A passion for passion

Not quite as fast as a speeding bullet

2008-01-15T21:59:00Z

After riding on trains almost daily for two and a half weeks last month in Japan, I have a newfound interest in the rails. I rode several different flavors and without exception they were fun.

I already wrote about the subway system, which is a joy to use. The cars vary in style and age depending on the line you're riding. Some of them are sparkling new, quiet, and have LCD maps showing your position on the line. Some are clearly older, rattle and roar, and have paper maps on the walls. They're all clean.

They all slide into the station platforms at a pretty brisk pace. The newer stations have special automatic gates at the edge of the platform to prevent the accidents that happen at older stations when the platforms are busy and customers get bumped into oncoming trains. Akiho told me that this happens several times a year.

In Hiroshima, I rode on two different kinds of streetcars. One looked brand new and futuristic. The other looked like a holdover from 1955. They shared a rail down the center of the street that runs from Hiroshima JR station to the Atomic Bomb Dome.

The local surface trains that I rode, to Kamakura, Nara, and Miyajima-guchi, were all older trains on narrow gauge tracks. On the way to Nara, I watched, mystified, as the engineer drove the train while making elaborate gestures at invisible friends. I thought he was waving at someone he knew along the route. But I noticed after a while that he would raise his arm and then thrust it forward to formally acknowledge each signal we approached. Occasionally he would raise his arm and thrust it forward to run his finger across what was surely a checklist mounted on the top of the panel. It was a nice, geeky view of train operation.

Japan Rail (JR) operates many surface lines, some ferry boats, hotels in some of the stations, and of course, the marvelous shinkansen: the bullet train. Shinkansen means "new trunk line," not bullet train, but it's an apt moniker nonetheless. Once you're up to speed (300 km/h or about 186 mph), the world goes past in a blur. Anything close to the train disappears before you can name it.

The train is so well balanced that there is no sense of acceleration, even out of the station. It just gently rolls up to speed and then hums along. It's quiet inside but noise pollution is one of the reasons they won't run the faster shinkansens at full speed.

I didn't ride the Nozomi, which looks like a bullet and is about thirty minutes faster than the Hikari to Kyoto and Shin-Osaka. The Hikari I rode used the duckbill 700 series, which still looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

If you go to Japan and plan to visit a few cities along the shinkansen route, the JR Pass is a great value. It cost me a little more than the round-trip fare from Tokyo to Kyoto but I used it to go to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima-guchi, Miyajima (on the ferry), Osaka, and back to Tokyo. That was using local lines and the shinkansen. You can't get the pass in Japan, as it's only for foreigners. You have to buy it before leaving home.

Overall, I can't rave enough about the rail systems in Japan. They're fast, clean, efficient and fun to ride. If you're a train fan, you can't do better.

A Pass to Railroad Heaven

2008-01-10T01:31:00Z

The best part of spending two and a half weeks in Japan over the holidays was the food. My friend Akiho comments frequently on the Japanese love of good food and she insisted on making sure I ate "real" sushi before leaving Tokyo. She took me to an elegant place in the Ginza where the ingrediants were bought that morning in Tsukiji, and the fish and rice melt in your mouth. Elsewhere I had my fill of okonomiyaki, tempura, and kaiseki dinners.

A close second to the dining experience was the transportation experience. I've ridden public transportation in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Washington DC, New York, and Cairo and I think Japan has them all beat. The system (or lack of) in Seattle is not worth talking about. We've been talking about mass transit for 35 years and we're finally building light rail from the airport to downtown.

You could make the argument that the integration of rail systems across Europe makes them the winner in a contest for the variety of experiences one can sample on one pass, but I don't know that they can beat Japan Rail and the Japanese metros for overall efficiency and ease of use.

You'd simply be mad to own a car in Tokyo. You can get where you want to go quicker and easier on the metro, you don't need to worry about parking, and it's not expensive. The metro cars are clean and fast.

The stations are a marvel too. The newer ones have brightly lit shops, restaurants, and even hotels, removing any argument for living above ground or ever needing to see daylight again. Some of them, like Tokyo Station and Shinjuku Station, are massive. (Pulling a large suitcase is no fun when the sign says your next platform is 450 meters away.) Shinjuku Station sees more than 2,000,000 commuters per day. But somehow the massive crowds (which are also a marvel to see) keep moving and there is never a sense of suffocating crowding.

I only experienced one rush hour ride. I walked up to a car that was already packed to the doors and I stopped, figuring I'd wait for the next one. A rider looked at me and smiled slightly. He shrugged and made a gesture like, "You might as well get on. The next one will be just as busy." I pushed my way into the car, only to have three more people push in behind me. What're ya gonna do?

The Tokyo subway map is imprinted on my brain and is now more familiar and easy to use than a map of Seattle. I'm smitten with the cheerful electonic voice whose announcements in Japanese I can now understand. When I heard her intone "Tsugi wa Suitengumae," my heart sank with the realization that she and I had one more station together before parting. She would continue riding her endless loop on the Hanzomon line and I would ascend from the vast city that lives beneath Tokyo into the city itself to catch my bus past Tokyo Disneyland to Narita. Only one of us will miss the other.

The shinkansen (bullet train) was the most fun. A mere 300 km/h...on the ground. I've never gone that fast without first rotating and retracting the undercarriage. I'll write more about that another time.

Blind cold wimps

2006-12-19T02:11:00Z

Good thing I filled up my gas tank on Thursday night before the 90 mph winds hit and took down the operation of most of the pumps in the area. Too bad I didn't get around to replacing the emergency release mechanism on my automatic garage door opener.

Yes, I had gas, but my car was locked in my garage, hobbled by a dearth of electrons commanding the opener to awaken. I asked the neighbor with whom I share a garage if she had the key for the release on her side of the garage. She had lost hers as well. "Do you want to use my car?" This very kind, Russian immigrant neighbor, whom I don't really know that well, offered to let me use her car until the power was restored. Not only that but she was headed out of town in her truck and couldn't even be notified when I drove the car over a cliff...which I didn't do, thankfully. I have a thank-you card and some Panettone (Italian holiday bread) awaiting her return.

By midwestern standards, the winter weather here is very mild. That thought did little to warm me while sitting in my pitch dark living room on Friday night with my down jacket on and a fleece blanket over my knees. Sleeping was fine with two comforters. Getting out of bed was less fun.

Stepping outside in your familiar neighborhood in a total blackout is a total weirdness. It's entrancing and unnerving at the same time to see an urban environment in absolute unsolicited darkness. I wondered if burgulars were stepping up their initiative to take advantage of the cover.

The telephone land line wouldn't work because the wireless base had no power. The cell towers seemed to be anemic as well. I finally had to go to a local hotel in a pocket of light still in the 21st century to borrow some unsecured wireless so I could tell the world I was still alive.

So many friends had it much worse...they have little kids. I didn't have to listen to anyone's complaining but my own, which I'm quite used to. Some friends are still without power, while mine started flowing back into my condo yesterday morning.

There was a near riot at a gas station because someone thought it would be ok to fill about two dozen plastic containers while a line of customers an hour long stretched down the street and the station was running out of gas. Someone else wasn't havin any of that. The cops were called.

On Friday morning, I waited in line at a bagel store (the line at my usual Starbucks next door stretched out the door into the cold). Two out-of-towners were ahead of me:

OOT1: You probably live here, right?

Me: Yeah?

OOT1: I've got a question for ya. With all of the streetlights non-functional and all this traffic, what's up with all the politeness? I mean, everyone is taking turns and no one is honking their horns; it's all so orderly.

Me: Yeah, that's just Seattle.

OOT2: We're from Philly and D.C. If this happened there, you'd have people zooming around and yelling and honking horns. Eventually a fight would break out...or two or three.

Me: Unfortunately, all of this politeness is evident whether there's an emergency or not. The bad part is that no one here knows how to merge so everyone slows down to politely let someone in and it backs up traffic for miles.

OOT1: Well, it's nice to see anyway.

I'm glad it restored his faith in humanity. And actually, Puget Sound Energy restored our faith in their service with remarkable rapidity. Nearly one million homes without power and by this morning, 3/4 of that was restored. Not bad.

The conversation among most of my friends was how wimpy we are. Two days+ in the cold and dark and we're whining about long lines and no Internet. Tell that to folks in New Orleans...or Baghdad.

Adults at play

2006-11-26T03:15:00Z

Nana asked me at the end of the Egypt trip, "What has been different than what you expected on this trip?" Really it was just that it all came together so easily and that nothing major went wrong.

I'm not a pessimist by nature but there were any number of things that could have gone wrong. Egypt can be a tough place for first-time travelers; things don't always work the way you expect, schedules get delayed, it's polluted far beyond most western cities. But it all went swimmingly for us.

You know why? It's not because everything we planned got executed according to plan. It's because I was traveling with a fun group that all acted like adults. No one got frustrated or upset by the dirt or the occasional mummy-tummy or inexplicable rules that prevented us from doing something we had planned. No one was demanding or psychotic.

No, everyone laughed a lot and adjusted and went with the flow. Which is, I think, how the Egyptians keep their sanity in a world designed to frustrate their most cherished ambitions. As our friend Hussein said in Aswan, "Living in Egypt is like digging a hole in water."

Somehow the Egyptians get through with patience and humor that belies the reality of their current situation. Perhaps it's from more than 2,000 years of occupation (from the Persian period-7th Century BC-until 1952). I don't know. But it makes them among the most likeable people in the world. I really love the Egyptians that I know. They're just as flawed as the rest of us but they exude such warmth and good humor that it's easy for me to forgive what would infuriate me back home...sometimes.

I have had experiences in Egypt that were less-than-wonderful (not surprisingly some of them involved westerners). But those experiences are so overwhelmed by truly lovely experiences that the bad experiences have become amusing anecdotes.

One positively amusing anecdote from this trip involved one of the archaeology team members, Rian Flynn. When he found out I worked at Microsoft, he begged me for a copy of...get this...Flight Simulator X! I was surprised and pleased and just happened to have two copies with me. He's a happy boy now.

More adults at play...

A writer's writer

2006-11-25T00:55:00Z

One of the real pleasures and frustrations of being a writer is reading other people's excellent writing. It's a pleasure because writers are in love with words and it's a frustration because someone else wrote something you wish you'd written.

Such is the case with a book called Cairo: City of Sand. I found this gem and started reading it just before leaving for Cairo. I was so amused and enthralled by the writing that I contacted author Maria Golia to tell her how much I loved the book.

To make a long story short, we had coffee in Cairo just off Midan Talat Harb in the midst of downtown. Maria is a tall (6 foot), strikingly attractive American expat who has lived in Cairo for about 20 years. Her insight into the lives and survival instincts of the Cairenes is so remarkable as to be favorably reviewed by two Cairenes on Amazon. She certainly captured the Cairo that I've experienced on multiple trips there.

We spent about an hour discussing writing and Egypt and the warmth of Egyptian culture. She also talked about the many changes she's witnessed in two decades of living in Egypt. Among these is Cairo's ever-increasing population and pollution. Two days in this fascinating city will have you coughing and popping lozenges to soothe your scratchy throat.

As to the population, as Africa's largest city with somewhere around 16 million inhabitants, Cairo never seems to be as crowded as I'd expect it to be. Yes the traffic is sometimes horrific in its self-organized, slug-like flow. Yes you can feel like you're going to be crushed in a crowd at a local outdoor market (Souq al Gommah). But in general the streets don't seem crowded and it never wears on me like I would expect. I felt the same to be true in Tokyo.

I once asked an Egyptian why no one paid any attention to the traffic lights scattered around Cairo's intersections. Without hesitation he replied, "They are just for decoration."

That same man, whom I've known for over ten years now, provided another bit of Egyptian wisdom last month. We were talking about Cairo and what a great city it is. I remarked, "Om el donia," (Mother of the World) which is what Egyptians sometimes call Cairo or Egypt as a whole.

Yasser replied thoughfully, "Yes, om el donia." Then after a moment he said excitedly, "No, 'om el donia' in the past, not now. Now 'om el donia' for what? 'Om el donia' for pollution? 'Om el donia' for crowding? No, I think not 'om el donia' any more."

Alas, I seem to see a different Egypt each time I visit. More development, more tourist infrastructure, more depredation to the monuments (60 huge tour buses parked on the Giza Plateau within 100 meters of the Great Pyramid), and a more obscured Cairene horizon. It makes me wonder where it will all end.

Writings on the Nile

2006-11-23T03:55:00Z

Since early this year, I've been planning a trip back to Egypt with some friends who have never been there. We spent twelve days together in Egypt in late October. I had thought of blogging here while on the trip but I was so busy I hardly had time to email.

The group included Niniane, my friend and former MS employee who now works for Google. She thankfully persuaded me to include her friends Dan, Mingjing, and Andrew in the trip, whom I consider all good friends myself now. My friend and coworker Brent, ACES test manager, and his girlfriend Julie joined the growing group, as well as my brother Bruce and his girlfriend Cheryl. They were all just a kick to travel with.

Niniane acquired an Egyptian name on her first day in Egypt: Nana. My old friend Yasser Saad bestowed this upon her when he found "Niniane" to be a bit of a mouthful. For the rest of the trip, everyone in the group called her Nana and I think she'll always be Nana to me now.

If I had any personal hopes for the trip, it was that everyone would have a good experience of a country and people that I love, that they would get out of the experience what they wanted to get out of it, and that they'd take home a new view of Arabs and Muslims than is generally experienced here in the U.S. I felt that those hopes were fulfilled although the last one was the least expressed and most personal I suppose.

I'll put more details in about various aspects of the trip as time permits. We started in Cairo. We took the night sleeper train to Luxor, drove to Aswan, and flew back to Cairo. Nana asked me at the end of the trip, "What has been different from what you expected?" Frankly it was that everything went so smoothly.

No one got cranky or psychotic. We laughed a lot. And my good friend, Mohamed Nazmy of Quest Travel, made sure that we had great hotel rooms and ground transportation.

The sleeper train was fun. I'd never done that before and it was like we had our own dorm room on wheels.

After nearly two weeks of ancient monuments and gorgeous scenery, we ended the trip in Cairo and got a tour of the site where my archaeological team works. I was so sorry to see my travel buddies leave, as I stayed on for business meetings in Cairo. It was a wonderful trip. There are pictures at http://sphinx.smugmug.com.

Think locally, write globally

2006-07-11T22:03:00Z

One of the challenges of documenting a program like Flight Simulator is that its complexity goes beyond program functionality. It's about aviation and aircraft and systems and aerodynamics...'n stuff. We have to think locally in terms of how to explain all of that to a technical and non-technical audience. But we have to think globally in terms of every word we write, whether it's a word in an article about graphics or a word in a control label.

We always have to think about the length of a string and where it's going to go in the UI, because that string will grow 25% in languages like German. We can't just think, "Oh, it would read nice this way." That doesn't cut it.

We can't write colloquially (although that always seems to creep in here and there) because some things just don't translate, no matter how hard you try. We even have to be somewhat circumspect about the aviation terminology, which is a language all its own.

Even though English is the international language of aviation, more than 50% of our customers do not use English as their first language. We're not teaching them how to fly, we're entertaining them, so we can't expect them to be fluent in colloquial English. We have to keep that in mind when we write for our audience.

Fortunately, we have wonderful colleagues in Dublin, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere that do the hard work of translating our words for an international audience. They come up with some amazing ideas and questions about aspects of FS that we'd never think of ourselves.

Flight Simulator's ATC system presents particular challenges. Because ATC-speak is truly its own language, what works in English doesn't work at all in some languages. Japanese for instance requires that the sentence structures be reorganized. Fortunately the way our ATC dev wrote the code, this can be done but it's a lot of work. We get questions from the translators about phrases that make perfect sense to us but are unintelligible if you translate them into another language.

Flight Simulator's appeal cuts across boundaries and languages, which is a very appealing thing for us to know. But it definitely creates challenges.

Back from the past

2006-03-16T20:39:00Z

The trip was exhilarating and exhausting. I didn't ever adjust to the time change and was getting only 3-5 hours of sleep per night (there's a 10 hour difference in time between Redmond and Cairo).

We had a lot of fun with the group that came to tour with us. They were completely undemanding and thrilled with everything we showed them.

At Giza Dr. Lehner gave us a tour around the Sphinx and a tour of the chambers in the Great Pyramid.

In Luxor we visited four tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut's temple, and the new excavations behind the Colossi of Memnon. This is the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III, mostly destroyed in antiquity. They are finding dozens of Sekhmet statues and even an enormous fragment of another colossus with a beautiful life-size statue of Queen Tiye.

We visited Karnak, Luxor Temple, and the Johns Hopkins dig at the Mut Temple. We saw two of our field school students at work at Karnak and Mut, which was very gratifying.

Our patrons had brought some of their private-label cabernet, which is lovely stuff. Another guest brought a Brunello from Rome. So along with the excellent wine, amazing antiquities, and fun company, how could it go wrong.

Our last day in Luxor, we visited Malkata, the ruins of Amenhotep III's palace and artificial lake. Field directors Ana Tavares and Mohsen Kamel, Director Mark Lehner and I walked the ruins for an hour or so. The gigantic mounds thrown up by the excavation of Birket Habu, the artificial lake, are on a scale that is hard to comprehend. It was a project nearly on the scale of pyramid-building but it gets little attention from anyone but archaeologists and geeks like me.

So now it's back to driving toward content-complete dates for FSX.

Habibi goes to misr

2006-02-21T03:00:00Z

I won't bore you with excuses about why I haven't been writing here because I only have enough Monday brain power to write this and thinking up excuses would hurt my head.

I'm about to take another trip to Egypt. This time for only a week but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. Only a few of the archaeologists are there but it will be fun to spend some time with them. The Director and I will be escorting some donors on their first visit to Egypt.

Egypt, by the way, is neither an Egyptian nor an Arabic word. "Egypt" comes from the ancient Greek word for the country along the Nile, "Aegyptos." The ancient Egyptians called it "kmt," or "the black land" for the fertile Nile silt deposited every year by the annual innudation.

The modern Egyptians call Egypt "misr," which they also apply to Cairo. "Cairo," by the way, is an anglicization of "al qahira," the original Arabic name for Cairo. It seems nothing is called what it should be in Egypt.

FSX announced! BillG talks FS at CES

2006-01-06T03:02:00Z

It's a nice relief or release or something when we go public about the next version of FS. After months of working away, knowing that you all are waiting to hear the word, it feels great to know that Flight Sim's fans now have something new to get excited about. The excitement on the forums fuels our already-existing excitement about the product and makes it all that much more fun for us.

We have a lot of work to do. But we're on track and punching away at the ones and zeros. My favorite new features are __________ and _________, but of course, _______ is really cool too.

Even though we've announced, the team is chomping at the bit to talk about features. But we can't yet. That's ok, it won't be long now.

I'm glad you're all in on the secret now. Stay tuned.