Taken in Lahore, Pakistan.
Category: Personal Page 48 of 59
 March 27th Update: reader pictures here.
While I doubt I’d ever want to fly coach in it, the plane dork in me is pretty excited about the new Airbus A380. The biggest passenger jetliner ever built, it’s a double decker that will carry between five and six hundred passengers at a time. This week will mark its first landings in the United States, with Airbus sending an A380 to LAX and Lufthansa an A380 to JFK today. LAX expects more than just media coverage:
Expecting “thousands of onlookers to line airport fences,†[ . . . ] officials have devoted “hours to meetings about where pedestrians should stand, what streets to shut down and how to provide security and traffic control[.]â€
So will those of us in DC get a chance to line the fences for a look? Well, the JFK A380 will head on to Chicago and Washington (via Frankfurt and Hong Kong, it seems). 
When I first heard about the Dulles landing, I was looking around for information about any public events or viewing areas at Dulles. Finding no public events planned, I took some solace in this article, which appeared to indicate a couple of daytime opportunities to see the plane land or take off. Unfortunately, that schedule seems to have changed. I called the Dulles Public Affairs office to ask about landing times, and they told me that the schedule has been changed to have the plane arrive late Sunday, and depart late Monday night, scrapping any chance of a daytime viewing. So while you might be able to catch a brief glimpse of the landing lights, any trip out to Dulles to see an A380 will almost certainly be disappointing.
I suppose seeing an A380 will be a common enough occurrence in the near future (the first delivery for regular commercial operation will be to Singapore Airlines this fall), but I’m still rather disappointed. And it’s a shame that Airbus and Lufthansa didn’t involve the National Air and Space Museum in producing some sort of public event. I would have loved to get a few shots of the latest wonder in the air from the observation deck. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to buy a ticket someday.
Photo by albspotter.
Update: Crankyflier shows us what we missed.
Further update: I sure am getting a ton of Google/Yahoo traffic from folks looking for information about seeing the A380 at Dulles. Unfortunately, nothing’s changed – the A380 “is [still] expected to arrive at Dulles some time after 9 p.m. on Sunday, March 25 and depart some time after 9 p.m. on Monday, March 26” and Lufthansa is not planning any public event. Further, I understand that they’re parking the aircraft where there’s no clear view from any public areas at the airport (tho’ if you’re actually IN Terminal B, I’d take a walk along the gates to see what I could . . .). If you’re still looking for more A380 coverage, I’d head over to the Airliners.net Civil Aviation Forums. Or, you know, stick around here and check out some of my travel writing.
Final update, as it will soon all be in the past: Ben at USA Today appears to be on track to check out the plane at IAD tomorrow. Maybe he’ll tell us something interesting.
First things first – I’m not a runner. In fact, I hate running. Cycling’s my thing. But I also dig adventure racing, and until someone can design a course that doesn’t involve running, I’ll just have to suck it up and learn to deal with running. So, in light of the cancellation of the last Quicksilver criterium, I decided to take a crack at my first 8km race, the St. Patrick’s Day Race. So, with that out of the way, here’s my take on it:
The St. Patrick’s Day Race draws a lot of runners (and a few walkers), and it’s easy to see why. The race is well organized, there’s a wide distribution of speed among the competitors, and the scenery is great.
Registration is handled through Active.com, and you can pick up your timing chip and shirt at the Old Post Office building up to two days ahead of time. This proved a smart move, and I didn’t envy those standing in the pick-up lines the morning of the race (not so much for the length of the lines as having to stand still in 30 degrees with a 20mph wind . . .). The swag is a white technical race shirt with an undated St. Patrick’s Day Race logo on it. A nice change from the usual cotton shirt that will end up in the “to donate” pile by the end of the year.
At least a few thousand runners showed up, and the course easily accommodated everyone. The starting area was organized by pace (and it seems our mayor Adrian Fenty did a job worthy of his spot on the front line, coming in at just under 34 minutes for 9th in his division). There was some slight bunching at the start, and then briefly when heading up the first (and only) hill, but that was about it. I’m a decidedly back-of-the-pack runner, so it was great that the course design allowed folk like me to get a few glimpses of the front runners as the race progressed. My only complaint here is more theoretical than practical – I passed a number of runners plugged into iPods. While I didn’t witness any resulting problems, it still makes me itch.
The course is generally designed around the eastern end of the Mall. It starts in front of the National Theater, heads down Pennsylvania Avenue, up towards Union Station, back down and across the Mall, a jog around a federal agency I can’t recall, and then back across the Mall and up Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s almost entirely flat, with the only hill being a gradual 70ft. elevation change. Something a guy like me can appreciate. The water station at 5k was welcome, but the hidden jig to the left when you thought you were almost upon the finish line was just cruel . . .
The race was a good experience for me, which is something I wouldn’t expect to say with regard to running. I didn’t feel like an elephant among antelope, but I got to see the antelope run. The good organization made sure that I could direct all of my efforts and worry to the race, and not logistics. All in all, the race served the runners well, and I expect to be back next year.
Next effort: Kidney Kare 5K in Carrboro, NC
A slight modification of Dony Permedi‘s master’s thesis project in animation:
The NYT has a piece that touches on the question of what Gen. Pervez Musharraf means to the United States. It’s an important question – far more important than the two page treatment it gets there. I do fear that it will become a political question in the US before the US even understands the question.
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Jack Landers wonders what happened to public admiration of courage, valor, and honor:
Right this second, without resorting to Google, can you name a single decorated American war hero from the war in Iraq? It’s not as if there aren’t soliders and Marines over there doing extraordinarily heroic things in battle every day. It’s that nobody cares enough to tell their stories anymore. Not the Bush administration, not the media, not the general public. This is not a problem coming from the right wing or the left wing. It’s everybody.
Personally, I think it’s some combination of the cleaving of society (those who see nothing but brave soldiers, and those who see nothing but the immediate aftermath (a vast oversimplification, admittedly)) and a general loss of the concept of hero. In a way, we’ve seen almost every mythologized hero (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.) deconstructed to show his human failings. So why make more? Until modern mass media can bring itself to grasp the concept of a uman hero, instead of a mythical one, I don’t think we’ll be seeing coverage of heroes any time soon.
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Harper’s John MacArthur poses the question we Americans who support withdrawal from Iraq should all be considering: who gets left behind? And speaking of Harper’s, I reread this amazing Jonathan Lethem essay on plagiarism this morning. I won’t pretend to recognize all of the literary references it in, but that’s one of the points. It’s not a work aimed at a popular audience (something I am always appreciative of), but it’s absolutely worth a read:
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.
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And in service of jarring our perspective a bit: I was going to post a link to Slate’s photo series on bored couples, and extol its capture of the ordinary. And then I came across this photo by James Natchwey, who helps reminds us that our ordinary isn’t always.
I have absolutely no intention of ever getting a National ID card. The government doesn’t need my fingerprints, biometric details, addresses, driving licence details or my insurance numbers. As a result, it looks like the Home Secretary won’t renew my passport when it comes due in 2009. I trust the British government with my details even less than I trust the US government (and they’ve earned that distinction.)
I cannot believe that I’m saying this, but David Cameron’s Tories are increasingly looking like a reasonable response to the overreaches of Labour.
More (opposition) info about the national identity card scheme here.
All set for the first race of the season (first snowed out, second injured out) and then . . . the Man keeps me down.
As alluded to in my last post, I’ve been experiencing a cascade of technology failures. They’ve stopped now, if for no other reason than that there’s nothing left to break (I wonder if I’ll regret typing that . . .). A number of these items were in warranty, and some were not (sadly, my primary camera is included in that group). For certain items under warranty, it was simply easier to buy a replacement than try and make a claim (e.g., my desktop power supply). I really dislike disposible consumer goods, though. As a general rule, I pay a premium for quality goods/services and expect the manufacturers/providers to stand behind them if there’s a problem. Unfortunately, that’s not an expectation that is always met (especially by tech companies, and I’m looking at you, Verizon FIOS). In any event, rather than getting myself working up by going on about what went wrong with my recent warranty claim efforts, I thought I’d share a couple of cases where it went right.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been suffering from the Great Tech Meltdown of ’07. Back up soon. I think.
(Shot from a Quicksilver Winter Solstice Series criterium)
Went to Atlanta this weekend for a brief visit with my parents. While I was there, I came across my very first passport:
I have to admit to some disappointment with it, though. We did an extraordinary amount of travel while it was valid, but it seems that I rarely received any interesting visa stamps. For example, I’d hoped that the interminable waits at the East German border had at least resulted in some nifty bits of Cold War officialness. What did I get? An unimpressive American stamp and some civic boosterism:
