Year: 2006

A380 Size Implications

I’ve been a bit con­cerned about the idea of fly­ing in one of the Air­bus A380 jets (assum­ing they ever actu­ally deliv­er one to an air­line I fly on, that is). I haven’t been con­cerned about the safety of the big plane, but rather the logist­ics and com­fort. Although, with the latest ter­ror­ist scares, I’m begin­ning to won­der about the safety of fly­ing on these big planes.

Although in the­ory a double-deck­er plane has room for a fit­ness centre, spa, and cock­tail lounge, most air­lines will take the oppor­tun­ity to cram as many pas­sen­gers in as they can. How many that is will depend on the air­line, just the same as it does today for oth­er planes. 

So, what does a plane hold­ing 550 people imply? It implies the same prob­lems as with a Boe­ing 747 that holds around 450 people, only more so. Let’s assume the air­lines in gen­er­al keep the same seat pitch, seat widths, and legroom as for the 747 or Air­bus A340, so the com­fort level on board is roughly the same. Then there are two sets of prob­lems I see. One is the logist­ic­al one of cop­ing with get­ting that many people on and off the plane, and the oth­er pre- and post-flight hand­ling. Board­ing time and dis­em­bark­ment time will depend on wheth­er air­ports have the mul­tiple jet­ways to ser­vice the mul­tiple doors; some already do for the 747 but it’s a good ques­tion as to how many air­ports will make the invest­ment early on or wheth­er they’ll wait until there are lots of A380 planes fly­ing to incur the cost. Bag­gage hand­ling and cus­toms and immig­ra­tion form­al­it­ies are already pain points when 747 planes from mul­tiple des­tin­a­tions land close togeth­er; they will likely get worse with the big­ger planes as they’re cost centres for air­ports, not rev­en­ue generators.

And then there’s the secur­ity angle. Will the big­ger planes be big­ger tar­gets for ter­ror­ists? They’re not that much big­ger than a 747, but it seems likely to me that under the “max­im­um bang” the­ory, ter­ror­ists would aim for the largest num­ber of people they can get at once. To min­im­ise this danger, secur­ity checks at the gate are likely, which will fur­ther increase the board­ing time, assum­ing that some amount of cab­in bag­gage con­tain­ing books, knit­ting etc will be allowed on board to try to keep the pas­sen­ger bore­dom level reas­on­able. As an aside, if the pas­sen­gers are not going to be allowed to bring along means of enter­tain­ing them­selves, and the air­lines aren’t going to widely imple­ment indi­vidu­al in-flight video sys­tems, I hope the flight attend­ants are pre­pared to cope with more cases of air rage.

So what’s the answer? Apart from avoid­ing travel com­pletely, that is, which isn’t always pos­sible. Avoid­ing large hubs isn’t pos­sible for many trans-ocean­ic jour­neys, avoid­ing the large planes for these jour­neys also won’t be pos­sible in many cases. It looks like the cost of air travel is just going to increase, in money, time, and irrit­a­tion. The biggest win­ners are prob­ably going to be the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies that make the rem­ed­ies to help pas­sen­gers sleep, or to calm them down. I can just see it now, flight attend­ants ask­ing “Would you like some melaton­in with your ginger ale to help you sleep?”.

Airline Thoughts

In the after­math of the latest round of air travel restric­tions, it seems to me there will be quite a few rami­fic­a­tions for the travel industry, if these restric­tions stay in place for any length of time. Here are some of the ones I see, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

  • Full-ser­vice air­lines will have a fight­ing chance again, as long as they actu­ally provide the amen­it­ies that used to be expec­ted for travel, such as food, drink (even if non-alco­hol­ic), pil­lows, blankets, in-flight video sys­tems, and magazines. 
  • Flights will be full of tetchy bored people whose elec­tron­ic toys were taken away from them curs­ing the noisy bored chil­dren whose toys were taken away from them.
  • Boe­ing’s decision to cre­ate a plane for point-to-point travel rather than hub and spoke looks like the right one. Flights from Heath­row and Gatwick (the big air­ports) were the tar­get points rather than those from smal­ler air­ports; flights from smal­ler air­ports may be used as a way to get mater­i­als onto oth­er flights (if there are no secur­ity checks between land­ing from one flight and get­ting on the next) but are less likely to be tar­gets them­selves. Tak­ing flights from small air­port to small air­port will also avoid the longer secur­ity-check­ing delays at lar­ger airports.
  • Secur­ity screen­ing of bags as you get on the plane is likely to start, to enable people to take some cab­in baggage.
  • Cheap air­lines which have been try­ing to stop people check­ing lug­gage and only take on hand lug­gage are going to have a hard time.
  • Com­pan­ies that sell really good pad­ded bags so you can check your laptop without wor­ries will find a lot of cus­tom­ers. People should also give more thought to secur­ing the data on their laptops when they check them, but most prob­ably won’t both­er. Insur­ance com­pan­ies will have to cope with a lot of claims for lost and dam­aged laptops, iPods, etc.
  • The mid-80s fash­ion for see-through briefcases and purses will be rein­vig­or­ated. I had one of these purses, it was actu­ally quite handy being able to find things quickly in it.
  • Air tax­is will start to become pop­u­lar as people try to avoid the increas­ing unpleas­ant­ness of com­mer­cial air travel.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this all plays out, and wheth­er the vari­ous Air Trans­port author­it­ies man­age to come up with real, effect­ive secur­ity meas­ures that don’t incon­veni­ence the inno­cent too much. I’m just glad I don’t need to travel any­where much in the near future.

Coffee Musings

The Pacific North­w­est is meant to be an area full of cof­fee bars and people addicted to the bean, but in Van­couver it’s not the num­ber one addic­tion by any means, at least judging by the num­ber of estab­lish­ments you see. It’s far easi­er to find sushi than cof­fee! Some anec­dot­al evid­ence — we took our son to a birth­day party in Coquit­lam (one of the sub­urbs in Great­er Van­couver) and after drop­ping him off at the party, I decided I wanted some cof­fee. Driv­ing around the streets in search of a café we noticed every strip mall had a sushi bar (some of dubi­ous qual­ity), but we had to drive to a large mall to find a cof­fee bar. I had­n’t thought to look up cof­fee bars in Delo­c­at­or first, so we ended up with Star­bucks, but at least it was coffee.

And some­thing I only dis­covered last week which will be of interest to lan­guage ped­ants — in North Amer­ica, cof­fee cake is a type of cake with crumble or streusel on top that is served with cof­fee. Where I grew up (New Zea­l­and) and lived (Aus­tralia) and, I assume, in many oth­er parts of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, a cof­fee cake is a cake that has cof­fee as one of its main ingredi­ents. I have a recipe book from Great Bri­tain with a recipe for cof­fee car­rot cake, for example, which has cof­fee in it, and no streusel on top. I guess I don’t eat cake very often since it took 10 years to dis­cov­er this discrepancy…

Liberty Baby

The Liberty Alli­ance quarterly spon­sors meet­ing was in Van­couver this week, so even though I’m still offi­cially on mater­nity leave, I decided to attend as much as I could (baby allow­ing). It was worth­while going, the baby was a little fussy but slept through enough of the time that I could take part in some of the meet­ing, although I will admit there was one time while I was watch­ing a pre­vi­ously fussy baby lie on the chan­ging mat in the ladies, wav­ing her legs and arms and gurg­ling hap­pily at the sight of the under-basin plumb­ing, when I wondered wheth­er I should be at home instead. That “why am I here” feel­ing passed once she let her­self be put in the sling so I could go back to the meeting.

The Liberty meet­ing itself seemed to go well from what I saw, quite a few people took advant­age of it being opened up to non-mem­bers to observe and par­ti­cip­ate, at least in the meet­ings I was in. It’s always hard for new people to really take part, but I think this exper­i­ment was successful.

The Iden­tity Open­Space meet­ing, jointly pro­duced by the Liberty people and some people from the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop, was sched­uled for the Thursday and Fri­day after the Liberty meet­ing. Lots of people stayed over for this, lots more came spe­cific­ally for the meet­ing. I did­n’t see every­one on the list of attendees that I knew, but that’s prob­ably at least in part because the baby melted down in a big way in the early after­noon on Thursday so I had to take her home, and decided mak­ing her take in a fourth day of meet­ings and present­a­tions on Fri­day would be too much for all con­cerned. Still, she slept through Jane Win­n’s Leg­al Basics, lunch, and Robin Wilton’s Pri­vacy and ID Theft before throw­ing her wobbly, so I got to par­ti­cip­ate to some extent.

Jane’s present­a­tion, as usu­al, was ter­rif­ic. She’s quick to grasp the cent­ral points of issues, her talks are always thought-pro­vok­ing and suit­ably cyn­ic­al, and I was glad to be able to attend it, and also glad she took part in the Liberty meet­ing before the IOS event. Robin is also a deep thinker whose blog often por­trays things in a dif­fer­ent way to the gen­er­ally accep­ted dogma; he’s part of the group I’m in at Sun, and I think we’re lucky to have him there.

The IOS did seem to go well from what I saw and heard, bring­ing togeth­er people with dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences, know­ledge, and view­points. Kaliya Ham­lin organ­ised it and ensured people doc­u­mented the ses­sions on the wiki. This goes some way to neg­at­ing one of the chief unavoid­able prob­lems of this format — that there are often things going on in par­al­lel that I’d like to attend.

Kaliya put up a sign encour­aging people to con­trib­ute or learn, or go where they could con­trib­ute or learn, and I hope that those who sat there quietly, not con­trib­ut­ing, will con­trib­ute what they learned some­place else in the future. Iden­tity man­age­ment, with all its rami­fic­a­tions of pri­vacy, secur­ity, and the user exper­i­ence, is a com­plic­ated issue and affects all of us and the more people talk about the issues and try to come togeth­er on solu­tions, the bet­ter. I think this meet­ing helped with that and it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of it. Right now I’m an out­side observ­er until my mater­nity leave is over but I’m already look­ing for­ward to par­ti­cip­at­ing lots when the baby allows.

Blau-Rote Grütze

Since a couple of mem­bers of the group I work in were in town for the Liberty meet­ing, I invited them to din­ner last night. For dessert, I decided to make Rote Grütze, which is pretty much the stand­ard dessert in Ber­lin at this time of year. It’s pop­u­lar through­out North­ern Ger­many, and I’m told also in Scand­inavia. I think it’s my new favour­ite dessert when rasp­ber­ries are in sea­son, it is easy to make, can be made a day in advance, and every­one liked it.

The stand­ard recipe has red­cur­rants in it which I could­n’t find at Gran­ville Island. So I used blue­ber­ries, which are loc­al and plen­ti­ful at this time of year, hence the “blue-red” in the title. For pos­ter­ity, here’s the ver­sion I ended up making.

One jar sour cher­ries in juice, approx 12 ounces (400g) cher­ries. Put half the cher­ries in a pot with the juice, add 200g blue­ber­ries, 200g rasp­ber­ries and 3/4 c sug­ar (could have been 1/2 c). Bring to the boil, cook a couple of minutes and then mash. Take some of the liquid out in a cup, mix in 2 heaped dessert­spoons of corn­starch in to a smooth mix, stir into the hot mix­ture. Stir until it boils again and thick­ens. Add the rest of the sour cher­ries, anoth­er 200g rasp­ber­ries and 200g blue­ber­ries, heat just to boil­ing point, then take it off the stove. Cool. Serve with cream.

Slow Learning

Hav­ing a new­born is a les­son in many things — in fact, one could prob­ably write one of those “Everything I Needed to Know About ABC I Learned From DEF” (try typ­ing that into Amazon, there are some inter­est­ing titles in the res­ults that show up, includ­ing “Everything I Needed to Know about Busi­ness– I Learned from a Cana­dian” and “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor”).

  1. The top les­son would have to be patience — when you think that almost 6 weeks after being born, the baby is still not in much of a routine (well, she some­times has a nap in the morn­ings, and she inev­it­ably wakes up and wants to be fed just as we put food on the table for us, no mat­ter what time that is, unless I wake her up to feed her first). Even­tu­ally babies can get to a routine of sorts, but it can take a long time. So you just keep try­ing. Even if it takes weeks.
  2. The next would be just how much you can get done when sleep-deprived, and when to recog­nise that you really do need a break. Doing some­thing when you’re sleep-deprived is fine when the qual­ity of the end res­ult isn’t import­ant, or it’s easy to do (it’s hard to really go wrong put­ting laun­dry in the wash­ing machine) but hav­ing to redo things because you mucked up the first time is annoy­ing. Sleep depriva­tion often equals not think­ing prop­erly, or for­get­ting import­ant aspects, or over­weight­ing unim­port­ant aspects, of any­thing you’re think­ing about. And drink­ing cof­fee only helps a little if you’re really sleep-deprived (and too much cof­fee just makes the baby fussy any­way, so it’s self-defeat­ing). I keep lists for lots of things, it’s the only way to make sure noth­ing import­ant is forgotten.
  3. Which leads me to effi­ciency — when the baby only naps for short peri­ods, and you need to get things done (blog post­ing, shower­ing), you can­’t pro­cras­tin­ate or muck about. If it needs to be done, you need to do it in the few minutes you have, oth­er­wise you may not have anoth­er chance until tomor­row. Or next week. Or next month. And you really need to pri­or­it­ise (which explains why I haven’t been post­ing much, showers take pri­or­ity if I only have time for one of those in a day).
  4. Break­ing action items into steps is also neces­sary. Since the naps might be short, which will only give you a few minutes at any giv­en time, you need to have stop­ping points all the way along and a sys­tem to remem­ber quickly where you were. Unfor­tu­nately this does­n’t work when you need to think deeply about some­thing, but there’s the think­ing time you get while nurs­ing, which you can try to use, assum­ing sleep depriva­tion, see (a), does­n’t make it a waste of time. Or you don’t nod out while nurs­ing (I haven’t yet, but I’ve come awfully close). And you have to fig­ure out how many items you can stand to have going at any one time, so the house or com­puter isn’t overly littered with items in vari­ous stages of completion.
  5. And finally, the need for bal­ance. I take walks to the corner to clear my mind and get me out of the house, with or without the baby depend­ing on wheth­er someone at home can mind her; this gives me some bal­ance and a chance to be a per­son in my own right rather than solely “moth­er”. Being a per­son and not solely a whatever-your-job-is, no mat­ter how inter­est­ing or import­ant or ful­filling that job, is equally import­ant to life’s bal­ance in the work life. It seems to me that every­one I know is busier than they were a few years ago (maybe it’s just the people I know) and they’re hav­ing to work harder at find­ing that elu­sive bal­ance, while at the same time real­ising more how import­ant it is.

Time is mov­ing slowly right now, like mov­ing through treacle or molasses. I’m blam­ing it on the sleep depriva­tion; I have to be care­ful what I do and how I do it and think­ing straight isn’t all that easy. Once the baby starts sleep­ing for longer at nights it’ll be easi­er. In the mean­time, I’m learn­ing patience. Slowly.