It worked for Batman.

It worked for Apollo and Starbuck.

James Bond did it, and so did Kirk, Spock, and Optimus Prime.

Even G.I. Joe and the fascist space lizards of V are going to give it a shot.

And now that all the cool kids are doing it, I figure it's my turn, time to reboot my personal franchise, as it were.

Time for a new career ... in a new place.

After a few months as a paradoxically busy layabout, I'm proud and exceptionally pleased to report that I have returned, with a distinct lack of kicking and no real screaming, to the ranks of the gainfully employed. Continuing my extraordinary run of good luck at building new jobs from the best bits of the old ones, I have accepted an extremely generous offer from the Experimental Aircraft Association as their new Online Community Manager.  Thus, my wife and I will soon be heading to America's heartland, more importantly known as the Mecca of sport aviation - Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Relocation will be bittersweet, naturally, though the Microsoft layoffs last January certainly have scattered some of my close friends and colleagues to the four winds already. Thankfully, things like email, Skype, Facebook, and my retired-United-pilot dad's giveaway "companion passes" make the world a lot smaller than it used to be. I've been a proud EAA member for many years, and the opportunity to actually work for them is extremely exciting to say the least. I'll be working alongside a number of friends I've made over the years, so immersed in the aviation world that I'll go to work each day inside a building that's actually located on two airports. (It's tough to explain if you've never been.)

I'm eating a lot of cheese to try to build up an immunity, and honing my pronunciation of the phrase "Go, Packers!" even though I have absolutely no idea what it actually means.

I'm also dreaming of great big skies and the rolling green hills of the countryside I've fallen in love with over my last dozen or so trips to the area. Not to mention enjoying four distinct seasons instead of the local two (grey and gorgeous), and the sheer number of aircraft I'm going to try to weasel myself into flying because that's just who I am.

I'm expecting to have an EAA-specific blog up and running at some point, but I plan to keep this one around as well for the more personal bits of esoterica that need to find their way out to the Internet.

And should Microsoft decide to reboot that other franchise, the one that deserves it more than Knight Rider and The Bionic Woman combined, I'll be first in line at GameStop. And happily reminding them that they've got friends at the EAA.

See you at EAA AirVenture — July 27 – August 2, 2009!

Note: rumors that the part of Hal Bryan will be played by Katee Sackhoff, Dick Sargent or Barry Van Dyke are total fabrications.

I just received this stunning, disturbing press release from the CEO and Publisher of AVSIM.com. I'm publishing it here not only to reach my direct audience, but to ensure that it is picked up on MSDN as well. My thoughts are with Tom and my many other friends on the AVSIM staff as they regroup and consider their options.

PRESS RELEASE:

AVSIM Hacked

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

Or, why I love the Internet, Vol. MCXXI ...

A few months ago, I found myself completely entranced by a video of a young woman on the Internet.

While this sort of thing is not  uncommon amongst broadband-connected men of my age or any other, her talents most certainly were, and are. Her name is Julia Nunes, and, you'll be pleased to know, my interest in her is decidedly non-creepy.

Julia is a twenty-year-old musician who sings and plays the ukulele just like I do. Except she's way better than me. And I don't sing unless there's some kind of a cappella emergency and somebody needs a bass for a "bom buh-buh-bom duh-dang-di-dang-dang" sort of thing. Anyway, I was free-associating my way through YouTube and found her cover of one of my favorite songs of all time, the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows. " That was followed quickly by a another favorite, the Beatles' "All My Loving", done slower, like the first part of the version in the film "Across the Universe."

After watching these two, I was hooked. Her singing, her playing, her choice of songs, the tricky chord and tempo changes, the multitracked harmonies, her writing (on her originals), and the video editing captured my attention immediately, but there was something else. There's a charm to her style, something that makes me happy and glad to have ears. Something the French elegantly fail to define by calling it je ne sais quoi. She's engaging and witty (some of her "answers" videos where she responds to viewer comments are brilliant), but that's not all of it. It's that she projects a rare sort of fearlessness, as if it never occurred to her not to record her music and put it online for the world to see.

Something in our culture, something ugly, says that talent should be hidden and that success demands apology. It says that only those people who are A) willing to suffer indefinitely and 2) extraordinarily lucky will be allowed to enrich the lives of the rest of us. And then, only after a staggering army of faceless middlemen has stepped in to tell the talented what to do ... and to tell the audience what to like.

Conventional wisdom says that we'd describe her as unselfconscious, which dictionaries define as "...natural or genuine." This is completely backwards and upside down to me - people who are literally "not conscious of self" are hollow, timid shells, there's nothing natural or genuine about them. Julia, clearly, has a profound sense of self that's brightly displayed as one watches her doing what she loves to do.

Julia clearly works hard for her success now, but twenty years ago, even as little as ten, her story would have been dramatically different, if not simply impossible. In the days before the Internet (which, it kills me to realize, she might not even remember), her very ability to make and share music and video would have been entirely dependent on the impenetrable whims of giant corporations. In the heyday of record labels (a record is like a giant CD made of black vinyl) less than 1% of those artists who tried were actually signed. She's become something of a phenomenon, a meme (a word that itself was invented not long before the Internet), and for the right reasons; she's talented, and people enjoy hearing her music and watching her perform. She sells CDs published on a label she co-owns with her parents, does shows on her own, and has even toured with Ben Folds.

The tools, technology, and reach of the Internet have made it possible for artists like her to interact and trade directly with their audience. By creating and publishing her work online as she does, Julia is asking to be judged not by the cleverness of her marketing or the salaciousness of her scandals. She's simply willing and able to succeed or fail on her own merits.  And she's succeeding, as she should.

By way of a postscript, I recently ordered a CD by another singer-songwriter called Wade Johnston. I found Wade's music because he'd done a duet with Julia that I'd spotted on her YouTube page, and from there I made with the clicking and the linking and the listening and the buying. Wade's CD showed up promptly, and with it, in the envelope, was a receipt. I would suggest, with characteristic lack of hyperbole, that this was probably the best receipt in the entire history of people receiving things. It was, literally, a scrap of paper, torn edges and all, entirely handwritten. At the top, in block caps, it reads "OFFICIAL RECEIPT." Below that, it says "Dear Hal, you gave me $6 for my CD. THANKS! enjoy," then it's signed.

Yes, I gave him six dollars and he gave me a CD. Other than the costs of duplication and printing of the CD and the sleeve, and the postage to mail it to me, Wade got most of the six dollars, orders of magnitude more than he'd have gotten in the "old days."  While I'd suggest that I got the better end of the deal (it's good music), it really was a win-win, the best kind of business. And in these ridiculously turbulent times, it's only the very best kinds of businesses that will survive (unless they're so dreadfully bad at it that they qualify for a government bailout.)

Just knowing that there's talented, smart, and enterprising young people out there like Wade and Julia actually makes me optimistic; it's more than just the music that puts this smile on my face.  It's amazing that, thanks to the Internet, it's not amazing that a couple of kids armed with ukuleles and computers (and, of course, talent) manage to reach out three thousand miles to their left and brighten my days.

Plus I get to watch videos of a college girl in her dorm without going to jail!

My business cards, both my last cards from Microsoft and my current "between jobs" variant, read "Hal P. Bryan, Super Genius." When presented with one of these, most people get a good laugh out of my particular brand of mildly ironic self-aggrandizement, while a few actually get the specific reference. For any that don't, it's a nod to the cherished Warner Brothers cartoons from my childhood (when they were already more than 30 years old, thank you), as the terribly bright but hapless Wile E. Coyote identified himself the same way.  I grew up thinking not about how great it would be to actually be a super genius, but how funny it would be to put that on a business card. Such are the choices one makes.

The first time I added it to my Microsoft cards, I assumed they'd be denied and I'd get some sort of a talking to - I crave attention, after all. That faulty assumption was based on another one - the idea that, in a company the size of Microsoft, my humble request for a thousand business cards would actually be attended to personally by a human being, instead of just being fed through an automated and ridiculously efficient process. Suffice it to say that my official business cards identified me as a Super Genius, not to mention a Notary Public - but that last bit is another story.

Regardless, the reactions have always been positive, and good for starting conversations. Most recently, I gave one to a potential colleague while doing some work for the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, OH. This gentleman, Paul, gave it a long look, frowned a little, making me wonder if I'd finally found someone willing to be somehow offended by it. Then, he lowered the card, slowly, and, still frowning, looked me in the eye and said "So I'm assuming that you have close ties to the ACME Corporation?"

And that's how I make friends.

Anyway, just last week, I actually found myself deciding not to give out a couple of my cards. This was unprecedented, and I regret it now, as I suspected I would. Here's what happened:

My friend Scott, an Airbus driver temporarily between gigs, posted on Facebook that he was spending some of his days at the University of Washington's  Aeronautical Laboratory, specifically in the Kirsten Wind Tunnel. This sounded interesting to me, and, being a fan of interesting things, I wrote him and invited myself to come visit. As it happened, Scott was working with a friend of his, Mike, who was also a long-lost childhood friend of mine. Thankfully, Mike had forgotten enough to think that it might be good to see me. Anyway, Mike works for a company that had built a wind tunnel model for another company that's working on what could be a spectacularly cool new business jet. This jet is not pictured, to the right. (I think the names and such are public knowledge, but I'm erring on the side of circumspection here.)

Mike was kind enough to give me an in-depth tour of the facility, which was fascinating to me. Construction began in 1936, and the place has been operational since 1939. You can't take a step without tripping over or ducking under history, given the designs that have been tested there. You can check out the link above for a detailed list, but my favorite had to be the the Taylor Aerocar model I saw hanging from the ceiling. You'll also find models of cars, skiing helmets, boats, and even a Commerson's Dolphin.

The tunnel itself is about what you'd expect - a big tube with windows, holes on both ends for the wind, and a sticky-uppy bit on which to mount a model for testing. But the rest of the place is overwhelming in its largely analog complexity. Every few steps there's a half-flight of stairs that leads to a door beyond which there's an impossibly giant room that's filled with impossibly giant-er generators, electric motors, and giant metal boxes with levers and gauges calibrated in things like kilo-pascals-per-furlong. Between rooms, there are mazes of pipes and valves and the like that make the whole place look as if you took a submarine and turned it inside out in the Batcave.

There's even a giant-scale working model of the facility itself that they use to plan tests, experiment with different airflow patterns, etc. I abruptly stopped looking at the model when I realized that I was afraid I'd see a tiny me looking back.

The single most fascinating part of the place for me was the fact that so much of the analog technology is still in use. And it's not only viable, it's extremely effective - their 6-degree "balance" (the thing underneath the aforementioned sticky-uppy bit) measures "moments" at resolutions in tiny fractions of inch-pounds, to offer an example that even a Super Genius can understand. In these mazes of elegant industrial complexity, it's an overstatement, but not much of one, to say that computers are nearly an afterthought - the thing you plug in at the end so that you can use Excel instead of graph paper for making charts. This idea of history being used to build the future really resonated with me.

What also resonated with me was the fact that the facility is run by students. I say again, students.

Now, I don't know how many of you have actually seen a college student lately, but be warned: these days, they're less than half my age. And they're smart, too. Granted, I can talk aerodynamics a bit better than the average lay person plucked at random from, say, the stands of a tractor-pull. I can nod sagely and pepper the talk with phrases like "pitching moment" and "Reynolds number" without being entirely disingenuous. But these people, these ...fine, I'll say it ... these kids that are younger than the Internet and have no idea that Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, and the Bionic Woman are remakes ... these kids are brilliant. And they not only understand the magnificent melange of technologies at their fingertips, unlike what I might expect from some of their peers, they genuinely respect it.

While that gives me all manner of hope for the future and all that, it was undeniably, and uncharacteristically humbling. Somehow, being a laid off 40-year-old who spent the last ten years of his career "sitting on his *** playing vidya games" seemed the tiniest bit less Super Genius-y in that company. So the cards, cards I've given blithely to test pilots, movie stars, authors and astronauts, they stayed in my pocket.

I got over it, and quickly, and now, as I said, I regret it. It would have been fun to keep in touch with some of these rising stars, and I'd guess that they'd appreciate the fact that even an old man of 40 can have a sense of humor. But I suppose it didn't kill me to be humbled like that, however briefly.

Just don't expect me to make a habit of it.

After all, "Hal P. Bryan, Genius" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

And it listens, too. And usually understands. 

Usually.

Even before I left Microsoft, I was never an angry Apple-basher. Any grumbling I did about them was usually motivated by a slightly begrudging envy about how intuitive their products are and how miserably spot-on they were with their "Mac vs. PC" ad campaign, especially when it came to the classic Vista-basher, "Cancel or Allow."  While I confess that I'd really get shoe-tossingly frustrated at their ads that tout all the things you can do with an iPhone, because I've been doing all of those things and so much more with my Windows-based phones for several years, even that was envy-based. Apple repeatedly "wins" in three key areas: branding, marketing, and usability.

However, their key marketing message around the latest version of the iPod Shuffle is, not to put too fine a point on it, wrong.

One of its cool new features is a text-to-speech function that they call VoiceOver. According to their marketing site, VoiceOver is "...the feature that gives iPod shuffle a voice. With the press of a button, it tells you what song is playing and who’s performing it."

Because of this, Apple touts the new Shuffle as "The first music player that talks to you."

But it isn't. It's not the first at all.

And I don't get that - Apple doesn't need to lie. All they need to do is show some vaguely hip Gen-Z half-slacker smirking at the chrome and rounded corners of whatever they're selling while the next Feist or Ingrid Michaelson sings plaintively in the background, and they'll sell more of the next iAnything than there are people on the planet.

I've had a long and tumultuous relationship with my Windows Mobile gadgets.  I love what they can do, and I find that I actually, if masochistically, enjoy the ridiculous amount of tinkering required to make them do it. On the other hand, I hate what a bad job Microsoft, the hardware manufacturers and the cell carriers have done over the years in giving them useful names and then telling people about them. For example, I currently carry an AT&T Fuze, aka HTC Touch Pro, aka Raphael, aka P4600, aka Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Device.

See what I meant about branding?

In addition to being my phone, my phone is my mini-laptop, my GPS, my ebook, my web browser, my camera, my barcode scanner, my inventory tool, my camera, my game system, and my media player - music and video. I use it with headphones or in a cradle wired to the stereo in my car.

Anyway, one of the indispensable components of my Fuze (and of my Tilt, my 8525, my 8125, my MPX220, my SMT5600, and a host of Compaq-then-HP Ipaqs before it) is a Microsoft application called Voice Command. It comes standard with some phones and PDAs these days, but I've been using it since it came out as a standalone product.

And, just like VoiceOver, if I want it to,Voice Command will tell me the name of the song that's playing and who's performing it. And it's been doing this, as I said, since 2003.

What's more, it'll do this if I simply ask it to by saying "what song is this?" It'll also play music that I ask for by artist, album, or genre, even genres that I've made up: "Play The Beatles," "Play Pet Sounds," "Play 80's Hair Band Crap That I Wish I Didn't Actually Own." I can control other functions by voice as well, launching programs, making phone calls, asking it to read my email aloud, tell me the time, etc.

The recognition itself is surprisingly good, though, like all such applications, when it misunderstands, it does so  in ways that most humans would not. Humans that have some interest in maintaining a polite and orderly society that is.

A few years ago, just after the film Walk the Line came out, my ever-malleable consumerism sent me on a Johnny Cash kick.

<tangent> It was around this same time that, for a brief period, I had two WinMo devices. One of them was playing music, Johnny Cash singing "Folsom Prison Blues." The other one, in my pocket, was making phone calls without my knowledge. It had decided, for some unfathomable reason, to call a friend and colleague of mine who works at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum. I'll call her "Victoria Portway", A) because that name has a certain Jane Austen ring to it and sounds like someone who would work in an important place, and 2) because that's actually her name. It was only after leaving more than two minutes of me singing at the top of my lungs along with the late Mr. Cash on her voice mail that I realized what had happened. Now, to this day, Vicki insists she never got any such message. At the time, I suspected she was just saying that because we were just good enough friends that she didn't want to humiliate me. Now, a few years on, I suspect it's because we're considerably better friends, and she's waiting for just the right moment. I live in constant fear. </tangent>

Anyway, in addition to picking up some Cash CD's, I bought the soundtrack to the film, because I thought Joaquin Phoenix did a pretty credible job with the singing. (This was back when Phoenix himself was somewhat involved in polite and orderly society and not reinventing himself in awkward Letterman moments.) I'd ripped the soundtrack to my media player (my phone, probably the 8125 at that point), and wanted to listen to it next time I was in the car. I keyed the mic and said, clearly, "Play Joaquin Phoenix."

Voice Command confirms your choices with an audible response in a vaguely female voice. In this case, then, "she" said "The Wondermints" and started playing one of their albums.

I tried again. "Play Joaquin Phoenix."

"The Beach Boys" she said, and off she went.

"No", I said, then keyed the mic again. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Fruit Bats", came the response, and the music.

I laughed at that one and dove back in. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Please repeat."

I thought this was a good sign. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Death Cab for Cutie."

What?!?! "Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"Oasis."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"The Moody Blues."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"Apples in Stereo."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"The Flaming Lips."

At this point, I started to lose it a little, wondering just when the passive-aggressive little woman who lives in my phone had started to hate me.

"For the love of all that is holy, PLAY JOAQUIN PHOENIX!"

"The Carpenters." (Yeah, I know, shut up.)

I could have given up. I could have simply said "Play Walk the Line - Soundtrack" and gotten the music I'd asked for. Instead, I thought it might be helpful to start giving Mr. Phoenix middle names.

"Play Joaquin ***ing PHOENIX!!!"

"Fountains of Wayne."

I tried other additions, profane and scatalogical, to no avail. She kept coming back with seemingly senseless choices, delivered with icy digital patience. She listed artists that I didn't even know I had. At one point, she launched a game of Solitaire, which I read as her playing HAL9000 to my Dave Bowman and suggesting that I "...take a stress pill."

I thought about throwing the phone out the window. I thought about just unplugging it and listening to the radio. I thought about pulling over and having a good cry.

Then it hit me. (Not literally, though I wouldn't have been surprised.)

I'd been pronouncing the name properly. "Wah-keen Fee-nix."

What if ... what if I said it wrong?

I took a deep breath, and, as clearly as I could, said "Play Joe-Ackin Puh-Ho-nix."

I'll swear to my dying day that I heard her smiling as she said, perfectly clearly, "Joaquin Phoenix."

I tried it a dozen times to be sure, and it was conclusive: she knows how to say it, she just doesn't understand it when she hears it.

They say the biggest challenge in any relationship is communication, and that was a watershed day for us.

So, Apple, there you have it. My music player talks to me, and it was doing that 6 years before yours.

And it listens.

And, sometimes, just once in a while, it drives me into fits of screaming apoplexy.

Let's see your fancy new Shuffle do that.

Thanks to David @ FuzeMobility for the post that brought this to my attention: http://www.fuzemobility.com/the-future-ipod%E2%80%A6today-no-ipod-needed/ And for his closing sentence in that piece that I so desperately wish I'd come up with first: "Voice Command has been out a few years now and comes standard on the Fuze so it’s nice to see that Apple finally invented it."

I'm unemployed for the first time in 12 years.

My group, the Microsoft studio responsible for Flight Simulator, Train Simulator, and ESP, was closed in January. My severance package included 60 days' paid leave with recruiting support to find a position elsewhere in Microsoft. I looked at a number of job descriptions, most of which started with a question, something like "Are you passionate about integrating SQL server with dynamic .PHP calls and cross-referenced bubble-sorted data groups with an eye for increasing performance as much as 4%?" At this point, my answer to that is a respectfully sighed "...no, I'm just not." (But ask me again when the money runs out.)

Yesterday was day 60, and I turned in my cardkey, my parking passes, and my belov'd corporate American Express Card, sauntering off into uncertainty with a distinct lack of fanfare.

My last break was a mere 18 hours (I had to formally quit one job before the next company could make me an offer without violating a non-compete agreement) back in the summer of '97. If you don't count that, then my run was even longer - about 21 years.

If you include part-time work, then my history goes further still: I got my first job when I was 14, which was 26 years ago.

Instead of working in a field and "picking berries and building character," my dad's suggestion, I was a professional musician, believe it or don't. I was a drummer, accompanying my friend Tom Gire, a piano playing prodigy who remains the best keyboardist I've ever heard. We worked the restaurant circuit, entertaining diners eating Sunday brunch at Andy's Auburn Station and dinner at Jabingo's, playing for tips, and, in the case of Jabingo's, barbecued pork sandwiches.

Tom and I threw ourselves into the rock star lifestyle with rebellious teenage abandon. After our moms dropped us off, we'd jam sedately through a set list that included Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and, when we thought we could get away with it, Bobby Hebb. And the groupies ... I can still feel that tingle at the base of my neck that I'd get whenever some babe would catch my eye, and, with a wink and a smile, send her great-grandson up to the piano to drop a quarter in the jar.

Since then, I've held the following positions (many of which have overlapped):

• Actor
• Security Guard
• Day Care Worker
• Radio Voice Talent
• Mailman
• Emergency Medical Technician
• First Aid / CPR Instructor
• Police Officer
• Emergency Communications Specialist
• Database Developer
• IT Consultant
• Senior Technical Support Engineer
• Toy Store Proprietor
• Technical Support Instructor
• Sr. IT Technician
• Software Test Engineer
• Beta Coordinator
• Notary Public
• Software Test Lead
• Subject Matter Expert
• Software Design Engineer in Test
• Community Evangelist
• Business Development Manager
  

The last two blend together a bit and describe my final two and a half years at Microsoft, and, in combination, encompassed a lot of different roles: writer, editor, web publisher, public speaker, media spokesman, networker, researcher, amateur marketeer, etc.

Clearly, I don't know how to do just one thing.

I'm utterly baffled by what my friend Jim calls the "40 years and a gold watch" crowd. Barbara Sher's books call me a "scanner", Ned Hallowell's books tell me I have Attention Deficit Disorder*, conventional wisdom tells me that I just lack discipline and my friend Glenn simply calls us "Swans." My personal favorite came from my friend and "other mother" Donna who has no idea the gift she gave me when she called me a "Renaissance Man."

The tagline on my résumé closes with "...I’m looking for a new place to hang at least some of my many hats." And therein lies the challenge, and the promise.

While I am seriously considering a couple of "real jobs", the kind where I'd be employed by somebody and paid by them to go to where they are and do the things they tell me to for eightish hours a day, those are the exception - not many places are actively advertising for world-class-hyphenates.

In the meantime, then, I'm trying an experiment: As of today, I am now officially a full-time part-timer, a freelance thinker working from a home for which I hope to continue to be able to keep paying.

I'm consulting (in some cases as a volunteer at this point) for groups like the Museum of Flight, the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the BRAVO 369 Flight Foundation and Topgun Simulations, as well as a couple of other ventures (including one that I'm starting with two close friends) that aren't quite ready to be discussed. And, above all, I'm finally, and I hope fully, committed to writing, something that the universe has been patiently screaming at me to do more of for years.

Yesterday, I came up with a daily schedule for my new job, one that specifically delineates periods of writing, as well as email, mucking about on Facebook, and semi-aimlessly surfing the web. I wasn't sure if it would work, but, as I write this, I'm actually 19 minutes ahead of schedule.

Not bad for my first day.

*-For the record, it's not that I have a deficit of attention, it's that I have a surplus of tangents.

More proof that the smartest thing we (Microsoft) ever did while building the Flight Simulator series was to build it as a platform, enabling third-party developers to build things like this.

Or at least do our best to stay out of their way ... enjoy this utterly stunning before and after footage of a virtual Austraila.

(And watch for the blink-or-you'll-miss-it Rapide!)

The latest ephemeral film added to my personal collection is this classic from the U.S. Air Force about an obsessive airport kid. Animated by the well-respected Gene Deitch,  in a Chuck-Jones-meets-Quisp-Cereal sort of style, the film is a love letter to the airplane, showing how it allowed the rest of the world to come see how we live. (The " ... and bask in our obvious superiority!" is mercifully left unspoken.)

Listen for the "Roger, Roger" joke at least 30 years before Airplane!

This post, like the film,  was produced by the Jam Handy Organization.

Click the pic.

In my continuing quest to vent my irritation at the mistakes of everyone in the world but me, I've written here about strange messages from machines (mojay and NO2), and, more recently, about things that are printed backwards by people who should know better. Sitting here in my glass house, it's my duty to throw more stones, this time at yet another Swiss watch company.

The culprit today is Torgoen watches, though given their propensity to reverse things, they may actually be called Neogrot, which is much more fun to say. They first caught my eye in this month's issue of the Smithsonian's always enjoyable Air & Space Magazine. They have a full page ad, scanned and shared here, that shows one of their watches in the foreground with a grainy, monochrome, slightly fish-eyed airplane  behind it. I'm about 95% certain that this is a CP-121 Tracker on display outside somewhere (note the anti-bird mesh riveted over the engine ... maybe the museum at Trenton or Comox?) though the distortion makes ID a little tricky. I am about 104% certain, however, that the image is ... wait for it ... backwards: note the words "RESCUE" and "DANGER" in the detail blowup, not to mention the pitch of the prop.

To make matters slightly worse, when I went to their website to snarkily try to find some text about how proud they are of their attention to detail, I found no less than three other pictures that were also reversed. I don't make watches, nor do I make advertising, but, in the words of laymen everywhere ... come on, why not just do it right?

Oh well, at least Torgoen watches cost about 98.5% less than their IWC counterparts, about which I ranted previously.

And now back to all the things I was supposed to be doing.

I'm not normally a big fan of writing something here just to tell you to go look over there, but in this case, I'm happy to make an exception. My friend and esteemed once-and-future* colleague Mike Singer has written two great pieces that deserve all the attention they can get. In the aftermath of the closure of our studio at Microsoft and the fact that our jobs "went kablooee", as he so eloquently put it, Mike offers some fantastic perspective.

First, he reminds us what every pilot needs to remember when faced with a crisis: Fly the Airplane. When things go bad, you have to prioritize, and his insights are a wonderful and I daresay inspirational refresher course.

In his follow-up, It’s a game, it’s a simulation, it’s a … platform!, he offers the best and most concise encapsulation of what this whole Flight Simulator thing has been about for the past 27+ years that I've come across.

With both of these articles, it's as if Mike took the words right out of my mouth. Then, after taking them out of my mouth, it's as if he dried them off, looked them over, replaced them with good ones in a different order and then published them.

Do give them a read if you haven't seen them already.

*-Mike and I have too much fun scheming about things for this to be the end of our professional collaboration!

Earlier this morning (and, by "earlier", I mean "much earlier than I would have liked") I had trouble sleeping. (It seems there's a lot of that going around lately.) Because of the way my mind works (and, by "works" I mean ... well, I don't really know what I mean) trying to get (back) to sleep is usually an uphill battle between a body that wants to crash and a brain that wants to go sprinting off in every direction at once like a dog chasing a swarm of bees. This isn't always a bad thing, as I get a lot of ideas this way.  Unfortunately, this is also when I tend to do my best worrying, with visions of unemployment and dead franchises dancing in my head.

So, I have a number of revolving strategies that, if they don't actually keep my mind in check, at least restrain it from getting too wildly unchecked. These usually involve math problems of some kind, my current favorite being stepping through the Fibonacci sequence in my head, which works fairly well: there seems to be about a one in three chance that I'll start dozing by 4181 or so. This morning, though, it was more like 0,1,1,2,3, how am I going to pay the mortgage in March, 5,8, what was the number of that truck driving school, 13, 21, do places actually buy blood, 21, no, wait I did that one, blast, 0,1,1, etc.

Clearly, it was time for plan B: external distraction. Television wasn't an option - my eyes were too tired, and there's only so many times I can stand hearing people say "Sham-wow!" before I run the risk of believing it. So I grabbed my AT&T Fuze / HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile Phone (I hear WinMo is hiring!), fired up the RSS reader and decided to listen to a podcast - in this case, it was today's Aero-Cast special feature from Aero-News. 

And what I heard was ... me.

In the wake of all of the things that have been euphemistically going on lately, they decided to air an interview that my colleagues Brett Schnepf and Mike Singer and I did with ANN back in 'Ought Six. So, instead of an interesting story that would distract the front of my mind (while the back of it snuck up from behind, threw a bag over its head, and smacked it until they both dozed off), I listened to myself. (And the other guys, of course, but that wasn't nearly as weird ...)

It is perhaps needless to say that I didn't go back to sleep,  but maybe you will. Click the banner image just south of here if you'd like to give it a listen, and enjoy the sounds of three of us waxing optimistic back in what we had no idea were the good old days:

Or, if "Star Trek" is more your cuppa ... "All Good Things ..."

So there's an email floating around the Intertubes that purports to show a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress being transported on an aircraft carrier. The image is accompanied by the following text:

While this may look like a gag shot, it is actually a "transport of a transport" necessity. The B-52 was in Beirut, Lebanon undergoing routine fuel tank cleaning. Workmen accidentally damaged the bladder system and had to install the bladders from smaller C-130s temporarily. The plane was flown to nearby McCollough air base where it was lifted upon a barge bound for Tyre on the Mediterranean. Once there it was off-loaded onto the carrier deck for transport to Crete where the appropriate tank bladders were installed. It was then flown back to Beirut. Military cooperation in action.

Even before seeing the picture, I was skeptical - and not just because it came from the Internet (over and over and over.) There's a lot wrong in just the text - the US has no military bases in Lebanon (in Beirut or Tyre), there is no McCollough air base as far as I can tell, I highly doubt that anyone could or would install C-130 fuel tank bladders in a B-52, etc.

An inspection of the picture yields even more evidence: the shadows are incorrect - the B-52 is lit from the upper right, while the rest of the scene is lit from a point closer to center or lower right. Then there's the height problem – there’s no way that the (mysteriously unshadowed) F-14 would fit under the right wingtip of the B-52, nor would the F-18 fit under the nose like that, not to mention the EA-6B and the S-3 just outboard of the #4 engine. This led to the single biggest giveaway which was one of scale: according to some organization that refers to itself as the United States Navy, the width of CVN-68, the USS Nimitz, is 252 feet. As anyone (and by anyone I mean my brother Chris, who is a bubbling cauldron of B-52 trivia, among other things) will tell you, the wingspan of a B-52H is 185 feet, which means that, as pictured, the airplane is roughly 36% too big (or the ship is the same percentage too small.)

Oh, and finding the original, undoctored photo didn't hurt either.

Last year, I was beset (if something happens twice, I can say it beset me, right?) by strange messages from vending machines - a gas pump that asked me to remove my NO2 and a stamp machine that prompted me to insert more mojay. This year, the universe is expressing its contempt for my stability by (among other things) occasionally showing me things that are backwards.

Thank You For Flying Arganap
First, there was the Antonov AN-2 biplane in the film Indiana Jones and They Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead. The magnificent Russian biplane was decked out in Pan American-Grace Airways colors and was shown in a traveling shot, superimposed over a map. For some reason, I was completely willing to forgive the fact that Panagra never flew AN-2s, even though the idea is every bit as preposterous as pretty much everything that happened before and after that scene in the film. What I couldn't forgive, however, is that the scene was printed backwards. I can almost understand a lazy editor thinking that the "PAA" logo looked fine as "AAP", or even that Arganap was a real-sounding name for an airline, though I have more trouble with the use of the word "Ecarg" in the "PAA Grace" logo. But certainly the reversed letters would have jumped out at ... anyone?

As an aside, here's a bit of trivia from the same scene that is coincidentally flossy, in a spine-tingling sort of way: The registration number used on the AN-2 in the film is N48550. In real life, that number belongs to a 1939 Grumman Goose, currently owned by Larry Teufel of Hillsboro, Oregon. Larry's Goose was the one that we used for the majority of our photo shoots, sound recordings, and flying research for Flight Simulator X. His airplane's beautiful blue and gold paint scheme, complete with prominent "N48550" on the fuselage and in the cockpit, is the default livery. Click here for a screenshot, and here for an article about this airplane in particular.

Why I Won't Buy a $14,000 Watch
The next incident happened in Orlando, Florida (watch this space for more on that trip shortly.) I was in a shopping mall, looking for a watch, and I happened on a display case featuring a number of watches by the plainly-named International Watch Company (IWC) of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I remembered IWC from their peculiar nine minute commercial starring John Malkovich as a pretentious bellhop, and featuring some nice flying scenes with two (real) Spitfires and an awkwardly CG'd Ju-52. You can watch the film here, and even (speaking of pretentious) a "making of" featurette here.  IWC used the film to launch their collection of pilot's watches and they continue to use an image of a Spitfire in their advertising and store displays.

Did I say "image of a Spitfire?" Sorry - I meant "backwards image of a Spitfire!"

This is a company whose "undisputed specialty" lies in crafting "unmistakeable (sic) originals of chronometry", a company who promises watches that take you "...from the No-Longer to the Not-Yet," and enable you to "...experience the Right-Now in the form of a mechanical work of art" without a hint of irony ... prints their advertising materials backwards. Click the image for a closer look at the not-great camera-phone picture I snapped.

Swiss watchmakers are stereotypically synonymous with precision, quality, and detail (and, in my mind, most of them look like Charlie Watts, but that's neither here nor there.) If they can't be counted on to get things just right, especially when they're trying to sell me a watch that costs more than I make in ... a while, who can?

Et Tu, Disney?
Apparently not the Imagineers behind the Mission: SPACE ride at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center. (Note: Yes, I know they changed the name and call it "Epcot" now, but, as far as I'm concerned, it's still an acronym, and will always be the Experimental Prototype Community Of To-MORROW!) I'm sure most of you (both of you?) are gasping in disbelief as you read this, but it's true: Disney made an ekatsim, to coin a term.

In the queue for the ride, there are a number of stage-setting props and displays that, admittedly, do a pretty good job  of melding real history with the fictitious future (is that redundant?) timeline of the ride itself - pictures of astronauts from the early '60's through 2038, a real lunar rover on loan from the Smithsonian, etc. One of the display cases shows plausibly mocked up spacesuits with the "Mission: SPACE" emblem patch on the front. Just below the patch on the suits are switch panels for "environmental controls" and the text is, as you've no doubt surmised, backwards. (Another grainy camera-phone pic to the right.)

Granted, this didn't ruin the ride for me (the fact that I was *not* selected as Pilot in my four-person crew did that), but still ... Disney should know better. In fact, Leonard Mosley's thoroughly discredited biography Disney's World states that Disney's apocryphal interest in cryonics was based on his desire to be revived " ...in time to rectify the mistakes his successors would almost certainly start making at EPCOT the moment he was dead."

Should Walt be thawed and return to clean things up, this should be tops on his list ... right after shutting down every incarnation of the horrific "It's a Small World" attraction, but that's neither here nor there.

The latest post from Fearless Widget, a video homage to an airplane I know well - the lovely Miss Gloria!
 

 
Last summer, I had the good fortune to meet Rob Kostecka while I was visiting the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, ON. Rob noticed my Tiger Moth lapel pin (yes, I'm aware that I have a problem) and introduced himself. It turns out the Rob flies Moths as well - in his case for Vintage Wings of Canada out of Gatineau, QC. VWOC's collection also includes a Harvard, a P-51, a Spitfire, a Fairey Swordfish, and a de Havilland Fox Moth, and they fly the lot, which is, of course, fantastic. Anyway, Rob has written a wonderful piece for the VWOC web site called "On Yellow Wings", about his summer as a Moth pilot. It's a great read, and, like all of the rest of the site, it's beautifully photographed and presented. Click the image and have a look.

From L-R: Me, my wife, Muffy, and my dad, Hal. (Photo by Al Gay.)

Earlier this month, my wife Muffy and my dad (who also goes by "Hal" but I'm not "Hal Jr." - it's complicated) and I spent the weekend in Guelph, Ontario, my home-away-from-home-with-better-airplanes. Among other things, we celebrated the Canadian Thanksgiving with an outdoor feast, the sort of dinner that starts before noon, and gets bigger and bigger as more people showed up and / or flew in. In addition to Thanksgiving, I was celebrating having flown my first Moth passengers - my wife and my dad. They'd both flown with me a number of times before over the years, but giving them rides in a Moth let finally and fully claim the title of "barnstormer."

In addition to the usual suspects in Guelph, my friend Al Gay of Flight Ontario came out for a visit, and was kind enough to take the picture that kicks off this piece.

There were, as always, lots of other adventures on that trip - starting with AVIS having no record, whatsoever, of me having reserved a rental car (they even let me use their computers to try to prove them wrong) and ending with a sunset that was maddeningly beautiful, almost offensive in its brilliance. Here are some pictures to tell a bit more of the tale (photos by Muffy and Hal Bryan):

An AVIS Preferred Customer at work.	Giving my dad the 50-cent (CDN) tour.	A Fleet Finch and Woody the Tiger Moth holding short.	Miss Gloria overflying the circuit.
Me on takeoff.	Me slipping in on very short final, while dad snaps pictures.	Tiger Boy Steve Gray beating up the field in the 5/8 scale Hurricane.	Aeronca-tack! Rotten and Tiny on a low and over.
	Rotten - Over the moon.	On final with dad.
The aerodrome at dusk.	The moon rises over the Yale.	Debriefing at Tim Hortons: (L-R: Dad, Glenn, Bob, Don, Michelle.)	Snapped out the car window, this picture perfectly fails to do the scene justice.

First of all, here's a clip of a 747 doing a "low and over" in Portugal. Not quite "acrobatic" as the original YouTube post suggests (though the climbing turn at the end might break through 60 degrees of bank ...), but certainly right down in the weeds, as they say:

Next up is an airplane, a Tiger Moth, as it happens, that ended up stuck in some trees after an engine failure on takeoff. The pilot (according to the story he's one year older than the airplane) looks to have done everything right - landing straight ahead, even though "straight ahead" was full of trees. It worked - the pilot and the passenger came through unscathed, and the airplane suffered only minor injuries. Click the pic for the whole story, including the local news broadcast.

Comes Sky King!

Sky King was a television series that ran in the US in the 50's (see the Wikipedia link above for the convoluted history of networks and run times) that was based on a radio series by the same name. It featured the adventures of the titular character, a rancher and pilot, and his niece Penny, a pretty and blonde Robin to Sky's Batman. The plots usually involved some wayward criminals passing through the area, the local sheriff needing help, and Sky flying his airplane (first a Cessna T-50, then a Cessna 310) to the rescue, landing on a dirt road in the desert and punching the bad guys in the head.

I have a soft spot for the show since the first airplane I ever flew was a Cessna T-50, and, as my friend Glenn hates me pointing out, at Oshkosh in 1989, I not only got to fly one of the T-50's used in the series, I waved an original screen-used Sky King cowboy hat out the window when we taxied by the crowd.

The whole series is now available on DVD, or, thanks to the good people at American Flyers, you can watch most of the episodes online here - click the logo above to watch the first episode right now.

My thanks go to my friend Bruce of BruceAir for sending the link, and for undoubtedly giggling quietly to himself about my use of the word "titular."

If you're inspired by the flying in the show and want to take a virtual T-50 around the patch, Alphasim's version is now freeware and can be had at Simviation. (Note: the red one is our family airplane (though ours has never been on floats to my knowledge.))

In the meantime, why not reach for Nabisco?!? After all, the bright red seal on the package end means mighty good cookin' inside, my friend ... Or at least have a look at the NabiscoWorld web site, which is almost certainly the only place on the whole Interweb where you can download a recipe for Crunchy Stuffed Zucchini Boats whilst playing a spirited round of Nut Vendor.

That question opens (and recurs in) a book called Atlas Shrugged, by novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. Galt is described, indirectly, as the “…man who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did.” In the story (does a 51 year old book, touted as the second-most influential of all time, need a “spoiler alert?”), Galt is initially presumed to be a myth, but turns out to be quite real. As the story unfolds, it’s revealed that Galt has created a haven, a gathering spot for the like-minded to meet and live and interact according to their own standards of value.

More on that in a second.

I first read Atlas Shrugged in 1987, when I was 19 years old. At that same time, I also dove into the flying stories of Richard Bach – Biplane, Nothing By Chance, A Gift of Wings, etc. Both authors became favorites of mine, joining Ian Fleming and Douglas Adams on the short list.

More on that, too, in a second.

Jumping ahead to 1989, my dad and I flew our 1944 Cessna T-50 to Oshkosh for my very first trip. I spent most of my time at the show gawking at Moths, and, on the way back, I got to taxi one in Bozeman, MT. I’d loved the airplanes all my life (so far), but this was first contact, and, even stuck to the ground as we were, I knew I was hooked. When I got home, I started really digging into Moth lore, and caught wind of some guys in Ontario, Canada called the Tiger Boys who were really into Moths, and even had a flyable Thruxton Jackaroo. I was fascinated by this and wrote them a letter, and got a very nice postcard with a picture of “TJ” from a man named Tom Dietrich,  suggesting that, if I was ever in the area, I should stop in.

Naturally, I took him up on it, though it took 17 years to do so.

More on that … well, you know.

Backing up just a bit, in 1993, a fifth favorite author was added to my top four – Richard Bach’s son Jonathan. When I read his book, Above the Clouds, I had the thoroughly non-stalkerish feeling that we’d be friends if we’d ever met. Six years later, when we were both working at Microsoft (and his sister was setup on a blind date with my boss), we did, and we are.

In 2004, Jon introduced me, via email, to a family friend he hadn’t seen since he was about 4 years old, a man named Glenn Norman. Glenn pops up in A Gift of Wings a couple of times, and features prominently in the movie version (yes, there was one) of Nothing By Chance.  Anyway, Glenn is also one of the Tiger Boys, and he and his partner Michelle Goodeve owned the aforementioned Jackaroo before Tom and his partner bought it to restore, beginning their collection.

Still with me? Sitting comfortably? Excellent.

When Jon made his email introductions to Glenn and me, we each rolled our eyes and said to ourselves “yeah, right” - this friend-of-a-friend business never works as well as the common denominator thinks it will.

We could have been precisely none more wrong – just like Jon, Glenn and I have been brothers ever since.

Knowing my love of the airplanes, Glenn immediately started inviting me to come visit and do some flying.  So, in 2006, when a business trip took me to Oshawa, Ontario, I extended my stay and made my first pilgrimage to Guelph. It was there and then that, after a mere 38 years of wishing (and doing next to nothing about it, frankly) I flew a Tiger Moth for the very first time. (Not to mention the Jackaroo…)

More importantly, I got to know Glenn and Michelle, met Tom Dietrich and his fellow head Tiger Boy, Bob “Knock, Knock” Revell, and, just like that, my family-by-choice expanded yet again. I not only met the Tiger Boys on that first trip – I became one. I’ve described the group as being somewhat like the Mafia (the Mothia … ?) only nicer, with Tom as the godfather, and me, at the time, becoming the newest “made guy.”

Since that first trip, I’ve been back every chance I could. I’ve obtained a “Foreign Licence Validation Certificate” from Transport Canada, so now, when I go (after a flight or two to clear out the cobwebs) I can legally fly their Moths on my own as pilot-in-command.  My last trip was just last week, right after Oshkosh, and, like all the rest, it was as much of a homecoming as it was a vacation. (I even tried to make myself useful by getting checked out on the Cyclo-Blast machine and prepping and cleaning doors for an Aeronca C-3 and a landing gear assembly for a Heath Parasol.)

In his way, then, Tom Dietrich is a real-life John Galt, and the world he’s built with his friends in Guelph is precisely the haven that Rand and Bach, each in their own way, sent me hunting for when I first read their books way back when.

What I didn’t learn until my third or fourth visit, however, was the name of the original founder of the town of Guelph: John Galt.

Things like that truly put the “Coincidental” in “Coincidental Floss.”

Now, instead of asking me what the "Floss" bit means, have a look at this low-res version of a video I assembled from pics and raw footage courtesy of Glenn and Michelle.