Those one or two of you that got excited about this Avidyne press release may save yourselves the anticipation.

I own a couple-year-old EX500 MFD in GXRP’s avionics suite. It works fine, but was missing an extra-cost feature that would be particularly handy with my realignment of IFR navigation data sources. This feature used to cost $2500 and included a hardware tweak, but about a month ago Avidyne announced that it would be a mere $500. I asked my avionics shop to go for it.

A few days later, they sheepishly came back, reporting that Avidyne is tying this particular upgrade to another one, which by the way costs $1000.

OK, in aviation, everything is expensive. Electronic, mechanical, liquid, it doesn’t matter. But it bugs me to no end that this company has the gall to preserve a misleading press release/advertisement, with no apologies and no corrections – let alone consideration for those who took it at face value, relying on their dealers to disappoint the customers. It’s not right.

Heard from the 2-year-old this morning:

I want to change your name from Frank to Frankie by adding “i” and “e” to the end.

This is a response to my colleague Michael Tiemann’s blog posting. Despite the “add a comment” link over yonder at opensource.org, I have yet to see any comment actually published, so here we go.

It may be misleading to draw an analogy that compares the “millions” of people who can conceivably participate in open source software to the “half-million” employees of e.g. IBM. Those hypothetical millions are not coordinated with each other just by virtue of working on “open source” — not any more than the efforts of all people working an economy are “coordinated” by virtue of capitalism. The largest open source projects may have genuine coordination of a few hundred people, but those projects are few and of a comparable scale to proprietary ones.

On the positive side, it is nice to see Michael sense the “false choice” (false dichotomy) “between exclusive reliance on the government and exclusively ignoring the problem altogether”. This perception is mainly private to statists, for whom there are no problems for which government action is the wrong solution. Another mass of people called “individualists”, “conservatives” or perhaps “libertarians” — in any case, somewhere along that axis — have never held that “false choice” belief. Welcome to the club, Michael, in even a small way.

Headline: Student Builds Tiny House With Big Sustainability
In other words: “Student camps in someone’s backyard in shed.”

I come to praise Brian Hayes’s book Infrastructure.

Not only is the writing crisp, informative, even compelling. It is even psychic at times, presciently answering questions that an educated layreader will naturally ask about each object at hand.

Not just does it include photographs that decorate, they illustrate and educate.

Not just those things. This book is also funny. It’s not groaner humor made of cheap puns and gags that certain amateur comedians need to inject into everything. (I resemble that remark.) It is the gentle wit that earns at least one smile per paragraph, connecting the technical to the personal. It reminds me of very few non-fiction works – perhaps the snippets Kenneth McLeish authored in this philosophy book come closest.

If you have a sliver of interest in knowing about the infrastructure that keeps our industrialized society moving, get this book. You don’t have to be an engineer, though it might make you want to become one. Sorry in advance about the long nights.

Headline: Stimulus projects bypass hard-hit states
Punchline: “… amounted to only about $7.42 per person on average …”
In other words: Citizens now owe $3630 each, to fund the $1,200,000,000,000 stimulus bill.

This is a sad thought-provoking summary of what has happened at the lower tiers of the airline industry. (I don’t know to what extent it applies to Canada.)