Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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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I spent Sunday attending the wedding of two friends.  Generally the idea of being trapped inside a hotel conference room on a fine summer’s day fills me with horror.  In this case, however, the wedding had some cultural interest because the groom was Korean-American and the bride Chinese-American.  One big difference was the level of participation of the parents.  They came right up to the front and, before any vows were exchange between bride and groom, each of the young people promised to love and honor his or her in-laws.  Another difference was the level of intelligence and education in the room.  Asian-Americans are our most discriminated-against ethnic group.  They have a tough time breaking into the Old White Guys’clubs and golf games.  They are officially discriminated against by universities and government because they aren’t the right kind of minority.  How do Asians respond?  Apparently by studying and working like demons.  A person at the reception who attended an Ivy League college, earned an M.D. or Ph.D., and was a good enough violinist to play in a symphony orchestra would have been average.  The Taiwanese-American woman officiating had an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT.  Twenty more years of Affirmative Action and we will have effectively bred a super-race of Asian-Americans.

My favorite part of the wedding was the groom’s mother’s toast.  She recounted how, not having ever been introduced to a girlfriend, she sat her son down and said “I’m your mother.  I will accept whatever you tell me, even if it is difficult.  Just tell me the truth:  Are you gay?”  Thanks, Mom.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer details an idea for giving a Joe Consumer the illusion that his smartphone is his only computer but still providing him with 99 percent of the function of a home PC that would otherwise need to be separately administered, upgraded, etc.

Comments would be appreciated as I’m going to talk about this at Xerox PARC in a month or so.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20050922/tc_pcworld/122653 is a fun story for former Treo owners such as myself.  I had about 10 Treos, each of which suffered a catastrophic hardware failure after about two months.  I gave up when they stopped replacing them under warranty.  I sorely miss the keyboard but my Motorola/WinXP phone has been working great for about a year.

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This has been my week of comedy shows.  At the Piper Malibu and Meridian Owner’s and Pilot’s Association annual convention we were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear from Norm Macdonald and Victoria Jackson, Saturday Night Live alums.  Tonight it was a younger generation at Harvard Square’s Comedy Studio (upstairs from the infamous Hong Kong restaurant).  Out of the nine acts featured by comic/emcee Dan Sally, the clear standouts were Rebecca Anderson’s impersonations and Matt Soni’s stage presence.  The worst was oldster Gary Sohmers, a public TV junk collector, who said that the secret of happiness was to surround oneself with the stuff of one’s childhood and to hate George W. Bush.  To my mind, Sohmers’s only redeeming feature was his graying ponytail, which made him resemble the television producer driving in his Jaguar during the opening scene of the movie Intolerable Cruelty (seen with Spanish subtitles in Bariloche, Argentina).

I’m parking this posting here so that I can come back five years from now and say that I saw Rebecca Anderson and Matt Soni back before they were famous.

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Done with my CFII (checkride was yesterday; hot, bumpy, surface wind gusts to 24 knots, but I passed and now can teach Angelina Jolie her instrument rating), I jacked into the World Wide Cybernet for the first time in awhile and found the following email from a reader of http://philip.greenspun.com:

Are you Philip Greenspun? Do you perform as Bonkers the Clown?
What city are you in?

John Rain – Dallas, TX

Perhaps it is time to revise my personal site.

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/09/08/report_rates_boston_most_expensive_city/ says the following:

Propelled largely by high housing costs, Boston is now the most expensive metropolitan area in the country, outpacing Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and even New York City, according to a report that will be released today.

The report found that last year, a family of four living in the Boston area needed $64,656 to cover its basic needs. This was $6,000 more than in New York City, and about $7,000 more than in San Francisco. Living expenses, which include healthcare, child care, and other basic needs, were $44,000 or less in Austin, Texas; Chicago; Miami; and Raleigh, N.C.

The third annual ”Housing Report Card,” produced by the Boston Foundation and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, concludes that even an uptick in housing production could not halt the relentless climb of Greater Boston’s housing prices, which are increasing far more rapidly than are wages.

Should we be concerned that housing prices are so high?  In some ways it is depressing that government here is so restrictive that even rich people are forced to live in 120-year-old wooden slums.  In Cambridge, for example, it is illegal to tear down an old structure and rebuild something decent of the same size; the new house would have to conform to modern zoning setbacks and height restrictions so that if you tore down the typical 2-family or 3-family 4500 square foot slum you’d only be able to build a dollhouse to replace it.  On the other hand, perhaps we should feel good that people love it here so much they are willing to pay $2500 per month for a small apartment.  On the third hand, maybe it is only because most of the rest of the country has become such a sprawl-ridden wasteland that Boston seems comparatively attractive.

I was driving up Route 1A the other night to visit a friend in Marblehead.  The route goes past wooden slums hard by the highway all through Everett, Revere, and Lynn.  One’s gut feeling about such an apartment is “they would have to pay me to live here”, especially since the daily traffic jams getting in or out of the slum are horrific.  Yet compared to the rest of the country these apartments rent and the slum houses sell for far more than a nice comfortable place of equivalent square footage almost anywhere else in the U.S.  I guess I’m not surprised that people would be willing to pay a premium to live in beautiful Back Bay or among the intelligent wanderers of Harvard Square but why are the prices in the slums of Everett so high?

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