aircraft noise

what did I learn today, you ask?

If you want to file a complaint about aircraft noise, you need the exact time, in order to pinpoint the responsible pilot. In most cases, you always know the exact location (somewhere above your head, at home). I know, I know .. it's hard to believe that few complaints come from people on the cellphones, in their car. Or when they're at a friend's home.

Most aircraft (including commercial passenger jets) are flown almost completely by computer. The pilot is there to (a) act as a prima donna; (b) override the automated systems so as to cause more noise; (c) be there in case the black box fails (highly unlikely).

Most noise complaints occur on cloudy days.

Additional noise complaints happen in the spring and autumn (in the 48-hour span each year when temperatures in Texas are pleasant). It is during this brief time that Texans open their windows, and notice airplanes.

Aircraft are usually told to fly straight from the airport, and make no turns until reaching a predetermined altitude.

RVSM means Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (and refers to a costly gadget for airplanes).

Check21 has/will dramatically affect the aircraft industry, which is/was paid to fly checks around the country. One of those affected is Airnet Systems (Columbus, Ohio)

The Federal Aviation Administration has a website dedicated to aircraft noise.

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unrelated: okay, okay. put down your spatulas. The Sundry on Thursday blog is updated.

there's a truck on the phone, backing up ...

what a great way to start the day.

minutes after 8am, the phone rings. CallerID shows the name of a business (not one with which I do business). "I wonder what they want?" .. so I pick up the phone.

Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep.

{sigh} I recognize that sound: it's a Group III fax machine, trying to shake hands with One Of Its Own Kind. A Bonehead has mis-digited the number (I have never had a fax machine on that line).

This mis-digiting has happened before. I know what will happen next. The remote fax will try automatically redialing until it gets very, very tired. It does not know it has reached a wrong number (in this case, my home voice line). It doesn't care. It is persistent, and will redial. Again. And again. And again. And again.

Hmm, I thought. There are two ways in which I may defeat it:

OPTION A

Plug my fax machine into the line they dialed, and accept the fax. Then again, there may be URs (unforeseen Ramifications). (begin tangential roll)

1. would it be a one page fax, or 80 pages?
2. what if I cut it off after the first 79 pages? Perhaps someone is trying to send the original manuscript to War and Peace (a mere 1472 pages).
3. if I interrupt, will the sender try again?
4. can I take a loan against my 401(k) to afford the fax machine supplies (paper, film cartridges)?
5. will the fax be someone's private medical file (something I can sell on eBay for millions?)
6. what if the sender remembered to put a disclaimer on the cover page, ordering me to destroy a fax if I was not the intended recipient? could I ignore that order, and still sell it on eBay?

My thought processes were disturbed: it's trying again. {sigh}

Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep. (pause)
Beep.

My fax machine gets very little activity: maybe 2 faxes a month. The film cartridge affords me good quality, but is pricier than some other solutions. The machine is about 5 years old, which means that shopping for a replacement cartridge will be an exercise in futility (even though it's a name brand - Panasonic - the supplies will be out of stock/out of production). This is The Joy that is Planned Obsolescence. I hate shopping for fax cartridges more than printer cartridges.

Deep Thought #45: When Gene Bob becomes King, there will be one brand of fax cartridge, and one brand of printer cartridge. Not 473 of each.

Okay. All done. The fax machine's hooked into my voice line. As luck would have it, a real voice call arrives -- about 30 seconds after I plugged in the fax machine. Argh! My friend got an earful of that infernal truck backing up.

Then there was OPTION B: somehow get a message to The Bonehead that they dialed a wrong number. Maybe, just maybe .. the CallerID is not the number of a switchboard, but is the actual fax machine. I dialed the number. Beep. Beep. Beep. Hmm .. me thinks it's worth a try.

So, I grabbed a blank piece of paper and wrote in BIG BLACK LETTERS:

"972-867-5309* IS NOT A FAX!"

* (you know what I mean)

and faxed it to the number on the CallerID. Surprise, surprise, surprise! It worked! The line receded to silent bliss. Downside: I won't be able to sell (on eBay) whatever they were faxing. {sigh}

Freudian Typo?

as reported by Nathan Callahan:

"We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation."

-- George W. Bush, in a White House transcript of a speech at the 2004 Christmas tree lighting. Nineteen (19) minutes later, a corrected transcript changed "profits" to "prophets."

in search of The Perfect Cable

About 5pm yesterday, I decided It Was Time to do something with the poor PC that's been rotting in the next room, for the better part of 4 years. I didn't remember much about the configuration, and was amused to find a (whoosh!) 200 MHz AMD K6, with a whopping 128 MB of core RAM. From the look of the logfiles, it was last turned on in 2001, so at least all the Y2K patches are there.

Turns out I left it as a dual-boot machine, running Red Hat Linux in one partition, and Win98 in another. It was setup to use a (gasp!) dialup connection - remember 56 Kb modems? I remembered that Win98SE had a TCP/IP stack, so I thought I'd wing it and see if I could get it to talk to my DSL circuit via Ethernet. Turns out it was just like riding a bicycle : there are a few times when I fell off and scraped my knees, but it didn't take all night to get this ancient warhorse online.

The biggest pain was the sheer number of times (maybe 40?) that Win98 had to reboot, once it found the broadband connection and proceeded to insist on adding four years worth of Critical Patches. I suspect it was a bit confused to see such a pterodactyl online, but eventually it stabilized, and now it sits 2 metres away, connected to the same KVM Switch that my primary box runs.

"What's that?", you say .. "I didn't know you had a KVM Switch!" What's he doing with quasi-modern technology? Well, you see .. that's when the bee entered my bonnet last night.

I nosed around the web, looking for a KVM switch that would allow me to use one keyboard, mouse and monitor on both a new USB system, and my ancient relic which had (gasp!) RS232C serial ports and a DIN-5 keyboard connector (big enough to steer). I settled on Belkin's OmniView SOHO line, one of which sits atop my desk, oozing an amber speck letting me know which of two boxes is on at a time (as if I couldn't tell the difference between Win98 and WinXP, or Linux running GNOME).

To be honest, I stopped at MicroCenter first (preferring to do business with them) but I left after seeing that they wanted $150 for the Switch, and Fry's was willing to be rid of theirs for $90 ... I figured it was worth the 6 mile drive to save $60.

Naturally (after returned home), I decided to simplify things. Naturally, that meant that none of the hundred of thousands of cables in Fibber's closet would work, so .. it was off to Fry's in search of The Perfect Cable, which was a hybrid of USB A:B, VGA M:F and mic/speaker. I was amazed to find what I wanted, and was pleased not to catch a load of grief over my desire to return what I'd bought the night before (PS/2 cables).

Yes, there were hiccups. The keyboard suddenly disappeared after I thought everything was working (turns out the cable became unplugged when I replaced the removable shroud on the Switch. Then, the old PC doesn't support USB in the BIOS, so booting it requires an old keyboard (so that I can opt for Win98 or Linux at the lilo boot prompt (LILO being a a lovely old accounting term). Give me a few months (and a paycheck) and I'll upgrade the motherboard to 21st Century technology. Heck, it'll probably be liquid cooled by then.

it's a long (Seg)way from Oklahoma

I spotted five (5!) Segway® Human Transporters in Richardson this morning, as I made my way south from a rendezvous with Todd-Bob at Starbucks (the one at Coit/Spring Creek in Plano). Seems the City of Richardson closed northbound Coit Road to hold a Christmas Parade, and I'm guessing those Segways were one of the "floats".

The city's website included this one-line explanation:

The Christmas parade starts at 9 am on Saturday Dec. 4th traveling the streets of Promenade then north on Coit RD to Melrose.

No clue why those five Segways broke from the parade and were heading south (toward Dallas) but I was surprised to see them here at all (in the land of pickups and SUVs).

What I could see of the parade (as I moseyed south on Coit) was typical small-town: lots of pickup trucks and a few haywagons converted into floats, and a marching band or two. The sidewalk crowd was very light (probably related to the bone-chilling 50F weather); I'm not sure how many years they've held this parade. Today is the first one I've ever heard of!

anyhoo .. back to those odd-for-Texas contraptions: Segway's website says there's a dealer in Houston (about 250 miles south), but the nearest one is in Oklahoma City (about 200 miles north). Wonder how long it took those Segways to "drive" those 200 miles, and how they found enough sidewalks for that distance? Hmmm.

9 December update: the Segway FAQ says that top speed is 12.5 miles/hour. The range for most models is 8-12 miles (only 6-10 on the p Series), and the recharge takes 4-6 hours. Given that, my NapkinMath™ says it would take about 4.5 days (110 hours) to "drive" a Segway from Oklahoma City to Dallas, assuming I could recharge it in 5 hours, every 10 miles. Or maybe I could make it in 20 hours, assuming I could (a) carry 19 spare/charged battery packs or (b) use solar power (not offered)

the start of a great movement?

Today, this is little more than a logo:

(Coalition of Unpaid Bloggers). To read more, see Eric Siegmund's blog (from lovely west Texas)

Other than the various laxatives on sale at our local chemist drugstore or grocery, I can't recall any great movements in this country, since the anti-(Vietnam) war movement of the 1960's. Alas, my parents wouldn't drive me to any of the protest marches, nor let me spend my allowance on hippie love beads or Earth shoes.

Sure, there have been demonstrations here and there (the 1995 Million Man March, the 2004 Million Woman March, etc.) but I'm not sure I even know what they were marching about, which is counterintuitive to holding the thing in the first place, n'est pas?*

* a French phrase meaning (literally) "ain't that right?"

circuit boards looking for a good home

I called a few local recyclers, trying to find one who's willing to take some electronic components off my hands. All are prehistoric relics that have no business becoming part of the water supply. I thought that Recycled Computers International (located in nearby Carrollton) would work, but they'll only accept stuff from businesses, not individuals.

One of the aliases I'm on mentioned First Saturday which I've never been to. Then someone else chimed in, suggesting other places with used computer parts (who may presumably be willing to take this stuff off my hands):

Universal Technologys [sic]
11508 Reeder Rd Ste 112
Dallas TX 75229
972-247-4469

Electronics Discount Sales
908 E Pioneer Pkwy
Arlington TX 76010
and
4070 N Beltline Rd
Irving TX 76034

Computer Junction: Richardson
1730 N Greenville Ave
Richardson TX

Tech Computer Service: Dallas
laptop and printer repairs

Tanner Electronics
1100 Valwood Pkwy Ste 100
Carrollton TX 75006
972-242-8702

22 December 2004 update: Anne Kandra wrote an article for the January 2005 (print) edition of PC World titled "A Computer Is a Terrible Thing to Waste" which has some good pointers to computer recycling. Places that are New To Me include the National Recycling Coalition and TechSoup.

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For those of you who haven't been able to sleep since last week, be advised that the Sundry on Thursday blog is now updated. Please put down your gravy ladles and resume eating leftover turkey.