Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

From the June 2007 AOPA Pilot:  Orville Wright quit high school after junior year.  Wilbur finished four years of high school, but did not receive a diploma.  Bill Lear (Learjet) also did not graduate from high school.  Texas has more public-use airports than any other state, with 389 airports.   Alaska is second with 312, then California with 263.

I spent part of today flying with a young U.S. Air Force officer.  She has about 100 hours of airplane time and is completing an instrument rating.  I introduced her to the Robinson R22 and she didn’t do anything clumsy or dangerous.  For that I am very grateful.  It is such a pleasure to teach people who are good learners and good pilots.  You don’t have to work hard.  You don’t get scared.  You pat yourself on the back at the end of the day and call yourself a great teacher, taking credit for their inherently good flying skills and intuition.

Plan:  Fly the R44 to the E 34th heliport in Manhattan on Thursday, dropping off a friend for a business meeting.

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More than three years ago, I started a thread here on the ideal laptop configuration: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/02/14/ideal-laptop-configuration/

What has changed in three years?  Apparently not that much in the hard drive realm.  I wanted 120 GB and this is apparently still a stretch (though bizarrely some Toshiba models (A205?) claim either to have a 200 GB drive in them or two hard drives plus a DVD drive and yet they are not especially heavy).

What do I want?  Mostly the same things:

• Windows operating system (aviation software is Windows-only and, without that software to keep databases up to date, a plane will become illegal for instrument flight)
• Medium-sized display, 14- or 15-inches (with medium resolution; I don’t want to be straining my eyes on tiny fonts)
• TrackPoint pointing stick or similar (the nub in the middle of the IBM Thinkpad; I can’t use a trackpad)
• big hard drive(s) for storing digital photos
• built-in socket for CF cards and possibly SD and other cards
• built-in Webcam and microphone for video/audio conferencing
• reasonable quality playback of DVDs, ideally from the built-in speakers
• built-in mobile phone-based Internet radio (my pet idea of having a universal wireless 802.11 network in the U.S. is apparently not going to happen within my lifetime)

What are the best laptops on the market that meet most of these specs?  As far as I have seen, Toshiba is the only company that claims outsized hard drive capacity.  Dell and Lenovo are the two with pointing sticks.  The built-in Webcam/microphone idea does not seem to have become universal.

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Seven years ago, I bought a bunch of Windows NT machines called Gateway Profiles. Imagine the display of a laptop computer, stuck on a deskstand, and thickened with a CD-ROM drive, CPU board, and hard disk. You plugged a keyboard into the back and had yourself a very compact machine that yet had (1) the screen at the right height for desktop use, and (2) the full-size keyboard of your choice.

What is the 2007 equivalent of the Gateway Profile? I’m looking for something to stick in a corner of the helicopter hangar, to use Firefox/gmail in between flights.  The closest thing that I could find was the Apple iMac, and it seems like a very poor value (a clunky Dell desktop with 1 GB of RAM and 22″ LCD monitor is $520; an iMac with 1GB of RAM and 24″ display is 4X the price at $2000).

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Weekend conversation #1:  A naturalized American citizen talks about how a visit to Gaza made her hate Israelis for being responsible for the straitened circumstances of Palestinians and now she took every opportunity to criticize the Israeli government, which she saw as exceptionally evil.  I pointed out that the U.S. government had been a lot harsher to anyone who had ever borne arms against it.  There aren’t many in-person opportunities to feel sorry for those who have borne arms against the U.S. and are living in squalor because most of them are dead (or living in cages in Guantanamo).

Weekend conversation #2:  A forty-something mother of three recounts her recent citizenship interview and ceremony.  She is asked “Would you be willing to bear arms to defend the United States?”  Her secret thoughts ran more to escape with her children rather than standing and fighting, but she tried to come up with a sufficiently belligerent response to satisfy the officials.

If we decry violence in our society, why do we insist on the willingness to carry out violence as a condition of citizenship for new Americans?

[Note:  Personally I was a little offended that a new citizen wouldn’t be willing to shoulder any military burden if the barbarians were at the gate.  I would go to war if asked, regardless of the futility of the war, because I don’t see my own skin as more worthy of preservation than my fellow Americans, I don’t think that someone else should go in my place, and I don’t have any power to stop our government from conducting the war.]

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Folks:

My T-Mobile MDA, which was much unloved for its reliance on the stylus, seems to have failed.  Now I would like to solicit opinions on the best T-Mobile phone that has as many of the following features as possible…

• syncs street addresses as well as phone numbers from Microsoft Outlook (requirement)
• full keyboard for text/email
• flip phone (open to answer; close to hang up; this one seems very tough to find lately)
• good Web browser, ideally the capability of running Java so that I can run the Gmail mobile client
• Bluetooth

Thanks.

[Resolution:  I bought a Motorola KRAZR, which seemed like the least bad current T-Mobile offering.  It works pretty well as a phone (flip open to answer; flip close to hang up!).  To sync it to my Outlook contacts and calendar required spending about $40 on extra software (a 100 MB download; more software than was probably required to run all the U.S. airlines circa 1985).  The sync software did a moderately poor job, leaving out birthdays (recurring events) and leaving out contacts that were pure businesses with no person’s name attached.  The calendar function isn’t very useful.  One gets reminders of imminent events but I can’t find a way to see “what am I doing tomorrow?”  Google’s gmail Java download doesn’t seem to work, but maybe that is because I don’t have the right T-Mobile data plan (still recovering from paying them $1.50/minute for phone calls made/received in Southern Africa).  Looking up contacts is cumbersome compared to the Microsoft phone software.  If you sort your contacts by first name, you can only look people up by first name.  If you key in a last name, the software won’t find the contact.  Maybe there is hope for Apple’s iPhone, mostly thanks to the sloppy engineering of the incumbents.]

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I spent the weekend with 25 working photojournalists.  One interesting tidbit is that nearly all were using the Canon 5D camera body.  The extra ruggedness and resolution of the Canon 1Ds were apparently not sufficiently useful to justify the extra weight and cost.  Nikon was barely mentioned.

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My friend here in California has Talk of the Devil, Encounters with Seven Dictators by Riccardo Orizio.  The first interview is with Idi Amin.  Orizio reminds us that Amin sent a letter to Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis:  “When the stability of a nation is in danger, the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of the opposition.”

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One of the things that I often do with Windows is “switch users”.  This leaves all of my applications open and running, e.g., ssh terminal windows to Unix machines and Adobe Photoshop running a script, while allowing someone else to use the computer for a few minutes.  Then I “switch users” back and return to my state.

How does one do this on the Macintosh?  If you use the logout command to log out User A, it seems to close all of the applications by default.  So after User B is done, User A has to spend 5-10 minutes reopening applications, documents, and connections.

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I’m out here in California at a friend’s house. I did not bring a computer. I want to give a presentation in a room with no Internet access. Everything that I want to show is a Web page.

How I would do this with a Windows machine: In MSIE, bookmark the pages of interest and click the “make available for viewing offline”. Time consumed: two clicks per page, one to bookmark and one to check the offline box.

Problem: Everyone out here has Macintoshes. They spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on how greatly superior their computer is to anything that ever came out of Microsoft. Yet none of these hip sophisticated computing geniuses has any idea how to do what you can do with Windows, i.e., make a Web page available offline. Is it so much easier to use their computer than to use a Windows machine that they haven’t bothered to learn to use the Macintosh OS? Or is the Macintosh/Safari/Firefox/whatever incapable of doing what Windows/MSIE can do?

What should I do?

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