Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The South African newspapers are full of stories of government ministries and government-affiliated monopolies whose efficiencies and capabilities have slid downhill since the apartheid years. According to journalists, reasonably well qualified civil servants and managers are being replaced with cronies of the president and ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. The lack of qualifications of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is a particular concern this week.

Why should the ANC-lead government continue to attempt the same range of programs that the apartheid government operated? It might take decades for the ANC government, formed in 1994, to reach the standard of efficiency (perhaps not very high) set by the apartheid government. In the meantime, why not pare back the government to the essentials and privatize as much as possible? The government could, for example, deregulate the telecom sector and put the resources formerly deployed there into reducing crime, which is currently at a level that most Americans would find unimaginable.

One can argue the merits of reducing the role of government in the U.S., where the government usually does a mediocre job at a high price to taxpayers. Reducing the role of government becomes much more critical in a country where the government isn’t able to handle its core responsibility of ensuring public safety.

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While in a break from a meeting at the University of the Western Cape, I purchased a ticket from Boston to Long Beach, California on JetBlue (picking up new helicopter on September 7 and flying it back to Boston). Due to the lack of Internet bandwidth out of the university, what would have been a 3-minute task in the U.S. stretched out to longer than 30 minutes. Frustrated, I noted to the faculty there that “If South Africans are expected to drop dead from AIDS at age 45, they at least should be able to enjoy high-speed Internet until they die. The connection speed here is something you couldn’t be satisfied with unless you were planning to live more than 300 years.”

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Just arrived in Tanzania, sans luggage thanks to a combination of British Airways and Kenya Airways (neither of which seems likely to survive a deregulated marketplace without making huge changes). I do still have my laptop and camera since those were in my carry-on backpack.

When checking into the fairly upscale Hotel Seacliff here in Dar es Salaam, I asked the reception clerk if there was an adaptor in the room for a U.S. power plug. He seemed confused, so I pulled out a cell phone charger to illustrate. He had been chatting with a woman on the other side of the counter and said “She will go up with you to show you how to make it work.”

Once up in the room, this woman displayed a charming childlike ignorance of all things 90-250V. Her technical skills were not required in any case because the outlet next to the writing desk accepts European or American plugs directly. What was her ordinary job function? “I work here in the hotel for companionship and massage.”

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My 36 hours in London are drawing to a close. Here are a few tidbits…

The National Gallery displays a painting that Britons chose as their favorite in all of the U.K. It is a Turner showing a Royal Navy sailing warship being towed to the dock for dismantling. The ship had become obsolete due to the advent of steam power. A portrait of technological obsolescence is apparently the favorite image of Britons polled.

Lunch was with David Adams, Ruby on Rails expert, at the Itsu sushi chain outlet in Piccadilly where Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian spies.

The afternoon was spent with a stroll through St. James Park to gawk at an incredibly huge Russian pelican, a stop into a bike shop to look at the folding Mezzo, and a walk around the Tate Britain museum.

The evening was spent at the National Theater’s production of the Tenn. Williams play Rose Tattoo. It may sound stupid to travel thousands of miles to see an American play, but the trip was worth it and the play is a lot less depressing than the rest of Williams’s work.

Attempts to steal wireless with the new Toshiba Windows Vista laptop have proved fruitless. I am staying in a friend’s apartment overlooking the Thames from an unfashionable suburb of London near Heathrow. It is dense enough that you’d expect to see 3 or 4 unsecured networks and a handful of secured ones. All that the laptop can see are two secured networks. Wireless Internet may not be as popular as it is in the U.S. and Londoners are less trusting of their neighbors it would seem.

Off to Tanzania next…

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Just finished The Great Getty, the Life and Loves of J. Paul Getty, Richest Man in the World, by Robert Lenzner. Getty lived from 1892 to 1976, was married five times (typically to women around the age of 20 at the time of marriage), and died in England partly because he was afraid to travel by air or sea. He left an estate valued at over $2 billion, much of which went to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Some sentences that caught my eye…

p. 69: [Getty] invited suspicion with his open admiration for Hitler’s leadership, and by publicly bragging of his friendship with leading Nazis, including Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring. He was also reported to be trying to sell oil to Nazi Germany…

p. 78: After Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover personally issued approval for the custodial detention of Getty as a potential enemy.

p. 89: At fifty-five, Gerry was no longer the lean, mean playboy of a decade earlier. With slightly stooping shoulders and greying hair, now dyed reddish brown (he had used blonde dye in his early thirties), he underwent a second facelift (the first was in 1939). … The effect of the facelift, and the ones to come, was to accentuate the apparent size of his already large nose and his elephantine ears.

p. 102: [Getty said that he] “preferred Europe because he could travel with two or three women at the same time.”

p. 131: Getty wrote a magazine article in 1965 entitled “The World is Mean to Millionaires”. He noted that “Rich people once lived in a world apart; today almost the only difference between the multimillionaire and the reasonably well-to-do man earning $15,000 to $25,000 a year is that the millionaire works harder, relaxes less, is burdened with greater responsibilities and is exposed to the constant glare of publicity.”

p 140: Getty’s chief executive assistant was the glamorous, socially acceptable Claus von Bulow (subsequently convicted of murderinig his wife Sunny in Newport, Rhode Island).

p. 142: [Getty had agreed to pay double what other oil companies were paying Saudi and other Arab owners of oilfields for extraction rights, thus breaking into the market and setting off a cost-spiral.] In July 1957, … President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that voluntary import quotas on cheap foreign oil were needed to protect the domestic oil industry.

p. 160: two separate entries on wife-killing. The first is about Paul Jr., Getty’s son, accused of killing his wife Talitha, who died of a heroin overdose. The second is about Paul Jr. lending $1.5 million to Claus von Bulow to help him defend against the charges that he killed his socialite wife Sunny with insulin injections. Sometimes, apparently, divorce is not sufficient…

p 192: Getty discussed the design of his villa/museum in Malibu, California: “I refuse to pay for one of those concrete bunker-type structures that are the fad among modern architects — nor some tinted-glass-stainless-steel monstrosity.” [Getty never visited his museum since he was afraid to fly.]

p. 212: “The majority of very wealthy single men will tell you sadly that most, though not all, women can be divided into two types, those you pay to stay with you and those that you pay to stay away.”

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I bought a Toshiba 13″ laptop at BestBuy yesterday for $750, just to have a lightweight laptop with included DVD drive to take to Africa. The machine has more or less everything once should need: 1 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, Webcam, FireWire and USB ports, etc. It also came with Windows Vista preinstalled.

I tried doing some basic things with Vista, such as changing the workground from “WORKGROUP” to “MSHOME”. This involved trips into the Help system and finding help descriptions that didn’t match up to the dialog boxes. It was possible from some of the network dialog boxes to pick a collection of checkboxes that would, when Apply was clicked, result in a 1960s mainframe-style error of “incompatible parameters”.

Vista can’t connect to my Infrant NAS disk array, even after I upgraded the firmware on the Infrant. The XP machines have no trouble with this. The worst thing about Vista is that it doesn’t like to say no. When connecting to a network server that it has discovered, it puts up a “working” thermometer and will keep incrementing it for about five minutes. It never does work, but Vista never seems to give up. Dead Windows File Explorer programs litter the desktop and need to be killed with the red X in the upper right.

During a lot of system administration tasks, bizarre dialog boxes pop up demanding extra administrator rights, even though the machine only has one user, which was configured without a password.

The system tends to be sluggish, even with 1 GB of RAM and a modern dual-core CPU. Although Vista is supposed to be virus-proof, the system shipped with McAfee firewall and virus protection software (which I uninstalled, along with everything else that seemed superfluous, in an attempt to boost the machine’s responsiveness).

Summary: So far inferior in every way to Windows XP.

[Update: I copied a bunch of Canon RAW files from an EOS 5D, which has been out for two years, onto the Vista machine. Unlike my patched XP machine, which has a Microsoft extension to be able to show thumbnails from RAW photos, the Vista machine treats these as an unknown file type and cannot show thumbnails in the Windows Explorer. Yet another disappointment…]

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Linear Air accepted their first Eclipse Jet, which arrived yesterday at Hanscom, creating quite a crowd despite its location on the East Ramp inside the Air Force Base.

The pilots reported achieving a 700 n.m. range at high-speed cruise with a standard IFR reserve and a clearance to 27,000′. They described the interior noise level as extremely quiet (measurements to follow; I have lent one of them a sound level meter). As far as I could tell, there are no provisions for noise-canceling headsets. The plane has only the standard headset jacks, not a LEMO connector for Bose nor, as far as I could tell from skimming the documentation, tip-power for a Sennheiser.

Linear Air was kind enough to let me sit in the aircraft. The front seat is very comfortable for me (6′ tall), with pretty good visibility. The one really off note in the front seats is a backup attitude indicator that has been stuck on top of the pilot’s side glare shield, partly blocking the view. Supposedly, this will be removed as the avionics suite gets additional certifications.

There are four seats in the back, plus a small baggage area behind the last two rooms. With one back seat moved all the way forward and the far back seat moved all the way back, I was able to sit in the far back seat with my knees brushing the magazine holder of the seat in front. If I owned the airplane, I would remove two of the seats and say “Here is my four-seat 700 n.m. very quiet very capable airplane”.

Fit and finish is excellent throughout.

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Folks:

I have drafted “A photographer’s guide to Botswana” and would appreciate corrections, suggestions, etc. (I know that the article isn’t comprehensive, of course, but one purpose of putting an intro on a site such as photo.net is that it gives true experts a place to park their knowledge via the comment link at the bottom.)

Thanks,

Philip

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I would be interested in comments on http://philip.greenspun.com/research/solar-magnitude-forum

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