1.1 2025 January
1.1.1 2025 January 1 - Happy New Year
A Happy New Year to all my web-page readers.
I'm told the fitness gyms are packed wall to wall
for the first two weeks in January with people
who swear that this year they're going
to stay in shape.
My New Year Resolution is going to be keeping up my
weblog
pages.
Time will tell how well I do with it.
Here is a link directly to the
most-recent
entry.
1.1.2 2025 January 1 - From "Law and Order"
I love the television show "Law and Order,"
especially the inter-generational, inter-cultural banter,
usually around Detective Lenny Briscoe and his younger colleages.
1.1.3 2025 January 3 - Moab Pictures and Videos
Okay, the trip was last year,
2024 December 20-22,
but I finally got Tyler's drone videos and put them all together
http://the-adam.com/stuff/htm/moab2024.html
on a web page with links to the daily pictures,
my hand-held flying videos,
and, now, Tyler's drone videos.
The drone videos are fantastic and, alas,
they are also quite large,
large enough to tax some people's download speeds.
So I have the link to a smaller version and then a
"(large)" link to the full-size video.
There are also drone videos from an early trip,
2024 October 26-27,
to Bryce Canyon.
1.1.4 2025 January 4 - Aviation Day of Joy
Flying friend Shanley invited me and
other flying friend Tyler to a brunch gathering of
her local Phoenix chapter of the
Ninety-Nines
in beautiful-red-rocks Sedona (SEZ).
We flew up together in my Piper Cherokee N8377W
and had a delightful breakfast with good company
where we were welcome guests at their table.
There was talk of airplanes and airports
and flying and careers and other aviation subjects.
It was great.
As we were leaving Sedona
we bumped into the Sedona chapter of the Ninety-Nines
who also were having a meeting at Sedona Airport (SEZ)
and I got to see both groups taking a big group photo.
On the way back to Falcon Field Airport (FFZ)
we passed a local back-country airstrip called Red Creek,
the shortest runway in Arizona where I land my Cherokee.
"I'm not saying it's where angels fear to tread,
but they step lightly in these scary places."
Looking down on this seldom-inhabited aviation landmark
we saw an airplane on the side of the runway,
so we decided they might want company.
Radio calls unanswered,
we flew over the airstrip
to let them know we were landing, they waved at us,
we waggled our wings, I did a nice
landing
there, and our now new friends taxied over to greet us.
Matt is into aviation fire fighting and agriculture,
aviation careers outside the airlines
or the flight schools,
and interesting topics for young pilots
like Shanley and Tyler,
who are curious about careers in aviation.
It was a delightful conversation and
we admired his cool Piper SuperCub.
When we were coming back to Falcon
the radio sounded like a rapid-fire square-dance caller
and I was anticipating having to find five free seconds
to call my position and intentions,
"Falcon Tower, Cherokee
November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
inbound with [radio information] Echo,
south parking."
The last is squeezed in there
in the hope that the guys in the tower
will be kind enough to let us land on the south runway
further from where we are but closer to where we park
so we don't have to cross the south runway on the ground.
Air traffic controllers are usually pretty amazing
and they handle a lot of airplanes.
At so-called general-aviation airports like Falcon
they're handling lots of less-experienced pilots
which is a lot more stressful than sequencing airline pilots
who have thousands of hours and recent training
and who fly all the time with their excellent radio skills.
It's an interesting relationship between
pilots and controllers and usually it works very well.
We cede control of our immediate destiny to controllers
after telling them what we want
and their job is to get everybody where they want to be
safely and quickly.
It's like police where we give them control
so they can keep us safe and happy.
Whatever you may think of how good or bad
police-civilian relationships are in your town,
I have found air traffic controllers are my friends in the air.
Well, this time was above and beyond.
Just as I was anticipating introducing myself on the radio,
the point where we pilots tells controllers
who we are, where we are, and what we want to do,
I heard on the radio,
"November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
do you park on the south side?"
I sat up with a start.
Not only had I not introduced myself
to this frantically-busy tower controller,
so he must have been looking at the tracks
on the traffic display
(where on earth did he find the time
to look for me?),
but he also remembered I parked on the south side
and I might want to use the south runway,
not the nearer north runway nearer my current position.
So I answered, "Seven Seven Whiskey, yes, please."
"Seven Seven Whiskey,
fly to the confluence
(a known reporting point for Falcon pilots)
for extended base leg to Runway Two Two Left."
Wow, yes sir,
"Seven Seven Whiskey, fly to the confluence, thank you."
After being cleared to land and landing,
I was able to get off the runway quickly
(to help him with traffic behind me) and,
as an encore,
he gave me taxi instructions to get to my parking space
so I didn't have to call the equally-busy ground controller.
We did find a gap in the radio chatter to thank
the controllers for doing a kick-ass job for us.
The whole day was pleasant, wonderful, and surreal.
1.1.5 2025 January 7 - The Gloomiest Week of the Year
The solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year,
summer being the most daylight hours and winter being the fewest.
However, the earth's orbit is not a circle but an ellipse,
the earth is tilted on its axis, and the result is an effect
called "The Equation of Time" in some books.
The result is the winter solstice is neither
the earliest sunset, usually around December 7,
nor the latest sunrise, usually around January 7,
check out the
analemma
for more details.
So, for morning people like me,
especially morning people that like to ride a bicycle
and don't like doing it at night at my more-advanced age,
that makes this week the gloomiest week of the year.
At least there's nowhere to go but brighter mornings
until sometime around June 7.
1.1.6 2025 January 11 - Making Cool Friends
This one isn't really my story,
but I got to enjoy the moment today.
My buddy Tyler was playing some video game online,
I'm older and I don't play these games
(although I did go through a bunch of first-person
virtual-reality games like "Castle Wolfenstein"
and "Doom" and "Heretic" a few decades ago),
and he met a fellow Hayden.
This fellow was Out There in Cyberspace,
who knows where, some user handle in an Internet universe.
The same gregarity that got Tyler and me to become friends
from a chance meeting from a flat tire he got at another airport
got Tyler and Hayden to ask the next questions.
These are questions like "Where do you live?"
and "Can we meet in real life?"
Well, the short version is they did meet,
they have other interests in common,
and I got to meet Hayden today on a flight to meet
another friend for breakfast
out in the Middle of Nowhere,
the Wayside Oasis restaurant at Alamo Lake
in western Arizona.
He is truly a delightful and interesting person.
Not all my friends of friends interest me,
but this one does and I look forward to future meetings.
1.1.7 2025 January 14 - Retired from Clear Demand
It looks like my time has come,
at least so far as Clear Demand is concerned.
Jim and I started Clear Demand in 2011 October
and incorporated in 2012 April, thirteen years ago.
With a combination of our very-different knowledge and insights
we became a serious force in retail science
and we made eight or ten clients a lot of money.
With my usual lack of aw-shucks modesty,
my phenomenal ability to turn good ideas
(my own ideas and those of other people)
into working, practical, production-quality software
made our success happen.
We sold the company to M3 in 2024 June,
M3 bought a retail-competitor-data company BungeeTech soon after,
and the combination should be
a stronger, more-complete company,
still called Clear Demand.
Where the company is going is different enough
that my role as an employee is coming to an end.
My last day is today and, going forward,
my connection with Clear Demand will be less and different.
There is opportunity for me to give advice
and to answer questions and maybe to do work with Jim Sills.
I hope to get more exercise with longer bike rides
and to continue
my aggressive
(I consider eighty concerts a year "aggressive")
concert season,
enjoying my vinyl and tape collection on my
hifi,
flying my airplane with friends to wonderful places,
seeing total solar eclipses
with Barcelona
(2026)
and Luxor
(2027)
on my planning horizon,
and enjoying my family and friends.
1.1.8 2025 January 17 - Car Crash - Ouch!
A delightful, and delightfully redheaded, paramedic
named Monica chatted with me for a while
and reported to me, and to others I presume,
that I showed no symptoms of anything other than
impending soreness.
I asked specifically about apparent vocabulary or memory issues,
slurred speech, anything like that, and she said I seemed fine.
Monica assured me I could still to a hospital then,
or tomorrow if I felt bad then.
After a bunch of forms professionally and politely
offered by police, who also were nice enough to get my
stuff from my car for me,
I walked to a nearby petrol station and took a Lyft ride home.
My neck and lower-right ribs are uncomfortable.
We'll see how sore I am tomorrow.
1.1.9 2025 January 19 - Smart People Conversation
I have some smart people in my
professional and social life and
I never stop enjoying dialogue with them.
It's a myth that
reasoned conversation reliably reaches consensus.
You know the message
that if we keep cool heads and discuss something reasonably
that we will reach a common-good conclusion.
Even if every party is reasonably intelligent
the result can still be back-and-forth babble
not getting anywhere useful or interesting.
It's especially difficult when the two people involved
have different cadences.
I'm smart, Charles is smart, but I'm quick and Charlies isn't.
When we have conversations I have to remember that Charles
will get it, but it will take him fifteen seconds to one minute
to get what I get in two or three seconds.
That doesn't make me smarter, only faster,
and I have to remember to wait the extra time
for his equally-valid, equally-insightful ideas to emerge.
Charles and I have been having conversations
for forty-seven years and we have worked it out.
There are media like email that allow for each step
to be reasoned carefully where an extra five minutes doesn't
impeded communication.
A conversation shouldn't feel like a chess game
with a ticking clock.
I was having one of those
politically-relevant math converations with Baxter.
It was about voting schemes.
We are both frustrated that the current election process,
with or without the Electoral College,
pretty-much guarantees victory for
one of the two big parties
even when a third party actually has more popular support.
It's not a new issue nor is this a new discussion for us,
but the subject is especially topical
right after a major U.S.-Presidential election.
My scheme is algorithmically consise,
people submit a list of preferred candidates,
intially any U.S. native-born citizen over thirty-five years of age.
We take everbody's first choice on the list of candidates,
rank order the candidates by that count,
and keep enough candidates for half the vote.
Usually we expect one candidate to get half the vote and it's over.
Otherwise we keep just the candidates that total half the vote
and repeat the process with people's first choices on
the new, much-shorter list.
We repeat until only one candidate is left.
In the case where most people prefer D or R
it comes out the same as now,
but supposing there is strong support for some third party,
we would see that support in official ballot counts
because people could vote their Libertarian or Green or other choice
first knowing their D-vs.-R choice would still
affect the outcome.
His scheme is to have people vote just YES or NO
for each of those same initial list.
In practice they could list up to, say, five names.
We're interested in the case where there are two, three, or four
candidates a voter prefers rather than having
vote lists like every U.S. citizen except one person.
There were points in our recent discussion
where we debated the notion of numerical-score voting
where my hope-he-wins candidate gets a score of one,
my hope-he-loses candidate gets a score of minus one,
and some third party candidate gets some numerical score reflecting
the voter's confort with that candidate.
I rebelled strenuously on that one claiming
I might trust people to state a preference
but not to say they liked one candidate some numerical amount
more than another.
Baxter's scheme was that people would list their acceptable
candidates for office and whoever got the highest number,
regardless of rank among a voter's choices, wins the election.
At the end, I said,
"Look, in the current scheme of things,
we would both be mostly satisfied if we could name
one or two candidates for President of the United States
and in my scheme the two-choices voter expresses a preference
and in your scheme the voter just lists both names."
What made it cool with a converation between
two smart people is there was clear recognition
that this captured the essence of our difference.
I find myself in conversation with less-smart people
we get enmired in details and
I find myself unable to communicate essential differences
amid a flurry of minor issues.
I'm a smart person, no mystery there,
and I use other people's ideas well which makes me smarter.
Maybe another part of smartness
is being able to codify the essential difference in a discussion.
Of course that requires both parties in the discussion be listening.
Thank you, Baxter, for being a friend who gets it.
1.1.10 2025 January 21 - Recovering and Relaxing
My neck is a lot less sore from my
accident
on Friday night,
my lower-right rib is still tender,
so I'm not doing my twice-daily plank exercises
or riding my bicycle yet.
I plan to see my doctor soon to check things out,
but I figure I'll wait a couple more days,
once because I want to see how I'm doing after about a week
and again because I tend to procrastinate.
(I keep meaning to look up "procrastinate"
and I keep putting it off.)
Meanwhile I'm enjoying my life of leisure
to catch up on home-computer-system issues,
tools I use that don't work quite the way I want.
There are some new projects I'm going to start soon.
(There's that procrastination bit again.)
One project I'm starting is transcribing my old "master" tapes
to high-bit-rate digital.
During my graduate-school days in 1980 and 1981
I recorded about forty big-reel tapes
(Ten inch reels of 1-mil tape,
48 minutes at 15 inches/second (38 cm/sec))
of local jazz in and around Stanford,
really sweet recordings with the life and energy of live music
and the musical resolution and spatial imaging of
only-two-microphone stereo recording.
There were Maxell-brand tapes which are pristine and wonderful,
no problems there,
and I'm starting with those.
There are also Ampex Grandmaster-456 tapes that have succumbed
to Sticky Tape Syndrome where they get all gooey
and can't be played the way they are.
It turns out they can be baked in an oven
at 60° C (140° F) for twelve hours,
left for a day,
and then played for the next two or three days.
That window is wide enough not only to make digital copies
at high resolution
(24 bit depth at 96K samples/second resolution, "24/96" in geek-speak,
I made compact-disk (CD) 16/44 copies of these tapes twenty years ago
and they're pretty good)
but also to copy them onto Maxell tapes I bought
from The Tape Warehouse in Atlanta twenty years ago.
That means I get to listen to these wonderful moments from my past,
more than forty years ago.
1.1.11 2025 January 23 - Itzhak Perlman
We normally think of violinist Itzhak Perlman
as being a classical musician with exquisite interpretations
of the great composers.
On the Mendelssohn-piano-trios compact disk (CD)
his name gets more than half the album cover,
mostly because "Ax" and "Ma" are such shorter names
than "Perlman."
This concert was different.
He was in a band called "Fiddler's House"
where they played Jewish music from eastern Europe
centered around 1875,
a decade before seven of my eight great-grandparents left that area.
It was fun to hear the music and the banter and the stories.
In a world ripe with strife
it was wonderful to have a concert
celebrating Jewish tradition without
politics.
The joy of the music and the culture and, of course, the food
was the message and the audience had fun with it as well.
One of the fun moments was a brief discussion
of the piano part of the group.
These people were nomadic enough that they tended
to play instruments they could carry with them
and the piano doesn't quite fit that bill.
One voice mentioned electric keyboards and it was pointed out
there weren't a lot of electric keyboards
one hundred and fifty years go.
There was talk of good times and good matzo-ball soup
and wonderful weddings.
It was a good evening all around.
Lenny Briscoe: I always wanted to learn guitar.
Ed Green: Actually it's a bass, a Rickenbacker.
Lenny Briscoe: Is that good?
Ed Green: It was good enough for Elvis.
Lenny Briscoe: Now you're talking my generation.
Ed Green: Actually, that's Elvis Costello.
Lenny Briscoe: Who's on first?
I was driving home
in my new, ten-week-old Volkswagon Golf GTI
from dinner at the home of friends
northbound in the left lane of Hayden Road in Scottsdale.
(I was in the left lane rather then the center lane
because there had been some traffic in the center lane.)
All of a sudden a red car appears to my right
making a left turn "across my bow" not stopping,
just moving directly into my path.
I hit the brakes hard figuring I would stop before impact,
that didn't happen,
I heard a crash,
and, the next thing I knew,
my car was stopped and I was surrounded by white airbags.
I slithered my way out of the car and walked around.
My front end was completely destroyed, "squished in,"
and the other car was on its side with people inside.
Needless to say, the primary effort of the police and fire folks
was getting them out of their car to safety.
Here
are my pictures after the crash.
8:40:30 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
436 visits to this web page.