Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A female friend of mine worked in Afghanistan for eight months and got friendly with the locals.  One of the things that men with extra cash like to do over there is have sex with boys, usually around 14 years of age.  One of the ways in which they showed hospitality to my friend was by offering her the services of their boy toys.  Afghanistan being a traditional Islamic society in which women are the property of either their father or their husband, these guys had no knowledge of what an adult woman would choose for herself.  They assumed that an adult woman with free will would jump at the chance to have sex with a 14-year-old boy and were surprised when my friend turned down their gracious offers.

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Is there among the readers a Solaris sysadmin expert in the Boston area?  The ancient E450 server that ran http://philip.greenspun.com and part of photo.net suffered a system drive failure last week.  This was the only unmirrored disk, ironically enough.  A week-old backup of the server root has been loaded onto a GNU/Linux system and the site is back up.  The guys running photo.net, however, can’t find a Solaris 7 media kit and can’t get the E450 to boot from a CD-ROM.  Is there anyone who reads this Weblog who might have the right mental and physical stuff for booting up the E450 and mounting the working disk drives in read-only mode?  The server is in Central Square, Cambridge.  Your potential reward:  everlasting gratitude, public glory (if you want it), and dinner in Central Square.

[Epilogue:  This posting brought a lot of heroes out of the net/woodwork!  The prize goes to Rob Isaac of Auckland, NZ, who offered to FedEx a CD-ROM and any required chassis pieces, up to and including a fresh SCSI CD-ROM drive.  The photo.net guys were finally able to net boot the E450 from one of the new Linux machines.  So thanks to everyone who commented or sent email.]

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Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio’s book, Hungry Planet, is now available from amazon.com.  I just bought copies for my young nephews and cousins.  Highly recommended for fans of photography and people interested in geography and world cultures.

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As of today I am signed up as a flight instructor at one of Boston’s most active flight schools:  East Coast Aero Club (www.ecas.com).  I’ll be doing primary instruction in the Diamond Katana aircraft and perhaps some of the 1999 Piper Warriors (almost brand-new by flight school standards and equipped with GPS).  I’ll also be doing one- and two-week cross-country instrument training trips, mostly with folks who have their own airplanes.

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Michael Bloomberg is up for reelection.  I asked a friend who runs a non-profit organization down in Manhattan whether Mr. Bloomberg had done a good job as mayor.  She works intimately with the NYC public schools.  “Before Bloomberg, at least 40 percent of the school budget was pure waste.  Now it is down to 25 percent.  So I’d say that he is doing a pretty good job.”

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At a dinner party the other night the person sitting next to me asked how I knew our hostess, Lisa.  I told her that I refused to answer on the grounds that Lisa and I had known each other for 15 years and there was no possible answer that would be interesting or significant against that background of friendship.

A dispute ensued over whether or not asking “How do you know X?” is a lame conversation-stalling question and this dispute came up again at a dinner the next night.  I stuck to my guns that there was nothing I could have said that anyone at the party would have cared to hear.  Jin’s idea for a response that would pique folks’ interest, despite the intervening decades:  “We were college roommates, back when she was a man.”

(For the curious:  Lisa was friends with one of my friends from MIT and we would often see each other at his house.  Subsequently we’ve both lived in and around Cambridge.  Glad you asked?)

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Warning:  this posting is for airplane nerds and no attempt has been made to explain jargon.

I was teaching an instrument student yesterday and we happened upon the Columbia (formerly Lancair) sales guy at Pease in NH. He took both of us up for a one-hour demo flight in the 400, a fire-breathing turbocharged rocket ship of a plane (same engine as an older Piper Malibu, basically, but pulling a narrow 4-seater instead of a fairly large 6-seat cabin).

Bad: the seat back angle is not adjustable in flight so you can’t vary it during a 4-hour leg. The speed brakes are controlled by a tiny little switch and I can’t remember how prominent the warning light was that indicates that they are deployed. The interior is a bit cramped compared to a Cirrus but at least as spacious as a Diamond DA40 or C172. The doors seem more fragile than the Cirrus G2 doors.

Good: aileron trim is provided but the autopilot does not use it to fly the airplane, unlike with a Cirrus (ergo, when you take the plane back from a screwed-up autopilot you don’t run the risk of having a plane that is trimmed for a 30-degree bank); blistering speed (the 400 will supposedly true out at 230 knots up at FL250); side stick (not yoke) and relatively easy hand-flying.

Flying: When you’re indicating 160+ knots the Columbia feels a bit heavy to hand-fly because of the high airloads. I did two landings, both of which were smooth and nearly full-stall. The second landing probably consumed less than 1500′ of runway with moderate braking.  The plane has good control into a full stall though a wing will drop fairly violently in the end if you’re not vigilant with the rudder.

I had never considered Lancair/Columbia to be a legitimate competitor because their production volume was so small but now they are making roughly one airplane per day (250/year?).

Summary: The Cirrus is a better passenger’s airplane. The Columbia is a better pilot’s airplane, especially if you are going to hand-fly.

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I need a place to jot down a few New York stories…

A friend of a friend was preparing a new restaurant. He hired a couple of carpenters to do some woodworking. They were almost done when two huge goons showed up and noted that they weren’t members of the union. If the restaurant owner didn’t have them dismantle the work that had been done so far and hire union replacements, the goons threatened to make life so unpleasant for patrons that the restaurant would go bankrupt. The woodwork was torn out and some union carpenters were hired to redo the work at triple the original cost.

The same restaurant owner shopped around for a cook. He found a guy at a local Italian restaurant with a reputation for patronage by the Mafia. The cook agreed to leave the Italian place and come work at the new restaurant. Shortly thereafter he was found in an alley having been beaten by guys wielding baseball bats. His leg was broken and he was told that he shouldn’t consider changing jobs.

I visited my friend Matthew. His mom had just gotten some dark chocolate drops in the mail. I was eating one and his Labrador Retriever was begging. Matthew’s wife cautioned me not to share even a half drop: “chocolate is poison for dogs.” We all left the apartment. I bought some handmade chocolates at Martine’s on the 6th floor of Bloomingdale’s (59th and Lex). Matthew and I met at the Guggenheim where I absent-mindedly left the b-dale’s bag on a shelf for 15 minutes. When I returned, it was gone and it was never turned into the Lost and Found. Mourning the loss of our gourmet chocolates we found out that while we were all out the Lab had gotten up on a table and consumed an entire 1.5-lb. bag of dark chocolate drops. Perhaps four hours after the consumption, the 60 lb. dog was made to vomit up the offending material and she suffered no symptoms of ill health.

A different friend has a girlfriend who likes to ask him for money to take cabs. His response: “Why would you want to take a taxi when you can ride a $10 billion subway?”

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One thing about visiting Manhattan is that it puts one into direct contact with a lot of people who make their living being creative. One friend is a working classical and jazz composer and I asked him why he uses Windows. “The best program for composition, especially for opera, is Sibelius, and for the first couple of years there was no Macintosh version so I switched to Windows and now I know how to use it.” As for architects, the perennial choice of Hollywood for a cool character’s occupation (cf. “One-Hour Photo”), it turns out that they all use AutoCAD. AutoCAD is a Windows-only application and therefore young architects are Windows users.

Most Macintosh users, of course, only need basic email, Web browsing, and word processing. But a big part of Apple’s premium price depends on the perception that Macintosh users are somehow more creative. How long can this last given that people who actually ARE creative have seemingly all switched to Windows?

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I came down here to Manhattan mostly to see friends but ended up walking and talking our way through a handful of art museums and galleries. Here’s a report: Monday: Guggenheim Russia! show. Very exciting with 600 years of unfamiliar incredibly skilled artists. Save yourself the hassle and cost of getting a Russian visa and the trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Tuesday: Metropolitan Museum. The blockbuster shows have all closed but the Prague show is kind of nice for fans of medieval art. Wednesday: Chelsea Galleries. Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of experimental utopias across the U.S. were competent and the accompanying texts were riveting (Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th). Andy Denzler’s paintings of the Bush family and associates at the Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, 531 W. 25th Street, merit a visit, especially for the joyful and strange portrait of the twin daughters. Adam Cvijanovic’s murals at Bellwether, 134 Tenth Ave (18th), win the award for lowest cost per square foot ($75,000 for a huge Tyvek three-wall installation; peel her off and take her home!). Sol Le Witt brings up the other end of the value spectrum with some $45,000 pieces that you could execute yourself if you had access to some scrap metal and/or paint and an art student. The most disappointing art were photographs of strippers on poles by Philip-Lorca diCorcia at the Pace gallery (534 W. 25th if you want to see what others are paying $45,000 to own). Gary Winogrand did some great photos inside strip clubs, concentrating on the sad patrons. His pictures were available in large editions and were not expensive. DiCorcia’s photos are taken when the strip clubs were closed so there isn’t anything to look at besides a woman and a pole. They aren’t that different from what a working photojournalist would probably capture if given an hour inside a strip joint and told “take a picture of a woman hanging from a pole.”

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