Who is In Charge?

Who's In Charge, Here?

It's not always clear. And the results of uncertainty are sometimes terrible.

Consider for a moment, the case of the Royal Mail Ship TITANIC. The pride of the White Star Line, the ocean liner famously met her fate on the flat-calm moonless morning of April 15th, 1912. Back then, trans-oceanic travel was a severely big deal. Rich clientele would book passage with favorite ships and also with favorite captains. White Star badgered Captain EJ Smith away from retirement for one last turn of the wheel, aboard the giant steamship's maiden voyage.

This was fine, as far as it went. But leading lights of White Star would also share the journey, including Joseph (J Bruce) Ismay, the chairman of the line. These gentlemen had different goals for the journey than perhaps those of Captain Smith.

Flash ahead to that last evening, the weather reports and ice reports and wouldn't it be grand to arrive early in New York and surprise all of the newspapers? It would be easier to sell tickets for a grand ship like TITANIC if it could be seen as opulent and fast, though speed was never a design consideration. A more prudent option may have been to throttle back while traversing the icy area, or to take a more southerly route. Or at least to post more lookouts, and make sure they had the proper optics for their duty.

The White Star brass knew Captain Smith was experienced. They knew he would not place their new ship at undue risk. But while Smith was the boss of the boat, his boss was also aboard. And his boss would like to get to New York ahead of expectation. Smith knew his authority was unchallenged—he was doing this last run as a favor and there was nothing White Star could do to harm him or his retirement. And Ismay knew Smith wouldn't run the ship any faster than was prudent, given prevailing conditions.

The upshot of the whole thing is the majestic ship pointed at a dark mass and unable to steer clear of it without brushing against it for half the length of the ship, popping rivets and bending panels allowing water in. They say that given the weight of the water needed and the time it took, the "Gash" the press talked about amounted to just twelve square feet, spread out over hundreds of feet of the ship's length. A pantry door left open to the sea 2' by 6' for a couple of hours and it was all over.

More recently, consider the case of young Jessica Dubroff. Jessica was only seven years old, in 1996, when she was attempting to become "the youngest person to cross the country in an airplane". This was in its entirety a media stunt. To be a student pilot, you have to be at least sixteen years old. Jessica was not. So Jessica was in no way the pilot, or even a pilot aboard the airplane. For the trip to be legal, though, someone would have to be a pilot, and for Jessica to have any legitimate place, that someone would have to be a certified flight instructor. Enter Joe Reid. For all government and insurance purposes, Reid would be pilot in command for the entire trip. Reid was fifty-two years old, a stockbroker, and the registered owner of the Cessna used for the "record". Her father would also accompany her on the trip.

There had been a few kids who rode along on flights like this over the years. Nobody remembers because they weren't really records, but still, the trend was younger and younger children. Jessica's trip was designed for media coverage. ABC even gave her a camera to record her journey. She was given several minutes of national TV news coverage, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and some huge percentage of the country was at least somewhat aware of the little girl that they thought was trying to set a record by flying across the country.

The left California with a big farewell. They traveled west-to-east and finished up the day on TV again. It was all very scripted. Look at how far she's come! What a challenge, yadda-yadda-yadda. A fifty-two year old pilot had flown from Half Moon Bay to Cheyenne, with a little girl at his side, her dad in the back, and somehow it was news.

The next morning the three of them went to the airport. Forecast weather had arrived—a big storm. Normally, pilots wait out weather like this, but it was highly localized over the neighborhood and they had a media schedule to adhere to. They had to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, in time for interviews and editing and getting the taped piece to NewYork for the evening news. So while airliners waited for the weather to clear, Reid took off, nearly a hundred pounds overweight.

They took off, and bobbled under, into and out of clouds as they swung around to the east, going slower and slower. Finally, the aircraft stalled and crashed in someone's front yard. But here again, who was in charge?

Technically, legally, it was Reid. But Reid was being paid as an instructor and/or a charter pilot. And he was being paid by the guy in the back seat, who may or may not have known how dangerous their situation really was. Dad might have thought, people drive through this kind of weather all the time, right? So, let's go. We've got reporters to meet. And if it gets too bad, we can always come back and wait it out. And he's thinking Reid is an experienced pilot and he wouldn't get us into anything he couldn't get us out of.

And Reid is thinking we have to make time, we have to make time. And it's not really-really bad. Let's go up and take a look—it's a small storm and we'll probably be out of it before we have the chance to make too many mistakes, anyway. And little Jessica likely had no idea at all the risks involved.

There are hundreds of sayings in Aviation. Little homilies and platitudes we use to remember important lessons. One of my favorite's says "Pilots who crash in bad weather are almost always buried on nice days". There is no wait that's too long, too inconvenient, when it comes to flying and weather.

Bah-Dee-Yah!

The great wheel has turned, again. It is now September, the month of Back To School and the month of Football and the month of cooler and drier. It's the month of my birthday and the month when everyone is on the lookout for that first Christmas signage in stores. It's the month of long sleeved shirts and the first sweaters of the season. The soundtrack is the Indigo Girls' All That We Let In. It is the month in which we say "Bah-Dee-Yah!"

It's a good time to take a quick look back, and see if anything is gaining on you. We have a third of a year left. If there are things you were supposed to get done you have 120 days, the work of which is easier than if it were only ninety, or thirty.

Going back the other way, 240 days ago my world was much different. Since then, I have given up teaching HTML and Dreamweaver and Templates, pretty much. From here on out, it will be the UNL installation of Drupal, the UNLcms. I'll also pick up a few other technologies. We've recently put in a new "clicker" system for the classroom. And we are about to switch e-mail systems. There will probably be some opportunities for me, there.

Oh, there'll be much to do with the UNLcms. I've done a bunch of short videos, explaining how to log in, how to create a basic page, how to add images and so on. But I have also scheduled eighteen classes in thirteen weeks, for those who want the hands-on experience, or just want to spend a couple of hours with me. And I suspect that in short order I will be working on a more intermediate course, and an advanced session, too. And then maybe a Best Practices or a Quick Tips session. So there is lots to do.

But yeah, things have changed. Maybe now I don't want to be championing Dreamweaver and HTML and CSS books in my recommendations over there on the right. Maybe I can donate some of the technical books in my library, both here at work and at home.

I was lucky to be born into a service family. My mother and my father were both Marines. We got transferred around a lot, when I was a little guy. I saw the whole country on 25¢ gasoline. September wasn't always such a great time for me, as no matter where I went or what I did, I was always The New Guy. One year I went off to school in new blue jeans, and the kids wanted to know if I was poor. The next year, clear across the country, I started school in dressier pants and all of the kids wanted to know if I was rich! But I have lived on both coasts, in the middle and seen the rest and I can tell you this much: I love it, here. When I was a SysOp for GE and Microsoft and when I was a freelance writer, I could have lived anywhere I had a telephone and a daily FedEx route. I chose to live here. There is nothing in life so great as an eastern Nebraska autumn.

So now let's take a moment and cross off a few things from our ToDo lists. And sure, let's add back a couple of the things we've been meaning to do, but haven't quite gotten around to, yet.

I'm going to commit to passing the Math Placement Exam, and getting back into school, again. I need to get a downspout replaced, a driveway settled and start saving in earnest for a new roof. I'm going to learn all I can about iClickers and Microsoft 365. And continue to learn about Drupal and the UNLcms. I want to learn more about teaching. I would like to do a better job of that, too. And I hope to be able to take a break from it all now and again, and enjoy a nice drive in the country—maybe take my Sweetie to Nebraska City for the apples in a few weeks. Maybe go into Omaha for some comedy. Maybe this is finally the time I decide to do something serious about my weight.

Yesterday, I received a plaque from work, in appreciation of fifteen years of dedicated service. It does not seem like fifteen years, to me. Seven? Eight? Ten, maybe? Sure. But not fifteen. I'm looking forward to a few more turns of the wheel, ahead.

Disruptive Technologies

We bought a home a year ago and are still moving in. Still wading through the boxes. But every box we open and deal with is its own little triumph Many recent boxes have me thinking about how disruptive technology is.

I've been in this game for years. My first wife managed a RadioShack store when the TRS80 was big news. I had a friend who built his own computer from HeathKit.

As a mainframe computer operator, I used to chat with kids in Europe over a precursor to the modern internet. We'd discuss politics, movies and Formula One autoracing. We sent e-mail to one another. We joined lists of like-minded fans of various movies, computers and technologies. I was on one for Macintosh programmers, for a while. Every day I'd get a digest of all the tips and troubles people had discovered, all over the world, learning to program Macs.

I wanted two things out of owning a computer: I wanted to hook up with people who were earning a living writing, and I wanted access to stock market information. I had no idea what I was looking for, in particular. I just knew if I could download a years' worth of trading data, it might be useful, somehow, in predicting what prices would be tomorrow. The GEnie Writers' RoundTable turned out to be far more valuable, leading to a freelance writing career that spanned almost fifteen years, and an online career that spanned more than a dozen.

I don't remember my first electronic mail. I'm pretty sure it was at HDR in Omaha, running a Control Data CYBER 170. I do remember thinking it was pretty cool, though. Press a button here and *Whoosh!* your thoughts spilled out on someone else's screen a mile or more away. Flash ahead thirty years and the post office is running all kinds of modeling simulations that all point to closing post offices, restricting mail delivery to only part of the week, or both.

I found an old tax return, last week. I'd paid seventeen dollars to have it prepared. Then, somewhere along the way, I started doing it myself on my Macintosh. I prepared and filed our taxes every year for years, until we bought this house. I have copies of all of those returns printed out and sleeping in file cabinets somewhere. I also have copies on floppy disks I cannot read. I don't have a computer that uses 3½″ floppies any more. My tax program, MacInTax, was sold to Intuit somewhere in the middle, there. I switched to Windows computers for a while, and TurboTax, then switched back to the H&R Block program because I was mad at Intuit by then. I can't read any of them, now. And I don't know anyone who could help with that, either.

I have fabulous boxes perfectly designed to store 3½″ floppies, and CD-ROMs, too. Interlocking, heavy-duty plastic drawers and really nice little wooden rolltop boxes. I mean I had a ton of these, back in the day, and apparently I thought this was how we would keep and store data forever, or something.

I have boxes of incredibly complex hardware. How do you hook up a Macintosh printer to a Windows computer, or vice-versa? I've got a pig-tail, somewhere, I'm sure, with the right plug at both ends. Some of these come with stories.

I have nothing to connect these to. I have no hardware that requires or even accepts SCSI, now. I have dozens of cables to hook up alternatives to travel Macs in the era before the Macintosh Portable shipped. I bought a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop and Microsoft Works, as close as I could get to the Macintosh experience. I had a terrific translation program I did a review on (and kept) that would translate between five or six MS-DOS and Windows programs and four or five Mac versions of word processors, spreadsheets and several other formats. Now it's just spaghetti. Colored wires in a box. Lots of colored wires in lots of boxes.

I remember thinking when I bought most of them that this would be the last thing I would need, for a while. As if I actually thought I was through spending technodollars.

Well, before the Next Big Thing arrives, I need to throw this (now) crap away and get the boxes out of my life. Right now, I need the room more than I need the stories and the wires.