Posted on by mwhybark

Staring at the ceiling

I have a friend, a good and kind man who runs to the nebbish, facing some extremity. He’s on the verge of real homelessness, skating on the edge of no more couches and spiraling debt – not of the credit-card variety, but of the unpaid rent-and-utility-covered by-friends variety.

He’s got a substance problem, which he at least is aware of, and informing that are self-esteem and motivation issues. I have been busy-bodying myself with him for a few months and while he’s in better spirits now than when I first became concerned, he’s in lo lesser jeopardy. His dad lives nearby and I have strongly and repeatedly suggested he take up these issues with his parent but he’s reluctant to, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. I’m reasonably certain that in efforts to please me and to maintain self-image, he’s lied to me about his substance problem on more than one occasion.

I’m not hurt by the lies – I expected them, they come with the territory – but of course, it makes it that much harder to guage what sort of assistance one can effectively provide.

I was concerned that I would reach the lie-awake-at-night stage if I stepped up, and so it seems I have. I could make a truthful joke about how much more a good night’s sleep is worth to me than a pal’s future, but I’ll refrain and damn myself instead. I truly can’t help, I think; he has to take the first actions himself. All I can do is point out the places that persons actively concerned with self-preservation might choose to step, the places I step every day.

Each time my foot falls on one of these solid outcrops in the rushing stream I note it, and hate it. I’m unsure why I’m reaching out to my friend. He seems to actively desire the world, for all of his uncertain and self-wounding interaction with it. I basically loathe the place and fervently wish I’d never seen it. Since I’m here I’m obligated to fulfill my duties, which involve living as long as possible, apparently consuming far more of the planet’s gross production than I actually need or want, and working to accomplish what I can in the service of goals developed by others in my social network. That last duty is really the only one that I find vaguely satisfying, and probably underlies my efforts in the service of my troubled friend. He’s expressed shock and disbelief when I’ve tried to communicate the depth of my misanthropy to him, in an effort to explain why I’m bothering to try to offer a hand to brake his slide.

I guess I can understand that.

Posted on by mwhybark

Kentucky and Prine

Out to dinner this evening, I was surprised and pleased to encounter a salt-cured Kentucky ham on offer. I leapt at the nearly forgotten taste. On arriving home I was pleased to note that American Routes is devoting this weeks’ number to the Kentucky-and-Chicago bred songwriter John Prine, whom I think of as an Austin-school player.

I first came to appreciate the man’s work while working at the Runcible Spoon, around 1986. A tape of vaguely irritating country-styled nineteen-seventies singer-songwriter folk morphed under constant listening into a shimmering masterwork of mordant wit. The handwritten name on the tape was ‘John Prine.‘

The song that really caught my ear, I learned years later, is called “Sam Stone,” and appeared on the first record that the singer released.

Posted on by mwhybark

Dawn of Aces

Only those who don’t know me as intimately as a spouse or sibling will be surprised that once, about five years ago, I spent all of my spare time online in a massively-multiplayer combat flight sim known at the time as Dawn of Aces. The sim, based on World War 1 air combat, appealed to a specialty audience, and given that the developers’ company experienced something of a wild ride on Wall Street in the day and offered a mass-appeal product which used the same code, Warbirds (same deal, but World War II – much faster and more powerful planes, planes that don’t disintegrate around you in flight if you attempt to adjust the family jools), fell into near-oblivion. For the past five years it has been nursed along only by the fading devotion of a few afcionados and in particular one Matt Davis, who by sheer dint of obsessive-compulsiveness became the operation’s key graphic and historical designer from his remote compound deep in the wilds of untamed Texas.

The developers have been located in ‘the Triangle,’ in Research Park, North Carolina, for years. Every time I visit my folks I think about dropping by but don’t, largely because my peacenik pinko commie worldview is most unlike that obstreperously and understandably displayed by my fellow aviation obsessives, century-long beneficiaries of the grandest sustained state industrial investment campaign the world is ever likely to see. Despite our irreconcilable religious differences, we loves us the aeroplanes.

Thus, I have been happy this week to discover a marketing tie-in between Dawn of Aces and the film Viv and I observed this weekend, Flyboys. The film’s marketing budget provided the developers with the budget to develop new WW1 based content inspired by the film for the game. The long-moribund MMOL arenas are running about 30 participants at any given time, and that’s enough to make a dawn patrol fun once again.

Rumour has it that tomorrow will see the open release of new flight content, including the film’s Nieuport 17 and additional planes. I am seriously considering taking time off work in order to familiarize myself with the game as it stands now.

Currently, the WW1 stuff has been rolled into the WW2 stuff (in a separate online arena) and with nearly no-one flying the older planes I have not been able to justify the cost of a subscription. Now, though, I’m in for a month or two. What’s amusing and amazing me is relearning the ins and outs of this extremely technical game. Happily, I can still recover from a stalling spin in a Camel, which means there is a certain amount of bicycle-riding involved. What I don’t recall is the plethora of slash-and-dot invoked keyboard commends, the esoteric raw-text configuration files, and the deep magic of determining, designing, and implementing one’s personal joystick button-command-set.

Never a brilliant pilot, I am happy to note that I am able to fly sustained furballs under a realistic flight model tonight, on my second day back in the cockpit. Prior experience tells me the importance of having both my stickset and damage awareness well in hand before heading out to meet my fellow obsessives in the internet skies.

One additional factor which initially appeared promising but tonight frustrates must be addressed: five years ago, I played this game on a 21“ screen, a very nice display for its’ day. Currently, we employ a DLP projector for numerous entertainment purposes, including DVDs and the like. I had harbored great hopes for the sim on the screen, which displays the view from a Camel cockpit at approximately life-size. Alas, the default colors associated with the games’ informational displays are uniformly illegible when rendered into NTSC colorspace. It stands to reason that they are editable via the proliferation of raw-text config files; yet to date, the collapsed social network affiliated with the game provides no clues or cookbooks.

Ah well. It’s up to me to see if this crazy thing will get airborne again. Contact!

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iPhone?

Rumors are flying today about a speculated January introduction for the long-sought iPhone. Lucky for me, it’s supposed to be Cingular-only.

Supposedly, October will see one or more introductions of new Treos to Cingular as well.

I don’t think I will need to choose between the iPhone and a Treo. It seems unlikely that Apple would introduce a phone with a full alphanumeric keyboard, and I am certainly a subscriber to the notion that one should generally avoid Apple’s 1.0 releases, particularly hardware ones.

In addition, Apple’s introductory price points for almost any new line have been unreasonably high for my taste. It would also stand to reason that Apple would use the new device to steer more subs for .Mac, something I’m not keen on either.

So I will certainly be a wait-and-see type when the iPhone eventually heaves into view. That said, once the line is well established and matures into the three market segements that nearly always appear in Apple product lines, I will certainly adopt the product.

That is, if Apple ever releases it.

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Flyboys

Well, Viv and I made the arduous trek to far Lynnwood to see Flyboys last night. Presumably due to the unorthodox funding model employed by the film (the producers made the film with their own money), the film has terrible distribution in the Seattle area, playing only far-edge suburban screens. That said, the film is a very old-fashioned war movie and the values seen in the piece may be more inline with suburban America’s than Capitol Hill’s.

The film’s two-hour plus length was not problematic, for me, however peculiar a choice it may be. The film’s production values are absolutely top-notch, the acting is professional and on the whole I felt that the generally cool reviews the release has garnered to date undersell the film.

The film’s appeal, of course, is primarily in the visual recreation of the experience of World War One air combat, and again, I feel that the party line seen in most reviews undersells what is actually on the screen. There are about four lengthy set-pieces and I found each one absorbing and free from irritating technical gaffes. One interesting digital addition to the visual vocabulary of the dogfight is the smoke trails the rounds leave in the air.

Despite my happiness with the spectacle, there are of course what I take to be a few adjustments to the historical events. Only one really bugged me:

An opening sequence shows a main character watching a newsreel in a Texas theatre and a reverse angle displays a segment on the newly-formed Lafayette Escadrille. The planes displayed in the segment appeared to me to be Nieuport 28s, a place which came into service after the events seen in the film. I suppose I may have mis-viewed them, as the rest of the film is relatively insistent on historical accuracy in details of setting and technology.

The other adjustments that appear to have been made are all apparently in the service of making the film more cinematic. First, nearly all the DR1s seen in he film (the famous Fokker triiplane), are bright red. It’s my understanding that that color was actually only used by one pilot, the famous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, and that the majority of the DR1s in service actually employed a base color scheme of a streaky green camouflage. I could sure be wrong on this one though, as distinctive color schemes are well documented for a large number of pilots.

A further adjustment is the repeated use of spoken or shouted dialog while in flight between the characters. In reality, while one might very well shout in an attempt to communicate, the combination of engine noise and airspeed in an open-cockpit plane makes unaided verbal communication an impossibility.

Finally, there are repeated shots depicting planes in very close proximity for seconds at a time, right on one another’s tails, as the pilots hold fire in hopes of getting a solid shot lined up. While the tracking and firing details appeared satisfactory to me, it seems worth noting that these moments of close proximity did not make up the majority of time in this sort of combat; for each close-distance encounter a pilot often had to engage in long minutes of careful jockeying for position.

A kind of corollary to this is what appears to me to have been exaggerated performance characteristics of, in particular, the Nieuport 17s that are the featured planes in the film. N17s are in my opinion the most beautiful airplane ever made; however, they also exhibited a tendency to lose wings in steep, high-speed dives, an activity shown repeatedly in the film without such a consequence.

A further corollary is the repeated depiction of planes in relatively close proximity to the ground – a run of bombers appear to drop their payload from 500 feet or less; a Zeppelin is seen over Paris from above, the Eiffel Tower clearly visible in the distance, and an apparent altitude of 2000 feet. While the aviation technology of the war limited operations for most planes and zeppelins to under 20,000 feet (if I recall correctly, the Camel’s ceiling was about 13,000 feet), attaining maximum altitude was always a key aspect in successful sorties. In particular, Zeppelins were often able to operate above the reach of most anti-aircraft weapons. A low-altitude daylight raid on paris as seen in the film strikes me as exceedingly improbable.

Despite these entirely understandable adjustments, they clearly do make the film more cinematically legible than it might have been, and as noted, I entirely enjoyed it.

Posted on by mwhybark

Cringely on Apple iTV

Cringley has some interesting things to say about Apple’s announced iTV strategy. He makes a big deal out of using iTV to bring video-based iChat to the living room TV set and talks some trash in Redmond’s direction.

What’s funny about this to me is that I have my Mini set up with my old Firewire iSight for just this purpose, and we use it to talk to my folks at least once a week. It works great, but it’s not a mindblowing extension of the technology by any means. Despite that, I think Cringley’s argument, that Apple is aiming to capture the base platform for convergence, possibly by integrating their tools into the sets themselves, makes a great deal of sense.