Daily Archives: November 5, 2009

“I Want to Fly”

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E-mail from a reader.

I get the occasional e-mail from readers who evidently think I can perform miracles for them — or perhaps take them by the hand and lead them to the life they dream about. Like this one, which I got today:

I’m 35 no wife or kids and no ties to anything or anyone and want to learn top fly I can get the money to go to a school I just want to change careers and I have learned to live on 35k a year no matter how much income I dont mind being away from home for 14-28 days as long as there is hot showers and the internet please get back to me as I would like to find out more directly from you as to what I should be doing I have looked around for schools and filled out my FAFSA for aid

To the person who wrote this — who I won’t embarrass by mentioning any names — what the hell do you expect me to do for you?

If you’re incapable of doing your own research to find a flight school in your area, you’re likely incapable of learning to fly or getting a job as a pilot, too. Stop whining and begging for help from strangers. You’re 35 years old! Get your fucking act together and make your future happen.

And for chrissake, if you’re going to contact people by e-mail, learn how to punctuate!

Sorry, folks, but this is the end of a long week for me, I have a splitting headache, and I’m spending the night at a Super 8 Motel inhabited by loud drug addicts. Whatever patience I usually have for e-mail crap like what’s quoted above is long gone.

Arizona Storm Clouds Time-Lapse

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So very cool to watch the clouds grow and move.

One shot every ten seconds, compiled at 30 frames per second.

The forecast called for a 30% chance of rain late in the day yesterday, so I thought I’d set up my time-lapse camera and capture the cloud build-up. This video starts at about 7:20 AM and ends at 7:30 PM, right when it had gotten dark. The first 25 seconds is a typical Arizona day — perfectly blue sky with nothing going on. Then some light clouds chase each other across the sky. Finally, the storm builds and moves in. This is one of my better efforts.

These shots were taken from just outside my front door with the camera pointing almost due north. And no, the cactus isn’t crooked. Its the wide angle lens distorting the shot.

On Censoring Dictionaries

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Why?

This morning, one of my Twitter friends @mjvalente linked to an article on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, “Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple.”

As a writer, I’m bothered by most forms of censorship, so I read what Gruber had to say. He described Ninjawords, an iPhone dictionary application, and had all kinds of glowing praise for it, followed by the meat of the problem:

It’s a terrific app — pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store.

But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.

Apple censored an English dictionary.

Gruber goes on to point out just how idiotic this is and, frankly, I can’t disagree with anything he has to say. Dictionaries should include all words in common usage; the words that were removed — words like shit and fuck — can be heard daily on cable television and in schoolyards.

My question is this: By removing them, are they trying to pretend that these words don’t exist?

Whatever.

This morning, I used the Dictionary widget, that’s part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Mac. I use this tool often throughout my work day to make sure the words I’m using in my work are the right words or to look up words I’ve heard but am unclear on meaning. With Gruber’s post fresh in my mind, I decided to see what would happen if I looked up shit.

Shit in the Dictionary WidgetGuess what? As you can see in this screen shot, it was there.

So was fuck.

So Apple makes a dictionary with “objectionable content” available as part of its operating system, which can be used by anyone — including school children! — but will not allow an iPhone (and iPod Touch?) app with the same content?

You might argue that the Dictionary widget and application in Mac OS X are protected by Parental Controls. But how many kids who are unfamiliar with these words are likely to be buying dictionary apps? And with these words in common usage throughout the U.S., how many kids do you think have never heard them? And isn’t there some educational value to understanding the true meaning of a word and its usage? I don’t know about you, but I find the Dictionary Widget information shown here quite illuminating. I especially enjoy the “unobjectionable” explanations of the phrases.

This all goes back to George Carlin’s routine “The Seven Words.” The whole routine — not just the words. (If you follow that link and watch the clip on YouTube, watch the whole thing, including his reasoning. George Carlin was a genius.) They’re just words, people. They’re not going to bite you or make you immoral or cause you to want to kill someone. They’re individual words — not even used in sentences to communicate a message. Just plain words.

Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense to cut them out of the dictionary.

And removing other words with perfectly acceptable meanings — words that even appear in the Bible! — just because they also have “objectionable” meanings only makes matters worse. A cock is a bird. An ass is a donkey. (Gruber’s post lists more of them.) Should kids be kept in the dark about these meanings, too?

Apple, you know I love you — I’ve been using Macs and writing about them since 1989 — but you’re being silly. Cut it out. You’re embarrassing us.

Washington Photo Galley

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An ever-growing collection of my favorite photos from summers in Washington State.

I’m a serious amateur photographer and thoroughly enjoy taking my camera to new places to shoot photos. I’m particularly fond of landscape and architecture photography and love finding patterns and textures in nature and man-made structures. My summers in Washington State have given me plenty of free time and new scenes to explore. I find that I make more photo excursions here than I do at home.

I’ve Been a Victim, Too
I’ve had at least one of my photos stolen, right from my Web site. Fortunately, the person who stole it did so innocently. Like most other people who surf the ‘Net, he thought that anything on the Internet was free to copy and use as he saw fit. He saw my photo, liked it, and displayed it on his site with a link back to mine. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, so I was gentle with him. He removed the photo when I asked him to. But if he hadn’t included the link, he could have easily passed off the photo as his own without me ever finding out.

So now I include obnoxious copyright notices on my best images and display the others in smaller sizes that make them mostly unusable.

Unlike a lot of other amateur and even professional photographers, I don’t want to put my photos of Flickr. I simply don’t like the idea behind the service: photographic social networking. At its best, it’s a good way for someone to share photos with friends and families. At its worse, its a source of images for copyright infringers, many of whom pass off the photos they steal as their own. Copyright is vital to my livelihood; although I’m not a professional photographer, I do write for a living. I have zero tolerance for copyright infringement of any kind.

But that’s only one of the reasons I don’t use Flickr. The way I see it, Flickr is a service where people upload and “share” all kinds of photographs, from the crappiest, out-of-focus cell phone shot to the most artistic professional photographs. It’s that range that I don’t like. Depending on how my photos are tagged, they could come up in a grab bag of photos of any quality. I don’t like that. I don’t want my work appearing among photos made by people who don’t feel the same way I do about photography.

Instead, I use a service called Zenfolio for my own personal photo gallery. Not only does it give me a lot of flexibility, but it makes it easy for folks who like my work to order prints and other products. It also has a great feature that makes it easy to embed that obnoxious copyright notice — and to change it any time I like with very little effort.

My Washington slide show. You can visit my entire photo gallery at FlyingMPhotos.com.

Today, however, I discovered a new Zenfolio feature: I can create a slide show from one of my galleries. So allow me to come full circle with this blog post by showing off my Washington photo gallery in slide show format. If I’m not mistaken, it will be automatically updated to include any new photos I add.

Enjoy.

About My Watch

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Old one apparently gone to the dogs.

About two weeks ago, I realized that I couldn’t find my everyday watch.

I had four watches:

  • A Swatch that I bought years ago when I didn’t mind plastic watchbands. I don’t wear it anymore.
  • A Minnie Mouse watch that I bought in Disney World a few years back. I like it a lot, but with my failing vision, I can’t read it.
  • A Bulova dress watch with a tiny rectangle face, four lines instead of 12 numbers, a tiny diamond at the 12 position, and a gold-tone band. This is my dress watch and I only wear it if I dress up and need to know the time. Which is so seldom, I pretty much never wear it.
  • An Eddie Bauer watch. (No snide comments, please!) I got it on sale for $40 at an Eddie Bauer store. It was waterproof to 10 meters and came with three denim watch bands. Which was a good thing because it became my everyday watch and I wore out all the bands.

It was the Eddie Bauer watch that I’d lost. I wasn’t terribly upset. Although it was my everyday watch, I didn’t have much of an attachment to it. It’s not like it was a collector’s item or a keepsake. It was a cheap, functional watch.

How I Figured I’d Lost It

I figured I’d taken it off one day and left it on the kitchen table or on my desk. If you saw my kitchen table or desk, you’d recognize the black hole-like tendencies. I’m the queen of clutter and there’s a lot of junk just sitting around, waiting to be dealt with.

But when I cleared off the kitchen table and my desk, the watch wasn’t there.

So then I figured I’d left it on my night table and that it had fallen into the little waste paperbasket beside it and had been taken out with the trash. That’s how I probably lost my Pulsar dress watch years ago (although I do suspect my cleaning lady back then; she may have cashed in on my carelessness).

In any case, the watch was apparently gone for good. Minnie Mouse wasn’t going to cut it unless I added a magnifying lens over the watch crystal.

It was time for a new watch.

Zulu Time

I’m a pilot and thought it might be nice to have a watch that also told Zulu Time. Zulu Time is the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and it doesn’t adjust for daylight savings time. In Arizona, it’s always 7 hours after current time (because we don’t have daylight savings time either). So if it’s 9 AM in Arizona, it’s 4 PM GMT or 1600 hours Zulu.

And yes, I can do the math in my head. But I figured, why not get a watch that just tells me Zulu time.

I did some research. Women’s watches, in general, are pretty useless. Faces too small, often too ornate. So I concentrated on men’s watches. But I have a pretty small wrist and they’d likely look ridiculous on me.

Torgeon T1502

Long story short, I found the Torgeon T15 ladies watch. It has a big face, but not as big as the men’s version. It has numbers and hands that are big enough to see and read. It also has the date and a nice precision second hand. But what makes it a pilot’s watch is the red Zulu Time hand. It travels at half-speed around the dial, pointing to an inner scale of numbers from 1 to 24. When set properly, it points to the hour of zulu time.

Notice I said “when set properly”? That’s because I couldn’t set it. I tried five times. For a while the damn hand decided it was going to hide behind the hour hand and ride it around the dial.

But Mike, my husband, collects watches and knows a lot about them. The other day, he set it for me. So now I’m good until July 1, when I need to change the date. I’ll probably just keep it a day off until I see him again.

Postscript on that Eddie Bauer Watch

About two days after I got the new watch, I dipped into the big dog cookie box in the cabinet to pull out a bedtime treat for Jack the Dog. Mike buys certain things at Costco, so they come in really big boxes. The dog cookies are in a big box.

I stuck my hand in and felt something that definitely wasn’t a dog cookie. Could it be? I pulled my hand out, grasping my old Eddie Bauer watch. The band had broken.

Now you might think that this is odd. After all, there’s really only one way that watch could have gotten into the box: I’d reached in for a cookie weeks before and had pulled out a cookie while leaving the watch, which had been on my wrist, behind. How, you might ask, could I possibly not notice my watch falling off?

I wish I had an answer for you.

Maybe my subconscious mind had just decided it was time for a new watch.