Coincidental Floss

Note: Anything in the following that might remotely resemble an opinion is mine and mine alone, and reflects neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, its subsidiaries, associates, customers, antitrust investigators, or anyone who ever has or has not actually heard of the company.

So.

A while back, somebody sent us a fax. Faxes, or facsimile transmittals, for the cognoscenti, all go to one place at Microsoft, and are then routed individually thanks to the tireless efforts of our crack team of certified faxographists. If a fax isn't specifically addressed to an employee by name, sometimes it takes a little while to find the right person, but, eventually, they get there.

(Postal mail works the same way ... the customer who sent back their boxed copy of Combat Flight Simulator 3 to "Microsoft" with a piece of paper taped to it that read "won't download" with no other identifying information would be happy to know that it arrived on my desk just about one week after it was sent. This timeliness is appreciated on my end as well, since the sooner something like that arrives, the sooner I can start spending weeks and weeks frowning at it, wondering exactly what it is I'm supposed to do about it.)

Anyway, so I got this fax from someone who identified themselves as a pilot and Flight Simulator customer who had some questions about our latest release related to an upcoming book that he'll be self-publishing and selling out of a van down by the river. Click the thumbnail to see the actual fax, censored so I can take the moral high ground and avoid a lawsuit.

I made the call, and it was answered promptly by a reasonable-sounding gentleman who seemed glad that I was able to make the time to contact him.

He was right, it was brief. Of his promised 3-5 minutes, he spent three of them berating me for the fact that a company as high-tech as Microsoft had to rely on something as archaic and "totally 1975" as a fax. He was wondering why he hadn't been able to simply reach us directly by phone, a method that I didn't point out is archaic and "totally 1876". I did, however, suggest that he could have gone to our website and clicked the link to send us an email, something that might be charitably referred to as "fairly 1995 or so", at which point he changed the subject.

The subject to which he changed was a question of realism. He said a few kind things about our products and the time and energy he presumed we spend on details and things, but said that there was one gigantic, glaring error.

My first thought was "Only one? You're not paying attention!" My second through fifth thoughts were quick guesses as to where we had failed this particular pilot-author. Stalls and spins? SIDS and STARS? Winds aloft? No yaw string on the glider?

I could have been precisely none more wrong.

"Now, I got my numbers straight from the FAA - you can check them yourself", he said. "According to their statistics, only 2% of all the commercial pilots in the US are <edited> or women. In FSX, though, when I look at the exteriors of the airplanes and see the pilots inside, they're 25% <edited> or women. My book is about how political correctness is ruining this country, and I'd like to know whose idea it was to make this one area so unrealistic? Is it company policy, just somebody's idea, or is it part of your settlement agreement with the government?"

Wow.

Never mind the fact that I dislike political correctness more than most, personally (though people like this make curmudgeons like me look squishily sensitive and fanatically open-minded.)

Never mind the fact that we sell Flight Simulator all over the world, so US-only statistics are bogus to begin with.

Never mind the fact that we sell many times as many copies as there are pilots in the world, so, if the appearance of the figures in the cockpits were to reflect anything, it would be our customer base.

Never mind the fact that the makeup of the characters modeled in FSX was all but random - if there was an edict, it was something like "Let's show more than just middle-aged white guys flying the airplanes", and it would have come from retired FS artist and middle-aged white guy Jason Waskey.

No, let's set all that aside.

Let's also forget terrorism, high gas prices, sub-prime mortgages, the falling dollar, our own apparently anti-competitive tendencies to charge too much money for some things and too little for others, people with mullets, war, and the impending return of the Camaro, and pretend that political correctness is the thing that's actually ruining this country.

Having swept the elephants in the room under a rug, I'm left with one question:

Is there anyone, anywhere who actually thinks that some textures wrapped around a handful of polygons and viewed through a virtual camera system that doesn't let you get that close anyway could actually influence anything?

Well, okay, yes.

There's one.

And he's writing a book. A book that I, on behalf of Microsoft, declined to support, with Herculean politeness.

I won't mention his name here, tempting as it is. But I will say that when one Googles performs a Windows Live Search for his name, it turns out that he runs a consulting company that trains sales people by modifying their thoughts and institutionalizing behaviors to help them better connect with their customers.

I wonder if he teaches a section on what to do when you get a fax from someone like him?

Not too long ago, I published a few million words on FSInsider about my role demonstrating Flight Simulator X to His Royal Highness Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant, Prince of Belgium. For those of you that read me here but not there <Hi, Donna! - ed.>, here's a link to the article:

http://www.fsinsider.com/team/Pages/UsetheHatSwitchtoLookAround,YourHighness.aspx

This particular article was, I report with happy confusion, quite well received. So much so, that a number of people were compelled to comment via electrical mail.  In order to keep my perpetual vanity machine well lubed, I thought I'd share excerpts from two of my favorites here.

The first was from a gentleman in Germany, who said:

Gentlemen,

I'm a (mostly silent) fan of the Flight Sim since Version One was released on 5,25" disk, later swapped to the Amiga and returned to the MSFS with version 4.

Normally I prefer to stay silent but Hal's very honest and subjective report about this incident is really a rare PR stunt with more benefit for the company (MS) than a few millions of normal (and likewise stupid) advertisement for those, who can't read anyway...

Hal, I bow deeply and "Chapeau" for this great article!

As someone who knows a thing or two about stupid advertising and PR stunts, all I can say is Vielen dank!

My other favorite came from an actual Belgian, who wrote:

As a Belgian resident I can safely say that Hal Bryan’s ”A tale of a Royal visit!”  is by far the funniest FS related story I have ever read. BTW, in Belgium the prince is also known as <no need to reprint it here - ed.>, but let us not be too disrespectful (anyway, he prefers to be called <skipping this one too, just in case - ed.> ).

Also, Hal forgot the “accent aigu” in chargé d’affaires - but otherwise not bad for a ‘yank’ ;-)   And his Dutch is excellent – “eenvoudige missies” indeed, “te eenvoudig zelfs!” :)

Best regards!

For the record, it was Sharepoint Designer <no need to reprint my occasional nicknames for it here - ed.>, that stripped the accent aigu, but I should have caught that and fixed it after the fact. Excellent eye, safely anonymous Belgian customer! Excuseer me en Dank u!

I spend a lot of my workday these days tinkering with web stuff. I'm no stranger to the mysterious vagaries nor the vague mysteries of dynamic content roll-up queries and the like, nor am I an expert. I know just enough to get it wrong three times, then right on the fourth try. At least one of the three tries finds me cursing the designers of a particular software tool we use occasionally, though I tend not to do so loudly, as there's at least slim chance they'll overhear.

Anyway, I've noticed every once in a while that Slate Magazine's headline listings on the MSN home page get munged together in wonderfully senseless ways. If I happen to see an instance of this first thing in the morning, I'll stare at it angrily for a minute or so, as if the downward pressure of my eyebrows will somehow squeeze that part of my brain that is certain that, while it agrees that what I'm reading should make sense, just shrugs and returns only a gruff "...can't help ya."

Then, happily, I remember the immortal words of Francisco d'Anconia--"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Of my premises, I'm not sure if "Things on the Internet must make sense" or "Software people don't make mistakes" is the faultiest.

Regardless ... here's my current favorite. Don't stare too long, it won't get any better.

Being called Hal, spending so much of my life intertwined with computers,  and having been born in 1968, the year that the film version of the now late Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in theaters, it was inevitable that people around me would associate me with the fictional HAL9000 computer. I meet a lot of people in my line of work, and it seems that about half of them get a self-satisfied conspiratorial sort of twinkle in their eyes as they suggest the connection - "Oh, Hal ... and you work in computers ... have you ever seen ...?" A few take it a step further, confiding authoritatively the old myth that HAL was so named because he was one (letter) better than IBM, alphabetically speaking. If I don't like the person, which is pretty rare, I'll point out that HAL was actually an acronym for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer", usually pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose and spitting a little on the S's to complete the image of irretrievable geek.

The one connection I've found most entertaining is the one that no one has pointed out to me but me: In the mythology of the various books and films, HAL9000 was first activated in 1997 (1992 in the first film) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The very first iteration of what would become Microsoft Flight Simulator was born there, too. Original developer Bruce Artwick graduated from UI in 1976, and his company, SubLOGIC, was based in Urbana-Champaign, releasing the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch, for most people, and I should simply attribute any connection with my not-quite-namesake to my extraordinarily placid demeanor and my constant stubborn refusal to open any pod bay doors, anywhere, at any time.

Regardless, I've been a fan of Clarke's writing, and, to an even greater extent, an admirer of his mind, for as long as I can remember. He had a permanent spot, now sadly vacant, on my list of people I'd have loved to have met. As it happens, there weren't that many degrees of separation between us - you can even find both our names on the same page of supporters of the X-Prize Foundation here. (You'll find mine towards the bottom, due south of the important people.) Last summer I was lucky enough to meet and spend time with Rob Godwin through a close mutual friend. Rob is the CEO of Apogee books, one of my favorite things about Burlington, Ontario. Clarke was a friend of Rob's family and a supporter of his business. Rob has posted a touching memorial page here.

As Rob said, we have lost far, far more than an inventive and well respected writer, we've lost one of the truly great minds of our time. I leave it up to the likes of Kira, Kiersten, Annika, Quentin, Charlotte, Garrett, or any of my other honorary nieces and nephews as yet unmet (or even unborn) to grow up and help fill the gap.

Updated: See the YouTube trailer below!

I have previously disclosed on this site, more than once, my habit of collecting DVDs, especially those that have anything, whatsoever, to do with flying. There is, apparently, a masochistic underpinning to this, because so much of what I collect with such joy is, by most objective standards, terrible. (I somehow managed to inherit this trait sideways from my brother, a man who won't bother with the culturally accepted worst movie of all time, Plan 9 From Outer Space, because it's too good.)

In other words, I own a lot of movies with airplanes in them that are so bad they're ... well, still bad, but, as I said, they have airplanes in them.

Once in a while, though, something will find its way into my collection that reminds me that not every movie with an airplane in it is a guilty pleasure. Some of them, but not many, let you check your guilt at the door, and are simply pleasures.

Fearless Widget Productions' Flying the Finch is just that: a pleasure.

It's a lavish and loving look at at a fairly obscure airplane, a 1940 Fleet Model 16B "Finch", used as a trainer by the Royal Canadian Air Force as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Program during World War II. The film features one of the few surviving and actively flying examples of the type, owned and operated by my friends the Tiger Boys in the city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. (More disclosures on my connections to the film in a moment.)

Flying the Finch presents the history of the type and of the individual airplane, as well as an affectionate look at Tiger-Boy-in-Chief Tom Dietrich and a  "rotten little airport kid" who grew up to be really nice guy named Bruce. Actor and, more importantly, exceptional pilot Michelle Goodeve serves as host, while pilot's pilot and long-time filmmaker Glenn Norman took care of things behind the camera, and in the editing room.

And then there's the flying.

Shot in rich, warm high-definition, the blue sky and the green grass and the yellow airplane made my television disappear, and replaced it with an open window. It made me happily homesick for my belov'd southern Ontario, and I'm betting it will have the same effect on other viewers, even those unlucky enough to have never been. It captures the essence of flying for its own sake, especially the passionate finesse of flying an antique.

A documentary like this strikes a balance: it's part history lesson, part human interest, part pilot-talk, and part "Holy crow, would you just look at how beautiful that is! Really! Just look at it! Are you looking?!?! How do I rewind this thing?!?"

In so many cases, that balance is, well, unbalanced. Usually, the human interest and history bits are about right, the pretty bits are shortchanged because it's cheaper to Ken Burns your camera across an old photo than it is to buy avgas, and the pilot-talk is just a tease, if it's there at all. Some films can talk about an airplane, but not really offer a look at the cockpit, never mention things like approach speeds or how soon you lift the tail up on takeoff, or, most unforgivably, not actually show a landing for goodness' sake. If you're going to tell me about an airplane, you had better tell me what it's like to fly it, or there will be trouble.

Flying the Finch pulls it off. Fearless Widget found the secret to producing a balanced documentary: include the right amount of everything.

One of the very best things about this DVD is that it is "just" the first in a series.

One of the most remarkable things about the DVD is how much it made me want to fly the Finch on my next visit to Guelph, even though that would inevitably mean taking time away from flying the Moths that drew me there in the first place.*

Which brings me to my previously promised disclosure:

I know most of the people involved in the production of the film. Glenn and Michelle are like family, only better, because they're family by choice, not by chance. (Nothing by chance, after all ...) Tom, the man for whom they invented the word "avuncular", and his business partner Bob "knock knock" Revell actually made me a Tiger Boy on my first visit, a decision that was every bit as kind but potentially ill-advised as feeding a stray dog; I just keep going back.

Conventional wisdom demands, then, that I apologize, or, at the very least, somehow qualify my opinion, because it's presumed that more knowledge equals less objectivity. Yes, the people and places and things in the film carry some extra meaning for me, but that doesn't mean I suddenly forgot the difference between a good airplane movie and a lousy movie with airplanes in it.

I have way too many of those to be considered anything less than an expert.

If you like airplanes, especially old ones, if you understand - or want to - why absurdly lucky chumps like me fly them, then do what I told you at the beginning: Buy it. Right now.

You'll love it, and, besides, 50% of the proceeds go to the restoration and upkeep of the Tiger Boys' Antique Aeroplane Collection - aeroplanes that deserve to keep flying.

Here's the trailer, courtesy of YouTube:

*-Note: I was also drawn to the place by the people. But don't tell Bob. He'll never let me hear the end of it.