Oops in the skies

Each one of us can remember a moment when we pressed the wrong button but how about when this person is a pilot and caused a mid air scare. On September 6 a Japanese co-pilot flying ANA airlines en route from Naha to Tokyo carrying 117 passengers pressed the wrong button while trying to let captain back in from the restroom. Instead of pressing the unlock button for the cockpit door he mistakenly pushed the rudder trim knob. This caused the plane to roll 131.7 degrees to the left leaving it almost belly up. The plane also plunged about 1900 meters from a height of about 12500 meters in a mere 30 seconds as its nose pointed down 35 degrees. Luckily no one was seriously injured as the plane later landed in Tokyo safely. You can read about it more here.

Mid air scare by pilots is nothing new. In 2009 an Air India flight en route from Sharjah to New Delhi had the cockpit unmanned as the captain and co-pilot had a fist fight with two members of the cabin crew. The mid air scuffle happened in clear view of the passengers as the plane flew over Pakistan air. The crew settled after a while as if nothing happened and the plane landed safely with 117 passengers. You can read the whole story here.

Then there was the 2009 case of the two Northwest pilots who overshot the intended destination by more than 150 miles. The plane was flying from San Diego to Minneapolis carrying 144 passengers. The pilots told the investigators later that they were busy with their personal laptops in addition to distractions in the form of bathroom break and chat with flight attendant, all this while the air traffic controllers were frantically trying to reach them for more than an hour and the plane flying on autopilot at 37000 feet. You can read more about it here.

Don't worry as these incidents happen rarely. Remember there are also the brave pilots like Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who successfully landed US Airways plane carrying 155 people in the Hudson River after its engines failed.

Bay Area Traffic

Commuting for work in bay area is tough during peak office hours, freeways like 101, 880 can test anybody's patience. I commute to work everyday driving for about 25 miles each way, drive times can range anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on the time of day.

I know by personal experience that it did feel a little easy driving in 2008 and 2009 during the peak of subprime mortgage crisis. This would suggest unemployment rate inversely affects the traffic congestion, higher unemployment and less people have a workplace to commute to.

To validate this lets look at the traffic congestion trend for the last 20 years (1990-2009) and the unemployment trend during the same period.

Using the traffic congestion data available at the Urban Mobility Information at Texas Transportation Institute, I plotted two measures - Travel Time Index and Annual Delay per Auto Commuter. Travel Time Index is the ratio of travel time in the peak period to travel time in free-flow. A value of 1.30 indicates a 20-minute free-flow trip takes 26 minutes in the peak. Annual Delay per Auto Commuter is the yearly sum of all the per-trip delays for those persons who travel in the peak period (6 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 7 p.m.). See charts below:

Below is a chart that shows the unemployment rate in the counties of Santa Clara and San Francisco using the data available at California Employee Development Department:

The traffic congestion trend almost inversely followed the unemployment trend. This raises curiosity as to what economic events caused these sharp surges and drops. Saving and loan crisis and the housing bust led to recession of 1990-1991. Coupled with high gas prices due to gulf war the unemployment rose sharply. From 1995 to 2000 we see a drop in unemployment during the dot com bubble. March 2000 marked the dot com bubble burst with a sharp decline in the stock market and high unemployment particularly in technology sector thus impacting bay area. By 2004 economy started to turn around until we saw the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.

Google Maps - Quite Funny

Recently I was shown something really funny about how the "Get Directions" of Google Maps work. Performing a driving direction search from "Shanghai, China" to "Taipei, Taiwan" showed the following:

Observe the step 33, it says "Swim across the Pacific Ocean". Wow! Really?

So I was curious to find what other interesting transit strategies does Google Maps suggest. So I did a driving direction search from "Honolulu, HI" to "Taipei, Taiwan" which showed the following:

Observe step 6, it says "Kayak across the Pacific Ocean" and the distance is just 3879mi compared to 165km of swimming before. Awesome!

Performing the same searches on Yahoo or Bing will disappoint some as it does not provide any such adventurous routes or strategies.

This reminds of the following quote from Bertrand Russell:
"A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short."

TV Screen Protection

As parents of two young kids me and my wife are constantly on the look out for their safety as well as the safety of the things around them. My worst nightmare would be to find my big screen TV's LCD screen damaged. There have been plenty of close calls already which have made me very nervous. My kids make it a point to constantly keep us on the edge by bouncing things very close to it. So it almost feels a disaster waiting to happen.

It will be unjust to claim that only younger kids pose a problem. I remembered the news a few years back where Wii controllers slipped out of players hands and damaged the TV screen. Nintendo I believe has released numerous versions of the straps used to attach the controller to gamer's wrist to avoid this.

Fearing the safety of my prized TV (no kidding, I spent a small fortune to get the top of the line Sony 52XBR four years back) I started looking around for the various solutions that are available out there. Here are some of them that came up in Google Search:

• http://www.tv-armor.com
• http://www.tv-protector.com
• http://www.crystal-wall.com
• http://www.vizomax.com

For the 52 inch LCD they would cost around $150 and they are all being sold online, could not find a local store that carried them.

Then there was this website that provided instructions on how to build your own. Immediate question that comes to the mind is the saving over the commercial ones. After doing some costing of the parts at a few home improvement/hardware stores the cost is about $80 for a decent clear shield. This does not account for any tools and expertise required to complete the task. This wasn't encouraging, I was hoping to spend no more than $40 if I have to build on my own.

So, now the question becomes which is the best value for money out there? I would like to know if anyone else had any experiences good/bad that will help in making a decision. I am a little worried about the whole picture quality with the shield in front of the TV screen.

Ideal tenure - IT Industry

As a professional in the computer industry I often ask myself the question every few years in the job - is it long enough at the present job? Should I start looking for another opportunity? I am quite surprised that it is not just me and often talking to others sense the same confusion.

Looking at the IT industry I can see three types based on tenure lengths - long, short and medium.

Long timers are those people who stay at their job for decade and longer. They either really love what they do and/or really love the company, its benefits and compensation. There are some that just hate to be interviewed and would not like to totally avoid that situation until they are pushed into it. Another species here are the ones who have been waiting endlessly for the company to lay them off, in which case they get a handsome severance package.

Short timers are the ones that do not stay in one job for more than 2-3 years. They are the ones who either get bored with the job and want to take on a new challenge or sense an atmosphere that's not to their liking.

The ones in the middle generally have tenure of around 4 years. Oh no I am not thinking about the President here. The 4 years period has been primarily driven by the general 4 year vesting of the stock options. These include people who believe in the company they work for but tend to find themselves doing more of the same and would like to take up a new challenge. These people are generally in non-executive roles.

So coming back to our original question of what is the ideal tenure for IT industry?

For non-executives where I fall I do get a general sense that it is somewhere between 4 - 6 years. This is backed up by some factual data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS survey finds that as of Jan 2010 the median years of tenure at the current employer for ages 25 and over is 5.2 years. Also this has gradually risen since 1998 from 4.7 years to the current 5.2 years. Other interesting pieces of data in this regard is the median years of tenure for ages 16 and over for Computer and Mathematical occupations is 4.8 years and median tenure for college graduates is 5.2 years.

Having been on both sides of the interview process my general experience has been that people who fall out of bounds in terms of tenure lengths are simply asked more questions about it during the interview process. You end up explaining how you had a good reason for staying either that long or that short. The harder question is why you want to leave now?

I am sure there are other dimensions that play a role, a key one like geography (US compared to India or China) but that itself can be a bigger discussion.

What do you think about this? I would love to see your comments...