temporary living structure. True, you probably don't want to spend the time and effort to do so, but depending on your attitude about what "radical self-reliance" means, you might consider it a worthy and interesting challenge.
• Likewise, undecided about camping in Kidsville. It felt like a monoculture (bad) with a marginally safer environment for kids (good). I don't consider BRC to be an unsafe environment for kids to begin with, so I'm not convinced it was a fair trade.
• I heard lots and lots of good music, and I recognized almost none of it. The closest was remixes of songs I knew. I wish I had some way to get everyone's playlists.

I've been meaning to start a list of stuff that any self-respecting geek will have in his or her toolbox when out exploring in the world. These criteria are intentionally broad, and I don't want to limit the list by any specific constraint, such as weight, mass, or purpose.

• A wristwatch. Although many devices these days think they know what time it is, it's good to have a low-tech device that you can trust.
• An alarm clock. Most cell phones have a built-in software alarm clock, but they do you no good on a three-day camping trip after their batteries run out.
• A multimeter. Nothing too fancy; just enough to test voltage, continuity, and maybe resistance, any of which might restore your sanity in a flash when you can't tell which of several parts of a contraption is broken.
• Zip-ties. Get some big ones and a lot of small ones.
• A sledgehammer. I'm very happy with this one. Much better for ad-hoc pounding or smashing than a piece of wood or a soon-to-be-never-the-same-again book.
• A few dozen feet of rope as well as knowledge how to tie at least one good knot. For most purposes, this is just as good as tie-down straps or aircraft wire. A couple carabiners are nice, too, but not essential.
• A cigarette lighter. Or strike-anywhere matches, your preference.
• A pair of multi-purpose shears.
• Several different sizes of bungee cords.
• Sunscreen.
• A towel.
• A compass, or at least some very basic knowledge about which way is North.
• A power inverter. As long as you have a car nearby, you'll also have AC power. Just be careful about wattage, or else you'll soon have neither.
• Duct tape.
• An LED headlamp. This one is my all-time favorite because it has night-vision red, reasonably bright white, and a third Krypton mode if you need extremely bright or more natural wavelength light.
• A high-intensity utility light. I wouldn't bother with rechargeable models; if you don't have AC power, either wait until daytime or use a headlamp.
• An adjustable wrench. You'll curse yourself for not bringing a full socket set, but it's better than nothing.
• Work gloves. You can do anything once without gloves, but once might not be enough.
• Earplugs. Preferably a bunch of individually wrapped pairs, so you don't have to reuse an old pair with unknown history.
• Safety goggles.

I have purposely excluded various useful electronic devices (cell phone, laptop, GPS, scanner radio, portable printer) because they tend to be unavailable at any distance from civilization. They tend to need a battery recharge just when you need them most, as well.

Did I miss anything?