Last week, my job drug me, not kicking and with an utter lack of screaming, south for a week in sunny San Diego. Among the things I failed to miss at home was some surprise April weather, which left a dusting of about 1.5 inches of partly cloudy on the ground.
The reason for the trip was my third visit to the annual Mutual Concerns of Air & Space Museums seminar, sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, hosted this year by the impressive San Diego Air & Space Museum, hereafter referred to as SDAM. This event is described perfectly by its rather weighty sobriquet (though they announced that next year’s event will be a conference as opposed to a seminar, whatever that means) – air and space museums from around the world get together for a series of meetings and presentations in which they discuss concerns that are, as one might expect, mutual.
There are presentations throughout the event on topics like "Designing Effective Interactives", "Appropriate Selection and Treatment of Aircraft Fabric Coverings", and, my personal second favorite, "Building Education Systems in Museums – Pimp Your Outreach".
My first favorite, naturally, had to be "Put Your Visitors in the Cockpit", as it was presented by yours truly, along with Mike Singer, and an ex-Navy fighter jock called Snake, which was one of the main reasons I’d made the trip in the first place.
Last year, another colleague, Mike Lambert, and I gave a similar presentation when the event was held in Washington, DC. It was a bit tentative at first – normally, only those people directly representing museums are invited to speak, while commercial interests setup vendor tables to show their wares between presentations. In addition, there was some question on our end about the value of making the trip. However, it turned out to be an unqualified success – our presentation was lively and very well received, we made innumerable and valuable contacts, and found ourselves wholly welcomed into the air & space museum community. So much so that we were invited back, and this year’s presentation was a worthy successor, if I do say so myself. Which I did.
In addition to highlighting a few representative Flight Sim installations at museums around the world, we spoke about the Missions system in FSX, and showed a customer-created video that highlights the viability of an add-on loaded Flight Sim as a visualization tool. As I told the audience of screaming fans assembled group of professionals, I’m not an expert of exhibit design, goal-based experiential displays, education, or personal hygiene, but I’m just smart enough to know a good and useful tool when I see one. It was, as always, a singular pleasure to watch a room full of very bright people start thinking at a million miles a minute after we planted a simple seed or two.
The highlight of our presentation for me, aside from every second I was in front of an audience, was when Snake, a docent at SDAM, took the room on a quick virtual flight around the San Diego area. Snake demonstrated the 5-minute intro lessons he gives to kids several times a day on the museum’s impressive cockpit / projector setup. I managed to watch a number of kids use the sim on my trip – it’s fantastic to see an installation like theirs that’s accessible, but still teaches, and isn’t just a free-for-all. The look on kids’ faces walking away from the cockpit having successfully landed the Piper Cub is a heartening reminder of why, along with the huge buckets of cash, I do this job.
Much of the event was held at the 32-acre Town and Country resort – presumably so named because "Sprawling and Utterly Unnavigable" wouldn’t fit so well on the Lucy-and-Ricky-era signage out front. The staff was courteous and helpful – each time I got lost (which correlated directly to each time I left my room), one of them would invariably offer me a ride on one of their peculiar golf cart train contraptions. Given the fact that I was far too embarrassed to admit where I’d been and where I thought I was going, I always turned them down.
One full day of presentations was held onsite at the SDAM, which is impressive to say the least, starting with the Convair F2Y Sea Dart mounted out front – the product of an unrelentingly optimistic era when aviation innovation could still be described in short brainstorm phrases – "Let’s take a jet fighter, and put it on water skis!" Other highlights include the Ryan X-13 Vertijet ("What about a jet fighter that stands on it’s tail!"), a 1911 Deperdussin, and the Apollo 9 command module.
That evening, there was a banquet in the museum’s rotunda – anyone who has never had dinner underneath a PBY and a Ford Trimotor is really missing out. The speaker was Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown missions in the Mercury, Gemini (pronounced Gem-i-nee), and Apollo space programs, quite a trip from his birthplace of Hackensack. Schirra is 84, but doesn’t look a day over 60, and stands about fifteen feet tall. His talk was engaging, and his wit is almost too sharp to keep up with. Shaking his hand afterwards was a rare honor.
Dinner that night was also a great chance to catch up with some of my friends and colleagues from the last year, as well as meeting some new people. The entire universe turned upside down and inside out for a moment when I heard someone say "Oh, I need to go say hello to Hal!", and turned to see Maj. General Bill Anders USAF (Ret.) coming to shake my hand. Bill was the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 8 (and the photographer of the most-reproduced photo in history), a test pilot, the CEO of General Dynamics, and a warbird collector and pilot who flies his Mustang and Bearcat with the USAF Heritage Flight and the Navy Tailhook Legacy Flight, respectively.
I, on the other hand, make my living by sitting in the corner of a large room playing video games and messing about in Photoshop, so it’s only natural that Bill would be so excited to come talk to me.
The other big dinner was held at a semi-private museum in El Cajon (Spanish for "The Cajon"), on the Gillespie Field airport. Known as the Allen Airways Flying Museum (home of the world’s most understated website) it consists of a couple of oversized hangars housing the immaculate and brilliantly-displayed collection of Bill Allen, Jr. Bill has done something that most of us pack-rats in the world will never manage – he’s gone pro, successfully navigating the path from enthusiast to collector, skating effortlessly past wild-eyed-lunatic-obsessive and landing gently at "Curator". With a a half dozen airplanes, and 10,000 additional artifacts, Bill’s collection is inspiring, and, at times, staggering. In addition to loaning artifacts to the Smithsonian for display, Allen has published a book consisting of a number of aviation-related posters (the heart of his collection) which is highly recommended, as is a trip to the museum itself, if you can manage an invitation.
My membership vows in the two-bit writers club demand that I trot out a hackneyed bromide about how hard it was to "come back down to earth after a week with artifacts, aviators, and astronauts", but I just can’t do it, so I’ll just say that it was a great trip and leave it at that.
Note: Many of these photos are courtesy of (read: stolen from) Brett Schnepf. Here’s a few more pics from the trip that didn’t seem to fit.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
With my patented system …
Forget that Chivvy Three-Fitty – I’m
droppin’ a J58 in my Jagwire!
If there’s a Tiger Moth to be found, I’ll find it.
This is the worst thing ever created.
As I write this, a remarkable young man called Barrington Irving is on the first leg of a trip that will take him from Miami, Florida all the way to Miami, Florida, the long way, covering more than 21,000 miles in the process. His 5 week trip may not set any speed records, but he is set to be the youngest person in history to make this flight solo.
A number of us on the Flight Sim team have met with Barrington several times over the past year or so, but it was my good friend, colleague, and master of the pop-up Mike Singer who really figured out what Microsoft could do to help.
We’re proud to provide his tracking info, and for our logo to make the trip with him. It’s a rare pleasure to meet and do a small part to support the efforts of someone with a great idea, and the courage and dedication to follow through.
I’ve spent the last day and a half or so managing 3 FSX kiosks and offering demos and product info to attendees of this year’s Microsoft Air Force Symposium. This event, just like every other symposium, conference, trade show, or seminar I’ve ever attended is whirlwind of contacts, acronym-ridden conversations, lanyards, credentials and swag.
Most of the event is focused on IT infrastructure, sharing best practices, shifting technologies and embracing new paradigms to leverage emergering methodolgies, maximizing efficiency while … etc. There are a number of other vendors here, representing other Microsoft products, as well as third-party software and hardware, but the FSX stations are certainly among the most popular. Our traffic is surprisingly steady, even in the face of competition like the setup in the room next to me that says "Test Drive Windows Vista!"
While the number of current and former pilots that are stopping by is proportionally higher here than at a lot of shows, most of the questions are the same.
"What do I do?"
"What kind of computer do I need to run it?"
"It would be cool if you could use more than one monitor, or get rudder pedals or something."
"I used the first one, back in 2000." (For those not keeping score, Flight Sim 2000 was version 7.0)
"What happens if you crash?"
"If I buzz the White House, how come they don’t shoot me down?"
As usual, I’m finding that real pilots will do very well at flying the sim, if I can get them to try it for more than about a minute or two. That seems to be how long it takes for them to think of the sim not as a toy to be messed about with, but to approach it as they would any new aircraft they’d evaluate, getting a feel for the controls, and establishing a basic input, analysis, decision, response cycle.
One pilot in particular, a square-jawed C-130 aircraft commander with steel hair and flinty eyes called – and I wish I were making this up – Colonel Manley, sat for more than 90 minutes, refusing to leave until he’d successfully flown our Red Bull time trial mission, and beaten the jet truck in the race.
When I asked him why it was that he kept crashing when trying to fly through Gate 5, he had this to say:
"Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way."
I might be paraphrasing, slightly. his actual quote was probably closer to "Because this joystick is so &*#@!! sensitive!"
Something like that, anyway.
Since I can’t seem to get that other post written to my satisfaction, I’ve decided to write this one instead.
So … last night, my wife and I numbed our brains for 106 minutes (6,360 seconds, if you’re keeping score) and watched the movie Red Eye. (Which, sadly, is not a sequel to the 1978 Battlestar Galactica episode, The Lost Warrior.)
This movie is what I would describe as "zero sum", as if I’d walked into a bank with five 1$ bills and walked out with one $5 bill. Unless I were carrying a Costanza wallet and space was at a premium, I’d be exactly no better and no worse off than when I started.
To summarize the movie, then: It starts, things happen, it stops.
To an airplane geek, however, there’s a bit more to it. Most of the film takes place on an airliner, that, in the tradition of every movie that makes any reference to commercial avation, is painted in a fictitious livery, and magically transforms itself several times.
Actually, unlike the classics, such as Trans Global, Columbia, and Oceanic, the fictitious airline used in Red Eye … isn’t. They chose the name Fresh Air, which is a very real airline started in Nigeria in 1998.
The choice of names was clearly coincidental, compounded by the fact that the real Fresh Air flies 737’s, sort of like the one they used in the movie.
Their 737’s, however, don’t change paint jobs (magically becoming United airplanes), sizes (the double-aisle 2-3-2 seating and saftey cards that read "Boeing 767" clearly identify the interiors as those of a … Boeing 767), and manufacturers (the 737 becomes an Airbus A-319 a few times, for no adequately explored reason.)
I think there was going to be a point to this, but it’s lost in a sea of multi-tasking.
I told you so. You were initially a little concerned about watering down the FSX: Adrenaline announcement by mentioning Service Pack 1 and the DirectX 10 update in the same breath.
You weren’t wrong, of course – it isn’t good marketing to dilute the message of a commercial product by trumpeting the interim arrival of something free. However, we knew what was going to happen – as soon as we announced an expansion pack, we’d be on the defensive, facing accusations of incompetence and conspiracy. Incompetence, because not every single person involved with the ongoing creation of Flight Simulator is focused on a service pack, and conspiracy because, well, pretty much anytime Micro$oft does or doesn’t do anything, it’s conspiratorial.
I even wrote a post here that went live at about the same time, oh-so-cleverly entitled "Prequently Asked Questions", to hopefully head off some concerns. No, this doesn’t mean that SP1 or the DX10 update will be delayed, no this isn’t an evil plot to make you buy Vista … Granted, fewer people read this blog than read FSInsider, and, I suspect, fewer people read FSInsider than read AVSIM.
But still, we tried.
You, Marketing and PR, listened to us against your better judgment. We told you that some segment of our customer base would react negatively to the announcement, because they’d assume it meant we were taking resources away from the Service Pack and DirectX 10 updates we’d promised. We also told you that we needed to emphasize the fact that the Expansion Pack was intended for both XP and Vista, since we’d be accused of forcing people to upgrade.
What we didn’t tell you was that it didn’t matter how clearly we tried to get these key points across – some people would still say we were unethical liars, simultaneously too stupid to build a decent piece of software and smart enough to dupe our customers, surely a far-brighter-than-average demographic.
We also forget to mention that our latest bit of transparency would mean that somebody would compare us to Hitler. Sorry for the oversight, but, really, you should have known that announcing a series of updates to a piece of entertainment software really is just another flavor of National Socialism. That should have been obvious. Come on – bang the rocks together guys.
If you haven’t seen the threads, check them out:
I don’t want to sound ungrateful but …
– and –
New Expansion pack from Microsoft later this year
When I’m not shaking my head, finally understanding the full meaning of one of my father’s favorite words – incredulous – I’m especially grateful for the cooler heads that find their way to the surface. Friends I’ve met, like Geofa, and those unmet, like Ladamson. And even, in fact I daresay especially, those who are disappointed with FSX, genuinely anxious for some additional support, and who manage to express that without accusing us of being dead fascist dictators. Those are the customers I like to think we’re working for.
And for the record – I’m a fan of Ground Environment Pro. If there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know their stuff, go check it out. Their work is an example of why we build a platform, and not just a product.
Anyway, I wonder if it would have been worse had we announced the Expansion Pack with NO mention of the other updates? I have to think so, though one wonders.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and lasciviously eye Poland.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, or, more to the point, the Adrenaline is out of the adrenal gland, I wanted to follow up a bit more informally here with answers to a few questions I suspect we’ll be getting.
Q: Shouldn’t everybody on the Flight Sim team be working on SP1 for FSX, fixing that and getting it released sooner, instead of worrying about something that you’re going to sell, later?
A: No. Work on the Expansion Pack is not diverting people from work on Service Pack 1 or the DX10 update. All this means is that everybody is working on something new and interesting for FSX, which I think is great news.
Q: Does this mean that we have to buy the Expansion Pack to get the DX10 update?
A: No. The plans for the DX10 update haven’t changed – that will be a free download as soon as it’s finished.
Q: Since you’re including some new aircraft and missions, aren’t you competing with the third party community that has done so much for you and your customers?
A: No. The Expansion Pack will enhance the core FSX platform, and provide new functionality for the add-on community to build on. As always, we’re just seeding the waters, to coin a pointless mixed metaphor.
Q: Won’t the Expansion Pack require Vista, forcing us to upgrade?
A: No. Do we think it will look that much prettier on DX10 hardware (which does require Vista) and potentially encourage people to upgrade? Sure. But it will be a great value-add for customers using XP as well. Believe it or not, we can’t actually force you to do anything.
Q: What is the capital of Nebraska?
A: The capital of Nebraska is Lincoln.
My people aren’t available to provide the current monthly subscription count on such short notice, but last time I checked, it’s somewhere in the low-to-mid 40’s. Really.
The fact that I’m roughly three-quarters meticulous about keeping the stack organized and keeping only the most current issues makes our home look like a dentist’s office from ten years in the future, with fewer lead vests and less drilling. Thankfully, it’s my only vice. Yes, I know in a previous post, I referred to another "only vice" – no, not French prostitutes, but compulsive DVD collecting.
So there’s clearly no contradiction here: subscribing to magazines and buying DVDs … that is my only vice.
But I digress.
Anyway, given that the number of subscriptions I have is already several miles north of ridiculous (just outside of Simpleton), one more couldn’t possibly hurt.
How happy I was, then, to have rediscovered an old favorite from down under – Classic Wings. One of the best classic / warbird magazines around, Classic Wings is a lighter and glossier FlyPast with an Australia / New Zealand bent, so in addition to lots of Spitfires and Moths and things, you’ll find things like Winjeels, Wirraways, and Warbirds over Wanaka.
As one of the least discriminating magazine connoisseurs I know, I highly recommend it.
What’s your major malfunction?
Some days, it’s communication.
Any time you get a group of bright, enthusiastic, easily distracted people working together, it can create what we like to think of as a "dynamic workplace" – ideas popping like puffmais, and an electric sense of "get it done" tingeing the air like ozone in a thunderstorm. Every once in a while, however, "dynamic" becomes a Coveyesque synonym for "chaotic," and whatever that smells like, it isn’t quite so pleasant.
A couple of cases in point:
About a fortnight ago, I wrote a blog post about the upcoming Service Pack 1 release for Flight Simulator X. In this post, I took a stab at explaining why we hadn’t said anything formally on our official website, and gathered together some of the blog posts a few of us had made representing what little info we’ve been comfortable hinting at so far. A while after that, some people on the team told me that I should repost this writeup as an article for the FSInsider site.
Hmm.
An article on our website … explaining why there is no article on our website. There was something paradoxically perfect about that, so why not?
So, I took the original post, edited it slightly, and then asked a few people to sanity check it and make sure there was nothing that I’d said as Hal9000 that they weren’t comfortable with me saying as Microsoft. As the PM (Program Manager) "driving" the Service Pack release, not to mention the blogger who has spoken the most publicly about it, I wanted Phil Taylor’s signoff before releasing anything to the web, which I got. So, the article went live on Wednesday afternoon. Once it was out there, I did a quick read of some of the Flight Sim forums. The first hot topic I saw was an announcement of new information about the FSX Service Pack … on Phil’s blog. Clickety-click, and there it was – a whole new post, with greater detail, and a bunch of before-and-after screenshots, the first that anyone has released about the Service Pack, rendering the article that I’d just finished posting on FSInsider largely obsolete.
I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, he didn’t know exactly what I was doing – we both just forged ahead with our shared goal: give our customers whatever information we could as quickly as possible. In the end, no harm was done – I updated the article after the fact to point to his post. Frankly, if I could do only one pointless and irrelevant thing per day, I’d be way ahead of the game.
The second example came the very next day, as it happens.
The morning started very typically – I came in through the side door (so that Lumbergh wouldn’t see me), and sat staring at my desk for an hour, making it look like I was working. Then, I got an interesting email from one of my people, my vast and global network of agents, this one codenamed Branta Canadensis. In this email was a link announcing a webcast about the future of Windows gaming, featuring FSX and DirectX 10, with our own Phil Taylor as a primary speaker. This was definitely the sort of thing we’d want to promote on the FSInsider site. The problem was, I only had about 20 minutes to get it done, before I had to head offsite for a meeting.
I drafted a quick blurb, borrowed the banner from the cohost’s site, and spent a few minutes in Photoshop painting out a glaring grammatical error. I built the page using an HTML template, got it live on our test server, verified it, and adjusted the properties to ensure that it would be called out on the FSInsider home page and that it would expire and delete itself after the event. Next, I exported the package using our content management system, switched to a production server and imported the changes and we were live. After that, I went and posted a notice on several public forums, and sent a good-natured email gently chiding Phil for not having told us about this. All this happened in about 15 minutes.
A bit later on, I learned that there was a fairly strict log-on process required to access the webcast – it wasn’t private, by any means, but the online form that had to be filled out implied that you needed to be a Microsoft partner or developer or have some other credentials beyond just being an interested party. This didn’t seem to daunt too many people, but it would have been a good thing for me to have checked out and at least made note of in advance.
The best part, though, came when Phil replied to my email to tell me that it was my team that had set up the webcast in the first place …
Oops.
Once again, not every hand knew what every other hand was up to. While it’s certainly safe to say that the odd missteps like these are the exception, not the rule, especially when it comes to actually building software, as it turns out, even soulless corporate drones like us are people, too.
Anyway, as before, no harm was done – we got the word out, and the webcast went very well.
So why in the world would I bother posting this particular bit of lightly-soiled laundry? Two reasons:
A) We’ve set pretty clear goals around being more transparent to the community, and, from what I’ve read, transparency doesn’t mean "only show good things", and 2) I want people to think of events like these the next time someone suggests that we’re pulling the strings in any number of vast and complex conspiracies. We’d all have to spend a lot more time in the same room than we do now, plotting and scheming, in order to pull off anything even half-sinister.
Now I have to plug the USB cable back into my brain for an upgrade before I have to head downstairs – Friday is my day in the money room.
It seems like only 19 days ago that I announced that Flight Simulator X had been nominated for "Simulation Game of the Year" by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
Well, we won!
And congrats to fellow MGS title Gears of War, the Dixie Chicks of console games, for winning no less than eight awards.
Take that, Meryl Streep.
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Coincidental Floss 