Month: February 2005

I’m considering a trip to Portugal on Friday March 25.  A friend is coming with me and she has to return on Sunday April 3.  I have more flexibility and could stay on.  Some questions for Portugal veterans…

• Is the end of March a nice time of year to be in Portugal?


• Can one stay the whole eight days in one hotel in Lisbon and make day trips or would it be better to stay in several different places (and, if so, what are one or two favorite places)?  I don’t want to spend too much time in transit.


• If we are going to be moving around, is it best to rent a car?

Thanks for the help!

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I ordered a Cirrus SR-20 yesterday, to be shared with a friend.  I’m still looking for the ideal Malibu to purchase but this gives us something fun to fly around New England, is very cheap to operate, and I may want to use it to do flight instruction.  I’m currently working on my CFI/CFII ratings and think it would be fun to teach instrument flying on 14-day cross-country trips with guys who want to buy a Cirrus but lack the instrument rating or the time in type that will comfort insurers (the Cirrus has a terrible fatal accident record, which is ironic because it has been marketed from the start as an especially safe airplane with its emergency parachute, etc.).  So the question becomes how to equip this airplane.  It will probably be resold after 3 years so that I can always be teaching in a plane that has comparable avionics to the new ones.  Therefore we don’t want to go overboard on cramming this simple airframe with Boeing 757-grade avionics that won’t earn their value back on a resale.

We were thinking of the following options:

• leather seats (the dog needs his comfort)
  
• 3-blade prop (smaller diameter ergo lower tip speeds ergo lower noise for the dog, who doesn’t wear headsets)
  
• MFD upgrade to 5000C so that we can get the weatherlink
  
• weather datalink
  
• Emax engine monitor
  
• 3rd year extended warranty including avionics

This leaves us with a plane that is $260,000.  We decided against the Stormscope because we don’t intend to fly anywhere near thunderstorms and the NEXRAD datalink should be good enough.  We decided against the Skywatch system because it is $21,500 and we think that in the long run we can swap the transponder for a Mode-S unit for maybe $2000 (Cirrus doesn’t currently offer this option) and get the TIS feed from the FAA RADAR.  We decided against the $11,500 ground prox warning system because we think that the Garmin 430 will give this to us by mid-2005 with a cheap upgrade.

The open question is whether to spend $19,000 extra for the double Garmin 430s and the fancier 55X autopilot and flight director.  The stock SR20 comes with a backup Garmin 250XL GPS that is VFR-only and has no VOR or ILS receiver and only a 5-watt radio transmitter.  Its autopilot does not have altitude preselect and can’t fly an ILS approach.  With the upgrade you get two identical GPS/VOR-ILS/COM units and don’t have to learn a different user interface.  If you do get stuck by yourself in ugly weather you can have the autopilot fly an approach while supervising and adjusting power.  And the flight director is awfully nice for when something goes wrong with the autopilot’s servos but you’re still in the clouds.

Thoughts from more experienced pilots?

[Update:  Thanks for the advice from all commenters.  We decided to go for the dual-430s, the fancy autopilot, and flight director.  Cirrus tells us that the plane will be delivered in mid-May, i.e., about three months after we placed our deposit.]

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A young friend is starting a career in Los Angeles.  His goals are the following:

• fun to drive
  
• favorably impress superiors at work
  
• appeal to single women
  
• spend less than $60,000 and ideally much less

What should he buy?

[Update:  I hadn’t wanted to prejudice anyone so I withheld my suggestion… the new Ford Mustang convertible.  He will be in California, where driving on the backroads in a convertible can be a lot of fun.  The fanciest V6 convertible lists for only $25,000.  There is a small back seat for a Golden Retriever.  The solid rear axle isn’t an issue considering that California has no potholes.  He doesn’t need the big V8 engine because California traffic is generally so heavy that he’ll be lucky to hit 30 mph.  To me this is a fun car that doesn’t say “I’m trying to impress you with my wealth” (which is always a failure in LA because there is always someone richer in the next lane with a $100,000+ car).  What do folks think of the Mustang idea?  Am I totally out of touch with youth?]

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This article on the founder of IKEA reveals some interesting tidbits…

• one can move to Switzerland and negotiate a fixed income tax rate related to the value of one’s house


• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is richer than Bill Gates now, partly because of the slide of the dollar and partly because Billg has been giving money away; the 77-year-old guy is worth roughly $50 billion


• like our local hero George W., Mr. Kamprad has had trouble with alcoholism (perhaps we need to encourage young people to drink more?)

Alcohol is supposed to be so bad for brain cells, productivity, etc.  How can we explain the fact that so many hypersuccessful people are or were alcoholics?

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This interesting Harper’s story should make us all feel good that we don’t have to live in Baghdad, where a house rents for nearly $5000 per month and DSL is $750 per month.

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We had a full house last night for an Oscar’s party of sorts (TV is upstairs in a little loft area so people weren’t forced to watch).  I was sad because Titanic couldn’t win again; it was such a great film that they really ought to give it Best Picture every year in perpetuity.  I was confused when a neighbor sung the praises of the movie Rushmore and its genius director, Wes Anderson.  The movie was fun but if there were profound ideas in it, I’m not sure what they were.  Books, on the other hand, have been much more thought-provoking for me.  Is there any reason to expect that books are a better source of serious thinking than movies?  One possible theory is that people who have profound thoughts shy away from the committee and group work characteristic of filmmaking.  Even if Joe Director finances a film himself and has 100 percent authority he will still spend a tremendous amount of time and effort communicating his ideas to subordinates, many of whom will misunderstand what he says.  Thoughtful writers, by contrast, tend to be solitary figures who stay at home in the Connecticut woods (Philip Roth, Edward Tufte).  One of our friends is a truly brilliant and original scientist (i.e., more or less average for Cambridge).  This tenured professor says “I don’t like to read, write, or teach.”  What does he enjoy doing?  “I like to think.”

Would anyone like to take up my neighbor’s position that Rushmore is as profound as any book?

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Professor John Grotzinger is giving a talk at the MIT Faculty Club on March 8 on “Evidence for Water on the Surface of Mars”.  If you’re an MIT alum I can recommend this talk highly as Grotzinger is an outstanding scientist and teacher.  The event is run by the MIT Club of Boston and includes drinks and dinner starting around 5:30 or 6 pm.  The talk itself is at 7:30.  Doug Robinow and I are going.  Register at http://bostonclub.mit.edu/events/050308.html

(If you’re not an alum you might be able to talk your way in.)

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The only thing that attracts more New England women than a Larry Summers hatred rally is the IKEA furniture store in New Haven, Connecticut.  Inner minivan harmony was achieved by stopping there on the way back from New York City last night.  In ancient times I ran a small company and hired an architect to set up our new building.  He chose systems furniture (cubicles) that cost $3000 per employee.  When delivered the desktops were so shallow that they couldn’t hold a 20″ CRT monitor.  One of our customers had a similar big open office.  They bought each employee a desk and a table from IKEA for $300-ish.  Their office looked a lot better and was more functional with more work surface per employee.

One thing that struck me as odd about IKEA: many of the carpets for sale there are labeled as being from “central Persia” or “east Persia” and smaller tags say “Land: Iran”.  IKEA is importing carpets from Iran!  How do they do this?  My impression was that we had a trade embargo against Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

[Within about six months Bostonians won’t have to drive to New Haven for their complete-with-plumbing-and-appliances $2000 kitchens.  IKEA is opening a store in Stoughton.  It is unclear why they didn’t pick sales tax-free Nashua.  Maybe Scandinavians aren’t comfortable unless they are being sufficiently taxed.  IKEA tried to open a store in the Assembly Square slum/highway area of Somerville but various community groups objected (this is one reason that residential property taxes in Somerville are about 2X as high as in Cambridge; there are few business taxpayers).  Meanwhile, Somerville thrives on conceptual art projects.]

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Driving down to Manhattan on Friday we made the obligatory stops in Hartford (Rein’s NY-Style Deli at Exit 65 on I-84 and the Wadsworth Atheneum art museum) and picked up the local newspaper.  One of the lead local stories..  “Students Protest On Yale Campus–Object To Silence By President Levin”:

“More than 100 Yale graduate student teachers marched to the university president’s office Thursday to protest the university’s treatment of women and minorities.

“Even after the graduate students were told that President Richard Levin was not in his office, they remained in the building and speakers took the floor to air their grievances.

“The march, … was prompted, they said, by Levin’s failure to join other university leaders who have denounced remarks made by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers at a conference last month.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job where one’s most important responsibility was to throw rocks at someone in an unrelated organization in another state?  Or a job where you got to spend all afternoon hanging out with friends complaining about the top manager of your organization not spending enough of his time complaining?  Thanks to the magic of generous donors, a tuition price-fixing cartel among the Ivies, and the IRS not taxing the $billions in wealth accumulated by the Ivies, all of this is indeed possible!

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Four of us arrived at the Museum of Modern Art this morning at 10:15 am, placing us about 1000th in line.  The place was closed for a few years while $858 million was pumped in for renovation and expansion.  Before the renovation MoMA was white walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20, $10 to get in.  After the near $1 billion project?  White walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20… $20 to get in.  We made it into the museum by 11:15 but claustrophobia made us all anxious to leave by 12:15.  One native Manhattanite said that it was the most crowded place he had been inside during the preceding 12 months.

Personal favorite exhibit:  Bell 47 helicopter, as seen in the TV show MASH, hanging near some open stairs.  Strangest architectural detail:  glass half-walls throughout the museum topped with strips of stainless steel.  These are apparently too fragile for anyone to touch but because MoMA most resembles the line for Space Mountain at Disneyland it is hard for people to avoid putting their hands on these rails.  this necessitates the museum keeping dozens of security guards busy at all times walking around telling people not to touch the rails.

[Tip for tourists:  If you can plan at least one day ahead you can buy timed tickets on the MoMA Web site and avoid waiting on line in the cold.]

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