Pyper needs a new home.

Since before Eric’s arrival, it has gradually become clear that Pyper needs more time and space than we are able to give him. With the little brat now roaming around, Pyper is constrained to a tiny sliver of room and with often stressed-out humans. So we’ll try to find and make him available to a new home.

Pro	Con
Friendly, loves people, cats	Sad when lonely
Beautiful purebred collie	Strangers take interest in “lassie”
No bad habits related to him being “intact”	Some “rambo” dogs like to pick on him.
Mature	Minor medical problems, some goofy habits
Remaining commitment (lifespan) not too long – 5 years?	9 years old
Predictable	Don’t expect many new tricks

If you are able to care for him, are interested, and live somewhere on or near this map (a few hundred miles from Toronto), I can deliver Pyper to you at no cost. Send email.

Today, I flew GXRP up to 14000 feet. That’s about half way to jet altitudes, and twice as high as I normally go.

It was a gorgeous flying day, in terms of visibility. By the time I reached 14000 feet, the airplane was climbing at a measly 300 ft/min carrying me and 800+ lb. of fuel, and my portable oxygen supply. The top of climb occurred about forty miles east of my home airport, over the middle of Lake Ontario. From that high, from that single point, I could see the entire shoreline of the lake: from Hamilton to Watertown, from Rochester to Trenton.

Pressurized aircraft drivers must be used to such sights. I probably never will, considering the inconvenience of portable oxygen (tanks empty rapidly at 1.5L/min) and the lack of a turbocharger (so the engine power is meagre and the airplane feels sluggish).

That is the question a strange man asked me in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday.

There I was, shop shop, walk walk, start big yellow car start big yellow car, when a strange grey van starts honking behind and off to one side. A mustache attached to a middle-aged man yelled out “want a pair of speakers for your house?”. Since I haven’t heard a mustache talk before, all I could respond was “excuse me?”. The mustache elaborated: “I have an extra pair of speakers! new!”. I decided that this was not the right place to negotiate whether he had an acceptable substitute for my preferred model (Boise UltraNyx Opium 3000 HDX), so I said “no thanks”. The mustache took its man and drove away rapidly.

How strange.

Maybe it was a distraction ruse intended to attach a mind tracking device to my car.

I just realized that as of roughly now, I have spent the first third of my life in quasiformative Hungary; the informative middle third at/with transitory places and people; the most recent third with my dear lady wife Juimiin.

It has been a while since I posted a status update on our little brat Eric.

The boy has made some neat progress in the last four months. He’s just passed 16 in total. He has become able to do these things, though by no means consistently:

• sleep regularly through the night
• eat good food, feeding himself
• recognize letters of the alphabet by sound or by picture
• recognize digits
• recognize basic shapes, colours
• recognize a few written words
• recognize a boatload of spoken words
• say truncated forms of many words (one vowel + one consonant)
• count objects up to four
• giggle voraciously
• drawing horizontal and vertical lines
• bang on the synthesizer keyboard, yelling and wiggling (“Sing, Eric! Dance, Eric!”)
• invent little game 1: hiding things, feigning surprise at their disappearance, then finding it again, victoriously
• invent little game 2: sneaking around to my back, tickling me, cracking up if unable to get around me unnoticed: all this is payback for what I routinely do to him

• invent little game 3: sneaking over to this very computer (elastic.org), moving his fingers near the reset button, grinning with tongue-in-cheek, and saying “no no no no”, just taunting me

His first year was hell itself, but now he’s become a more entertaining than hassleicious. Brat.

Every season, there seems to be some public-sector labour disruption brewing or in rolling boil. Right now, Ontario’s college staff are on strike. The customers, as always, are screwed.

Even conservative newspapers like the Toronto Sun are calling for the provincial government to enact “back-to-work” legislation to stop the strike. I wish it was possible to rely instead on market mechanisms to correct this situation.

After all, track the money. College students buy their education (though they get subsidized by various governments): it is they who at the end of the day are the customers who paid for a service that they are not receiving. Why is it unheard-of to sue the colleges? Force the organization that committed to providing the service to actually carry out its side of the bargain.

The same concept would apply to ordinary municipal services. If the garbage guys stop coming, why not sue the city for the inconvenience? damages due to stench (as garbage strikes always seem to occur in late summer)? If elementary schools close, why not sue the school board for having to take time off work to look after the brats? Plus, once service is restored, is there ever a refund to those that suffered?

I have seen a few commercial contracts in my days at Cygnus. It was typical for these to exclude liability due to “labour disruption”. Of course, these terms were unused as Cygnus staff was never unionized (though there was a great April Fool’s Day note by Pati Palmer in 1999 that got management riled). Labour disruption was thus essentially impossible, so our customers didn’t have to discount their contract value by the risk of such loss.

I don’t recall seeing any such terms in the “contract” associated with my numerous university tuition transactions.

If governmental organs are implicitly provided by some sort of legal shield against such non-performance lawsuits, I wonder if a political party could make it a policy plank to revoke such taxpayer-screwing protection.

Given two intelligent species on a planet, where should the smarter one make its home, considering the possibility of extraterrestrial invasion?

Yes, sure, a likely scenario. But Douglas Adams dealt with it in his famous travel treatise (humans vs. dolphins … and mice). So did an odd dream last night, which included an amphibious llama with a cargo uterus (don’t ask, I won’t tell).

Anyway, studying my one or two dozen millithoughs on military strategy, I would have to favour the subsurface species. Let the aerial ones take the heat burns of screaming space ship engines; let the surface ones be stomped by block-sized landing feet. Those hiding below can plan their escape in the mean time.

Bring it on, baby. I’m growing gills.

The little local activist group “community air” has filed suit against the Island airport today, to try to block the construction associated with the impending startup of Porter Air

Amidst the doom & gloom language, there is a chivalrous little gem arguing that the airplane to be used by Porter, the Bombardier Q400 is actually unsafe to operate there. Let’s take apart this execrable document.

• The authors’ obsession with runway lengths presumes operation at maximum gross weight. However, the airplane will operate well under gross if it is used, as planned, for shorter distances. That means less fuel, ergo less weight, ergo less runway requirement. They can also leave a few seats empty if conditions require. Even big jets at big airports sometimes trade off fuel for cargo on hot days: it is a well-understood phenomenon in the business.

• In the paragraph about “canadian runway friction index”, they bring up “turbojets” for some reason, but the Q400 is not a turbojet. It’s a turboprop. (Then again, they misunderstand what the CRFI is: it’s a multiplicative adjustment to expected runway use, due to contamination such as snow or rain. It is not dependent on type of powerplant.)

• The “difficulty keeping their stories straight” paragraph indicates a naive expectation that every number must match every other number. All of the bullet points could be true, since they are talking about different conditions.

• Stopways are nice to have, but are just a bonus. The take-off runway lengths cited in the performance numbers already include the distance needed to stop after an aborted take-off.

• That three particular taxiways are too small for the Q400 is of absolutely no concern. Those taxiways (E, C, B) are not used by the Jazz Dash-8’s either, as they constitute shortcuts for smaller airplanes. Taxiways D and A, and the runways provide full roaming freedom for Q400s.

• I don’t know much about the pavement strength issue, but it’s fishy that they again go on about taxiway C/E, and runway 06-24, which the Q400 would just not use. Regarding 15-33, if it’s used only rarely as a crosswind runway on very bad days, chances are that the weight limits would not apply.

• Bird strikes are a hazard, surely. I just dodged a couple of seagulls a few days ago near Humber Bay shortly after take-off. But it’s a hazard only to the aircraft operator (in terms of maintenance cost), and if Porter is willing to take the risk, let’s let them.

• Likewise, the concern about weather at CYTZ is naive. Professionally flown aircraft can handle the occasional junk at the Island just fine, or at worst, divert to Pearson. And a reminder: a 60 km/h “crosswind” is not the same as a 60 km/h “wind gust”. I land/take-off happily in the latter, not the former. (The Q400 would operate fine with both.)

• Pilot cautions: thanks guys for transcribing the data out of the Canada Flight Supplement. Believe me, they are not a problem for even first-time visiting amateur pilots, let alone professionals that fly there daily. It is a blatant misinterpretation to present this as some sort of indictment that the airport is “unsafe”.

• Finally, in the press release doodad accompanying the lawsuit and this alarming safety report, they described the Q400 as a “monster which completely dwarfs the much smaller Q100s that Air Canada’s Jazz subsidiary has been using at the airport”. The Q400 is a whole 20ft (25%) longer and about 3ft (4%) wider. The humanity! The monstrosity! About as scary as Cookie Monster.

Oh well, what can one expect from political activists, especially such unlikely ones to receive ahead-of-time fact checking assistance from aviation experts, whom they despise.

You may have heard about Google being subpoenad by the US Department of Justice, in order to turn over query logs and database contents. Privacy advocates will celebrate that this was largely tossed out today. However, don’t be too hasty. According to the judge’s order, Google was not the only target of subpoenas, just the only one resisting. Page 3 line 22:

… AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft appear to be producing data pursuant to the Government’s request. …

I am now accepting proposals of interest to join us, sometime within the next month or three, for a weekend trip to visit the battleship New Jersey. Wow.

By the way, I blame my interest in big ships on Winston Churchill. His WWII series infected me with his admiration for all things naval.

Realizing how little I knew, I got reading. For example, I had no idea about the size of the US Navy, except some vague notion that it was big. Actually, there are only about a dozen huge ships (carriers), eighty major ships (submarines + cruisers), and a bunch of smaller ones in support (destroyers, missile frigates, etc.), making around three hundred in total. That’s it for the largest navy in the world.

Almost exactly four years ago, this same ship took Juimiin and me from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert during our cross-country drive.