Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend in Silicon Valley sent me this article on career choices for engineers in the U.S.

[If you’re looking to transition out of coding you might consider opening a helicopter flight school in Edmonton.  The economy here is booming due to the high price of oil (Alberta actually has more petroleum reserves than Saudi Arabia but they require some work to extract, unlike in the Persian Gulf).  There is one CFI here with a Robinson R22.  He charges CAD$500 per hour!  The price in the U.S. is closer to USD$200 or only about half.]

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Quick trip update for friends and family…  The trip to Edmonton was uneventful except for some strong headwinds in flight (almost 40 knots) and gusty surface winds (20 knots gusting 25 was typical for most of the landings from Winnipeg and onward).  Jeff Foster, the Cirrus authorized service guy here in Edmonton, turned out to be quite the craftsman like a lot of aviation mechanics.  The plane seems to be holding up very nicely after 60 hours on the clock.

The weather forecast for the next couple of days is pretty good so Alex and I should be able to make it to Yellowknife and Inuvik as planned.  I booked the last dog-friendly room in Yellowknife a few hours ago and if we can’t find one in Inuvik we’ll just pitch the tent next to the airplane and eat granola bars (if living out of one’s car is a badge of honorable poverty among singer/songwriters what can one say about living out of an airplane?).

Nearly everyone in Canada has asked about Alex.  Aside from the dog-curiosity the main difference between a Canadian city and a U.S. city seems to be that the Canadians have groups of working-age men hanging around downtown.  Unlike the U.S. the Canadians have a welfare system for men of working age and furthermore that welfare system has no time limits.  So a lot of guys choose to let others pick up the slack while they hang with their buddies and drink beer.

Aviation here is fairly similar to the U.S. but slightly less formal and much less busy.  One can listen to an MP3 track all the way through on a Center frequency before being interrupted by a radio call from an airliner checking in.  At the aviation museum here in Edmonton one of the guides talked about how crazy busy the Edmonton airport was during WWII when they were doing training here and also ferrying 8000 planes over to the Russians.  “We had 850 operations [takeoffs and landings] one day during the peak!” he noted.  For comparison Logan airport in Boston has 2000 operations per day and Teterboro, NJ, a NYC-area airport for private planes, has nearly 600 per day.

I will be spending the rest of the night spraying permethrin into my clothing to repel the mosquitoes and other nasty bugs up there in the NWT.

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I’ve written a primer for people buying a digital SLR camera system and would like feedback on how this could be improved before linking it from my main site.  Please comment!  Thanks in advance.

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The students whom I met during a brief stop at University of Wisconsin in Madison seemed to have chosen majors that aren’t very useful vocationally.  My friends who teach liberal arts at high-tuition schools in the Boston area report that their students are very focussed on getting into a high-paying career with an MBA or a law degree.  Two girls at U. of W. who stopped me to ask about Alex seemed like good examples of what happens when tuition is only around $3000/semester (in-state).  One was majoring in philosophy and headed for a Ph.D. program in philosophy.  The other was in women’s studies and headed for graduate school at UCLA in women’s studies.

Were these a statistical anomaly or is there a correlation between low tuition and students pursuing the intellectual life?

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Relaxing in the dog-friendly downtown Sheraton Winnipeg, I read this article from Technology Review about venture capital. 

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This is a must read:  “We’re looking for a few boring dorks; the engineer shortage made simple.”

[Forwarded to me by an MIT faculty member who probably wishes to remain anonymous.  Posted from the delightful FBO in hip lakeside Madison, Wisconsin (UW is not a “tech dork mill”), about to leave for Winnipeg.]

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Some friends and I are gathering at Children’s Hospital at 5:30 pm to donate blood.  I thought I’d invite local readers of this blog to show up as well.  The center tends to be less busy after 4 pm and you can walk in any time up until around 6:30 pm (they close at 7 and the process takes about 30 minutes).  You get free parking in the Children’s garage (across the street), a T-shirt, and name-brand snacks.  The technicians at Children’s are much more skilled than the Red Cross staff (i.e., you won’t have holes in your arms) and the environment is much more pleasant than a university blood drive.  Finally this saves Children’s Hospital from having to pay the Red Cross $200 for a pint of blood and cuts out a lot of middlemen.

[Remember that having lived for extended periods of time in England or other mad-cow areas is disqualifying as is having been to a malarial region in the last year (even places you might not think of as malarial, such as rural China).  Statistical risk factors for HIV infection are also disqualifying.  Call the number listed on http://www.childrenshospital.org/help/donate.html if you’re in doubt.]

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A business-minded friend of mine wanted a Web site with a lot of database-backed features, such as user registration, classified postings, auction bids, a user reputation system, etc.  A simplified eBay.  She also needed all the graphic design done.  She posted her specs on www.rentacoder.com and the numbers to implement this system came back at around $450 for the entire job, including the graphic design.  The five bids all came back fairly close to $450 from programmers in Bangalore, Romania, and Canada(!).  She put the project on hold for reasons unrelated to implementation so we don’t know how it would have worked out.

Has anyone used rentacoder?  I wonder if the undergrad CS majors one sees posting SQL puzzles and Lisp problems on USENET are going to start.  (Though if they spent enough time on rentacoder.com perhaps they would change their major eventually.)

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As I plan and pack up for Alaska I have had a couple of offers from guys who wanted to come with me from Boston to Anchorage (we leave Wednesday).  It turns out that the Cirrus SR20 is not that practical for long trips unless you are either very thin or totally friendless.  Full fuel is necessary for some of the long legs in the remote regions of Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories where airports are widely separated and airports that sell fuel are uncommon–mostly you only get fuel at airports that are accessible by road or ship.  With full fuel my old Diamond Star would carry 570 pounds.  The Cirrus has a longer range but the penalty is that it only holds 520 pounds fully fueled and its performance at gross weight is marginal on warm days or at high elevations.  You need a lot of runway and to make sure that you don’t need to outclimb any terrain.

The airplane isn’t any fun without Alex in the back seat.  Alex needs his Science Diet Nature’s Best, which isn’t widely available, plus some other accessories.  Dog+food is about 100 lbs. total.  The plane needs a towbar, canopy cover, and tie-down ropes at 20 lbs.  For navigation one needs paper charts and approach plates for a total of at least 20 lbs.  Survival equipment is required by statute (until 2000 or so the kit was required include a gun and ammunition) and a full tent, mattress pad, and sleeping bag is really a good idea for forced landings as well as impromptu camping when hotels are full or not dog-friendly.  That’s about 35 lbs. together.  You want some electronics in the airplane, such as headsets, EPIRB (the emergency locator transmitter that Cirrus includes in the airframe is an ancient 121.5 MHz design, which is not very effective for getting rescued), and maybe a little Iridium phone.  That’s maybe 10 lbs. put together.  If I want to take a camera and some clothing and my 195 lb. carcass it looks as though I will have only about 100 lbs. left over for a human passenger.  If I want to take a little folding bike that comes down to 70 lbs. spare capacity.

How does a minivan compare?  A 2005 Toyota Sienna has a “curb weight” of 4120 lbs., 2000 lbs. more than the Cirrus.  Its gross vehicle weight is 5690 for a “payload” of 1570 (the curb weight includes full fuel).

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On Friday my friend Rich asked for a ride up to the Wiscasset airport (KIWI) on the central Maine coast.  He wanted to take his dad and I had already arranged to practice approaches with a CFI buddy so it was fortunate that the Cirrus had only “tab fuel” on board (26 gallons, good for 2.3 hours).  It was an uneventful instrument flight up towards Portland, mostly on top of a layer of clouds at 2500′.  Once on the ground at Wicked Good Aviation we petted the big Black Lab and his 6-month-old puppy friend then borrowed the “courtesy car”, an old Cadillac that would have been called a gas-guzzler until the SUV came along and demonstrated that 18 mpg is not as low as a family car can go.  After chatting with the contractors who are fixing up a house on the peninsula, Rich said “let’s take the boat over across the cove to a restaurant.”  We ferried ourselves out to the boat’s mooring via canoe and had an uneventful trip to and from the restaurant, which is next to an old Civil War-era fort at the mouth of the Kennebec River.  At the end of the boat ride we had to ferry ourselves back from the mooring about 20′ to the beach via the canoe.  I got out on the beach and watched as Rich and my CFI buddy went back to pick up Rich’s dad.  As soon as he stepped from the boat into the canoe the canoe flipped over, dumping everyone and everything into the salt water.

What do three average Americans carry when they are in a boat these days?  Cell phones, digital cameras, etc.  In the 1950s the total cost of this incident would have been a little time to let the clothing and wallet dry.  On Friday the total cost of the electronic items destroyed was closer to $5000.

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