Swiss has gone to the 777 now. The seats are better than the old ones in the A340-300, and contrary to what SeatGuru said beforehand, they are lie-flat, not angle-flat. The seat controls are right where your elbow hits, so they’re always getting bumped by accident. You still want to get the seats at the front if possible for more space. I think the separated interior aisle seat might be better than the throne seats (not the aisle window seats – those must suck, either crawling over or being crawled over to get to the restrooms). The thrones have the legspace kinda constrained by the seats in front which ends up being uncomfortable after a while.
Not having a window is not a big deal, and I say that liking to look out the windows. There’s little to see on the 12 hour international flights anyway. It’s tundra or ice for the day flight or nighttime for the red-eye (I always get high clouds anyway), and you’re an asshole if you open the shades when everyone else is trying to sleep. There’s always one.
It’s nice to have more storage space for small items. And a built-in USB for keeping the iPad charged. This was the first time the waitress asked me to put away my iPad for take-off and landing. Hopefully that won’t continue.
I really miss having some control of an air nozzle. It gets warm in the rear seats, even though I was sitting next to what looked like a vent. The front seats seem to be cooler.
No more jingus dual-pin headphone adapter necessary! Now there’s a touchscreen with a wider view-angle. Also about 25% bigger.
Always avoid the Swiss wine – go for the French or Argentina.
Still lots of James Bond. But more space, so it seemed like more other movies.
ObHomer[1]:
This is basically one of the central plot points of The Odyssey:
On the way home from Troy, after a raid on Ismaros in the land of the Cicones, he and his twelve ships are driven off course by storms. They visit the lethargic Lotus-Eaters and are captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus while visiting his island. After Polyphemus eats several of his men, Polyphemus and Odysseus have a discussion, and Odysseus told Polyphemus his name is “Nobody”. Odysseus takes a barrel of wine, and the Cyclops drinks it, falling asleep. Odysseus and his men take a wooden stake, ignite it with the remaining wine, and blind him. While they escape, Polyphemus cries in pain, and the other Cyclopes ask him what the matter is. Polyphemus cries, “Nobody has blinded me!” and the other Cyclopes think he has gone mad.
[1] Doh! Not that Homer!
How is it possible to have a West Coast tour that goes to San Diego and SF, but doesn’t stop in LA? I mean, LA went from having basically no gyms [1] to having about 15 [2], including one listed as one of the best in the US in a recent climbing rag [3].
If you climb in the Sierra, one of the premier alpine destinations in the US, well, LA is the place to live. Then there are those little known places like Joshua Tree and Tahquitz. While San Diego basically has a two hour longer drive to everywhere good, the Woodson Boulders, and Mission Gorge. Which no one ever goes back to twice.
Sigh. Being in SD at 5pm on a Monday is probably kinda tough.
[1] Cough, Rockreation, ARC, H18.
[2] Though still not a one in the SFV/SGV, dammit, aside from my backyard. ARC doesn’t count and never has. My backyard is better. And I have better taste in music (seriously, Air Supply is not even ironic). And no one steals the bouldering mats out from under me when I’m 15 feet off the ground. Though occasionally I have to yell at Ms Crashpad to get off the damn pads.
[3] Sender One. I’d agree. It’s almost as good as going to a real crag. Step enough. Good route-setting. Continually changing routes. An unfortunate propensity to play reggae, but that’s an objective hazard of any climbing gym where 23 year-old pad-people get to pick the music. Now if they’d just install some of the Big-Ass Fans that Cliffs of Id has…
One of the gyms I go to… wait, all the gyms I go to, on a couple of continents, will only sell you a “day pass”, even if it’s 8pm and they’re going to close in two hours. But several of them will give you a discount on the so-called day pass if you’re in before the rush – 2 or 3 pm.
So the “day pass” is $15/EUR per session if you actually might use it for a whole day, but is $20/EUR per session if you’re only going to use it for a couple of hours.
Big ups to the guy at ARC who only charged me $10 one night when I got there at 8pm. That seemed fair. And only happened the once.
ObXKCD:
A thought occurs to me: my place of work (heretofore POW) puts all sorts of requirements on passwords, and also requires that they be changed every 90 days (against best practices), so having worked there for a while, I am long past the point of being able to actually remember a password, or even caring to try. Password manager to the rescue.
However, POWIT also requires that the new password be more than x characters different than the last one. How can they know that, unless they are storing passwords in plaintext? If they’re handling them correctly, then all they should ever see, or be able to see, is a pseudo-random hash that either matches the current password hash or doesn’t. Even if they store the last hash, they shouldn’t be able to tell how far away the new password is away from the last, entropically.
So I’m guessing they’re not actually doing it right. Which is not a big surprise, from the same folks whose best practices brought you the OPM hack.
Teju Cole thinks that Steve McCurry is too boring.
I won’t even address the other controversy about photoshopping images, whether it’s to change the color or add or remove elements, or whether the photos are staged. A different post. [1]
No, I want to address the stupidity of going back thirty years, and saying that the work is boring today.
It’s boring because it changed the world. Everyone copied it, incorporated it, stole it, paid homage to it. It’s no different than listening to early Charlie Parker and thinking, “There’s nothing special about that. Everyone does it. Some people do it even better.”
No.
He invented it. It didn’t sound like that before. You have to have some historical awareness. It was like this. Then it was like that. There was a pre-, and a post-. It’s not fair to come in 30 years later and say, well, that’s boring. No. Everyone didn’t do it then. Now they do. If you don’t know any better, it makes old work look boring. But it looks boring, or sounds boring, because everyone else had to step up their game.
Of course there were others. There were predecessors, and influences, and a whole progression. Nothing comes from nowhere. But the reason you’re bored by McCurry is because you can’t unsee it. You can’t unhear Parker. And Bach. And Sherman. And Adams. And Hendrix. The Beatles. Yeah, they might be boring. Now. But go back and look how they changed everything. They’re incorporated. You can’t make pictures, or music, without incorporating what you’re heard and seen.
So it isn’t fair to go back today to 1985 Steve McCurry and say, “that’s boring.” There’s a reason why it’s everywhere. Today isn’t the same without Afghan Girl.
[1] tl;dr – Guilty, but who cares? Someone is going to make decisions. Silicon doesn’t have the same response as the human eye, which doesn’t have the same response as an LED screen, which doesn’t have the same response as an ink-jet, sorry, gicleé printer.
If it isn’t you making decisions about what you saw, and how you want others to see it, it’s the guy at Nikon who set the defaults for JPEGs. And if it isn’t him (sadly I can guess that I do not have a gender issue here), it’s the guy at Sony who designed the chip. And if not him, the guy at Intel decades ago who created the doping process being used that determined the sensitivity of silicon to visible light. Or Bayer, for the array pattern. Or Nikon for letting Sigma buy Foveon and letting it languish. Decisions have been made. If you accept the defaults, you simply aren’t the person making them anymore. If so, then be pure. Never crop. Take the bland RAW white balance. Don’t move to get the trash out of the frame. Make a video, else you are distorting by choosing a single non-representative moment out of the timeline.
But also be aware that your heroes didn’t accept these limitations of their equipment and resources. Read some history.
I guess this wasn’t a different post after all.
Here’s a kinda cool idea, a $500 backup camera that ties to your phone. Although I’m pretty sure there are already systems like that out there, just not tied to your phone.
I hope it has some serious screws on it, else what’s to stop anyone from putting a screwdriver to it and walking off with $500…
Man, I can’t believe it’s 2016 and Windows and Linux have still not figured out a laptop touchpad. As much as OS X annoys me sometimes, every time I go from the MBP touchpad to a Windows or Linux machine, I just want to shoot myself. I go from being a 60 wpm typist, having some skills, to a complete five-thumbed single finger dork.
It’s like it’s designed to make me feel like my own grampa.
Windows, which I don’t mind ordinarily when using a mouse (thank you iTap Mobile RDP, and fuck you MS for buying and killing it – I’ll be sad when it stops working), becomes completely unusable with a Dell or HP touchpad. I could no more select a bunch of files and drag them someplace else than do a pommel horse routine.
And Linux has that experience, pardon me, “UX”, plus Gnome window borders that are literally one pixel wide. The guy who installed it says that’s a feature. I want to check back with him in 20 years. And then kick him in the shin.
Don’t even get me started on the crappy focus-follows-mouse, and how that interacts badly with the crappy touchpad, while issuing commands to irreplaceable flight hardware. I don’t think I’ve every finished a complicated command in the same terminal window it started in. It’s a PFR waiting to happen.
At least on Linux I can usually ssh and do everything from iTerm on the command-line on a MacBook Pro with a working touchpad, without having to figure out this week’s recipe for installing cygwin on Windows.
Tagged Linux, UI, UX, WindowsIs there any point in even kidding yourself that there’s any such thing as the 4th Amendment anymore? Your communications, your metadata, your location, your finances [1], your car, and now there’s not even the pretense of fruit of the poisoned tree.
[1] due to the increasingly irrelevant “third party doctrine“.
This is rarely mentioned, but… you get a SDC. It starts driving you around. Until it runs into something it can’t handle, and hands the wheel back over to you. But you don’t actually practice driving anymore. And you were playing games on your iPhone.
Because SDC, amirite?
No one can context-switch like that in the space of reaction times measured in fractions of a second. It defeats one of the reasons for SDCs if the pilot has to monitor it all the time.
Planes get away with it because largely there’s nothing to run into up there, and also co-pilot. Unless you’re in the Blue Angels (or a glider pilot on tow), you’re not flying close formation as a United pilot. Gaps are measured in minutes and 10ks of feet.
And skills require practice. This is a thing with planes too, that has to be addressed in training – more things are automated, so pilots get less real-time practice. Accidents are attributed to this. And airlines require simulator time on real simulators, not GTA on XBox.
There’s no intermediate step where we have part-time self-driving cars with a human monitor to step in. It’s all or nothing.
Tagged SDC0700, and they’re going to go off for at least five minutes. Thanks and fuck you anyone who has jet lag and just got to sleep, or works a night shift.
How are these things even legal? 95-100 dB noise levels. Like standing next to a jet. They are painful, and I say this as someone who spent years playing in a band on stage next to stacks of amps, working construction, and grew up shooting guns thinking ear plugs were for wusses [1].
There’s one place I frequent that’s particularly bad, to the point I consider earplugs to take a piss.
At least they’re washing their hands, I suppose.
For us smart eco- and scientific-types, paper towels FTW!
[1] Ear protection. And eye protection, kids. You won’t regret it. Also sunscreen.
Today’s slightly disconcerting announcement
at 1700: “Gamma ray testing is commencing in Building 233. All personnel should clear the area. Gamma ray testing is commencing in Building 233. All personnel should clear the area.”
Five-hours-too-late ObArcher: “Do you want giant ants? Because this is how you get giant ants.”
Five-hours-too-late career realization: There went my chance to go all Bruce Banner…
Tagged Hulk, PSAHigh Energy Physics
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