Ever since I was a kid I’ve always enjoyed watching airplane takeoffs. The 787 has been of double interest to me in this respect. Technically this is as much a leap forward as the 707 and the 747 were – where they brought routine jet travel and the widebody long distance aircraft to the market, the introduction of the all composite airplane will revolutionize air travel just as much. So it’s with excitement I’ve been following the development of the project, agonized at the delays, and waited for the first flight with bated breath. At the same time, as someone in management for a long time, I can only shake my head at the weird ineptitude of Boeing’s senior management, who seemingly lost in a haze of powerpoint haven’t a clue as to what their engineering teams are up to. At times they’ve give press conferences making announcements saying a milestone was met only to retract them the very next day saying there was a large delay. They seem to have mostly lived in a world of wishful thinking, only to rudely awakened to the fact that their project is using a lot of brand new technology which is somewhat unpredictable, being brand new technology. This is on top of the disastrous attempt to get the suppliers to to do all of their integration work for them, which they might have guessed would have been problematic especially given the radical nature of the technology on the project. But after all that, the engineers produced a beautiful airplane, and it looks like it’s about to fly in the next few days, weather permitting!
Jon Ostrower’s nice FlightBlogger blog is carrying lots of coverage of the airplane. Here’s some video of it on its taxi runs (with rotation!) yesterday:
Friday Ida and I recovered from the annual thanksgiving food binge by doing a nice loop at Pinnacles National Monument, my wife having bowed out declaring our ambitions too strenuous. We left early and were the very first car in the parking lot on the Soledad side at 8:15 in the morning. It had rained most of the drive, but interestingly it was completely dry inside the park. Our route took us up the top of the Pinnacles via the High Peaks trail, then down the other side into the west end of the park, then looping around back to the entrance via the North Wilderness trail. The route is about 13 miles, requiring two steep climbs, and usually take us about five hours.
The steep climb up the pinnacles is rewarded by amazing views. We were just admiring the view when I asked Ida what those white wisps were, and inside of two minutes the view vanished as we were encased in fog. So we got moving again, and as we hiked downwards we got underneath the fog.
The fog gradually lifted and we got an alternation of clouds, threats of rain and bits of sunshine. As we crossed onto the wilderness trail we were soon reminded of why it’s called that. The trail is poorly marked and you have to find your way by looking for these odd little rock piles.
More than once we needed to look for them to figure out where the trail was. Oh yes, and then we heard a tell tale crunch in the bush, a crunch I’ve heard before, and I looked closely into the bushes and saw hiding in the distance the fur of a large tan colored animal, presumably looking back at me. I’m fairly sure it was a mountain lion, because I’ve had such encounters before, but fortunately we all went our seperate ways. The rough trail makes it hard work to hike. You’re either wallowing in sand, clambering across rocks, pushing through brush wondering where the trail is, or jumping across fallen logs. But since the trail follows a river valley you can’t really get lost because it’s fairly obvious which way the trail has to go. Finally there’s a really steep climb to cross a ridge to get back to the parking lot.
The scenery is amazing – it has a wildness to it that our local redwood forest just doesn’t match. You really feel you’re far away from everything.
As we got close to the parking lot it finally started to rain. So we put our jackets, which stopped the rain. Oddly, when a few minutes later we got to the picnic area there were now people there, and having a picnic too! Puzzled, we asked them, did it rain? And they said it hadn’t. So we got a real microburst. All in all it was a fine way to spend a day in one of America’s really great landscapes.
I went to the funeral of a best friend the other day. As with many such memorials it was bittersweet – nice seeing a lot of old friends, and sad to say goodbye both a friend as well as a chapter in my life.
Two decades ago he was a new imimgrant to America and one of my other friends at work hired him. He was brilliant, and soon learnt all about American culture. He also had a good heart, and the three of us soon became fast friends. We loved nothing better than coding and discussing technology. Eventually together with another acquaitance formed a company. The best part about the company were the summer trips. To reward the families for putting up with our long hours we organized week long vacations for all of us and our somewhat extended families. Sometimes we went camping by a lake – one year we even all took a cruise together. These were great adventures. The families got to know each other, and we watched our children grow up together.
Then the .com boom came, and we went our separate ways, but still stayed in touch. But something wasn’t right for my friend. First he left his wife, then he moved to Asia and became a nomad – doing training, and going wherever the clients were. Vietnam, Australia, Illinois, it was all the same. He had no fixed address. I could only reach him through his work email. Once we met in Bangalore, going bar hopping – but needing a cab to go from hotel to hotel for lack of sidewalks. Last summer we had lunch again when he was back here. He seemed happy. Little did I know I would never see him again. Not too long thereafter he failed to show up for a conference. No one heard from him again. No one even knew which country he was in. Abrubtly a few weeks ago his son got a call from the US embassy in Manila – his dad’s body had been found in a hotel. Now they have a box of ashes, it looks the ones we have our dead pets in, and not even an autopsy report. Oddly, there’s no clear way of knowing if that box even has my friend in it. So it was a funny ending – he vanished and was found, or was he? Or is he playing some kind of joke on us, and simply wanted to vanish altogether? It’s all hard to say.
He was a great guy, but liked to keep his secrets, and had a bold nature not above unforeseen and extreme thoughts. As weird as it is to us, I bet he is smiling at all this.
What’s left are his kids, now a bunch of wonderful young adults, really nice people. He and his wife did good there!
I went biking today over to Fremont via the Dumbarton Bridge. On the way I crossed 84 and saw that work is continuing on the branch to the Port of Redwood City. Sitting at the end of the lead into Lyngso I saw parked this cool little piece of MOW equipment.
When I was an undergraduate I remember once a student asking a famous visiting philosophy professor, known for his work in philosophy of science, about questions dealing with the meaning of life. He looked puzzled at the question, and harumphed that this wasn’t really a proper activity for philosophers at all, he preferred to stick to nice rigorously logical things. Now it’s true that figuring out how to make an argument clearly and logically, and understanding why a proposition is true, false, decidable, unknowable, etc., are some of the key low level disciplines of philosophy, at the same time they aren’t sufficient for defining the scope of philosophy. If we think of philosophy as an interdisciplinary field involving critically asking how we understand and think about different activities, we realize that while philosophy of science and math is certainly a vital field, but ultimately the most interesting question in philosophy comes back to ourselves: How should we live?
The philosophers who really thought about that lot are the ones who’ve stuck with me over the years. At the same time, when I look around in daily life, what I notice is that there is no philosophical discourse at all. Our culture is centered on entertainment and anesthesia, it does not encourage us to ask the really hard questions. On top of that, most people aren’t used to asking these questions, so that even if they encounter them, they don’t find it easy or appealing.
Some months ago I obtained some fresh insights. My wife had been introduced by a friend to the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church where she was very impressed by John Ortberg‘s sermons. Curious, I went along, and it struck a chord with me. He really does a great job of introducing complex questions and rendering them in a simple and often entertaining way, and gets people to really attack some of the hard questions in their life. What is changeable, and what is permanent? What can we control, and what can’t we? What options do we have even when there don’t seem to be options? And beyond these seeming abstract issues, it comes down to, how do we treat each other? How can we make a positive difference? Where do we find hope? How do we give hope? What struck me in listening each sunday was the extent to which the ideas presented resonated with a lot of thoughts I’ve had on my own. Obviously as a pretty large institution MPPC is many things to many people, and provides many services, (too bad we didn’t know about it when our daughter was little…), but for this amateur philosopher it provides a good community to further spiritual, ethical and intellectual growth.
Much to my wife’s dismay I have an enormous collection of recorded live music, which occupies an entire closet, one my wife wishes she could reclaim. As my collection has gotten larger two issues have come into focus. (1) The continuing change in formats means that a good bit of the collection is always in danger of obsolescence, and (2) it’s cumbersome to locate recordings. I’ve resorted to tagging things with numbers so I can look them up, much like in a library. So the idea of storing music on a hard disk and and simply browsing for it has long held appeal. One challenge is that my collection does not fit the usual itunes paradigm, in that I don’t have songs and playlists. Each concert is an integral whole, and is most easily represented as a directory containing an ordered sequence of flac or shn files. So any solution that is just a bag of songs is useless to me, I need connected series of songs.
Last year I prototyped a solution. I got a popcorn hour A-110, which is basically a network-to-hdmi bridge. It lets you stream video, pictures or audio from a network connection to yours stereo. This lovely device presented the problem of how to get the network to it. The stereo is on a different floor than the wired network, so I would need a wireless network. I put in a dedicated 80211N link to avoid contention with our normal wireless network. Particularly video stresses the network to the maximum. Obviously I can’t stream Blueray this way, but fortunately that’s not one of my requirements. The next question was how to organize and transmit the music. I opted for llink which lets you organize your media in a directory tree, then lets you browse it with via web pages and transmits it via http. This solves a couple of problems. http is by far the fastest protocol to devices like the popcorn hour. The hierarchical presentation is ideal for my kind of collection. For now I simply put the files on my pc.
This first solution worked ok. It did exhibit a number of problems. First of all, for unknown reasons, the popcorn hour often couldn’t see the PC, forcing me to restart the llink service and/or reboot the A-110. Second, it wasn’t real fast, with considerable gaps between songs, which is a problem if the music is continuous. Third, I was running out of disk space. And finally, most critically, I was depending on a single disk drive, which could fail at any time, with no redundancy or obvious provision for backup.
After having studied the matter for a long time, I finally bought a Synology DS-509 NAS. I populated it with 5 1TB Samsung Raid-class drives. I decided on a Raid-6 setup. Raid-6 degrades write performance, but my filesystem is mostly read-only. Conversely, if one disk does fail, the rebuild can take almost 18 hours at this size of file system, and the stress from that rebuild could well push another disk over the edge, so being able to recover from two failed disks is important. So now I have a 3TB of disk space, in a tiny, compact, silent and cool box. LLink installed very easily on it (fortunately you can ssh into the DS-509, it’s just linux).
So far I’m very pleased with this setup. It’s scalable, fast, and reliable. And if I manage to run out of disk space, I can add an expansion cabinet. The web based interface makes it easy to administer. It’s much faster than my old setup, and is always instantly recognized by the A-110. A lot of the quirky behavior I attributed to the A-110 seems to have just been interactions with my Windows PC. The A-110 has been much better behaved since it’s connected the DS-509. Interestingly, when copying files to it, I often wind up using ftp instead of the explorer, because ftp is so much faster.
Next steps are upgrading my wired network to Gigabit ethernet, chiefly by replacing the routers. This will let me stream video more effectively, as right now the wireless links are faster than the wired connections! I’ve ordered an C-200 from popcorn hour, a device which I find fascinating if they can only make it work, but that’s a story for another day.
