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Happy New Country

January 20, 2009 in Art, Blogging, Events, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Places, Politics | 12 comments

Changes at Whitehouse.gov are the top item on Techmeme.

My tweets watching The Event:

Say Amen. about 2 hours ago from web
search isn’t working too well at http://whitehouse.gov about 2 hours ago from web
This may be the greatest speech ever given about the United States. about 3 hours ago from web
“We are willing to extend a hand if you will unclench your fist.” What is this form of homiletics called? “This, then that…” about 3 hours ago from web
“the lines of tribe will soon dissolve…” whoa. about 3 hours ago from web
“We reject as false the distinction between our safety and our ideals.” Another great one-liner. about 3 hours ago from web
“the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” Well put. Hope it’s even partly true. about 3 hours ago from web
Wow. Check out http://whitehouse.gov. Change has come. Here’s the blog: http://tinyurl.com/6tdmhy about 3 hours ago from web
World’s greatest orator flubs the oath. O well. It’s cool. Roberts didn’t look like a teleprompter, I guess. about 3 hours ago from web
My attorney, to my right, says “It’s the end of an error.” about 3 hours ago from web
We’ll all remember where we were for this. The place is Together. about 3 hours ago from web
Those people have faith. Which he called “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” In this case, next 8 years. about 3 hours ago from web
The view up the mall… Stunning. about 3 hours ago from web

Not sure if that beats blogging it, but it sure was easier.

And I’m still glowing, three hours later.

[Later…] Apparently I topped the retweet radar list for a moment there. And Twitter itself peaked without pique.

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Eight years’ differences

January 18, 2009 in Art, News, Past | Permalink

In the Atlantic. Tweeted by Werner Vogels.

In the likely event of a water landing

January 18, 2009 in Art, Blogroll, News, Past, Science, Travel | 9 comments

Good, tight story of what happened on . In the International Herald Tribune.

By the way, somewhere in this weekend’s Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor sings a delightful tribute to the crew of flight 1549. Heard it live yesterday. The show is running again today on many public stations. Public Radio Fan has times and stations. If you have an iPhone, catch it on your free Public Radio Tuner.

Speaking of which, our first planned VRM feature for the tuner is a “listen log”, to answer “What was that?” questions and to provide fun data that’s yours (not anybody else’s) to do with what you wish.

If you have other features you’d like, on this tuner or on future ones (not just on the iPhone — that’s just where you’ll see it first), let us know.

New England Blues

January 18, 2009 in Fun, infrastructure, Life, News, Places, problems, Travel | 1 comment

The soft white silence is settling outside on a cold winter mornng. I’m guessing about two inches so far, atop the eight or so that remain from last week’s storm.

The above is from Intellicast, my fave new online weather toy.

Talked to a friend in San Diego last night. He was taking a break from playing tennis. Back home in Santa Barbara, it’s been in the 80s lately. At one point a couple days ago, the temperature difference between there and here was close to 80 degrees.

Still, this is a kind of loveliness I grew up with. There’s still a 10 year old inside me who sees this and wants to go outside, go sledding down the hill, build snow forts and not do a damn thing that isn’t fun.

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Following USA1549

January 16, 2009 in Events, infrastructure, Life, News, Photography, problems, Travel | 3 comments

Afterposts on (more popularly, just )…

Bio of the pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger, aka “Sully”, the captain of flight USA1549 yesterday afternoon. Via TheSmokingGun.

Charles Bremer, pilot and editor for the London Times, on the flight. Includes interesting background, such as why Airbuses can float “in the unlikely event of a water landing”. Expect Boeing planes to be fitted retrofitted soon with the same feature. Hat tip to Andrew Leyden for that one. (Note: This comment says I have my facts wrong here, and offers corrective details. Interesting stuff. Go read it.)

Airbus 320 fact sheet. Includes interesting safety record info.

Sully’s Facebook fan page.

Nice series of photos and a graphic from one commenter on this FlightAware discussion page.

USA1549 down but not out

January 15, 2009 in News | 11 comments

That’s almost as far as it got.

From Twitter search:

From FlightAware:

FLIGHTAWARE BREAKING NEWS

US Airways flight #1549 (an Airbus A320) from New York, NY (LGA) to Charlotte, NC (CLT) crashed into the Hudson River today (January 15, 2009) around 3:30pm EST, less than six minutes after takeoff. The maximum altitude was 3200 feet before the aircraft began a descent into the water.

Plane appears intact. Helicopters and ferries responding. FAA is reporting all passengers are out of the plane, and a secondary search is underway.

Early unconfirmed reports are that the aircraft hit a flock of geese. CNN reports that a pilot of the airliner reported a bird strike to air traffic control after takeoff.

Developing.

Related Links

  • FlightAware Discussion Forums: Airliner Down

    • If FlightAware calls the flight USA1549, that’s how I’m going to call and tag it.

    More as I can write about it, sitting here at a pharmacy in Cambridge. As of now, it appears that all passengers and crew got out alive. Amazing. Some great piloting there. And a sobering lesson in listening to pre-flight safety pitches.

    Reallhy helps that the plane stayed intact (from what we can see). Amazing job landing — actually, ditching — the thing. Wow.

    5pm, on FlightAware:

    USA logo
    USA1549 (web site) (all flights)
    US Airways
    Aircraft Airbus A320 (twin-jet) (A320/Q)
    Origin La Guardia (KLGA)
    Destination Charlotte/Douglas Intl (KCLT)
    Other flights between these airports
    Route BIGGY J75 GVE LYH SUDSY3 (Decode)
    Date Thursday, Jan 15, 2009
    Duration 1 hours 44 minutes
    Progress
    11 minutes left
    1 hour 32 minutes
    Status En Route (No recent position)
    Scheduled Actual/Estimated
    Departure 03:04PM EST 03:26PM EST
    Arrival 04:38PM EST 05:10PM EST
    Speed 455 kts 153 kts
    Altitude 36000 feet descending 300 feet

    Want to get that down before it scrolls away.

    How long before video of the plane landing, shot from a ferry or shore, shows up on the tubes?

    From a FlightAware post, ship number 106 (N106US, Airbus A320-214, delivered August 2, 1999)

    Jumping in the subway now. More later.

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    Too late. Just go ahead with it.

    January 13, 2009 in Business, Events, Future, Gear, infrastructure, News, Places, problems, Science | 15 comments

    Barack Obama wants to wait on the DTV shift currently scheduled for 17 February. On the grounds that it’ll be a mess, this is a good idea. But nothing can make it a better idea. It’s not that the train has left the station. It’s that the new OTA (over the air) Oz is mostly built-out and it’s going to fail. Not totally, but in enough ways to bring huge piles of opprobrium down on the FCC, which has been rationalizing this thing for years.

    I explain why in What happens when TV’s mainframe era ends next February?. Most VHF stations moving to UHF will have sharply reduced coverage. The converter shortage is just a red herring. The real problem is signals that won’t be there.

    Most cable customers won’t be affected. But even cable offerings are based on over-the-air coverage assumptions. Those may stay the same, but the facts of coverage will not. In most cases coverage will shrink.

    FCC maps (more here and here) paint an optimistic picture. But they are based on assumptions that are also overly optimistic, to say the least. Wilimington, NC was chosen as a demonstration market. Bad idea. One of the biggest stations there, WECT, suffers huge losses of coverage.

    Anyway, it’s gonna be FUBAR in any case.

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    All of Fame

    January 13, 2009 in News | 2 comments

    So Jim Rice made the hall of fame after fifteen years of falling short in the voting. Here’s more from a report on .

    Rice was a “borderline” candidate, a sub-obvious selection. There are a lot of those. Among those I’ve cared about (and there are few), Brett Butler comes to mind. I cared about Brett because he started his pro career in 1980 with my minor league team, the Durham Bulls. (Yes, that Duham Bulls, years before the movie was made.) He was too good to stay with an A-league (lowest in the farm caste) team, so he skipped AA Hampton and went straight to Richmond and played AAA for a short while before the Atlanta Braves brought him up as a leadoff batter. His career continued for 16 years, with the Indians, Giants, Dodgers and Mets. He was a great fielder and one of those reliable leadoff guys who scatters ten fouls then hits a single. His career batting average was .290, but during his best years he stayed within a few points of .300. (His top year was .311, with the Indians.) He also had 2,375 hits and 558 stolen bases. And he was a quotable guy. One line I remember was, “Jeff Leonard is a good player having a great year. Will Clark is a great baseball player.” It was true, too.

    Anyway, I actually met another borderline player when I was a kid visiting my cousins in North Carolina. I think I was about nine years old when this older guy sits down next to me in my cousins’ back yard and says, “You like baseball?” It was a tough question, because I liked the game, but couldn’t play it for shit. I could hit and run well enough, but in my one summer in Little League I did something to my shoulder that limited my ability to throw the ball a long way.

    “Yes,” I said.

    “What’s your favorite team?”

    “The Dodgers.” Which were still in Brooklyn then. My father was a Dodger fan, and it pissed us both off hugely when they left town. Although the Mets later made up for the loss.

    “What about the Yankees.”

    “I hate the Yankees.”

    “You know who Babe Ruth is?”

    “Sure.”

    “How many home runs did he hit?”

    “Sixty.”

    “Do you know who pitched his 60th home run?”

    “No.”

    “I did.”

    The old dude was Tom Zachary, who in fact had sold the land I was sitting on to my cousins’ family in the early 50s. Tom still lived next door, in fact.

    I guess he wasn’t borderline, since he lost more games than he won. But he had a long and good career, and was a fine source of baseball stories.

    Of course, there’s only one I remember.

    At least he’s in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

    Faustian bargaining

    January 12, 2009 in Berkman, Business, infrastructure, News, Places, Politics, problems, Travel | 5 comments

    Lots of folks in China get around the Great Chinese Firewall by using circumvention tools. But at what risk? That’s one of the biggest questions raised by Hal Roberts in this post here.

    Seems the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIFC, which offers this laudable PR…

    1. GIF Offers China-Based Reporters Software to Break Through Internet Blockade(2008-08-02)
    2. Testimony of GIFC in the US Senate Hearing on Global Internet Freedom (2008-05-20)
    3. GIF Defeats Another Wave of Internet Censorship (2007-11-11)
    4. Burmese Found Virtual Underground Railroad to Escape Internet (2007-10-09)

    … is also selling users up who-knows-what rivers. At least that’s what Hal finds when he checks the FAQ at the Edoors Ranking Service, which lets you browse the “top anti-censorship sites”. The FAQ begins,

    Q: Who is the owner of this service?
    A: This service was developed by World’s Gate, Inc. with help from other Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) partners.

    Q: Where did you get the raw data for the analysis?
    A: The raw data came from the server log of GIFC member companies. Right now, data from three of the five tools of GIFC (DynaWeb, GPass, and FirePhoenix) are included for analysis.

    Which sounds okay, so long as the data used is of the aggregate sort. In other words, as long as it’s not personal.

    Alas, there is this smoking gun, pointed right at the heads of DynaWeb, GPass and FirePhoenix users:

    Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?
    A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.

    That means they track browsing data of individual users, and sell it. Hal adds,

    …the data about circumventing users is much more sensitive than the data about most ISP users. These are the histories of users browsing sites that are not only blocked (and therefore mostly sensitive in one way or another) but blocked by an authoritarian country with an active policy and practice of persecuting dissidents. The mere act of anyone, let alone projects proclaiming themselves for internet freedom, storing this data is very bad practice. Any data that is stored can be potentially be shared or stolen. The best way to make sure that dangerous data like this does not get into the wrong hands is not to store it in the first place.

    But these projects are not only storing the data. They are actively offering to sell it. None of the projects has anything like a privacy policy that I can find, and none of them provides any notice anywhere on the site or during the installation process that the project will be tracking and selling user browsing activity.* But all of the sites have deceptive language…

    I’m sure what these companies are after is advertising money from companies wanting to “target” individuals personally. That’s what it smells like to me.

    We live in a time when personalized advertising is legitimized on the supply side. (It has no demand side, other than the media who get paid to place it.) Worse, there’s a kind of gold rush going on. Even in a crapped economy, a torrent of money is flowing into online advertising of all kinds, including the “personalized” sort. No surprise that companies in the business of fighting great evils rationalize the committing of lesser ones. I’m sure they do it it the usual way: It’s just advertsing! And it’s personalized, so it’s good for you!

    Ah, but what happens if one of those advertisers is a front for the Chinese governent, looking for dissidents to jail — or worse? If you’re one of those (or anybody) would you trust the “strict screening test” at Edoors Ranking Service?’

    Me either.

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    Sad news

    January 9, 2009 in News | 1 comment

    Rest in peace Roland Piquepaille is the final post on Roland’s blog. It’s by Larry Digman, who also posted notices for Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant when those two also passed. My sympathies to Larry as well.

    I barely knew Roland. Our paths crossed from time to time. (Such as here.) But he was a fellow journalist and blogger and another temporary visitor to our lush planet. He was two years older than me: just 62.

    My best to his family and friends.

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