I've been reading Writers Block Live for a while now, and I've really enjoyed it. Since I don't keep a blog roll, I'll just comment about blogs I enjoy in my posts. This blog is about an ex-Apple employee who has left and is now writing a book about his experiences at Apple. It's interesting to here about the inside of a company I admire so much. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!
I just read this interesting interview of Dean Kamen on Make: Magazine and it included this interesting bit about education:
You dropped out of college to pursue a more "hands-on" education. So, too, did Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, among many other creative luminaries. Is there a pattern here? Does public education and higher education actually stifle creativity and innovation? I think that most of the people who succeed in some extraordinary way, and most of the people who fail in some extraordinary way, tend to be people who did really well or really poorly in school. I think that school systems are really good at telling people how to do "okay" in the world. That is what their curriculum is about. That is what their institutional capability is about. That is what the people who run them are about. This is not to say that there isn't a world full of hugely talented teachers working hard every day to make a difference and change kids' lives. It is simply to say that the bureaucracy of the educational system limits the ability of educators to address the fringes. So if somebody was a good "B" student in school, you can be pretty sure that he or she is a good, average person. If a person gets A pluses in everything, or F minuses in everything, you can be pretty sure that he or she is an unusual person. Unusual people wrap around the ends of the bell curve. The system does not deal well with them. And I am not sure that the A+ person and the F- person are particularly different. It does not surprise me that when you look at people later in life, the people who got A pluses and F minuses end up doing substantially differently than the average people who are doing well in a system designed to accommodate the center of the bell curve.At work we hired a new developer and while he was introducing himself to the team, he explained that he was homeschooling his son, "Basically, because we don't want him to waste his time." he explained. There is so much wasted time at school. Education is so important, but that doesn't mean school is. How you get your education is something you choose. No matter your choice, education costs. It costs time. It costs energy. The return on your invested time and energy however, can vary dramatically.
Powered and controlled by your USB port. Control the aim and the firing mechanism of the darts via your computer.
Just one more interesting thing found via digg.com
This last Summer I went to the famous EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2005 with my Dad and 5 brothers. It was amazing. For those who might not know what the Oshkosh Airshow is all about-many of my friends and coworkers have never heard of it-here is the summary from Wikipedia.org:
The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) is an international organization of aviation enthusiasts based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. EAA was founded by Paul Poberezny. Today the organization is run by his son, Tom Poberezny. Paul still works with EAA as its Chairman of the Board. On January 26, 1953, Paul and 35 other aviation enthusiasts created the EAA in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a club for people who were constructing their own homebuilt aircraft. Homebuilding is still a large part of EAA, but the organization has grown immensely over the years to include almost every aspect of aviation and aeronautics. Each summer EAA presents the largest annual aviation event in the world, 'EAA AirVenture Oshkosh', also known as the Oshkosh Airshow. During the airshow, the city's airport, Wittman Regional, is the busiest airport in the world. The week long event annually attracts around 10,000 planes and about 700,000 visitors to the region.I can't really explain how big this airshow is. There are so many planes, shops, shows, booths, demos, sales, restorations, how to presentations and generally fun things to do, it's frankly overwhelming. One of the presentations I attended was one where Burt Rutan, Sir Richard Branson and Will Whitehorn talked about the Future of Space. I had my video camera with me, so I took video of the presentation. I found the presentation inspiring. I've encoded the video in a format suitable for use with the video capable iPod. Now some disclaimers about the video: The video is a bit shaky. This is because I didn't bring my tripod and I was literally holding my video camera with my hands for the whole presentation. People who have held a video camera, no matter how light, for longer than 15 minutes can understand. Because of muscle fatigue, stabilization later in the video it gets worse. I'm sorry, but the audio is still good. :) I'm constantly trying to avoid heads and moving people. I didn't get to the presentation near early enough. Each presentation in this outdoor hanger starts every 1 hour 30 minutes. I got there an hour early, but when the prior presentation finished, I think maybe 20 people of 300 left. The were all there for this presentation 1 to 2 hours early! The upshot is that unless you got there early enough to get a good seat for the prior presentation (around 2+ hours early) you basically didn't get a good seat. For this reason I'm zoomed in the full 10x optical zoom on my Canon SR10. Obviously this exacerbates the image stabilization problem. I've encoded this video as a MPEG-4 movie so you'll need to download QuickTime 7 in order to watch it. I've tried a few of the of compression options available in iMovie, but decided on the video iPod compatible format in the end. As I mentioned earlier, I have some online storage and transfer limits, so I was really looking for the best quality given these limitations. Here are some of the best parts if you don't have a spare 1 hour 5 minutes and 10 seconds. 00:00:50 - Space Ship Company founded to manufacture 5 space ships dubbed SpaceShipTwo or is it Space Ship 2? 00:01:15 - Will introduced as Paul Allan who was NOT there. :-P 00:01:50 - 30th anniversary of Brut Rutan bringing the Very EZ to Oshkosh. 00:02:41 - Able to hold on to SpaceShipOne long enough to bring it to Oshkosh. Apparently there was pressure to put it in the museum quickly to avoid putting it at risk. I love that Burt wanted to fly it, and even had an engine all prepared for his flight. 00:03:19 - It doesn't take the government to put people out side the atmosphere! 00:04:40 - Less than 450 astronauts in the last 45 years! 00:05:00 - Spaceline will only be a reality when space flight is 100 times safer. SpaceShipOne and carefree re-entry is part of that. 00:06:30 - One or two degrees loss of control with the Space Shuttle on re-entry would cause catastrophic results. SpaceShipOne attacks that problem face on. 00:07:00 - Thermal protection isn't the big danger, it's the flight control failure that are the risk with Shuttle re-entry. 00:08:00 - SpaceShipOne's hybrid motor and airlocks were big advances just like the feathered "care-free" re-entry. 00:10:00 - Great story about Burt's Dad watching an airplane take off and thinking he'd never get to fly one because he could never afford it. 00:11:30 - Mention of some secret plans for the space program once the safety of space travel is proven. I wonder what this is and why he wouldn't want to share it just yet. It's not like he has a whole bunch of imminent competition. Still interesting to speculate. 00:13:30 - His plea for key talent, what he calls, "fire-breathers" :) I love his comment that, "I will not look at your grades, but I will look into your eyes to see if you have the passion." 00:15:00 - Will's dream of space travel as a kid. Sadly, taking risks for the cause of a dream is no longer encouraged. The shuttle program didn't have a dream or a vision. 00:17:00 - Great story about Will's son getting sent out of class for telling the students, "My Daddy is going to build a spaceship." 00:19:00 - The vision is lowering the cost and as proof of this Virgin Galactic is ordering 5 Spaceships! This talk of courage, and risk and simply doing the valiant thing is what is driving these men. It's not the money and it's obvious. 00:21:00 - Sir Richard Branson talks about focusing on sub-orbital first, then orbital and then after that "other" things. 00:23:00 - Branson talks about the environmental damages caused by the Space Shuttle and commits to helping make Spaceships that are much less damaging to the environment. This is a cost of space travel that I've personally never considered before, but I'm glad that they are aware of it and think they have a solution for making less damaging space travel. 00:25:30 - Question: What is your plan for dealing the bureaucracy of certification? (Part 25 conformity in particular) 00:35:20 - Launch license for SpaceShipOne: Faith in the American government. Amazing. 00:37:00 - Funny story about British Space Program. 00:37:45 - Question: Any comment on the Shuttle foam issue? 00:38:00 - Question: Will you be going public soon? Answer: Virgin Galactic will invest all profits back into the program so the goal is space exploration, not profits. This proves the focus on exploration and not the money. Very noble in my humble opinion. 00:29:00 - Question: How does T-space relate to the SpaceShip company? 00:42:00 - Question: Honeywell employee plugs to supply parts for SpaceShipOne :/ 00:43:19 - Question: How do you address the velocity difference between orbital vs sub-orbital? 00:44:00 - Burt compares SpaceShipOne with X15. SpaceShipOne only gets up to 270 degrees on re-entry. Thermal protection is really needed for accent boost, not decent. SpaceShipOne has 10 times the thermal protection it really needs and that's only 14 pounds of thermal protection. 00:46:00 - Question: Can an non-US citizen's apply for a job? 00:49:00 - Question: How might the economy effect your venture? 00:51:30 - Question: Could this scale to intercontinental travel? 00:52:00 - Interesting note about how intercontinental travel would work. Bouncing on the upper atmosphere 00:53:00 - Question: Is debris up there a problem for sub-orbital travel? 00:55:20 - Question: 4 Phases of Innovation. Commercialization too soon? How are you going to keep government at bay to allow you to innovate? 01:00:00 - Question: Didn't the airline industry grow because people were able to get from here to there quickly, not because they got to see pretty pictures of the black sky. 01:01:40 - We have the internet because we had a decade of people buying computers, "just for fun" 01:02:15 - Airplanes for fun and how great innovation starts with just doing things for fun. "There are 5,000 pilots at Oshkosh, and I don't think they're traveling anywhere, they're having fun!" 01:02:55 - Question: Are you going to stick with the current propulsion system? The movie link: Burt Rutan: The Future of Space
Just in time for your shopping, if you are going to buy a Mac this holiday season, don't miss this awesome deal. Office Pro comes with Office 2004 + VPC 7 + Windows XP SP2 and with this rebate you save $250! Check out our MacBU home page for more information.
Today Microsoft announced that the XML file formats to be supported by default in the Office "12" product will be open.
"We are going to bring the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard. This should really help everyone feel certain that these formats will always be available and fully accessible. We are going to work with Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba to form a technical committee at ECMA International that will fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them. This is obviously a huge step forward and it really helps to increase the value of these document formats because of the improved transparency and interoperability. This will help to create a large ecosystem built around these formats that will support them in a large number of different scenarios for customers.This is great news, for various reasons, but what this means to consumers is this, if your data is stored in Office 12 file formats, in the future the question will not be if you will be able to get to your data, but how you will get to it. I've had documents in several file formats that have eventually died and getting the data out has been a real chore. This kind of commitment is a great thing for everyone involved. I hope it is well recieved.
I've often wondered about how things we create so often attempt to "represent" things that are already created. From Object Oriented Design to Database Theory to Human Computer Interaction, there is a theme that I'm only beginning to see, and that is our search for doing things like they are done in the natural world. Sometimes it's using the examples of schools of fish or clouds of flying grasshoppers to elucidate dense transportation problems. Other times it's as simple as organizing a set of data the way a tree organizes its leaves for sunlight. As one of my favorite poets writes of little children this way:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six years' Darling of a pigmy size! See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, With light upon him from his father's eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song: Then will he fit his tongue To dialogues of business, love, or strife; But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little Actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation. William Wordsworth - Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early ChildhoodI just finished reading a most interesting article entitled Turing's Cathedral where George Dyson visits Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer. All of it is interesting. This part I really liked:
Fifty years later, thanks to solid state micro-electronics, the von Neumann matrix is going strong. The problem has shifted from how to achieve reliable results using sloppy hardware, to how to achieve reliable results using sloppy code. The von Neumann architecture is here to stay. But new forms of architecture, built upon the underlying layers of Turing-von Neumann machines, are starting to grow. What's next? Where was von Neumann heading when his program came to a halt? As organisms, we possess two outstanding repositories of information: the information conveyed by our genes, and the information stored in our brains. Both of these are based upon non-von-Neumann architectures, and it is no surprise that Von Neumann became fascinated with these examples as he left his chairmanship of the AEC (where he had succeeded Lewis Strauss) and began to lay out the research agenda that cancer prevented him from following up. He considered the second example in his posthumously-published The Computer and the Brain. "The message-system used in the nervous system... is of an essentially statistical character," he explained. "In other words, what matters are not the precise positions of definite markers, digits, but the statistical characteristics of their occurrence... a radically different system of notation from the ones we are familiar with in ordinary arithmetics and mathematics... Clearly, other traits of the (statistical) message could also be used: indeed, the frequency referred to is a property of a single train of pulses whereas every one of the relevant nerves consists of a large number of fibers, each of which transmits numerous trains of pulses. It is, therefore, perfectly plausible that certain (statistical) relationships between such trains of pulses should also transmit information.... Whatever language the central nervous system is using, it is characterized by less logical and arithmetical depth than what we are normally used to [and] must structurally be essentially different from those languages to which our common experience refers." Or, as his friend Stan Ulam put it," What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?"
James Duncan Davidson has a great post about his experience shooting pictures of folk as they present and interact with customers in a public way. I think it's great advice for any one who works with the customer directly, not just CEOs or big wigs giving keynote presentations. Check it out.
Arstechnica has a great article about why the MacTel switch and why there's more to it than Mr. Jobs' "perf/watt performance road map." Here's my favorite bit:
But they didn't jump ship for performance or performance/watt reasons. They jumped ship because they no longer care about making leading-edge computer hardware. They also don't care about PC market share, or any of that other G3-era Mac Faithful malarkey. From now on, merely "good enough" is good enough for the Mac line, and the real innovation will come in the form of post-PC gadgets and entertainment-oriented, techno-cool doohickeys.It's anyone's guess what Apple will do, but it's certain their options are pretty open. If the PowerPC becomes important, the could use it and switch back. If the Intel really does gain, they've made the right bet. By moving to Intel, the performance comparisons become much more meaningful and not so full of caveats. If their deal with Intel gives them cheap access to chipsets they need for their "next big thing", it sure is nice that the open ended question: "Will Apple license their OS to other hardware vendors?" will continue to taunt Microsoft and pundits alike, even if they never pull the trigger. What's more clear now, is that what we heard Jobs preach, was much more like a favorite short story of old.
I've been saying this since 2000 and it's even more true today. Recently the Journal Times wrote an amazingly positive piece about MacBU entitled, Microsoft Corp. is plugged into Macs In that article there is this gem:
The autonomy of this relatively small division allows Microsoft programmers to cut loose and design the best software they can imagine without having to conform to the restraints of the mammoth parent company.I absolutely LOVE being in the MacBU here at Microsoft. It's at the confluence of all this Microsoft Technology and all this Apple simplicity. It's really an exciting combination which allows for a pretty good perspective. I've often wondered why we are next door to Redmond MSR, but I think it's just because all the "cool kids" hang out together. ;)
I just read a great quote as I begin another of Henry Petroski's books, this one named The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. The quote is from the Preface of the books and is as follows:
I believe that a person who is attracted to bridges, for example, can learn more about the method of all engineering-–including such seemingly diverse branches as chemical, electrical, mechanical, and nuclear engineering-–from a focused study of bridges alone than from a diffuse and cursory survey of all the past and latest wonders of the made world. Yet a focused study need not be overly technical. It need only place the artifact in a proper social, cultural, political, and technological context in order to allow the essence of engineering to be distilled by the receptive mind.This has been true in my life. As I've focused my curiosity deep in a subject I love, I have been forced to learn more about almost every other ancillary subject. For this very reason, I'm excited about how my younger brothers are working to build an airplane in my parent's backyard. I'll paraphrase what I remember Burt Rutan saying in one of his presentations at Oshkosh when talking about how he hires people, "We will not ask you about your college grades, but we will ask, 'What did you do?' and hope to see that fire in your eyes." The focused study of anything over time in my experience has a deeping and broadening effect that like a deep tap root, makes for strength, but also well rounded influence and understanding. When someone says you need a "well rounded" education, don't think cursory survey of everything, think deep, focused study. With the "deep" will come the "breadth" and it will make a whole lot more sense in context.
I was just reading a post by Steven Sinofsky and he mentions the new UI in Office "12" with this comment
One of the things that has made us very comfortable thinking about change has been the role of new hires and interns in our group. They have seen the work we are doing and take to it right away. In fact they don’t see it as nearly the huge change that folks who have grown up with the products see it. The generation of people that move between TiVo, iPods, and IM have not been indoctrinated by “consistency is all that matters” or the goal of having “one single user experience”. Rather they experience life, and productivity, through a series of programmed experiences each tuned to the task at hand remarkably well. Our job in Office is to build those tuned experiences while integrating the work products seamlessly across the entire range of programs in Office.
In physical life, where phsyical things are created and made, this happens quiet a bit. Design, good design has a lot to do with understanding the process and needs of the user as well as the specific task at hand. I'll give an example. My small yard has grass and in that grass a small plant likes to grow called by us Duvall folk Dandelion. They spread around the yard like crazy and really distroy the look of the lawn. You can go and weed them out, but with their tap root, it's really hard to get them fully gone, and they just come up again, this time closer to the ground. Well, the other day, my neighbor introduced me to a tool that is specifically designed for this weed removal task and as a proud owner, I can say it's perfect for the job. Here's what it looks like and some pictures on how it works:
The basic idea is that the suspended nails pierce the broad leaft vegitation and surround the tap root while simulaniously squeezing it, so when you pull up, the whole root comes up. It's perfect. It's called the Weed Hound and the whole Hound Dog web site is full of specially purposed tools. The point is someone actually sat down and worked out how to solve this very specific problem, and by doing so, produced a tool that is aguably not general purpose, but also perfectly suited for maximum effeciency given the specific purpose for which it was intended. The same can be said for Office. When you look at what people do with Office there are certain patterns, problems that show up again and again. It's taking the time to specifically solve those problems in a tuned way that makes the UI changes to Office "12" so exciting.
I just read an interesting post by Chris Pratley on the History of the Project Manager position at Microsoft. He ended it with this bit that resonated with me:
I'm not sure where this saying came from originally, but one way to describe PMs is that they not only "pick up and run with the ball, they go find the ball". That really defines the difference between "knowing what to do and doing it", and "not knowing what to do, but using your own wits to decide what to do, then doing it". That means as a PM you are constantly strategizing and rethinking what is going on to find out if there is something you are missing, or the team is missing. You're also constantly deciding what is important to do, and whether action needs to be taken. The number of such decisions is staggering. I might make 50 a day, sometimes more than 100 or even 200. Most of the time there is not nearly enough hard data to say for certain what to do, and in any case almost all these decisions could never have hard data anyway - you need to apply concentration and clear thinking. Some years ago I realized that as a PM, my definition of vacation was not just going somewhere to have fun (work is quite fun most of the time). Vacation means getting to an environment where no decisions have to be made. I used to drive my friends nuts, since I would go visit them, and they'd say "what do you want to do?", or "where do you want to go?", and I would simply say "you decide".Some times it's hard to for everyone to realize that a vacation can be simply not doing what you have to do normally. For my wife, it's often time away from the house and kids. For me it's time to think and be home. What ever it may be, it sure is important to find time to relax and really re-create.
Well, kind of... Last MacWorld I got to help with building what the Marketing team calls a "sizzle reel." If you've ever been to MacWorld and seen the Microsoft booth there, you know that there's a projection screen in the "theater" area where we demo Office. Well when we break between demos we show stuff on the huge screen for folks just walking by. So that's what you have here. I asked for a copy after we finished back in January, but just re-discovered it on my hard drive and thought I'd share it. Why it's cool:
I'll never forget reading this post by Robert Scoble:
Two guys, heading back to Iraq Yesterday, when I was boarding the plane in JFK airport I saw two guys, dressed in US Army uniforms, huging their wives, crying. One had a young daughter hanging off his leg while her parents clung to each other with the kind of hug you give someone you know you might never see again. They said their goodbyes and entered the plane behind me. "Where you off to?" "Back to Iraq." I don't care what your politics are. I don't care what your view of the war is, or your position on what we're doing over there. There are plenty of places and times to argue those things. It's just that scene has just been burning in my mind all day. I'll never forget the sacrifice that these guys are making on my behalf. Voluntarily.I enjoy reading the pithy news bite as much as the next person, but some topics, and often very important ones can not be summed up in one small statement. Even E=mc^2, while an accurate summary, does not justice to the subtlety and implications involved. The challenges of NASA's Space Shuttle program are not something you can fully describe in a headline. Often I see references to Iraq or the War on Terror without giving the issue the full discussion needed. I just recently read this speech written by the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, Gordon B. Hinckley. I think it accurately and fully expresses my opinion, so much so, that I'm going to quote it in it's entirety. It's true, that as a member of the LDS church, I view these words as prophetic, but independant of your religous or political views, take a few minutes to read this speech and see if you don't agree also. I think there is a tenor in this treatment of the topic, that to me, speaks of wisdom that only comes after long experience with life, real life.
Yesterday we had our Office 2004 Service Pack 2 ship party, and I got to talking with Rich Schaut about his blog and we started to list all the MacBU bloggers. We kept listing names, but they no longer work in MacBU, so the qualification became: currently working at MacBU and has a blog. The funny thing is we only came up with three people: Rich Schaut (Dev) Andy Ruff (Entourage blog) and something here... (PM) David Weiss (that's me) (Test) It's all about transparency, and I expect that this list will grow, but who am I missing?
Last Friday we had the 26th Microsoft Company meeting and celebrated Microsoft's 30th anniversary. As a member of the Macintosh Business Unit I got to attend. Microsoft rented the SafeCo baseball stadium for the 7 hour meeting and it was cold. It was fun. I'm overall pretty sure my underwater stock options will come up gasping for air, eventually. So that's good.
Part of the tradition is that everyone brings, hats, shirts, noise makers etc. to distinguish which tribe or team you're a part of. The MacBU was no different in this aspect, and we got the rebellious slogan, "go ahead, mac my day." all lower case at no extra cost. In the test team, we came up with some other slogans, that didn't make it on the shirt, but that I thought I'd share for your enjoyment:
I love my Jobs
I have a good iWork-iLife balance...
On the other side of the fence, the grass is always greener. So are the Apples.
I work with iPods
My Software runs on a Mac. Does yours?
My Office is prettier.
Guaranteed not to run on Vista
Turn up the AAC!
An Office for the rest of us
Uniting the world: Macintosh, Unix, Intel, Microsoft
Always nice to work with a bunch of Mac heads. :)
From President John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.There is some passion in this address! To me it's saying "We do things not because there is a return on the investment, but we do things that are hard simply to prove that we can and enjoy the growth that comes of it." I felt this same drive and same ambition listening to Burt Rutan speak of SpaceShipOne at Oshkosh 2005 and quite frankly, it's contagious and inspiring. If NASA's new space program produces more creative drive, more ambitious "Why not?" questions, especially in the youth of today, it will be worth every penny it costs.
Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and found this gem, the first paragraph of which is simply the background by Neal A. Maxwell for the quote:
I think, for instance, of the towering and courageous Winston Churchill, admired in so many ways, including by me, but who had serious difficulty containing his ego which sometimes tarnished his otherwise remarkable contributions. One winces, even at this late date, as he reads Balfour's rebuke, in 1905, of a pressing and eager young Churchill in Parliament. Just after Winston had been excessive, Balfour rose in dignity and said: As for the junior member of Oldham . . . I think I may give him some advice which may be useful to him in the course of what I hope may be a long and distinguished career. It is not, on the whole, desirable to come down to this House with invective which is both prepared and violent. The House will tolerate, and very rightly tolerate, almost anything within the rule of order which evidently springs from genuine indignation aroused by the collision of debate. But to come down with these prepared phrases is not usually successful, and at all events, I do not think it was very successful on the present occasion. If there is preparation, there should be more finish, and if there is so much violence, there should certainly be more veracity of feeling. [Ted Morgan, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 175.]People just don't talk like this anymore.
If you are wondering where my Oshkosh videos of Burt Rutan and friends are, well, they're on my hard drive, beautifully encoded in MPEG 4 and waiting to be given to the world. The problem has been a technical one. If you care for the details, I can't "seed the torrent" from behind my AirPort Extreme connection to the Internet. Anyhow, I'm looking into some other solutions, so don't worry, I'll get them posted as soon as I can.
