From Wish List to Check List: Customer Input Drives Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1
From Wish List to Check List: Customer Input Drives Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 Service Pack 104/20/2004 11:26 PM In an academic setting, a score of 90 percent earns an automatic "A".
By that measure, the team shaping Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 merits
a similar high passing grade. When the innovative application debuted
last October, it reflected the pioneering edge of the digital
note-taking category. Today, Microsoft honed that edge by announcing
the preview release of Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1
(OneNote SP1). Ninety percent of the features included in the software
update are a direct result of customer input and feedback -- with the
remaining 10 percent coming from indirect customer feedback.
Powell, Black Cat to Cross Paths on Friday 13th (Reuters)
Powell, Black Cat to Cross Paths on Friday 13th (Reuters)08/13/2004 09:04 AM Reuters - Secretary of State Colin Powell will
cross paths with a black cat on Friday the 13th, posing for a
picture with a copper-eyed Bombay male that bears his name.
A long-standing and
very popular tradition in the blogosphere -- The Friday Five
-- in which you were invited to answer the week's five questions on
your blog and then link back to the home site, so participants can
browse everyone's answers -- is no more. Heather, the woman who
established and ran Friday Five single-handedly, has stopped asking
the
weekly questions so she can concentrate on her Globe of Blogs
directory.
Every once in awhile when I needed something light for a Friday (or
more often, a Saturday) post, I would turn to this site for
inspiration. I participated about a dozen times. Once I had my five
questions accepted as the questions of the week -- and with 600-700
people participating each week it was great exposure for my
then-fledgling blog. Heather wisely decided not to turn the reins over
to anyone else, since such sites always take on the unique flavour and
style of their owner. Many people found a lot of the questions inane,
but hundreds also protested when the questions were "too hard". So the
questions stayed mostly lowbrow and the popularity (it's one of the 25
most blogrolled sites, with 2500 inbound blogs) stayed high.
I, for one, liked the highbrow, "too hard" questions. Their answers
provided an insight into the mind and heart of the blogger that often
could not be gleaned from their daily, impersonal posts. So my
proposal
is to create a Friday Five type weekly question (or at most two --
five
is too many to allow time and space to elaborate on your answer),
which
we'd solicit, post, and aggregate answers to, through a Google Group
(to save having to set up a separate place and buy bandwidth and
server
space for it). I'd further propose we run it Saturday (quietest day of
the week on the blogosphere), and that it be called That's Awfully Personal, to reflect
the fact that the answers should be revealing, more than just an
off-the-cuff opinion poll or survey.
Here's some examples of questions that might
qualify:
Your home is aflame and burning out of control. All
living
creatures have been safely evacuated. You have time to go back in
quickly and save one possession from the flames. What would it be, and
why?
Your spouse/loved one has come down with an inexplicable
and terminal illness. Their last request of you is to (re-)marry
someone as soon as possible, and not unduly mourn their passing. Do
you
honour this request, and if so, who is the first person who comes to
mind as a possible spouse?
You are one of five finalists in a
winner-take-all $1
million lottery being decided by a reverse draw. A stranger offers you
(and this is allowed) $160,000 now for your ticket, and says if you
decline he will offer $200,000 if yours is one of the last 4 tickets,
$267,000 if yours is one of the last 3 tickets, and $400,000 if yours
is one of the last 2 tickets (each offer being 80% of the 'expected
value' of the ticket at that point). One of the other finalists offers
to split the million with you if yours and theirs are the last 2
tickets remaining, provided you agree to this irrevocably now with 5
tickets remaining. Which, if any, of the offers do you take, and
why?
And here's the simple instructions that we could use:
This Google Group has four sections: One for the
Question
of the Week, as selected by our Awfully Personal Panel and posted each
Friday evening, a second for your permalinks to where you've answered
the Question of the Week, a third for your suggestions for future
Questions of the Week, and a fourth for general discussion about
That's
Awfully Personal.
To participate, just look for this week's
Question of the
Week, copy and paste it into your blog post, along with your answer
(usually a paragraph or two), then return to this Google Group and
post
your permalink (the URL where you've posted your answers) in the
second, My Answers Permalink
section. And feel free to browse others' answers and learn more about
them -- maybe even find like minds and hearts.
If you have a
suggestion for Question of the Week, post it
in the third section and our Panel will review it and, if selected,
they will acknowledge you as the author with a link to your blog.
Questions should ideally be challenging, so that the answers will be
revealing (when answered honestly). But this isn't Truth or Dare -- we
want people to want to answer honestly and to have to think a bit
before they do.
If you have questions or comments, please post
them in the fourth section -- our Panel will read them and reply
promptly.
Not All Sales and Marketing People Have a Black Heart Right?
Not All Sales and Marketing People Have a Black Heart Right?09/02/2004 02:07 PM One of the Google insiders to strike it rich with the IPO was Omid
Kordestani. He's Google's senior vice president of worldwide sales
and was formally an executive at Netscape Communications.
According to the article, Kordestani made $20,444,710 on the Google
IPO and retains a stake worth $388,449,490.
Hey Omid, if you have any fondness left for what remains of your
former company's browser, the Mozilla Foundation is accepting
donations!
Related
Jul 2003 Time Magazine profile of Omid Kordestani
Ferrari
CIO Wish List for 2003
CIO Wish List for 200303/14/2003 01:28 AM At first glance, the dynamics operating today in the CRM industry --
flat sales, tight budgets, vendors cannibalizing each other's market
share -- seem to create a CIO's dream scenario. But many do not see
the supposed silver lining in the economic clouds.
NEC returns to black as net profit boosted by cellphone sales (AFP)
NEC returns to black as net profit boosted by cellphone sales (AFP)04/28/2004 07:28 AM AFP - Japanese computer giant NEC Corp. said it returned to the black
with a full year net profit of 377 million dollars thanks to strong
sales of cellphones and gains from stock issues by subsidiaries.
Communication Technologies, Inc. (COMTek) is a Leading Facilities-Based Broadband Telecommunications Company as Ranked by Black Enterprise 100 List
Communication Technologies, Inc. (COMTek) is a Leading Facilities-Based Broadband Telecommunications Company as Ranked by Black Enterprise 100 List05/31/2004 02:16 PM Communication Technologies Inc., (COMTek), a national leader in
delivering trusted information technology and telecommunications
solutions for mission-critical environments, announced today that
Black Enterprise Magazine, a distinguished national business
publication, has ranked it as a leading facilities-based broadband
telecommunications service company in the magazine’s 2004 Black
Enterprise Industrial /Service 100 list (BE100). The BE 100s list
features the largest black-owned businesses in the nation. [PRWEB May
30, 2004]
The 22nd TOP500 List will be introduced
during the Supercomputer Conference (SC2003) in Phoenix, AZ. The BOF
session will be held Tuesday, November 18, 5:00PM - 6:00PM, Room 36-37
at the SC2003 conference. A comprehensive list of the top 500
supercomputers throughout the world.
Attn: Buyers of MAILING LISTs - MORTGAGE LEADs - BUSINESS LISTs & DIRECT MARKETING SERVICEs : TOTAL Marketing One - TMONE launches Direct Mail List and Sales lead business unit and becomes one of the most competitive list marketing agencies.
2003 Microsoft Security Bulletin List - Final12/29/2003 10:29 PM We'd just like to remind you that the full 2003 Microsoft Security
Bulletin list is up for your perusal. All 51 bulletins are listed with
links to the specific Microsoft page. Also, at the bottom of the list
are links to the full 2002 & 2001 bulletin lists. Double check the
list to make sure you haven't missed any for 2003!
Windows Server 2003 Vanishes From Vulnerability List
Windows Server 2003 Vanishes From Vulnerability List06/26/2004 11:05 AM There are some lists that you don't want to be on, and Microsoft may
have finally managed to avoid this one. By Wayne Rash, InfoWorld (via
MyAppleMenu)
Jobs makes 2003 Scientific American 50 list
Jobs makes 2003 Scientific American 50 list11/19/2003 01:02 PM Apple CEO Steve Jobs is among the 2003 Scientific American 50 List of
Winners in the Communications category for starting "an online music
service that serves as a model for the rest of the record
industry."...
Holiday Sales Show Internet Taking Its Place in List Industry
People will listen
when
they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a
time,
you weren't ready
to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let
people
come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate
them.
Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll
keep
you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to
something
new.
When presenting a new
idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's better to say 'I
don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their own
questions.
Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty
is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't
understand
a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine
times
out
of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen.
Your close attention is sometimes more important than your
articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good
thing.
When I've talked to people about the ideas I've presented in this
blog,
I get the sense that maybe 10% really understand and appreciate what
I'm saying. Perhaps another 40% are ready to listen and want to believe, but either my
inarticulateness or their internalization mechanism garbles the
message. After all, saving the world (or, as one recent commenter
'geo'
put it more accurately "changing how humans live so we as a species
can
continue to survive") is not easy or obvious, or we'd all be busy
doing
it. This reading list is for that 40%, in the hope that better writers
than I can convey more clearly and compellingly what we need to do and
why. The remaining 50%, I suspect, are not ready. Five years ago
someone gave me The Spell of the
Sensuous and I gave up after five pages -- I just wasn't
ready.
Here's the list -- 56 books and articles that forever changed my
worldview, and my purpose for living::
What Life was Really Like
Before
Civilization: Revisionist History
Full House, by
the
late Stephen
J. Gould.
The presence of man on Earth was a random occurrence, and after the
next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve
differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
The Wealth of Man
by Peter
Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very
pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the
rest.
The
Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay
by Jared
Diamond Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe
from which
we have never recovered'.
Original Affluence,
by Marshall Sahlins.
If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy,
agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery,
wouldn't you try to portray
the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
Extinction,
by Michael
Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by
massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to
end this one sooner (a century) or later (several millennia).
The Axemaker's
Gift
by Jame
s
Burke
and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly
corrupted
to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world
better.
What's Going On
Under our Noses: The Real News
The Unconscious
Civilization, by John Ralston Saul.
How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic
system we built.
Ockham's
Razor, by
Wade Rowland.
What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new
ones.
People
Before Profit, by Charles
Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged
the vast
majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so
again.
State of the
World,
by WorldWatch
Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse:
population
growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland
per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the
extinction
of plant and animal species.
World Scientists' Warning
(online), by the Union
of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are
on
a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain
before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost
and
the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great
change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if
vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet
is
not to be irretrievably mutilated."
Dream of the Earth
by Thomas Berry.
"We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.
We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we
fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the
new story."
The Future
of Freedom, by Fareed
Zakaria Why we can't change another
country's culture from outside it.
The New
Rules of the World, by John
Pilger
An accurate, devastating
portrait of the world in 2003.
The
Demon in
the Freezer, by Richard
Preston. How vulnerable we all are to
individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
Against the Grain,
by Richard
Manning. How grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the
Earth.
Population
Projections,
by US
Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global
Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you
believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still
rising?
Global
Warming, by
NOAA.
An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and
consequences of global warming.
This Overheating World -
Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article
in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and
cynical political expediency, of denial.
Are Cities Changing
Local
and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA.
Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local
climate change and instability.
Restoring Scientific Integrity
(online) by Union of
Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific
research to forward its
own political agenda.
Climate Collapse,
by David Stipp
(online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling
implications of
global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
Conservative Myths
on
Global Warming (online) by Blogger
Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science
behind
global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to
human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant
instability
The Empire
Strikes Out,
by Kenny
Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our
world, but nature always bats last.
The Tragedy of the
Commons,
by Garry
Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us,
is
disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
Elizabeth
Costello, by JM
Coetzee.
Why we tolerate a holocaust against our
fellow creatures on Earth.
The Machine in Our Heads,
by Glenn
Parton.
How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological
crisis.
About Gaia: What
Nature is Really About
When Elephants
Weep,
by Jeff Masson. Compelling
scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
Mind of the Raven,
by Bernd
Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are
intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
The Sacred
Balance
by David Suzuki. A
passionate explanation of James Lovelock'sGaia Hypothesis, the need to
redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in
nature.
The Hidden
Dimension,
by Edward
Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and
human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
The Spell of the
Sensuous,
by David
Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
Radical Analysis, Radical
Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you
probably won't 'buy' their arguments unless you've first read much of
the material above)
Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn.
Also the IshCon
discussion forum. The first two of these three books
are fictionalized stories about human history from a different,
anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis
and insight. Ishmael is more
popular but I prefer The Story of
B
which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The
two critical lectures are online here.
Beyond Civilization is about
what
we should do about all this.
A Language Older Than
Words, by Derrick
Jensen.
A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our
current predicament won't work.
The
World We
Want, by Mark
Kingwell.
Why we are best served by trusting our
instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or
rational.
Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We
Can Use
to Save the World
Freeman Dyson's
Brain
(online interview), in Wired Magazine.
The
twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable
self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states
and
governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like
solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
The Developing Ideas
Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly.
An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons
instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and
ecological footprint.
The
Unconquerable World, by Jon
Schell.
Why non-violence and
consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
The Support
Economy, by Shoshana
Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
Unequal
Protection, by Thom
Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood'
to corporations.
When
Corporations Rule
the World, by David
Korten.
The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized
economies that
empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming
the
myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and
focusing
instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in
untrammelled
corporate power.
Radical
Simplicity, by Jim
Merkel.
How to free yourself from
possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
The Tipping
Point, by Malcolm
Gladwell. What makes things change.
Ten Ways to Make a
Difference, by Peter
Singer.
A pragmatic recipe for change.
The Truth About
Stories,
by Thomas
King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a
new
society? Write a new story.
The Corporation,
by Joel
Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
Humans in the Wilderness,
by Glenn
Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a
primarily wilderness Earth.
At Home in
the Universe, by S
tuart
Kauffman. How self-organizing,
self-managing systems work.
EarthDance (entire
book online), by Elisabet
Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is
here)
eGaia
(entire book
online), by Gary
Alexander. How to achieve of peace,
cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth,
the fuels of our current culture) and a future state
vision with vignettes from
individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future
world.
A simple way to
simultaneously send new blog articles, as they are posted, to any
number of user-maintained, editable e-mail lists (from which people
could easily unsubscribe, of course).
10.
An
automatically maintained Table of Contents with one-sentence abstracts
for each of your blog posts, editable by you and sortable by your
readers by title, date, and category/sub-category.
9.
A
simple, meaningful measure of total readership, that weighs blog hits,
visits, average duration of stay, RSS subscriptions, inbound blogs,
e-mail subscriptions, and visits to copies of your posts on
aggregators.
8.
An
ability to create standing-order 'profiles' for all blogs, as you now
can for newsfeeds, so that you can receive a single daily e-mail or
web
page that aggregates everything posted that day, anywhere in the
blogosphere, on a specific topic or containing specific keywords or
phrases.
7.
A
gigabyte or two of free storage on the hosted blog server, so you can
keep a copy of your entire My Documents folder on the server, link to
anything in it from your blog without having to FTP a copy, and be
able
to access your entire 'e-filing cabinet' from any computer anywhere
anytime.
6.
An
easy migration path from the asynchronous, polished
anonymity of the blog to the real-time, one-to-one, face-to-face or
voice-to-voice, halting interactive iterative intimacy of other media,
media
that
move you from talk to action.
5.
Inclusion of our posts,
if we want them to be, in Google News.
4.
More
first-person accounts, first-hand news, live photos and reports, and
investigative reporting in
the blogosphere.
3.
A
blogging tool so simple even our parents can maintain one.
2.
No
more fear of your blog or your computer crashing and irretrievably
losing everything
you've written on your blog.
1.
The
end of the terms 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogger', and to be simply
called An
Online Journalist.
I've updated the Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. Please send
me details on any missing and new Salon Blogs, and errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive at
least once a week.
There are now 159 active (updated in the last month, or officially on
vacation but returning) Salon Blogs. Comings & Goings this past
month:
Daniel X. O'Neil, the veteran Salon blogger at
GoogObits
who uniquely chronicles the deceased, has moved to his own site.
The flight from Radio to Typepad seems to have
stopped, at
least for now.
Of the roughly 100 new Salon Blog numbers
assigned this
past
month, about 40 actually made at least one post, and the following 17
appear to be posting regularly. I especially
recommend MallowDrama, Hermit's Notebook, Hoi Polloi and I Don't Know
What Happened, which are off to sensational starts. Welcome, new
Sloggers all.
Total hits this month for Salon Blogs were about 1.1
million, up about 8% for the month, but they were very unevenly
distributed (even more than usual), with 850
thousand of these hits going to the top 11 blogs. For the typical
Slogger, December traffic was about 10% quieter than November, due
probably to the holidays. The median for active Salon Bloggers was
only
about 700 hits per month, about 30 per day.
Inbound blogs totaled about 3250, up about 5%
month-over-month, with the top 11 blogs
accounting for 50% of them. The median for active Salon Bloggers was 7
inbound blogs.
About 42% of active Sloggers are female, up
significantly
from just over 30% three months ago. That's great news, but I don't
know what to make of it.
I'll continue to keep the Directory current, with your help, and will
report at least bi-monthly on comings & goings and stats.
P.S. I've also updated my
Tables of Contents (see top left of my blog). Since Google has, for
some reason, stopped crawling How to Save the World, Google is no
longer a reliable way to find things in my archives. I'm going to test
some other search engines and change my search bar
accordingly.
25-Sept-2003 -- Court Hangs Up on Anti-Telemarketing List
My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web
Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?
The list should not
include pay
sites, nor should it include news sites, blogs or other sites that
appear on blogrolls (too many, and too subjective). Nor should it
include highly specialized sites (I have a personal list of favourite
genealogy sites, but I realize that few people would consider these
'essential').
To make the list manageable, I've identified 21 categories for the essential links
(let me know if you think I've missed an entire category). If I get
enough response, I'll publish a list of the Top 3 in
each category and keep it on my sidebar or Spurl it (Spurl lets you keep your
web bookmarks online and share them with others).
The examples shown for each category are my personal favourites and
some of them are eccentric, so they may not make the Top 3 list. Quite
a few of them come from the excellent Jason
Lefkowitz' Quality Software list (thanks to Internet Time for the
link):
« The bas-relief on this slab of dark granite becomes a cool bit
of snowy art. A Thanksgiving day postprandial gallery of pictures from a
November Snow to gape at in a turkey induced coma. »
Thanksgiving, a treasured holiday that involves lots of food, family
and no religious obligations. A day that likely makes all the
surviving Native Americans wonder what in the hell the Wampanoag tribe
was thinking when they helped those prissy pilgrims survive the first
few winters instead of taking care of the problem early. So much
romanticism is imbued in the whole idea of Thanksgiving that even
Plymouth Rock is a major tourist attraction which, I can tell you from
personal experience, is the saddest bit of rock anyone might waste
their time travelling down two hours from Boston to gape at.
In the annual fit of family and patriotic turkey eating frenzy, the
Pilgrims were, in fact, immigrants celebrating the fact that they
managed to survive a year or two in their new homeland, one that they
either chose to or were forced to move to. Not that everyone shouldn't
have something to reflect happily upon in the previous 365 days, but
people who move to an alien land have a completely different need to
do so since, like with the Pilgrims, there are lots of days where the
misery you knew back home seems a lot more comfortable than the misery
you are just beginning to make friends with. Simple things you once
took for granted are a new challenge and few things come easily.
I didn't go home this year, much as I wanted to, but we had a
'Finnish Thanksgiving' dinner of turkey meatballs, mashed potatoes
with aura cheese and garlic, and lingonberry sauce. It wasn't the same
as a full spread of turkey, stuffing, giblet gravy, yams, cranberry
relish, pumpkin pie, and piles of other food you try to cram in before
you feel so full that you feel sick, but it was good. I don't feel
much like a pilgrim but, like them, I've managed to survive so far and
that's something worth treating yourself to a big meal that would drop
a moose in 50 paces. Of course, this year I have something to be quite
thankful for and that is, after much waiting and hoping, I finally got
a job. Not only a job, but a job at the one place I wanted to work for
above all the others. :) I'm happy, too, that I'll be working
somewhere that I'll be, I think, the only native English speaker and
where the operating language is Finnish and I will have no choice but
to finally start speaking a bit more Finnish. I hope I survive the
awkward stage. Getting back into a regular workday routine is going to
feel really strange for a week or three I think. :)
Also, this week's paper had a story about Korttelit.fi, a pictorial map of
every building in downtown Helsinki. The interface is very nicely done
and the pictures are good as well. It's not finished as the person who
created it is doing it himself, but I suspect there will be some
commercial interest in it to make it worth his while.
Thanksgiving and Apple Events12/02/2003 12:22 AM
The Thanksgiving holiday falls on Thursday (November 27th) in the
United States. As a result, reporting across the web from U.S. based
sites may be a...
Database Sales Rebound in 200306/07/2004 01:52 PM After a dip in 2002, DBMS revenues rose in 2003, market researchers
say.
Music sales decline again in 2003
Music sales decline again in 200304/09/2004 03:55 PM Recorded music sales around the world fell by more than 7% in 2003,
according to latest figures.
Site News: Happy Thanksgiving!
Site News: Happy Thanksgiving!12/02/2003 01:36 AM Just wanted to drop in a personal note this morning - I hope that all
out there that are celebrating it a Happy Thanksgiving.
Alex and I set off from Boston Tuesday on a trip via light aircraft
to northern New Jersey, Washington, DC, Norfolk, VA, and Gettysburg,
PA. I try to avoid flying in the clouds and I try to avoid
flying in the dark. But there was a cloud deck over New Jersey
at about 2500' above the ground and the weather for Wednesday was
forecast to be much worse. So it was going to be a flight
through at least some clouds. If I had been alone I would have
left around noon but a friend wanted a ride for the first leg of the
trip and couldn't leave work immediately. So we didn't take off
from Hanscom Air Force Base (Bedford, MA) until after 3 pm.
Knowing that there would be clouds in New Jersey and not wanting to
deal with the complex air space around New York City, I filed an
instrument flight rules (IFR) plan. Knowing that it would
be dark when we arrived I decided to go to Teterboro airport where
they have a precision instrument landing system (ILS) rather than
cheaper simpler Essex County Airport where they have smaller runways
and no ILS (Essex County is where JFK, Jr. kept his Piper Saratoga;
Teterboro is closer to Manhattan but horrifically expensive for fuel
and other services). From the weather forecasts that I'd seen it
sounded as though 6000' would put me above the lowest deck of clouds
and below the higher decks. That was indeed true until around
Hartford, CT. Then we were headed straight for the top of a
cloud. The dog in the back didn't budge from his sleeping
position but I could feel some tension from the right seat. "Why
aren't we climbing to get above that cloud?" my passenger asked.
An instrument clearance means that Air Traffic Control (ATC) has
cleared a block of airspace in front of you of any other airplanes
that are also flying under IFR. The pilot is still responsible
for looking for visual flight rules (VFR) airplanes when out of the
clouds but it is ATC's job to keep everyone inside the clouds
separated from each other. The system only works if pilots don't
deviate from their clearance, which includes an assigned
altitude. This I explained just as we went into the cloud
top. In addition to obscuring one's view of the horizon clouds
have a nasty habit of containing turbulent air. The airplane
rocked a bit.
The real problem with flying in clouds in the New England winter is
airframe icing. Whenever the temperature in a cloud is below 0 C
there is a risk of ice accumulation. The temperature, on
average, drops 2 degrees C for every 1000' rise in altitude. So
at 6000' it was about 12 degrees colder than on the ground or -2
C. A simple airplane such as my Diamond Star DA40 does not have
heated wings, a heated propeller, rubber boots along the wings
that can crack ice, or a system for spreading antifreeze out onto
the wings. It does have "pitot heat" to make sure that the
instruments for measuring airframe and altitude don't have their air
intakes frozen shut. I had turned this on just before entering
the clouds but it is only helpful for maintaining airplane control
while getting out of the ice. My rule for instrument flying in
the winter is that I won't go unless it is above freezing at 3000'
above the ground. Because there are no mountains or other
obstacles over the coastal sprawl of the East Coast it is always
possible to descend to 3000' without fear of hitting something.
After 15 minutes in the clouds small amounts of ice began to
accumulate on the "wing walk" grippy surface next to the
cockpit. Airliners and the one small airplane on the radio (New
York Approach) were complaining about ice accumulation and asking for
lower altitudes. The helpful controller said that people a
few miles ahead were reporting ice and asked me if I wanted
lower. I was cleared first to 5000' where the temperature was 0
and the ice accumulation stopped but the built-up ice did not come
off. At 4000' the temperature was +2 and the ice quickly
disappeared. We were still inside the clouds at 4:30 pm when the
sun was supposed to set so we noticed only a rapid darkening of our
surroundings.
Teterboro airport tends to be busy and a day with low clouds when
everyone is coming in IFR slows things down considerably. In
theory ATC should have parked us in a holding pattern somewhere.
I would have been responsible for driving around in fairly precise
ovals, 1 minute long on the flat side, at some precise point in
space. In practice the New York controllers are so good and they
have complete RADAR coverage so to be nice they just gave me vectors
that took me northwest of Teterboro until it was my turn to come back
in. With vectors they just say "fly heading 270" and you point
the airplane west at the present altitude. After about a
10-minute vector delay we were turned back in towards Teterboro and
cleared down to 3000'. We didn't break out of the clouds
completely until we were at 2000' and heading in towards Runway 19 at
Teterboro. It can be a challenge to locate a runway amidst the
clutter of parking lot and street lights in an urban area but the
Teterboro runway is 7000' long and has a fancy centerline lighting
system. In any case it isn't necessary to visually identify the
runway until several hundred feet above the ground. An ILS is
flown by tracking two radio beams emanating from just in front of the
runway. The localizer beam gives left/right guidance and the
glideslope beam gives up/down guidance. Deviation from the
center of these beams is displayed on a little round dial on
the airplane dashboard. Not wanting to trust my perceptions in
the dark, I flew the gauges while running the pre-landing
checklist.
Once on the ground we taxied off the runway as fast as possible
because there was a huge Gulfstream business jet right behind us,
moving at more than 2X the speed of the little Diamond Star.
Both of us taxied into Jet Aviation, one of the airport gas stations
at Teterboro. Their parking lot this Tuesday before Thanksgiving
was crammed with business jets and turbine-powered helicopters.
There were probably $2-3 billion worth of airplanes on their ramp and
in their hangars. The Jet Aviation staff took our bags from the
plane through the palatial terminal into a waiting Hertz rental car, a
little over 2 hours after we'd taken off from Bedford and about 3
hours after we'd left Cambridge.
Next stop is Washington, DC. We have a big family dinner
there at 4 pm on Thanksgiving Day but the weather forecast calls for
clouds, rain, strong headwinds, turbulence, gusty surface winds,
etc.
Grok Description matches for Black Friday - After Thanksgiving Day Sales List 2003 GrokA matches for Black Friday - After Thanksgiving Day Sales List 2003
Black Friday - After Thanksgiving Day Sales List 2003
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
A long-standing and
very popular tradition in the blogosphere -- The Friday Five
-- in which you were invited to answer the week's five questions on
your blog and then link back to the home site, so participants can
browse everyone's answers -- is no more. Heather, the woman who
established and ran Friday Five single-handedly, has stopped asking
the
weekly questions so she can concentrate on her Globe of Blogs
directory.
Here's some examples of questions that might
qualify:
In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn
says:
I've updated the Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. Please send
me details on any missing and new Salon Blogs, and errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive at
least once a week.
My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web
Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?