A passion for passion

Not quite as fast as a speeding bullet

Habibi — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:59:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:31:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 02:11:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 03:15:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 00:55:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 03:55:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:03:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:39:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:00:00 GMT

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

Habibi — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:02:00 GMT

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.

A passion for science

Habibi — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:50:00 GMT

I like science. So does my friend. He just doesn't like scientists much. Or at least the ones he sees on TV. Richard Dawkins is one of his favorite whipping boys. He thinks that scientists are arrogant and that they approach science as their religion. Having worked with scientists, I don't believe this is generally true.

No responsible scientist would ever make the argument that they’re looking for absolute answers. The very processes of scientific inquiry exclude absolute answers as a goal.

Science is about making observations of the natural world (the only place where science can operate), proposing theories about those observations, and then testing those theories with viable, replicable methodology. Any experimental result that cannot be replicated (Ponds and Fleischmann for example) is dismissed as incomplete or invalid.

Scientific theories are never about absolute conclusions. They’re the best statement that can be made at the time about a set of facts that can be verified through experimentation. For that reason, science is always in flux and theories get overturned. But when theories like relativity and evolution are supported over and over by many scientific experiments over many decades, we can say they are fact within the framework that we use that word in science.

If none of this were true, then your microwave would not work.

If the processes of science were invalid, the predictions we can make about microwaves, orbital geometry, nuclear reactions, and, in short, rocket science, would have no validity either. The scientific process that gives us verifiable facts upon which to make predictions about behavior in the natural world is what gives us the miracle of electric socks.

Dawkins’ alleged arrogance about his point of view on religion has nothing to do with the solid work he’s done in the field of biology. It’s a big mistake to confuse the two. Or maybe he needs more fiber in his diet, I don’t know. But if you sat down to talk with him, I'm confident his position would be, “There are no absolute answers in science but we can know X (based on controlled, experimental observation), we can therefore predict Y, and we can test whether that is scientifically valid.” Not absolutely true; scientifically valid.

The reason science appeals to me is not that it gives absolute answers, which I don’t believe exist in any framework that is useful to our lives, or that it’s some kind of system of belief that calms my existential anxiety. It’s because science is a rational process to know what we can know with as much certainty as experimental validity will allow. Science will never answer everything but it makes my cell phone work.

Outside of that we’re left with supposition about the nature of reality.

I can also tell you that the scientists I work with are the most conclusion-averse people I know. They hate drawing hard conclusions about their work because it immediately invites criticism. That’s why they prefer to state hypotheses that they can test. The best of them are amenable to being challenged. So I like science and generally like the scientists that I know. Now, if they could just figure out how them durn pyramids were built.

Tumbling tumbleweeds

Habibi — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:05:00 GMT

I went to see King Kong last weekend. As a technophile, I loved the CG. The big monkey looked amazing and the island was pretty cool. I liked the scenes in NYC where Kong is tossing cars around. 1930s NYC looked totally believable.

As a writer, I was quite disappointed. Lot's of lame, cliched dialog. I know, I know. It's a remake of a 1930s era film that established some of the cliches. It didn't work then as dialog and it doesn't work now. I'm sorry, Jack Black delivering the original corny end-line made it even more laughable than the classic version.

Beyond that, the story had so many holes and moments that took me out of the movie. Anytime I'm shaking my head and thinking about what's going on in that moment, I'm not suspending disbelief. It doesn't work as a story.

Naomi Watts is a fine actor and lovely to look at. But I could never buy into her feelings for the big monkey. The primary primate in this version was a brutal killing machine. This did not seem to bother Ann Darrow. Her adoring, sympathetic gazes at the oversized alpha-male were discomforting in the least. Especially after she watched him rip several of the ship's crew limb-from-limb during the escape.

If there was some character development here that gave us insight into why this otherwise normal woman would get so mushy over a primate with a pituitary problem, then we might be getting somewhere. But in a three-hour movie, there was somehow no time for real character development.

There were scenes that defied physics and the limits of human skeletal structural integrity. Kong wrapped Ann in his hand and jerked her around, smashing dinos on the head. Her neck would be broken.

Also, how could she stand on top of the Empire State Building in sub-zero weather in a satin evening dress and not get hypothermic? I wouldn't be thinking about this stuff if the story kept me engaged. It didn't work.

What was up with the relationship between the first mate and the cabin boy? There was no story element that grounded that relationship in the story except for exposition (which never works in film because film is a visual medium). So it just seemed bizarre that the first mate should care that much about this whiny little cabin boy.

Then there was the interminable (classic Peter Jackson ick-factor scene) battle with giant insects that inexplicably ended after Whiny Cabin Boy used a machine gun to shoot the bugs off of Jack Driscoll long after Driscoll should have been dead but was still standing upright.

As they like to say after spending $200,000,000 in Hollywood, "It's all on the screen, baby." It's just that most of it got there from a computer screen and none of it comes out of anyone's mouth.

Oh man it gets quiet around here this time of year. People take a lot of vacation to coincide with the holiday season in the States. I'm not planning to take any time off other than the company holidays. My family members all live here so I don't need to travel to get together with them.

I have a few holiday events planned with friends and family. A good friend will be in town from Japan and we'll spend quite a bit of time together while she's here, I'm sure. If you're celebrating a holiday, have a safe, warm, and happy one.

Information when you need it

Habibi — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:32:00 GMT

The problem with software, especially really deep, rich software products, is that users want to start using them right out of the box. So maybe the problem is with users.

That's a joke.

We tech writers sadly admit (to ourselves) that if a user is struggling to use our product, it's not the user's fault...it's ours. Ok, it's not just our fault. Usability also involves user interface design, even more so than documentation.

This is a bigger challenge to solve than the average user realizes. But users don't care that it's a challenge for us. They just want the software to work and to be able to use it right out of the box without any hassle. They're absolutely right to feel that way. We know that. We're users too.

With Flight Simulator, the challenge is multi-layered. There is the challenge to help new users to get flying quickly in a way that ensures they have a fun initial experience. And there's the challenge of exposing the incredible depth of features that FS has accumulated over more than 20 years of existence.

In addition, we find that some users, even brand-new users, actually enjoy reading through the Learning Center articles or taking Rod Machado's lessons. They'll spend hours learning how to properly employ the autopilot in the 737 or learning VOR navigation. But most users just want to jump in and start enjoying.

We cringe when we go to airshows or conferences and some of our most loyal, passionate users stare with amazement at some feature that has been in the product for years that they didn't know about. It's not their fault that they didn't know it was there.

All of this is just to say that we care about this stuff. It keeps us awake at night. And when we don't get it right, we weep silently into our pillows. But it's also part of what makes this kind of work fun. My degree is in psychology and most of our User Research people are social psychologists. The problem of understanding how people use software or computers is interesting to us. And we do really care about making it better.

The tech writers on the Flight Simulator team fall into a group called User Experience. We are charged with thinking beyond the documentation because, let's face it, the documentation is the last place most people want to go to find information about the product. So we think a lot about not only the docs but the user interface and even down to details like the labels for the controls in the UI. All of that has an impact on how easy...or not...the software is to use.

It's even more fun because not only is Flight Simulator a technically challenging piece of software, flight is a technically challenging activity. But, as my pal, Singer, likes to point out ad nauseum, "A well-done simulation of a compelling real-world activity is game-like by it's very nature." It's true. It would be interesting to see if it tweaks the same neurons.

Anyway, keep exploring Flight Sim and we'll keep trying to make it a richer, a deeper, and an easier to discover experience.

Civilization and the human heart

Habibi — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:33:00 GMT

"Civilization, after all, is but a thin layer of civility stretched across the passions of the human heart."

I have this reputation as the Egypt guy. I've been interested in ancient Egypt since I was a kid. My home is filled with Egyptiana and my office walls are covered with pictures of the Egyptian monuments.

I took my first trip to Egypt in 1996, expecting it to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Eight visits later, I'm hopelessly in love with the modern Egyptian people and culture as well as the ancient monuments.

I was fortunate to meet world-famous archaeologist, Dr. Mark Lehner, two years ago. Through an extraordinary set of circumstances, he helped me fulfill a lifelong dream to work with an archaeological team in Egypt. I've continued to work as a volunteer for Mark's organization, Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) since early 2004.

I played producer/writer on a new website for AERA this year. We hope that it gives people a window into the important work that Mark and his team are doing at the foot of the Giza Pyramids. I'm grateful and proud to have played a very small part in helping AERA with business planning and development.

As a psych grad, I'm endlessly interested in the nature of passion. I can explain some of my attraction to Egypt and to aviation, but some of it remains a mystery. Why the art and iconography of ancient Egypt intrigues me more than that of ancient China, I cannot explain.

Some might say that it's because Western culture has some of its roots in the Near East and Mediterranean. But ancient Egypt's plethora of exotic deities and unusual cultural habits were strange even to Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.

Passion for flight is easier to grasp. There is a discernible thrill and freedom associated with flight, even for passengers. There's a graceful beauty inherent in aerodynamic shapes. A fascination with Osirian mythology tweaks other neurons that are perhaps more difficult to map.

I'm sure it could all be dissected. I prefer to enjoy some mystery in it all. Have a happy holiday if there's one going on in your corner of the globe. Thanks, Owen, Mathieu, and Tom for reading and commenting.

Thanksgiving flights

Habibi — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:49:00 GMT

One of my best friends works right across the hall from me. We've worked together on FS for six or seven years. Some of you know him from AVSIM conferences or airshow booths: Mike Singer. We often discuss how to eliminate barriers for new users to getting into the FS experience and we have a concept we call "Mike Singer in a box."

Mike can take just about anyone from zero to 110 in Flight Simulator in five minutes. He has a very simple, unintimidating method. It simply reduces the information needed to get flying to what is absolutely essential and then Mike coaches the new user through a flight.

Mike tells a great story about using this technique with a cousin who had never expressed an interest in simulations. Later in the day, Mike asked the cousin what he wanted to do that evening. The cousin replied, "Can we practice some more landings?" The cousin called Mike some days later and told him excitedly how he'd just learned how to navigate by VOR using the Lessons in FS. All from a little spark ignited by someone who has passion for Flight Simulator and has a talent for helping newbies get started.

So have you all done this with friends and relatives who either didn't understand your passion for simming or who expressed an interest but were intimidated?

Are any of you readers in the U.S. going to take time out from mindless gluttony (not that there's anything wrong with that) this weekend to initiate a pal into the wonderful world of Flight Simulator?

What's your technique?