Thursday trivia #59

• I’ve decided to start journaling my flying lessons. Look for the first entry in the next couple of days.
• This weekend I’m headed to see my first live professional MMA bout: the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix final. I’m pretty excited about it.
• Diablo III: sorry, couldn’t care less.
• If you’re thinking about attending MEC 2012, the early-bird discount for registration ends tomorrow. Get it while the gettin’ is good. (And if you’re not thinking about attending, whyever not?)
• And speaking of conferences: I’m moderating a panel discussion at Hewlett-Packard’s Discover 2012 conference next month in Vegas. I would have included a link to the session but H-P’s event website is so encrusted with JavaScript that I can’t get the links to work properly.
• Beautiful 1971 letter from Ronald Reagan to his son Michael about marriage. If you are married, want to be married, or know someone who is married, read it.
• A volcano. In a trash can. That fires rubber ducks into the air. Yes please.

Thursday trivia #58

• On Monday I went flying; during the flight, I shot some landings at the Hayward airport; it is more or less right across the bay from the Palo Alto airport. As I was flying downwind for an approach to land on runway 28L, I heard an unusual radio call: “Hayward Tower, Boeing 5017 November…” My CFI and I looked at each other, wondering what kind of aircraft it was. Turns out it was the Experimental Aircraft’s B-17, Aluminum Overcast, come to town for a visit! (Their tour is this weekend, when I’ll be in Huntsville, so I did the virtual tour instead. So should you.) He landed while I followed in trail, but it took him long enough to clear the runway that I had to go around– so I got to overfly a B-17. Bonus: I could see our friendly neighborhood Zeppelin about 10nm to the north as I executed the go-around. Some flights just can’t be improved on…
• …but others can. Case in point: the Indian Air Force has purchased 872 MiG fighters since 1966. Since then, they have crashed 482 of them, killing 171 pilots. That’s a loss rate of 55%! I can’t find official data on accident rates (as opposed to total numbers of airframes lost) for the IAF, though an article (whose link I lost) cites a loss rate of somewhere between 0.83 and 1.07 per 10,000 hours. For comparison, see the USAF mishap data from 1947 to 2006 (see the “Destroyed” column), which appears to be calculated per 100,000 hours. It’s surprising both that the IAF has such high total losses and that their mishap rate seems to be pretty steady. (Interesting side note: the USAF apparently flew 25% more hours during “peacetime” in FY 1993 than in the midst of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in FY 2007!)
• From the “could you possibly find a more obvious research result?” department:  “…The surprising result is that relationships in which the man is happier than the woman are significantly more likely to come to an end relative to relationships in which both partners are similarly unhappy.” You don’t say. In other news: water is still wet, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
• I was excited about Bo’s mention of Mad Anthony’s XXXTRA HOT Private Reserve hot sauce… but for $10 a bottle plus $10 shipping, Im thinking I’ll pass. That’s a high barrier to entry just to try it. On the other hand… mmm, delicious spice… so I might have to get some anyway. (Related note: just ordered a refill of Blair’s Death Rain habanero chips, yum!)
• Great persuasive essay from Brian about willpower and desire in relation to fitness. Go read it. And then stay out of the snack closet.
• Attention Tony: now that I know of the existence of The Aviator’s Guide to Ireland my interest in visiting Ireland has gone up about five notches.
• I wish I could convince Amazon to stop cluttering up their home page with top-center ads for womens’ clothing and the Kindle Fire. I don’t want either of them, nor am I likely to suddenly change my mind; if they put up ads for things I might actually buy it would be better for both of us.

The Walking Dead videogame

Normally I am not a big fan of things that are bloody or gross. I don’t recall the last time I voluntarily watched a horror film, and I completely missed out on the epidemic of slasher and torture porn films like the “Saw” and “Hostel” series. Despite that, I started watching AMC’s “The Walking Dead” when it premiered and was immediately captivated. I have always been a fan of post-apocalyptic storytelling, which I blame on a childhood and adolescence spent eagerly absorbing Cold War-era science fiction, so the setting of the show suited me just fine. The ongoing emphasis on having to make the best possible choice from a set of bad alternatives, and often finding that that choice leads to a set of still more difficult choices, makes for compelling drama.

This is by way of scene setting: when I saw an Xbox 360 game based on the Walking Dead universe, I was curious enough to download it. It’s the first episode in a planned series of five. The game sets you in the role of Lee Everett, a convicted criminal who is on his way to prison when a car accident frees him from police captivity. He’s abruptly dumped into a world filled with zombies, where he quickly meets, and takes responsibility for, an 8-year-old girl named Clementine whose parents are missing. The story develops from there, as Lee and Clementine meet a variety of other survivors and travel to try to find Clementine’s parents and Lee’s family.

The story’s told in the visual style of the original comics, which I have not yet read; this is a bit jarring at first, because the graphics often look crude and, well, cartoonish, but that is by design. The ambient sounds and voice acting are both top-notch. I’m not sure what you would call it, but the scenery or set design is excellent as well; it very much evokes the feel of rural Georgia where most of the story is set.

There isn’t much I can say about the story without giving away key elements, so I won’t. I will say that the plot features a few characters from the television series, and that as Lee, you are forced to make some of the same kinds of difficult choices that other characters have encountered. The game developer claims that the choices you make in this first episode will influence the plot and gameplay both within this episode and in forthcoming episodes. I plan to go back and play it again, making different choices, to see how much truth there is to that. Interestingly, at the end of the episode, you see how your decisions compare to other players– for example, “You and XX% of players chose to…”. This is an interesting way to establish behavioral norms in the game world: did you make decisions the way other people did, or not?

The gameplay itself is fairly linear. If you remember old-school text adventures, where you would give the computer commands like “take rock” or “extinguish lantern” from a very limited vocabulary, you will feel right at home here. This is not an open world game: in each environment, the number of things you can interact with, and the number of things you can do with them, is quite constrained. Sometimes accomplishing your objectives is simply a matter of looking around until you find an appropriate object. Other times, you may find an object and have no idea what to do with it until you explore further. If you are used to a large open ended game like Fallout or Grand Theft Auto this can be frustrating. However, in this setting, the constraints are not too bothersome. I decided to look at this more as a television show (with lower resolution and more interactivity) then as a videogame (where I would expect to have a much broader range of action), so in that light it turned out to be pretty good.

One caution: the game is rated M for graphic violence and bad language. There is plenty of both. This isn’t a game for the kiddies by any stretch, although the violence is not as gross as the television show (though the language is far worse.)

I am looking forward to the next 4 episodes.

“See something, say something” stupidity?

This week a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to Chicago was quarantined upon arrival by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why? Because CDC thought the woman might have monkeypox. Why on earth would they think that? Therein lies the story.

First off: according to the CDC themselves, monkeypox kills between 1% and 10% of people in Africa who contract it. So, it’s worse than chickenpox, but not up to the level of Marburg or ebola. 

So, Lise Sievers went to Africa to work on her pending adoption of two special-needs children. During the four months she was there, she developed what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune  describes as a “bad rash” that she thinks was caused by bedbugs. One of the boys she’s adopting also has what her son, Roger, described as “pus-filled bumps.” Still with me? Lise has a rash. Her son-to-be has bumps.

In a phone call with her mother, Lise mentioned the rash and the bumps. Her mother, no doubt with the best of intentions, called a local hospital and asked them (and I’m paraphrasing here) “What kind of treatment do you need to get if you’ve been in Africa and have pus-filled bumps on your skin?” I’m sure that the hospital staff jumped at the chance to make a diagnosis over the phone; I hear doctors love that stuff. Anyway, somehow the story got garbled until the hospital staff thought that Lise, the passenger, had the pus-filled bumps. At some point, a bright star at the hospital decided “hey, this might be monkeypox,” so they did the natural thing: they called CDC… who then quarantined the airplane for a couple of hours. 

Is this a “better safe than sorry” thing, or an ignorant overreaction?

I don’t blame Lise’s mom; here’s what Lise’s son Roger had to say (a textbook example of “Minnesota nice” if I’ve ever seen it):

“It was all misinformation from a speculative call that my grandmother made,” Roger Sievers said. “She’s just a concerned old lady. As sweet as can be. And she makes a mean banana bread, I can tell you that right now.”

It should be said that I bow to no one in my respect for the CDC, particularly their Special Pathogens Branch, nor my desire to avoid a pandemic. However, if I recall, we weren’t even quarantining entire airplanes when there were known cases of H1N1 or SARS aboard. This seems like a bit of an overreaction to say the least. The CDC’s page on airline travel sets out their requirements for cabin or flight  crew aboard an airplane who suspect that someone aboard has communicable illness: basically the pilot’s supposed to call ATC and tell ‘em that someone aboard has Belgian waffle disease or whatever. Seems reasonable enough.

On the other hand, it sure does seem like the hospital people jumped the gun a bit. This seems like a textbook case of “if you see something, say something” carried to an extreme. At least I can take some comfort from the fact that the TSA wasn’t involved.

(Bonus for those who read to the end: The Last Psychiatrist’s review of Contagion. Contains spoilers.)

Thursday trivia #57

• I have long been fascinated by the history of Bell Labs, perhaps one of the best-known research outfits in the history of the modern age. There’s a new book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, that looks like it might be interesting, so it’s on my Amazon wish list now.
• Speaking of my wish list: I love it that I have a single location to keep track of every interesting-sounding book I run across. It’s much easier to add books to the list than to read them, though, so periodically I have to make a pass through the list and cull it a bit.
• Yet another reason why I love O’Reilly Media: their newest book is the Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments. It’s intended for home schoolers, but who wouldn’t want to read it?
• And speaking of biology: Brain freezes are caused by dilation of the anterior cerebral artery. Yep, really. Now you know! (Reading that story did make me want some ice cream, however.)
• And speaking of brains: I’ve been spending some time lately trying to wrap mine around the concept of storyboarding in iOS 5. There sure is a lot to learn; if you’re interested I recommend starting with this tutorial and working your way on from there.
• Speaking of working: women may soon be working in the Marine Corps’ infantry, artillery, and other ground combat jobs. After thinking about it quite a bit, I’ve come to believe that they’re taking the right approach: try sending some women to the Infantry Officers’ Course and see how it goes. In parallel, they are developing new, gender-neutral fitness tests. In theory, these tests should make it possible to set a standard that applies to men and women. Meet the standard and you’re good to go; fail to meet it and you’re not. If this actually happens, fantastic. Gunpowder & Lead said it best: “I think women should have the same opportunities as men to serve in our military, provided they can meet the necessary standards to ensure the maximum possible safety and effectiveness of our combat forces.”. Me too. As with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” I believe that the Marine Corps will lead the way in integrating women into ground combat forces if that’s what we’re directed to do.
• Twin-engine airplanes are supposed to be safer than single-engine planes, and in most flight regimes they are. But see this video of a horrible accident for a counterpoint: the pilot’s trying to land with one engine out. His turn to final approach is too tight, so he skids to try to make the runway. This causes the wing with the dead engine to enter an aerodynamic stall, which in turn causes a spin, with catastrophic results. Takeaway: don’t do this.
• Another takeaway: subscribe to the Flying Lessons newsletter, which is a weekly compendium of annotated aviation accident reports. Great reading, though sobering.

The Last Psychiatrist

No, it’s not a movie title, it’s the name of a blog: a very hard-hitting, complex, and yet highly readable blog. Here’s just one pull quote, from his (we all think the blog’s written by a man, but how can you tell?) review of The Descendants:

I’m simply posing the general question: since the audience has learned nothing from their own parents, and they don’t read 19th century Russian literature, what is their model for love in the 2nd decade of marriage? They don’t have one. Which is why when this demo finds themselves in the 2nd decade of marriage they feel unfulfilled, anxious, depressed, is this all there is? They have nothing to guide them except The Discovery Channel and mommy blogs, and they lack the courage to analyze their ennui, so these movies serve the important function of pretending that it’s normal. “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m feeling.” Fine, but don’t you also want to know why you feel that way? There are, of course, plenty of people with normal marriages who still love each other despite the absence of windfall inheritances and relentless drama. But they won’t be seeing this movie.

If that resonates with you, fire up your RSS reader and get on with it. You will find his articles frequently incisive, often maddening, occasionally inscrutable, and always provocative. (But why he hates pantyhose so much, I have no idea.)

Fog Creek Copilot

Sometimes I have to do remote computer support for friends and family members. In days of yore, this meant smashing the phone handset between my ear and shoulder while typing, and frequently asking the person on the other end of the phone questions like “well, what buttons do you see?” and “are you sure there isn’t a menu option that says X?”

Since about 2005, I’ve been using Fog Creek’s Copilot service instead. Copilot is simple, cheap, and fast; you go to the website, put in your name, and get a 12-digit code. You (as what Copilot calls the helper) either read that code to the person being helped or have the web site e-mail it to them. They put the code in too; both you and the other person download a small executable, which is prestamped with the code. When both ends have the executable running, you get a screen-sharing session with the remote machine.

Copilot essentially uses the VNC protocol to transfer screen images and mouse movements, which are all “reflected” off a Fog Creek server (details here). This approach works well through firewalls and proxies, and its performance is decent over low-bandwidth connections. The client has the ability to reconnect after temporary interruptions in network service, which is handy.

Pricing is reasonable: $5 for a 24-hour “day pass”, with free usage on the weekends. There are other pricing options too, but I don’t use the service often enough to need any of them. Fog Creek positions Copilot as a useful tool for corporate help desks, which is probably true.

One interesting thing to know about Copilot: when you purchase a day pass, it’s good for 24 hours. However, by default the helper can only use the day pass from the original computer. Suppose I start a session as a helper using my Mac at home, then I want to use the same session the next day (within the 24-hour window) from a different computer. Because the executable you run on the helper’s computer has a unique key, you can’t just start a new session, and there’s no place for the helper to put in an invitation code. The Copilot FAQ says to follow the instructions to reconnect, but there aren’t any! After a few fruitless minutes of poking around, I called their toll-free support number and within two minutes had the answer: if you start helping someone on computer A and then move to computer B, Fog Creek tech support has to send you an e-mail containing a link to the correctly-stamped version of the executable. They did, and I was able to use it without problems.

So, the next time someone asks you to help fix their computer (and you’re actually willing to do it– not always a given), give Copilot a try. I’m a fan.

On “Tweeting your insomnia”

Ah, Bo… you’re sounding like a grumpy old man:

I see a post nearly every day, usually in the morning, on Facebook or Twitter lamenting that the poster can’t get to sleep.

The poster, who is sitting upright, performing a task with his/her hands requiring considerable dexterity, and staring at a brightly lit and colorful screen can’t get to sleep.

Go figure.

See, here’s the thing: smartphones. It’s perfectly feasible to dash off a quick tweet, text, or Facebook status update in the middle of the night while remaining horizontal, and perhaps even using only one hand. Hell, you can even dim your phone’s screen before you go to bed so that it doesn’t blast you in the face like Ivy Mike.

Personally, I will often read and respond to texts, check Twitter, and occasionally even check in on Facebook or read e-mail when I can’t sleep. It doesn’t hurt, and sometimes it helps pass the time.

You don’t even have to be all the way awake, any more than you have to be completely sober (so I’m told.)

As for the quality of these communications, in both syntax and content: well, that’s another matter. If you get a garbled text from me, and it’s late at night where I am, that’s probably why.

Bonus image from Hyperbole and a Half.

Ten Things I’ve Done (That You Probably Haven’t)

This is admittedly an old meme. I missed the original round in 2006, and the revival in 2010, but maybe it’s time for another round. Even if not, here’s my list.

1. Been interviewed on CNN.
2. Sat in the captain’s chair of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
3. Gone pistol shooting with a member of the US Olympic pistol team. (He beat me, but not that badly. At least that’s what I tell myself.)
4. Climbed the Harbour Bridge in Sydney.
5. Received a meritorious spot promotion from the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
6. Been mistaken for a local pediatrician. At the hospital. By a delivery nurse. Who asked me what to do with a patient.
7. Performed CPR on an 18-month-old who had fallen into a swimming pool and drowned, successfully resuscitating him.
8. Rebuilt a 1957 Chevy Bel Aire and a 1964 Corvette Stingray.
9. Drove my rental car on the Monaco Grand Prix race course in Monaco the day before the race.
10. Toured the “secret” tunnel system underneath Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Thursday trivia #56

• If you’re at all interested in computer forensics (and, really, who isn’t?), this piece from the Boston Phoenix makes for great reading; it describes how cops found the “Craigslist Killer.”
• Microsoft is changing their professional certifications again, reintroducing the MCSE (this time branded as “Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert.”) It’s not completely clear to me what this means for people who hold the MCITP certification; there will be an upgrade path of some kind from Microsoft Certified Master to the new MCSM credential. I’ll write more about this when I understand it better.
• “Deaths from traffic accidents around April 15, traditionally the last day to file individual income taxes in the U.S., rose 6 percent on average on each of the last 30 years of tax filing days compared with a day during the week prior and a week later.” Think about that for a second. (Note to self: file electronically and then stay home on April 17th.)
• It’s nice to see this well-known principle getting better coverage: people make poor monitors for computers. Humans stink at repetitive monitoring of things that rarely change.
• Turns out that Australia has a simple process for getting a “certificate of validation,” which allows you to fly about the country with a US pilot’s license. Hmmmm…

Thursday trivia #55

• The Marines have landed in Darwin, Australia, and the situation is well in hand. I had an interesting discussion with a coworker about whether this was a provocation of the Chinese or a necessary move to register our continued interest in the Pacific Rim. I lean towards the latter, but not everyone agrees.
• I’ve finally started watching Game of Thrones after having read all of the books. So far I’m delighted, in particular by the characterizations. Barristan Selmy, Syrio Forel, and a host of other characters are very much as I imagined them, and the set design is superb. (However, I did wonder why all the characters have British accents. The BBC has one possible answer.)
• Why’d I take the plunge? U-Verse had a promotion: 3 months of free HBO. I signed up and immediately fired up the HBO Go app on my Xbox. It works superbly, including Kinect integration for voice control. The HBO Go app also works well on my Mac, so I connected it to the hotel-room TV here in San Diego and watched Game of Thrones on it too. WELCOME TO THE FUTURE.
• I really like the new Trending app for iOS. It combines stock data with news about the companies in your portfolio. Since it’s free, go get it.
• Fascinating story on ferries in Alaska. There’s more to it than you might have suspected.
• Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation: fun, quick read. Recommended.
• Today’s fun cloud computing game: anyone can play.
• Tuesday and Wednesday I went running at Shoreline Park in San Diego. It was beautiful: sunshine, sailboats, a few SH-60s. Here’s a panorama I took with Photosynth:

http://photosynth.net/embed.aspx?cid=d26f798e-29b5-428c-b7de-daa1632a21f1&delayLoad=true&slideShowPlaying=false

Thursday trivia #54

I have a large backlog of stuff to blog about but it’ll be a few weeks yet before I accumulate enough free time to do so. I’m in San Diego right now, working with the Institute for Defense Analyses to test our Digital Tutor students’ performance. It’s been a blast so far and I am very much looking forward to seeing the final results. Herewith a few assorted and mostly random notes.

• Ever think about how you’d read a mathematical equation to a blind person? Me neither, but publishers of math textbooks have to make their materials accessible to all students. Think about it.
• This article in Ad Age talks about how magazines are posting large gains in digital circulation. This may seem unsurprising, but I have found very few magazines whose apps on the iPad work really, really well. Most are inferior to the experience of reading a paper magazine. As a magazine writer, I am intensely interested in how this transition works for Windows IT Pro now that they’re all-digital.
• If you’re not reading Lowering the Bar, you should be.
• I’d like to think that if I had as much money as Jeff Bezos I’d do cool things like this: finding the F-1 engines from the Saturn V that launched Apollo 11.
• John Carter deserves a bigger audience: it was a fun thrill movie, great for what it was. The boys and I found it quite entertaining in a summer-movie kind of way.
• There’s a terrific iPad G1000 simulator in the App Store. The picture below shows it with a course laid in from the Palo Alto airport (KPAO) to Santa Clara-South County (KE16). It’s remarkably complete and I’ve had a great time using it along with Max Trescott’s G1000 book.

Thursday trivia #53

• I note with sadness the passing of CAPT Carroll LeFon, USN (ret). He was a fighter pilot until the end, a stalwart patriot, and a great American, and I say this with no trace whatsoever of irony.
• Fascinating BBC article on recycling of medical implants: hips, knees, etc. get turned into turbine blades and other artifacts.
• Since I’ve been in Pensacola, I’ve gotten to rent a number of different vehicles. So far, the Chrysler 300 I’m currently driving is my favorite. Comfortable, powerful, quiet, and stylish. The interior is well-assembled, and the avionics (or whatever you call them in cars) work very well, with none of the Bluetooth bugs I’ve gotten accustomed to working around in other vehicles. Plus, as Tom says, Eminem drives one, so what’s not to like?
• Brilliant news: LodgeNet (you know, the hotel-TV folks) have produced an app that turns your device into a TV remote for your hotel TV. I love this because, quite frankly, those remotes are swimming in germs.
• I’ve long been a nuclear-weapons nerd, so Restricted Data is like catnip.
• Speaking of which: Perimeter.
• I’m taking my FAA written exam this week. So far I’ve accumulated about 70 hours of flight time, and I only need a few more specific things before i can take my check ride. However, the weather here in Pensacola is worsening, so I doubt I’ll be able to finish up before I leave.
• This collection of LEGO science models gives me a strong urge to break out the LEGOs. Like I needed a reason…

 

MEC is back

Great news: the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) is back from the dead!

During the first day of the 2012 MVP Summit, Michael Atalla (director of marketing for the Exchange team) surprised us with an announcement that the MEC was returning. We weren’t allowed to discuss it until today, but now some of the wraps are off.

I have many fond memories of attending MECs past, including taking a group of H-P’s European employees to the pistol range in Anaheim for a little American cultural acclimation. The MEC that probably stands out the most for me, though, was 1998 in Boston. It was the first MEC I attended, and at the time I knew very little about Exchange– yet I was on the hook for an Exchange exam study guide. I took feverish, furious notes and tried as hard as I could to cram knowledge into my brain. What stood out to me was that the presenters included actual engineers and support folks from the product team: Laurion Burchall gave a presentation on the internals of the Extensible Storage Engine, Daniel Chenault did an excellent troubleshooting session at Fleet Arena, and so on.

The sense of community and shared learning was palpable, and it continued on at each successive MEC. A huge amount of what I now know about Exchange, I learned there; many of the Exchange community members I now count as friends were people I first met at a MEC.

The MEC was successful in my view for 3 reasons: it focused only on Exchange; it was staffed by deeply technical presenters who could get all the way down to the source-code level to explain things; and it was well-funded and supported by Microsoft.

In its later years, MEC was renamed from the “Microsoft Exchange Conference” to the “Microsoft Exchange and Collaboration” conference, and SharePoint– then in its infancy– was invited in. Then the MEC disappeared, while SharePoint got its own conference. It long surprised me that SharePoint had a Microsoft-organized and -funded conference, while Exchange didn’t, given their relative market sizes and market shares. It also continually frustrated me that there was so little Exchange-specific content at TechEd, but that’s a function of the simple fact that Microsoft keeps adding new products, and each one has to have its day at TechEd. The same-size pie with more slices cut into it means everyone gets a smaller piece.

Sadly, the enthusiasm and commitment of the people who actually write the code for Exchange has been a long-missing ingredient in the Exchange conference world. I know that when I was the conference co-chair for Exchange Connections we tried hard, and often, to get Microsoft to send us some developers and/or support engineers. We were largely unsuccessful (although we did manage to pry Tim McMichael loose for a few visits.) This is not to demean the contributions from the many program managers, writers, and others who have carried the Exchange torch at TechEd, Connections, TEC, and so on– but as good as their participation has been, it’s not the same as having engineers presenting at a Microsoft-sponsored conference centered on Exchange. Other events have had one or two of the three factors I mentioned before, but without all three, they didn’t hit the same heights.

While Microsoft hasn’t announced any of the specifics around the MEC yet, they have announced the date and location, but you’l have to go to MECisBack.com for those details. Expect more details soon– and expect to see me there!

Happy Mardi Gras

The boys and I are just back from a wonderful trip to South Louisiana for a mini-family reunion. Missie started the ball rolling a few months ago, so I made precautionary hotel reservations just in case. Things worked out beautifully– the boys had Friday and Monday off, so I picked them up in Montgomery Thursday night, and we stayed overnight in Mobile. Friday morning, we got up and drove to Houma; along the way we stopped at the National World War II Museum. I’d been there before, but the boys hadn’t, and they were pretty much wide-eyed throughout the entire tour. A stop in Luling for a shrimp poboy, and poof! we were in Houma.

That night we went to the Krewe of Aphrodite parade. In case you hadn’t guessed, this krewe’s court is all-female, and all the floats were crewed by women. I’m not sure if that was a factor in the boys’ massive haul of beads, but it could have been. We all had a grand time; we then joined Doug, Shawn, Missie, Jody, and the girls for Mexican.

the boys ended up heavily laden with beads, plus all sorts of other random paraphernalia.

sadly, Piranha Rentals doesn’t actually rent piranhas.

not actual size

Saturday drove around to check out Houma, which has grown quite a bit since my last visit– to say nothing of how much it’s grown since I lived there. Terrebonne Parish as a whole had about 94,000 people in 1980, shortly before I moved away. The 2010 census says it now has around 112,000 people, but that seems low based on the size and bustle of what used to be a fairly quiet small town. We were supposed to marshal at Mr. Poboy (which I highly recommend), but we had some time to kill. I decided to drive out towards the airport, and what a good decision that turned out to be!

As we were driving, I saw what looked like a DC-3… then another one… then some other large propellor transport, all parked behind a hangar labeled “AIRBORNE SUPPORT.” We drove over to their hangar, and after a little poking around a gentleman (whose name, sadly, I didn’t write down) came out and offered us a tour of their operations. At first, he asked if we were with the media; I later learned that various media organizations were using shotgun mikes, pole-mounted cameras, and other surveillance devices to eavesdrop on their operations during cleanup of the BP Macondo oil spill. Once he was satisfied that we weren’t part of any sinister plots, he could not have been more helpful and friendly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Airborne Support is a contractor that provides aerial spraying services to Clean Gulf Associates, an oil-industry-funded non-profit that maintains emergency response equipment and staff for spill cleanup. I’ll have to read up more on both of them when I have time.

The aircraft shown above is one of the DC-3s we saw (its web page is here.). More properly, it’s actually a C-47A, the military variant of the DC-3. This one was built in 1944 and is still flying! That’s not uncommon, as aircraft have a much longer life than most people realize. It’s fitted with a large tank that holds chemical dispersant; the spray plane flies at low altitude (30-50 feet above the water) and sprays in a pattern determined by a spotter plane flying at a higher altitude. The interior is bare-bones: there’s a big tank for the dispersant and that’s it. The cockpit below is mostly original, too, with the addition of a Garmin 530, some 1970s-vintage radios, and an overhead-mounted agricultural specialty GPS. The seats, yokes, and so on are all original, though.

my sons have the rare distinction of having been both in the cockpit of an operational DC-3 and the captain’s chair of a Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier

After the tour, we joined the family at Mr. Poboy for an excellent meal. I had the fried shrimp poboy, which was served with excellent soft French bread. The shrimp were apparently fried in Zatarain’s, which is my go-to seasoning, and were plentiful and of good texture. (I wasn’t sold on the fries, though; our Luling gas station fries were better). Then we went over to Ricky’s house, where Ricky and Carey cooked up two huge pots of food: seafood gumbo and pastalaya respectively. Both were superb, as was the lemon icebox pie that someone made (I’m not sure who, but it was certainly good).

Carey’s pastalaya pot is almost, but not quite, big enough to cook a small child in. Sadly you can’t see Ricky’s epic two-burner cooking stand but it was busy too.

One of the things I love about visiting my family is that it’s a given that all the men can cook well. I am by far the worst male cook in my family, but I’m working on it!

We stayed at Ricky’s until well after dark; the steady, heavy rain didn’t dampen our spirits, although it did force cancellation of the scheduled parades. We were too full to care, however. Sunday morning we had breakfast en masse at Waffle House, conveniently located next to our hotel, then went in search of another parade– this one the Krewe of Terraneans. We stayed for the first four or five floats, then headed west for A Cajun Man’s Swamp Tour, run by Black Guidry. I’d taken the boys on it before several years ago, and I don’t think Black’s jokes have changed much since then, but we got some great looks at wildlife, including turtles, young alligators, and nutria. The weather had cleared by the time we left the dock and it was clear, sunny, and very pleasant out on the water.

Capt. Guidry playing his Cajun accordion

A third turtle decamped the log just as I was pressing the shutter button.

He looks pretty comfortable, doesn’t he?

Sunday night we had dinner at Boudreau & Thibodeaux’s in Houma. The food was excellent, and the wait staff did their best to feed all 30 of us in a reasonable amount of time. I had some delicious grilled catfish and a small number of Tom’s two pounds of crawfish. He certainly did them justice, as you can see in the before-and-after pictures below.

Monday all we did was drive back: Houma to Montgomery for me to drop the boys off, then back to Pensacola: just under 500 statute miles all told. Great trip, and we’re all looking forward to doing it again next year!