The news from Canada late last week features an emergency airplane landing that makes my experience seem downright routine. My spine tingles just thinking about the experience these people had.

An Air Transat flight from Toronto to Lisbon was out over the Atlantic Ocean, nearing its destination, when they started losing fuel. Shortly afterwards, the fuel ran out completely and both engines shut down at thirty thousand feet. At night.

After the initial assumption that they would make a water landing, the pilot decided that they had enough altitude to make it to a small landing strip on a military base in the Azores. And so, with no instruments, no engines, and almost no power, he managed to glide the plane down from thirty thousand feet and one hundred kilometers out over about half an hour. They came down hard, bursting the tires and scratching the hell out of the runway, but all three hundred people on board were safe.

One article points out that the passengers on board that airplane were witnesses to a very rare event in commercial aviation: a successful landing without power. I'm sure they're just thrilled. Wahoo.

Please indulge a bit of tech-talk in the name of relating a bizarre occurence.

At home, I have a small local network connected to the rest of the internet through a cable modem. One of the machines acts as a firewall and gateway. It has two network cards; one talks to the cable modem and one is connected to a hub and the LAN.

Now under Linux, the ethernet devices are named "eth0", "eth1", "eth2", and so on. Each eth# corresponds to one of the ethernet cards in the machine. So when my machine starts up, it reads some configuration files that say "eth0 is going to manage the connection to the cable modem; here's how to do that" and "eth1 will be on the LAN; here's how to do that". It's a little bit tricky to set up, but usually it runs smoothly.

Unfortunately, today I accidentally pulled the keyboard tray out from my computer desk while getting up. The tray fell and knocked the computer on its way down, causing it to reset. Thankfully, I didn't lose any work, but when the computer came back up, the network was totally broken. Neither interface worked: I couldn't access the outside world or other machines on the LAN. Yet, the computer knew that both cards were still present. The computer still worked (so the problem wasn't, say, the PCI bus), and it seemed unlikely that both network cards broke simultaneously.

Eventually, I figured out the problem. When the computer reset, the assignment of the names "eth0" and "eth1" to the two network cards got switched. "eth0" used to refer to card A; now it referred to card B. "eth1" was now card A. I got everything working by switching the configuration scripts: "OK, eth1 is going to manage the cable modem; here's how..." and so on.

At this point, all I can really say is, "What the heck?" ("heck" isn't the first word I thought of there). How could bashing the computer's case cause this switcheroo deep inside its guts? My only thought is that there's a jumper switch camouflaged somewhere on the outside of the case, and the keyboard tray hit the jumper. Sure seems like a strange place for a switch...

This is one of those situations where I think that I would really enjoy computer programming if it weren't for those darn computers.

[update: 28 August at 17:20]: After a bit more work, I realized what had caused the switcheroo. When the machine rebooted, I didn't stick around to choose which OS I wanted, and it booted into its default, Linux 2.2.17, instead of the correct kernel, Linux 2.4.2-ac10. For some reason, the newer kernel orders the ethernet devices in the opposite order of to the old one, leading to serious problems when the two versions try to coexist. I have made 2.4.2-ac10 the default now, which should prevent this from happening again.

Doug recently helped me photograph some research artifacts using a Canon digital camera we grabbed from the lab. When you press the button to take a picture, the camera plays a digitized recording of a conventional camera taking a picture. I cringe whenever I witness a "feature" such as this one. All that wasted energy. Plus, perhaps they could have used the space given over to the sound-playing hardware to, say, take better pictures.

As always, travel has generated a significant gap in thingo. Another conference last week, this time in Los Angeles. Mind you, Doug and I didn't make the mistake of 1999, staying in a hotel just up the street from the convention center. Peter aptly refers to Los Angeles as a "Doughnut City" -- a dead zone in the middle surrounded by interesting stuff. The area around the convention center is a ghost town after hours. Instead, we stayed near Peter and Cheryl in Pasadena, which necessitated a daily shuttle trip to the conference but afforded some fun nighttime excursions in a neighbourhood with living, breathing people.

One of the first things I saw at the conference was a course along the lines of "How to Give a Great Talk". There were four speakers, two of whom most emphatically did not give great talks. The first speaker, who had never given a talk before, told us that the secret to effective public speaking was to tap a sequence of pressure points on your body in a prescribed order. The tapping would somehow create a positive flow of energy that would enhance performance and calm nerves. I see. The third speaker read slides of bulleted lists telling us not to read from slides of bulleted lists, and told us ten minutes past his allotted time not to go past our allotted time. This sort of self-reference can be amusing and effective when done as a joke, but it doesn't work when it's on the level and the embarrassed speaker is reduced to "um... don't do what I'm doing". I would have guessed that part of running a course on giving a great talk involves teaching by example. I guess not.

The remaining two speakers, on the other hand, did set a positive example, providing useful information with an inspiring style. In particular, I would like to repeat the lovely advice given right off the bat by Jim Blinn on how to give an effective talk. He opened by declaring that the three components of a great presentation are:

1. Be clear
2. Be entertaining
3. Wear a green sweater

You can guess what I'll be wearing for my talk next year.

I was in a science store yesterday, and I came across a book called Man Eating Bugs, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio. Don't be fooled by the clever title -- except in the most absurd of Hollywood movies, bugs don't (to my knowledge) eat people. Well, maybe a tiny nibble here or there. No, this book is subtitled "the art and science of eating insects". It's about one man's personal quest to experience the world of entomophagy, the scientific word for bug-eating. And about the quest of his wife to travel with him and occasionally, reluctantly eat a bug if one is forced upon her.

The book has the feel of an issue of National Geographic, were they ever to have a special issue about eating bugs. There are beautiful close-up photos of live bugs, dead bugs, cooked bugs, and bugs being eaten. Bugs are served up with the immaculate presentation values of French haute cuisine. Bugs are plucked out of the dirt and popped into the mouth. People are... eating... goddamn... bugs!

I'm not exactly sure why I was compelled to buy this book. I have become significantly more adventurous with food in the past five years, especially as a result of two trips to Europe. But there are limits to what I'll eat, and most bugs are well past that limit, no matter how many times Peter Menzel describes cooked grubs as having a pleasant bacon-like taste. Obviously, this has everything to do with my cultural background and my early training in what constitutes food. In fact, this becomes obvious in the book, even among bug-eating cultures. The authors will ask a person who eats grubs with every meal whether they've ever eaten a spider. They'll get a reaction like, "No way -- that's disgusting. Who would ever eat a spider?". Well, the woman on the cover biting the head off of a tarantula would, I presume.

You know, cicadas keep coming up as a popular dish. Judging by the incessant and very loud whine coming from every tree in Kansas, I suppose they'd be sitting on a culinary goldmine if they could alter their horizons of edibility a bit. Hmmm -- I think they might need lots of barbeque sauce and plenty of cold beer before they attempt that experiment.

"We've had to shut down an engine. We're going to Colorado Springs."

Getting back to the conference was already going to have been a long process. First a three hour drive across Kansas on Monday, followed by a pleasant evening with Doug's family. Then, Tuesday morning, an hour's drive to the Kansas City airport and airplane to Seattle via a stop in Denver. Not to mention a half hour drive home from the airport.

The drive across Kansas was fine, though we had to swerve to avoid a pig of all things, a small pig that was crossing the road. I don't know what became of that pig or where it could have come from, but he was cute and I hope he's okay.

Getting to KCI was a piece of cake. The first problem was that the Kansas City-Denver flight was delayed about twenty minutes for unknown reasons. Nevertheless, that plane eventually boarded and we left without incident, though I was nervous about catching my tight connection in Denver. And they didn't have any snacks on board, a minor frustration since I hadn't eaten since early that morning.

I stopped worrying about my connection when the pilot made his announcement about two thirds of the way through the flight. Actually, I'm sure he said it differently; I was in the very back of the plane and couldn't here the PA very well. The gist of it was that they had to shut down an engine (one of three on a 727), and because of thunderstorms in Denver they were going to land in Colorado Springs. At this point, I figured I wouldn't make my connection. Plus, I suppose I had something more immediate to worry about.

Now I gather that a situation like this is something like a 911 call; it doesn't matter what the situation is, you follow the established procedure. For a 911 call, they always send police, paramedics, and a firetruck (or so I'm told). In our case, they made us prepare for a possible hard landing. We had to practice crash positions. We had to remove any sharp or dangerous objects (the flight attendant told me later that she should have asked me to remove my glasses). None of which creates any confidence that this is a routine occurence, and routine is all I ever want from air travel.

The approach seemed rough. But really, was it any different from any other approach? I have no idea. We could have been gliding down in the hands of angels to land in a field of pillows, and it still would have felt unusually rough. For whatever reason, they had to land the disabled plane at a higher speed than normal. We came in fast, bounced off the runway a couple of times, and eventually settled. People applauded, but of course it wasn't over yet. Finally, we slowed down to normal landing speed. At this point, we were in the hands of the plane's braking systems, which presumably were working fine, and we came down to taxi speed. I'm told we were met at the gate by emergency vehicles (like a 911 call), but I didn't see any of them. No, we didn't get to use the slides, we got off the plane the regular way. Though I was sitting by an emergency exit. Arguably I could have opened the door and slid down the slide, claiming panic. Might have been worth it.

Of course, at this point the mechanical nightmare became a logistical one. A hundred people had no idea how to get to where they were going (were there a lucky one or two headed for Colorado Springs?). I would love to haved rented a car and driven the 1100 miles from Colorado Springs to Seattle, but I don't believe that the airline would have picked up the tab. Eventually, United sent buses to the airport to shuttle us the seventy or so miles back to Denver International. I got to Denver at about the time that I should have been landing in Seattle. With nobody from the airline to meet our bus and help sort us out (which seems pretty awful), we were left to wait in line at the ticket counter. I was reassigned to a flight that was boarding in ten minutes, which meant that the ticket agent was unwilling to issue me a food voucher, godammit. He obviously underestimated my capacity for food inhalation. On the way to the gate I bought some food and ate most of it on the rest of the way to the gate.

I'm glad I ate that food when I did. I might have waited for dinner to be served on the Denver-Seattle flight. But it turns out that our departure was delayed yet again. First by a maintenance delay (my heart did a little jitterbug at this announcement, but it turns out that the conscientious pilot simply wanted more oil put into one of the engines), and then by thunderstorms. We got underway more than an hour late, at which point the world of air travel settled back into its comfortable, dull routine. I even had an empty seat next to me.

All in all, it was an adventure I'd rather not have had. I'm confident that there was very little real peril involved. Mind you, I don't know how often these things happen. Certainly it was a rare enough occurence in Colorado Springs that the local news decided to report on it. But even without any danger, it was still a huge delay and annoyance. United's lack of courtesy and assistance certainly didn't help matters. Perhaps I shall have to avoid their product in the future.

I think I'm going to relax a bit today. Do activities that put me in touch with the solid, solid ground beneath me. And savour the next ten days until I have to fly again.