gulley

Dispatches from the front lines of air travel

Allow me to encourage you never to fly Air France. I should be on my way to Paris right now, but after a five hour delay, they cancelled my flight. It was a beautiful roller-coaster ride of almost scripted drama: The plane has a broken part. They found a spare replacement part! It’s not in Boston. It just arrived from Minneapolis! They’re not authorized to install it. The authorities in Paris approved the installation! We have to re-file our flight plan. We’re ten minutes away from take-off! They were working on last minute paperwork. We were so close. It was the nearest run thing you ever saw. But then… the crew exceeded their time-on-duty limits and BOOM! it’s everybody out of the pool.

Cancelling an international flight is not as simple as you might think. The alimentary canal at departure time is designed to push things onto the plane, not off of it. We had already been cleared through customs, and since we were the last flight of the day, there was no “arrival” staff in place to receive us. Reverse peristalsis is never pretty.

After picking up luggage, we had to suffer the indignity of another long snaking queue to reconstruct our shattered flight plans. After another hour of moving nowhere and getting no information, I pulled the plug and went home.

I draw from this experience two and a half valuable lessons which, generously, I now will share.

Lesson 1. Don’t fly on Air France.
Lesson 2. Don’t fly on Air France on Bastille Day (see also Lesson 1).

I realize these two lessons overlap somewhat, but at this moment I feel the point is worth emphasizing. Also, my editor is after me to boost my content. As for the remaining half lesson, don’t use the iPhone version of WordPress. I wrote the first version of this on an iPhone and then lost it when I tried to post. That sort of day, I suppose.

Here endeth the whining. Over and out from Logan International Airport.

Do you know where your HAL.DLL is?

Okay, I’m going to talk about something boring, because it’s distressing me and there’s a small possibility that the clever, good-looking sort of person that reads my blog might be able to help. I will try to make the story interesting, but you and I both know that what I’m really doing is BEGGING FOR FREE TECHNICAL SUPPORT.

The story starts with some educational software for my son. He got a special DynaVox computer for use at home (it was a loaner; we’ve since returned it). I installed some software on my computer (OS = Windows XP Professional) to help move files to the DynaVox. I should say I TRIED to install some software. The installer ran and ran, but then it stopped doing anything obvious. I now believe that installer was squatting on my hard drive and taking a massive poop, but I can’t prove that. Anyway, my machine was locked up, and after I rebooted I met a black screen emblazoned with this cheery message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32HAL.DLL.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Gosh! Thanks for the tip, helpful Windows boot program! But how do I do that?

After making unhappy noises, I used my wife’s computer to find a very helpful page at About.com. Their advice was cogent, concise, and effective. But it only works once, and then I’m back to square one. I’m able to boot successfully off my Windows CD-ROM, but every single time I reboot my PC, it goes all wobbly in the knees, mutters something about the DynaVox, and forgets its HAL.DLL all over again. It also forgets its BOOT.INI file, even when I create one and put it in the right place. I can boot my machine consistently; it just takes five minutes worth of fiddling. I put on 80s music and try to pretend I have moved back to a time when giant slow-moving computers roamed the earth.

To sum up, it appears that something between the Windows down-shutting and the Windows up-starting actively removes my HAL.DLL and BOOT.INI files. They are being sucked into a malevolent, dark vortex. Is there an incantation or small sacrificial animal that can help me?

And now my story is done. As expected, the telling was therapeutic, even if nothing comes of it. Good evening.

SPECIAL NOTE: Mac users, please do not taunt the bitter Windows user. He is grumpy and may bite.

ALSO: Yes, I ran diagnostics on my hard drive to make sure it wasn’t stupid.

UPDATE: The problem is solved at last. Many thanks to everyone who offered a kind and helpful word, and especially to my friend Zain who figured out the right Google incantation: boot.ini disappears reboot deshil holles eamus! My apologies to the good people at DynaVox. They still have a crappy installer, but it appears the blame for my vanishing BOOT.INI file must go to the Ask Toolbar which I installed that same weekend. I removed it last night, and my troubles are at an end. I feel certain that my life will go perfectly from this day forward.

Virusworld

In the book Genome, author Matt Ridley starts chapter four like so:

Open any catalogue of the human genome and you will be confronted not with a list of human potentialities, but a list of diseases, mostly ones named after pairs of obscure central-European doctors. This gene causes Niemann-Pick disease; that one causes Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. The impression given is that genes are there to cause disease.

As you might suspect, Ridley is at pains to point out that genes do not cause disease. At least they don’t cause disease any more than, say, hearts cause heart attacks. But we tend to notice genes when they fail in spectacular ways.

viruses

When it comes to viruses, we have to admit that they often do cause disease. But of all the viruses out there, very few are interested in making us sick. And since they surround us in such a thick cloud, they can perform an under-appreciated role: gene libraries. They are busy little day traders, moving their stock of DNA and RNA in and out of cells all day long. As such, they’re in a good position to acquire, store, and transfer useful genetic knowledge that bigger folk might have written off. Like bacteria, they take a beating for causing various diseases without getting any compensating credit for their health-giving talents and, I think you’ll agree, good looks.

One of the fun things about viruses is that, being small, it’s relatively easy to take their (virtual) snapshots. Virusworld, based at the University of Wisconsin, keeps a regular family photo album of virus pictures. There are some real lookers in the bunch. Check out the handsome reovirus core. And the Norwalk virus that ruined your aunt’s last cruise is a charmer up close. We have such a comprehensive three-dimensional understanding of some viruses by now that we can print out solid copies of them, like this fist-sized version of the pariacoto virus. I find it amusing that this virus has caused us to print out giant versions of itself.

Tools (and talent)

I love a good tools talk. You listen to the great ones talk about the tools and techniques they use to get through the day, and by the end of it you’re inspired to go out and buy some software or some special Sakura pens and a Moleskine notebook or something like that. At its most delusional, this kind of thinking will convince you that you can play like Michael if you can just get a pair of those shoes. At the shallow end of the pool your thinking runs more like this: if I own that guitar, at least it won’t be the tool that stops me from being another Clapton.

I have a strong memory from years ago of cleaning up after a raucous party. A really talented pianist had played my piano, and the sounds it made for him astonished me. Long after the guests had left, I remember staring at that piano and thinking, that can’t be the same machine I play. It was surprised and hurt by my long accusing glare. It knew what I was thinking: why don’t you make those sounds for me?

I started down this line of thinking after reading a column David Pogue wrote on his productivity secrets. It was refreshing because he tells it like it is. Oh sure, you can buy iData and Dragon Naturally Speaking and maybe you too will soon have your own column in the New York Times. But near the end, Pogue drops the bomb.

I’m just the sort of person who kind of knows what he wants to say; I can’t remember ever staring at the blank screen, trying to think of what to write.

Oh, right… I can see how that would be useful.

Armed only with borrowed pen and paper, the impoverished James Joyce wrote Ulysses in a series of squalid noisy flats. Hmmm… what did he have that I don’t have? Maybe it was the shoes. To recap: to write your great novel, use a Mead Spiral Bound College Ruled Notebook, a Sanford Papermate #2 Pencil, and be ambitious, hard working, and fantastically talented.

‘Kay thanks bye.

Narrate your flight

Here’s a fun video from the BBC. It’s an un-narrated view of the F-22 Raptor flying at the Farnborough Air Show in England last summer. If you haven’t already, you should try to go to an air show at least once. Watching a plane pirouette like this in person is a visceral thrill that’s hard to capture online. Nevertheless, I’m glad the web loves me enough to bring movies like this, because it’s been a long time since I went to an air show.

Even more fun than straightforward “Hey that’s cool!” videos are the videos that are narrated by the practitioners and protagonists themselves. They can tell you where to pay attention. I’ve been to an air show before, but I’ve never in my life watched an air show while sitting next to a test pilot who carefully describes what he’s doing and why. Here’s the same F-22 show, only narrated by Lockheed Martin test pilot Al Norman. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Here’s a quote from five minutes in:

Coming up is a slow speed pass… at a very slow very stable airspeed, 80 knots, maybe a little less, and we could fly this all day long.

Not that he wants to fly slow all day long, given that he can go Mach 2 if he wants, but I just love the idea of a supersonic jet poking along not much faster than a go-cart (or maybe an unladen swallow).

Anyway, listening to expert practitioners talk about their craft fits in with the idea of narrating your work that Jon Udell likes to talk about. Diego Rodriguez likes to call this the Director’s Commentary. Whatever you call it, I agree that it’s a wonderful gift to sit next to the best and scoop booty.

If You Had Wings

In all likelihood this video will be completely uninteresting to you if you’re not me, so I’ll give you a little time to sort that out and decide if it’s worth continuing.

Right.

This is a low-quality video of a mediocre ride at Disney World taken in 1985. The ride, “If You Had Wings,” was sponsored by Eastern Airlines, and despite its modest ambition, it had a few things going for it. It was free, it was air-conditioned, and the line was always short. This was in the Age of the E Ticket, so it was good to have a place to get out of the Florida heat without burning through your book of ride tickets. Beyond this, the ride had a few nice touches. The most exciting to me was the so-called Speed Room, in which your Omnimover Chair moved toward a giant wrap-around screen while you watched movies that made it appear as if you were zooming along at high speed. Tame stuff compared to a modern IMAX film, but in the 1970s it was the cat’s pajamas, let me tell you. The best part was a little hack where they tilted the seat back to make it feel as though you were accelerating. It was a beautiful, simple, and very effective UI hack that took me a long time to figure out. This being the web, I was able to find this terrific page on the history of the ride. How gratifying to see the blueprint of the whole ride and hear the story of someone who worked there.

The ride also feature a catchy little song that looped hypnotically. I rode it over and over as a kid, and as I recently watched the video above I found myself enchanted just like my 12 year old self from years ago. The scary part is that I was last on the ride some 30 years ago, but I can remember every single one of those little scenes and video clips. Why am I storing all that? It seems very likely that this will be the song I sing in the nursing home: “If yooou had wiinngs… If yooou had wiinngs… If yooou had wings, had wings, had wiinngs.”

Doot Doot Garden Blog

More than a decade ago, I came across a little hand-drawn journal in a second-hand bookstore in Cambridge. Written by Dan Price, it was called the Moonlight Chronicles, and I was completely charmed by the beautiful drawings and the quirky descriptions of his life and travels. Ten years later, at another Cambridge store, I happened on another inspirational drawn travelogue. This one was called Carnet de Voyage, and the art, by Craig Thompson, is far more virtuosic than Price’s oddball line drawings. But the charm is the same: an eccentric aesthete takes you for a walkabout looking through their talented eyes. In this case, Thompson is traveling around France and Morocco. The artwork is really gorgeous.

I went on to buy Thompson’s larger opus Blankets, which is another amazing piece of work, and after that I tracked down his blog, Doot Doot Garden. The blog is fun because you get to see him unfold some of his creative process, from the tools he uses to unpublished sketches and work in progress. And, as with all cartoonists, you will eventually find a long thoughtful interview in The Comics Journal.

For some reason, I find comics artists as a rule to be far more articulate and engaging in describing their artistic process than a typical musician, writer, or purely visual artist. I’m not sure if that’s because of the nature of the work (being both graphical and narrative) or that I simply enjoy the medium. In any event, I highly recommend Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, and old copies of the Moonlight Chronicles, if you’re lucky enough to find some.

The World of Tomorrow

It’s fun to chuckle while watching old and errant predictions of the future, like this one of Disney’s House of the Future. After watching a few of these videos, I have decided that the thing I miss most about the future-that-didn’t happen isn’t so much the jetpack or the silvery jumpsuits, but the chirpy background music. The voice-over is so close to self-parody that I can’t help being charmed: “While Father has a quick electronic shave… Junior brightens up ‘here and there’ with the electric toothbrush!” Here’s a longer and more informative promotional video. The repetitive bragging about plastics isn’t surprising given that the house’s sponsor is the Monsanto Chemical Company’s Plastics Division. But just imagine how the same premise would be received today. Start packing, sweetie! A giant chemical corporation is building us a plastic house! [cue music]

But suppose we uncovered an old prediction that got the future exactly right. What would that look like? Maybe something like this: The Astounding World of the Future.

I love the stress that the announcer puts on the words: “You’re welcome Mr. Robot Banker! Have a nice day!” It’s easy to do a bad world-of-the-future parody, but this is very well done and worth watching all the way through. And they got the music right too. (spotted on Steve Crandall’s blog)

Path Dependency in Economic Development

How is it that two people with similar talents and backgrounds can end up in such different places? This is the old nature versus nurture problem, and one way to unwind it is in terms of path dependence. Early choices, choices that may appear trivial at the time, lead to vastly different outcomes because of the branching structure of outcomes and future options. As Robert Frost says, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” According to this line of reasoning, you don’t need genetic determinism to explain big differences. The same rain drop, depending on where it falls, can just as easily end up in the Atlantic as the Pacific.

This same reasoning can be applied on larger scales. How can two similarly situated countries diverge so dramatically? A look around the globe provides some fascinating case studies. Haiti and the Dominican Republic. North and South Korea. Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Here’s something I’ve always wondered about: why isn’t Argentina better off than it is? In Paul Kedrosky’s blog I came across this Financial Times treatment of the U.S. vs. Argentina and path dependency in economic development: Argentina: The superpower that never was.

That’s the weird thing about history. It coulda turned out different, ya know?

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