Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Apple has released a new iPod that is supposed to set the world, and its stock, on fire.  This is the video-capable iPod, a 30 GB version of which will be available for $299.  Let’s compare this to the Creative Zen Vision, which came out last month.

• Apple:  2.5″ screen, 320×240 pixels of resolution, 5 ounces, batteries stuck inside the case, $299 at amazon, shipping soon?
  
• Creative: 3.7″ screen, 640×480 pixels, 8.4 ounces, removable batteries, $399 at amazon, in-stock now

For photographers who want to show off and video fans who just love their TV, the Creative seems like a better value due to its vastly bigger screen and higher resolution.  What do folks think?  Will adding video to the iPod be any more significant than adding video capture capability has been to little point-and-shoot digicams or cell phones?

Personally I have always preferred the user interface of the Creative MP3 jukeboxes, which have more buttons than their Apple counterparts, and don’t rely on a control wheel so much.  Creative’s desktop PC software was rather clunky last I tried it (two years ago) and I prefer simply to sync the player using Windows Media Player.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/whole-house-music is my latest consumerism article.  Please comment!

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Gregory Olsen has returned to Earth.  Folks and the media didn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to the welfare of this 60-year-old private citizen during his ten-day space odyssey.  To me this is additional support for my proposal of nearly two years ago (http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/11/18) in which I suggested that human space flight be turned over to private adventurers like Mr. Olsen so that we don’t have the tragic spectacle of young government employees getting killed in the line of duty.  Olsen’s biography makes it apparent that he is as qualified to do scientific experiments as anyone that has ever ridden on a NASA flight.

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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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