Month: November 2005

Ran into Mike, a former Army chaplain learning Spanish in San Miguel de Allende.  Mike served two one-year tours in Iraq.  I asked him what he thought the country’s long-term prospects were.  “Democracy is a foreign concept to them, as is capitalism.  Whether we get out in six months or ten years, our definition of success is not going to be a nation like our own.  You have to remember that Iraq is fundamentally tribal.  Democracy is fine as long as my tribe wins.”  The main obstacles to peace, in Mike’s view, were (1) the fact that the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis all hated each other, and (2) the fact that Saddam let 100,000 criminals out of his jails as we were invading.  “What will bring stability to Iraq will be a civil war, just as we had in 1861.  The Shiites will win.”

Mike was a fan of my old idea (proposed here in this Weblog 2.5 years ago) of splitting Iraq up into three new countries, one for the Kurds, one for the Shiites, and one for the Sunnis.  Mike was not a fan of the U.S. military staying there indefinitely.  He estimated that 50 percent of the troops were getting unbalanced mentally toward the end of their one-year tours.  “The divorce rate in the Army has gone up 50 percent.  Captains are leaving in order to keep their families together, which means that the Army is losing its future leaders.”

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I’m now into the third week of my trip to California and Mexico.  I’m now able to report on a statistically insignificant sample of Internet connectivity in both countries:

• my cousin’s house in Piedmont (Oakland): fast and reliable
  
• Chaminade hotel and conference center in Santa Cruz:  slow and $10 per day
  
• Crowne Plaza Redondo Beach (service provided by LodgeNet):  throughput similar to a 56K modem; $10 per day collected via a painful process requiring a phone call to the front desk every 24 hours
  
• Courtyard by Marriott Buena Park, CA: fast, reliable, and free
  
• my other cousin’s house up on Mulholland Drive: slow and flaky
  
• Quinta Real Hotel, Guadalajara:  fast, reliable, and free
  
• jewelry shop in Tlaquepaque: fast DSL

So far Mexico seems to be coming out ahead.  Also, the general rule that hotels that charge for Internet tend to provide terribly slow and flaky service seems to be holding true.

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Boring note to myself for the future, a diary of this current trip to Mexico.

Sunday: flew from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, GDL on Mexicana (2.5 hours; they upgraded me and a lot of other American Airlines ticket holders to First Class), checked in at Hotel Quinta Real in the Zona Minerva, a truly luxurious hotel with beautiful spacious suites ($215/night for the best rooms; all staff speak English; free fast reliable in-room Internet (wired)).  Anastasia says it is the finest hotel in which she has ever stayed.  Toured the lively and historic downtown.

Monday:  Visit to Tlaquepaque, great outdoor lunch at El Fuente (or Fuerte), on the pedestrian street.  Dinner at Casa Bariachi (good entertainment, bring cushion next time for the chairs, eat elsewhere).

Tueday:  ETN bus to Guanjuato (4 hours; incredibly spacious and luxurious; $25).  Stay at Hotel Refugio Casa Colorada.  Dinner at La Capellina (great salad and pizza, just E of the Jardin) with Daire and RoNelle, gringas from the bus.  Daire tells us of her trip on Primera Plus in which the driver lost control on a wet highway, flipped the bus through a complete 360, and then ran away so as not to be detained by police.  She rides on ETN now.

Wednesday:  All the downtown museums and churches.  Fabulous haircut for $5 just 1/2 block W of the university.  Ironic twist:  Diego Rivera’s house featured photo exhibit with pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.  Dinner with Joe and Naeko at La Capellina.  Concert in Teatro Juarez, Jorge Buenfil, the trovador of Yucatan.  Drinks with Joe, Naeko, and their lawyer friends from Texas, Steve and Ray.  Steve tells us about Veracruz and how we must go there for the best seafood, the best coffee (“they don’t make one cup at a time; they have a machine from the 19th century that drips espresso constantly and they shovel the coffee in”), and the danzon.  Steve tells us about the medicine women that one can see for advice.  Steve finds out that Anastasia is Greek and tells us about Matala, Crete, fears of having contracted a disease from a Norwegian girl, the hospital in Irakleon where none of the doctors spoke a word of English and the waiting room was crowded and chaotic, then having to leave for Morocco to avoid the shame.  He hitched a ride with the British Army, who took him to an American air force base where the doctor told him it was urethritis, not gonorrhea.

Thursday:  Museo de Momias, in which the mummified corpses of folks whose families could not afford to pay the cemetery dues are exhibited.  The state pays for the first five years in the cemetery and, after that, if no payment is received the body goes to be cremated or to the museum.  Cremation looks like a great option after you see how distressed the mummies look.  Visited La Valenciana, one of the most ornate churches in Mexico.  Fabulous lunch at El Conde, across the street from the church.

Friday:  Verdict on Hotel Refugio Casa Colorada:  incredible view, friendly staff does not speak English; no Internet; no writing desks in room; bathrooms outdated; restaurant fair, but not special and often out of menu items.  Might be worth the $250 per night if you stay in the presidential suite and are honeymooning.  Anastasia back to Boston; Philip to San Miguel de Allende.  Evening concert by Alejandro Campos Quartet at the jazz festival.

Saturday:  Breakfast with Gerald and Mora at the Posada Carmina (reasonably good hotel; $65-100/night; sort of noisy due to central location; no Interent).  Museums and churches.  Weather continues 75 degrees and sunny.  Evening concert by Salomon Maawad (Lebanese-Mexican) and friends.

Sunday:  House and garden tour with Biblioteca Publica.  Visited a beautiful house in Malanquin designed by Nicole Bisgaard and built in 13 months.  Second house was designed by Nicholas Schlee and also made good use of views to interior gardens.  Used free wireless Internet with laptop at Mama Mia’s.  Rumor has it that the Jardin is also covered by a free wireless network courtesy of the city government.  Enjoyed an evening concert, with dancing by 50-year-old (Mexican) couples, in the plaza.  Dinner at La Grotta.  Ended up at the owner’s table with their English expat friends.  One of them talked about how the U.S. economy couldn’t defy gravity forever and was headed for a huge crash because most people in the U.S. are useless realtor-style folks.

Monday:  Negotiated purchase of Robinson R22 helicopter, to be delivered in the Los Angeles area the middle of next week.  One-hour Spanish lesson at Academia Hispano America. Met Mike, a former Army chaplain, in the plaza and learned about Warren Hardy’s language classes (three two-week sessions), and also Casa de Mericela, 41B Jesus, $40/day incl bkfast and lunch, 3 blocks from Jardin, wireless Internet on 2nd floor, very clean and good food.  Visited at lunchtime, where 12 happy Americans were gathered around the table with their hostess.  The food did look excellent.  macahe2000@yahoo.com.mx.  Maricela Campos Hernandez, 1 409-209-0030 (U.S. number).  Quick lunch at Tortitlan.  Went with Sandy Baum out to the local San Miguel airport.  The strip is 1/2 mile long by his car’s odometer and in reasonable condition with grass and gravel.  There are some powerlines at the W end and some good-sized rocks.  Sandy’s friend operates a Cessna 206 out of here.  Enjoyed Munna Bhai, an Indian comedy, at the Cinemateca.  Dinner and wireless at Mama Mia’s.

Tuesday:  Breakfast with Rosalba Rangel, owner of www.rosalbarealty.com. Viajes Vertiz ride to the Leon airport ($25) and American Airlines to Dallas, then Boston.

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http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail400.html is the most interesting IT Conversation that I listened to while driving around California.  This is Brewster Kahle, founder of archive.org, talking about the practicalities of digitizing and storing everything that was ever intended to be published (print, photos, sounds, films and video).  There are lots of numbers in the talk, which makes it satisfyingly precise.

[http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail94.html is an older interview with me that might be of some interest to newer readers of this Weblog.]

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One of the things that I did while here in Los Angeles was check up on the fates of recent MIT graduates to see how their scientific and technical educations are panning out.  Here are the vital stats for one fellow:

• Age: 23
  
• Occupation:  Selling mortgages to people with poor credit records who are buying houses worth $700,000 to $1 million
  
• Income:  Over $150,000 per year (commission-based)
  
• Boss:  High school graduate; never attended college.
  
• Colleagues:  Mostly high school graduates.
  
• Rent:  $2300 per month for great 2BR apartment (shared)
  
• Social Life:  Meeting frisky young ladies (2X/week)
  
• Dream:  Break into the entertainment industry
  

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Los Angeles is the best helicopter town in the United States.  Distances are vast, traffic is beyond human tolerance, people are rich, helipads are everywhere, the weather is perfect, and the population is accustomed to 24/7 noise from various kinds of machines.

My helicopter week in LA started with the Robinson Helicopter Factory Safety Course.  Every two weeks, roughly 100 people flock to Torrance, California for this 3.5-day course, most of which is classroom instruction.  The most important thing for a non-pilot to take away from a course such as this is “Don’t walk anywhere near the tail of a helicopter, where the tail rotor can chop off your limbs or head.”  People should approach running helicopters from the front, depart by backing away from the front, and keep eye contact with the pilot.

After completing the course, I went down to the John Wayne airport (KSNA) in Orange County for an introductory lesson with Helistream, reputedly one of the best helicopter schools in the U.S.  Helistream does a lot of recurrent training for experienced police department pilots, but they also provide training for beginners such as myself.  Helistream is situated on the roof of a medium-sized office building adjacent t the airport.  Part of the roof is devoted to their hangar, and part devoted to a helipad large enough for about three ships.  Andreas, the chief instructor, and I, flew up into the hills and landed in a clearing.  Then we came back to the airport for “full touch-down” autorotations.  This is a required maneuver for helicopter flight instructors.  Starting about 500′ above the ground, you roll the throttle down to idle and let the helicopter glide until it is about 40′ off the ground.  Then you start to pull back on the cyclic to flare the helicopter and turn its forward airspeed into an arresting of the descent rate.  Finally, you pull the collective pitch control to cushion the final contact with the ground, which in our case was the hard asphalt surface of an airplane runway.  Even with an experienced pilot, in a light helicopter such as the Robinson R22, there will be an inevitable amount of sliding and scraping along the ground at the end.  Full-downs used to be required for all helicopter pilots, but the FAA and the manufacturers have been discouraging their use in training.  Very few helicopters get wrecked due to engine failure; quite a few were getting destroyed during practice autorotations.

The John Wayne tower eventually got too busy to deal with us, so we flew down the coast to Laguna Beach, 500′ above the surf.  There is no industry in this portion of the coast, just private houses that look like fancy hotels and fancy hotels that look like small towns unto themselves.

We landed in the dark, refueled, and then had to restart the helicopter and park it back on top of the building.  This would not have been easy for a student working on his private pilot’s license!

I ended my week flying Commander Chuck Street’s Bell Jet Ranger out of Fullerton.  From 6:00 am until 9:00 am, we watched the aftermaths of cars burning, a “vagrant/homeless person” getting struck and killed under a bridge, fatal collisions, and saw literally hundreds of thousands of people backed up for 30-90 extra minutes behind these various accidents.  Chuck worked the radios as we transitioned among LA’s complex airspaces, made on-air reports, and had me do various practice approaches and landings to hilltop pads, small airports, and various spots on the Fullerton airport.

The waste of resources viewed from the air was almost as tragic as the deaths that are a daily feature of folks trying to get around LA.  LA has a highway and surface road infrastructure worth hundreds of billions of dollars.  The cars on these highways are probably worth another $100 billion.  Yet for want of a few GPS chips and a wireless Internet system that would allow the cars to talk to each other, there is no way for a car to tell the driver “don’t go this route because you’ll just end up waiting for 90 minutes behind a clumb of other stuck cars.”

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When an average person is charitably inclined, the objects of that charitable impulse are most likely to be local.  The local opera company gets a big check.  Hurricane victims in a far-away corner of the nation, though their need is larger, get a smaller check.  Unfortunates in distant countries get almost nothing.  Government policies seem to reflect the will of the average person.  Lots of money is spent on domestic programs, helping the people we know and see every day; comparatively little is spent on foreign aid.

For American computer nerds, this relationship is reversed.  Bill Gates gets rich.  His thoughts turn to malaria, AIDS, and going over to Africa to try to hold back the tide of these diseases.  The Google founders are talking about their foundation concentrating on Africa and they just bought a personal Boeing 767 to make it easy to get back and forth.  A visit to www.itconversations.com reveals that when techie movers and shakers gather, e.g., at Poptech, they talk about how they are going to fix Africa.  Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, decided that his next act would be the $100 laptop for children in Third World countries.

How to explain this difference?  Perhaps the average person has a lot of emotional ties and uses these to guide his or her giving.  Whereas the computer nerd has mostly been isolated from other humans in his or her community.  When the time to do something charitable, he does a Web search for “unfortunate losers” and finds out that there are lots more in Africa than in Seattle or the Bay Area.  If you have no personal connections and the people to be helped are mostly just statistics, it is just as satisfying to help people far away as geographically close.  When the people far away are in worse shape than the people nearby, it becomes more satisfying to help them.

[The folks who’ve actually spent time in Africa feel a lot less sorry for Africans.  One fellow at the Hacker’s Conference spent nearly a year on a road trip through Africa with www.dragoman.com.  He said “In a lot of the villages where we stayed, folks only have to work about two months per year to pay for all of their food and shelter.  They’re so much happier than Americans.”  My friend who work in public health and have spent years in Tanzania don’t shed tears for the locals, either.  And there is some evidence that Africans may not be as bad off economically as the dry statistics suggest.  http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2005-10-16-africa-cellular_x.htm notes that “an estimated 100 million of [Africa’s] 906 million people” have mobile phones.]

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Five years ago I wrote http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-for-software-engineers.  At the time I was unhappy that most programmers did not seem to have an investment in the user experience.  How have things changed?  I was chatting with three distinguished software engineers from Silicon Valley.  We were talking about phones.  I mentioned that my Windows XP Mobile phone (Motorola MPx220) exhibits an annoying behavior:

• you are talking on the phone
  
• a call waiting beep interrupts the call
  
• you press the soft key to reject the incoming call
  
• almost invariably the rejected caller leaves a voicemail
  
• you continue talking
  
• the phone vibrates to let you know that a new voicemail is available
  
• the vibration of the phone, amplified through the microphone, makes the person you’re talking to think that you were just crushed in an earthquake

I cited this as an example of programmers who needed to do better by their users.  Silicon Valley’s finest disagreed.  The specs were drafted by a marketing person, they argued.  The specs said “vibrate when a new voicemail is available” not “unless the consumer is on a call.”  The programmer was responsible for doing what he was told by management, no more and no less.

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I’ve been talking to various folks in California for a week about http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer .  The reaction is almost entirely predictable based on the listener’s level of technical expertise.  “Nobody will ever want that,” says the typical 50-year-old Silicon Valley veteran.  “I would buy that right now.  My Microsoft PocketPC Phone already does everything that I want and need.  I just want a bigger screen and keyboard,” says a corporate lawyer (he charges about $600 per hour and presumably can buy whatever he wants).  The teenage girls in the hotel hot tub, one of whom was actually talking on a cell phone while in the tub, were enthusiastic about the idea.  Setting up and maintaining a home PC was for the losers and geeks.

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Some interesting things that I learned about at the Hacker’s Conference that either are or have Web sites:

• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html and http://www.googleguide.com/help/calculator.html
  
• http://www.nw.com/nw/projects/cubatron/
  
• http://www.dataplace.org/
  
• http://www.ergodex.com/ (arbitrarily configurable keyboard; intended for gamers but lots of other creative uses; Windows-only)
  
• http://www.ageia.com/ (physics accelerator for video games; Windows/PC only)
  
• http://mappoint.msn.com/directionsfind.aspx (select the “LineDrive” format and watch in awe as Microsoft draws you a schematic map to your destination, with the uninteresting long freeway sections compressed and the complex local neighborhood sections in detail, all black and white for easy printing, proof that not everything interesting is happening at Google)

Enjoy!

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