Favourite Restaurants: #2, Memories of India, London

After I bought my flat (apartment) in London, in 1997, for several years I was spending most weekdays on my own in London, returning home to France for the weekends. Cooking for one is no fun, and nor is eating alone in fancy restaurants. So friendly neighbourhood restaurants, where I could go with a book and eat a pleasant meal quietly in a corner, were highly sought after.

England is of course full of Indian restaurants. I doubt that there's a town that doesn't have one. In London there are literally thousands. The menu is pretty much the same in all of them, and with luckily rare exceptions the food is good too. But of course some are better than others. When I explored the ones in the area round my flat, I quickly found one that was head-and-shoulders above the others. Memories of India is an absolutely typical London Indian restaurant, that just happens to serve exceptionally good Indian cuisine.

When I lived just across the street, I would go there at least once a week, and when my willpower was feeble (often), more than that. Settling down at a corner table with a good book, a few poppadoms, a beer or two, a Shah Gostaba and a few side dishes was just as good as sitting down at home to a meal - with the added distraction of people-watching. This is a popular tourist area, with many mid-priced hotels and a handful of big ones. Every few minutes a couple or small group would pause outside the window to study the menu. And each time, the owner would rush outside to give them his sales spiel. About half the time it worked - to their good fortune, since they could easily have ended up in the nowhere-near-so-good place a few doors down. The other customers were a complete mixture, everything from noisy groups of caricatural American tourists to earnest young couples from the provinces, identified by their accents such as Geordies (from the Newcastle area) or from Northern Ireland.

"Eeh bah gum lass, even London 'as Indian restaurants, just like back 'oom in Bradford", they'd murmur softly to each other, holding hands discreetly across the table on their once-in-a-lifetime-treat outing to London. Or so I imagined, anyway.

Watching the owner makes you realise just what a treadmill it is to run a restaurant. Every single night he's there, keeping an eye on the place, trying to attract customers, greeting the regulars. The place can run without him - once when I went there he was on holiday. But still, there's not much of a break.

It's ten years now since I moved to California and let my flat. But when I stay in London it's usually in this area, often at the Royal Garden round the corner on Kensington High Street. And in that case, a meal at Memories of India is mandatory. Amazingly, even after ten years the owner still remembers me on the one or two occasions a year when I visit.

After I moved to the US I harboured a little fantasy of opening an Indian restaurant locally, just so I could call it "Memories of Memories of India". Surprisingly, here in Silicon Valley where half the population seems to be Indian, there are very few good (as good as Memories of India) Indian restaurants. So Memories of Memories of India, or M2I for short, would I'm sure be a great success, and soon I could open another branch - called, of course, Memories of Memories of Memories of India, or M3I. Eventually I could be the owner of a nationwide chain of excellent local Indian restaurant, its size limited only by the breadth of shopfronts to accommodate the ever-increasing names.

Well, it was a nice idea. My bubble was burst when I discovered that there are already several restaurants in the US called Memories of India. In fact, there's at least one more in London, too. But not as good as mine, I'm sure.

Update, July 2024: The restaurant is still there in Gloucester Road, but some time since Covid it has changed hands. The owner who would recognise me even after years of absence is no longer to be found encouraging passing tourists to stop for a meal. It's still a decent neighbourhood Indian restaurant, but it is no longer the same, for me at least.

Moving my Linux system to an SSD

Phew, done it! I decided to put a solid-state disk (SSD) on my new Linux system, to get some experience of using them. I expected to run into a few obstacles, but as usual with Linux I also expected to figure them out with a judiciously worded Google query. (Open-source would not work without Google).

It wasn't that easy. My goal was to move my existing system. A re-install from scratch would have been easier but then I'd have to try and remember all the hundred or so packages I've installed since, remember how I configured things like Apache and MySQL...

With Windows of course this is impossible. Thanks to that brilliant invention (not), the registry, you have to reinstall from scratch every time, then spend hours locating the CDs and babysitting the installation process. Been there, done that, and it's one of the main things I dislike about Windows.

I googled around and found a few descriptions of what to do, and indeed it seemed easy. So I physically installed my brand new 64GB SSD, which worked fine, and copied everything on my 1TB hard drive (not that much) to it. The of course I just needed to make it into a bootable system... and that is where the fuin started.

Ubuntu uses a boot system called Grub. I'd found clear instructions how to run that. Unfortunately for me, I just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 ("NattyNarwhal"), which uses Grub2, not Grub. And of course, they are completely incompatible - they don't seem to have a single command in common. (This seems to be a fairly widespread disease in the open-source world, deciding to reinvent some well-known piece of the system and make it gratuitously different. The most egregious example is Python 3, though bjam, the build system for Boost, runs a close second).

And I just could not find how to make Grub2 make changes to anything other than the currently running system. I could install it on the SSD, but trying to boot from it was a failure. Ubuntu finds file systems by their unique ID (UUID), and the SSD system was looking for the old hard drive's UUID. If both drives were plugged in, the SSD would boot Grub which then cheerfully booted from the hard drive. But if not... not so good.

I tried creating a "Super Grub 2" boot CD, hoping I could use this to make the changes. This however deserves some kind of award for unhelpful software. There is no "help" command and as far as I can tell no documentation either. So that was out.

By now I'd spent (wasted) two whole evenings on this project. Only my intense natural reluctance to give up on things kept me going, since I didn't actually need this to work. Then I tried a slightly reworded Google query and found this article. If you're an experienced Linux sysadmin you're probably thinking, "What an idiot, everybody knows that's how you do it". But I didn't know...

The key to success, once the files have been copied and /etc/fstab edited, is the following:

sudo -s
for f in sys dev proc ; do mount --bind /$f /ssd/$f ; done
chroot /ssd
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub

The magic here lies in the chroot command, which is what gets Grub to work on a different drive from the current one. Now I know about it, I'm sure I'll find all sorts of other places to use it.

That done, the SSD booted perfectly by itself, and with a bit of juggling of SATA connections, I got it to boot with the hard drive as well. Problem solved.

By the time I finished this, I was ready for a glass of wine and dinner. So I can't yet say whether the SSD has indeed given me the expected boost in system performance. But at least I've got it working.

The Joy of Country Codes

The creation of South Sudan as a distinct national entity implies a huge number of practical problems. Little things like creating a viable government, a functional police force and army, a national infrastructure, and all the rest. For the sake of the people there, who have already suffered much more than enough, I hope that it works, although one newspaper article has already referred to it as a "pre-failed state".

Among all these things, one that has to happen is the creation of country codes which are used for all kinds of things. In particular, there is the two-letter code that appears at the end of a URL (like '.uk'), and the international dialling code. Alphabetic country codes are designated by a standard called ISO 3166, administered by the International Organisation for Standardisation, or ISO for short - the acronym carefully chosen since it is actually not an acronym at all, standing for neither the official French nor English names of the organisation. International dialling codes are designated in a standard called E.164, administered by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The ITU grants an E.164 code to a country within 30 days of it being recognised by the United Nations. These codes are mostly two digits long (e.g. 44, the United Kingdom) or three digits (e.g. 351, Portugal). There are two exceptions: 1 and 7. 1 isn't actually a country code at all, since it designates the geographical area of North America including Canada, the USA, and various Caribbean islands. 7 used to be the USSR. Here be politics. It may seem simple enough to assign codes to countries, but actually it's a political and diplomatic minefield. When the codes were assigned, the Cold War was at its height and the USSR could not accept that the US could have a single digit (even though it didn't) and they didn't. Or so I suppose - I wasn't there, at the meeting of CCITT (former name of ITU-T) Study Group 2 where all this must have been hammered out. So now 7 is Russia, except that it's also used by Kazakhstan, and despite the fact that these two countries between them probably have fewer telephone numbers than some countries with three-digit codes.

Reading lists isn't everybody's cup of tea, but they often contain little gems of curiosity. Anyone who's had to call Taiwan knows that its country code is 886. But you won't find this in E.164. Rather, what you'll find is the entry for China, 86, with a footnote saying "within country code 86, 866 is used to designate the Chinese Province of Taiwan." But don't try dialling 866, because it won't work. Looking further, you'll find an entry for 886 with the text, "886 is reserved for assignment by the United States". In other words, China was not prepared to permit any reference to Taiwan as an independent country (their long standing position) but wasn't going to stand in the way of a practical arrangement that would let everybody get on with things.

Two-letter country codes, which are by far the best known, are in fairly short supply. In theory there are 676 (26*26) of them, but they try to have some mnemonic significance, and for well over 200 countries and other territories this makes it difficult to fit everything. For some reason, 'M' is a very common initial, and nearly all of the m's are used up. When I wanted to add Molvania (along with Elbonia and the Wallis and Grommet Islands) to the list of countries in our in-house database app, the best I could do was MJ. (Incidentally the same is true for state names in the US - M is the most-used first letter of the two-letter state codes). But luckily for South Sudan, even though 'S' is also a common initial, SS is still free. Perfect, n'est-ce pas?

Well, except that "ss" has, ahem, unfortunate connotations. Opinions differ as to whether the ISO Secretariat will allow this or not. And if not, all the other likely possibilities are already taken. About the best that I can think of would be to use a possible French version of the country name, "Sudan Meridional" (a word for "southerly" in French, along with "austral"). That would give SM. Of course that has connotations too, and very favourable they could be too for the fledgling country. Think how much money tiny Tuvalu has made from the happenstance of getting TV. There must surely be any number of kinky websites that would pay for as SM domain name... or there again, maybe the ISO Secretariat wouldn't be too keen on that either.

ISO 3166 is full interesting little tidbits. You know, of course, that FR is France. Well almost. Actually, it's "France including Clipperton Island". Where is that? I hear you ask. You mean you didn't know that it's a (usually) unpopulated atoll in the middle of the Pacific, 1000 kilometres from the nearest other land (Mexico)? And why on earth is it considered to be part of France? Thus begins a lengthy distraction on Wikipedia. Oh, Clipperton Island also has its very own code, CP, although according to Google there is not a single site that uses it.

And you know the code for my country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island (to give it its full title)... everyone knows that it is UK. Well, except it isn't. Actually it's GB. For some reason when they starting assigning URLs they decided to use UK instead. So UK is covered under a handful of oddball codes (along with CP incidentally) with the text "Reserved on request of the United Kingdom lest UK be used for any other country".

ISO 3166 has its share of odd diplomatic compromises and oddities, too. I bet you didn't know that BO is "Bolivia, Plurinational State of".

And you thought all this stuff was easy.

(Update, 16th August: they did get SS, read about it here. And the dialing code is +211.)

Favourite Restaurants: #1, Bar Oceanic, Hossegor

[Update 19/10/2023 - sadly the Bar Océanic is no longer with us. If you look for it, you'll find a place called La Nord. The owners of L'Océanic sold out about three years ago, after a short period of trying to manage without their star cook who had passed away. There have been at least two other attempts at revival in the meantime. Running a successful restaurant is hard. I can't make any comment about La Nord either way - we tried it once out of nostalgia, it was OK but not stellar.]

To me, a "favourite" restaurant is one that I go to every time I'm in the vicinity - a place that's part of my personal tradition. When I think of the place, I think of the restaurant. The food has to be excellent, of course, but it's about more than just that, it's about a feeling.
This week I'm in Hossegor, so it seems fitting to choose Bar Océanic as the first one. Hossegor has been a family tradition for over 20 years now, and a lot longer than that for my wife, who used to come here for her childhood holidays. We'll gloss over exactly when that was, but the house where I'm sitting typing this came into the family 21 years ago. The location is perfect, a two minute walk from the beach, a ten minute walk from the town, and close to the beachfront restaurants.

Hossegor is most famous now as a surf place. The annual world championship has an event here every summer, taking advantage of the giant Atlantic waves as they crash into the beach. Or not - there can be some really impressive surf here, but it's the exception rather than the rule. We've watched the championships take place in a millpond-flat sea, the surfers desperately seeking even the smallest wave.

Before the surf, Hossegor was - and still is - a family town for holidays. It has wonderful beaches, part of the vast expanse of of perfect, clean sand which runs from the Spanish border for a couple of hundred kilometres nearly to Bordeaux. It's the combination of families and surfers that makes Hossegor unique - it's a very lively place, with bars open until the small hours and beach parties, mixed with grandparents and their progeny and everything in between.

The beachfront, a two minute walk from our house, has a bunch of restaurants of different styles, from Dick's Sand Bar (not advised if over 25) to restaurants catering rather more to the family crowd. And of these, our long-term favourite is le Bar Océanic. Their menu is a range of south western French staples. And the king of such dishes is confit de canard, duck cooked slowly in its own fat for hours and hours until it becomes tender yet moist. Yum, especially when it's grilled at the last minute to make the skin crispy, then served with fried potatoes, either French fries or sliced thinly then fried slowly in more duck fat. Needless to say, this is on the menu. It may not be quite literally true to say it's the only main course I've ever eaten there, but it's close. Served with a bottle (or two or three, depending on the number of people) of excellent local wine, it's just irresistible.

The really surprising thing about le Bar Océanic, though, isn't so much the food as the proprietor. Or more specifically, his astounding memory. We've been regulars in Hossegor for 20 years, and I think we ate there the very first time we came, but that means just once or twice every year. And there was a period when we didn't come here in the summer, for about six years, just a couple of out-of-season visits in that whole period.

Yet every time we go there, he not only remembers us but even our favourite dishes. Can you imagine? You have thousands of customers who you see at most a couple of times a year, and you remember their menu choices individually? I just don't know how he does it.

When we moved to the US, there was a period of about three years before I managed to get back to Hossegor. The day I arrived, I was walking past le Bar Océanic. The proprietor happened to be standing outside. "Bonjour Monsieur," he said, as if I had just been in there the night before.

The Porkolab: all of our agents are busy helping other customers

You've all called the "customer service" number for some faceless monolith like AT&T or Comcast and heard, over and over, "all our agents are busy helping other customers". The useful content - the denotative significance, as semanticists would say (though it might take them a couple of goes, especially if they've already started on the semiotic cocktails) - is "so you're just going to have to hang on for another hour or two". But what else is it saying? Why did they choose this rather than just stopping at "all our our agents are busy right now"?

The answer is of course that it is subtle psychological manipulation. If they just said "all our agents are busy", you could reasonably get cross after the third full cycle of hold music, asking yourself why they don't hire more agents. But because they say "helping other customers", there's an instinctive reaction - even amongst cynical uber-rationalist grouches such as myself - that this wouldn't quite be cricket. The subtext is "the other people they're helping are just as important as you are, you have no right to expect that you should be served any quicker". Clever, huh? Instead of being mad at Comcast for being such cheapskates and not hiring enough people, you feel guilty because you were putting yourself above your fellow man.

I'm sure they pay psychologists a lot of money to come up with this. It's amazing how easy it is to manipulate people's feelings without them realising - there are various recent books about this, though offhand I can't remember any of their titles.

Another good one is "your call is important to us". I don't actually care whether my call is important to them - I just care that it's important to me, because otherwise I would long since have given up listening to cheesy electronic renditions of classical music. But it really does work - even though you know it's a blatant lie, and the only reason your call has the slightest importance is because of the remote chance that you might transfer your custom elsewhere, it still takes a little of the edge off your impatience and anger.

Then there's "please listen carefully, because our menu has changed". Without knowing you personally, how can they possibly know whether it has changed since the last time you were obliged to take your cardiac health in your hands and call them? Nearly always, you can short-circuit all of the "press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 to order a new service, press 872344100000019461111 to complain about your existing service" by just banging away on the 0 button - guess how I know. But the subtext here is that not listening carefully would be on a par with conspicuously keeping your iPod earphones on during the cabin safety announcement. Not only would you be imperilling your own safety, but you would also be acting irresponsibly to society at large. You would be a Bad Person.

You may wonder how they decide exactly what subtle implicit psychological lies they decide to use. Do they have batteries of simulated users, with blood pressure monitors and positron scanners? Probably. I was inspired to write this partly by having to deal with Comcast, but also by a piece of business spam I got today (you know the kind of thing, very professional-looking emails inviting you to vitally important conferences about the latest developments in HR). It was from someone called Porkolab (a somewhat uncommon Hungarian family name, so I've learned). In British English, a "porkie" is rhyming slang for a lie (via "porky pie"). I'm sure the "porkolab" is just the place where they try out all these messages.

"Hey, we're getting a lot of complaints from Islamabad about people being rude to the call centre operators. I think we need some new decoy messages."

"OK, let's get on to the Porkolab and see what they can come up with."

Comcast - such awful customer service that words fail me

So yesterday, while I was eating breakfast, my Internet service went down. The lights on the cable modem weren't blinking, and indeed nothing worked. It was time to go the office anyway, so I figured they would have fixed it by the time I got home.

But they hadn't. Still nothing worked. After the usual "press 1 for this" hell, and a ten minute wait, I finally got to talk to someone. "Oh yes," he said, "we discovered a signal leak back in February, and you hadn't made a service appointment, so we turned off the service."

Hang on... "Did you tell me about the problem?" "Oh, we probably left something on the door."

"And what about reminders, like on each of the five bills I've paid in the meantime, or an email?" "Yeah, that would probably be a good idea, but we don't do that."

"OK, so now I've made a service appointment, can you reconnect the service?" "Oh no, we have to wait for the technician to inspect it".

So... they may or may not have told me, for sure I never saw anything. Then they sit on their hands for five months, and then cut off the service without warning. And this passes for their idea of customer service!

The service guy did come on time, though he called the wrong number to warn me he was on his way! And guess what... his conclusion was that a different service guy needed to come, maybe in a day or two, maybe not. And no, of course they can't restore the service even though it was working fine for five months with whatever fault exists.

Comcast is outrageously expensive, the only thing that stops me switching right away to AT&T is that I know for sure that their customer service is even worse. Sigh.

Cross Country to Alturas

About a year ago I finally decided to get serious about my Commercial Pilot's License (CPL). Not that I have any ambitions for a second career as a pilot, but with well over 1000 hours of flying under my belt it just seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

Getting a CPL involves a checkride with an examiner, a written test, and a bunch of experience requirements, such as a minimum of 250 hours of flying. Most of the training goes towards the checkride. For single-engine planes, this requires a bunch of new things which don't form part of the Private Pilot checkride, specifically some not-quite-aerobatic maneuvers: chandelles, lazy-eights, eights-on-pylons.These are actually pretty hard to fly to the required standard, but after struggling with them for a while I can begin to see some point to them: they definitely do make for a finer touch in aircraft handling.

One of the experience requirements is a long cross-country flight, at least 300 miles round trip with the furthest point at least 250 miles away. Oh, those are nautical miles, of 6080 feet or about 15% more than the everyday statute mile. Why flying uses nautical rather than statute miles - and the corresponding unit of speed, knots (nautical miles per hour) rather than mph - is lost in the mists of history. And not all the time, by the way - some things, such as visibility requirements, are expressed in statute miles. More on that later.

There are a bunch of other requirements associated with this flight, such that, although I have many flights of this length, none of them qualifies. There have to be at least three landings, it has to be day VFR, and it has to be solo - nobody else on board, not even a non-pilot passenger. I suppose this is intended as a test of flight planning and navigation skills. The FAA, or the part that deals with "airman certification" anyway, doesn't seem to have heard of GPS, and doesn't know that nowadays all you need to do is enter the code for the destination airport and follow the resulting magenta line on the screen. Well, almost - it's as well to take things like mountains and restricted airspace into consideration, and to make sure you have enough fuel. So anyway... in the preparation for my checkride, I needed to make such a flight.

There are lots of places I could go. The LA area is over 250 miles, so a round trip to say Santa Monica would qualify, or to southern Oregon, or to somewhere in Nevada like Elko. I've done all of those, though. It would be nice to do something I've never done before. Looking at my wall-map of California, with pins for the airports I've been to, showed one big pin-free expanse, the north-east of the state. There a very few towns and it's not even on the way to anywhere. Alturas, the north-eastern most town in California, is 251 miles from Palo Alto, so just qualifies.

A straight line from Palo Alto to Alturas passes overhead Livermore, east of Mount Diablo, overhead Sacramento and Grass Valley, then across 8-9000 foot mountains to Quincy. The mountains are gradually replaced by high plains at around 4000' with the occasional pointy story-book volcanic peak. You can't fly in quite a straight line because of the TFR for the pilotless aircraft testing centre at Chico, so I flew a slight dogleg to the south which also kept me out of the big military training areas in the region. The easy way to do this is to find a waypoint in about the right place for the desired route. My route ended up as KPAO-SUNOL-HAGAN (the waypoint in question)-KAAT (Alturas).

The flight northwards was uneventful but beautiful. Crossing the mountains is always a bit scary - there really aren't too many good options if the engine stops. Luckily it didn't. I flew just to the south of Quincy airport. That's a scary place too - I went there one Saturday when I was on my own. It's the only airport I know that has mountains in the traffic pattern! You can't fly left traffic at approach speed, if you tried you'd quite literally hit a mountain.

Past Quincy, there was really almost nothing. I picked out Susanville to my right. There were just vast, green grassy plains, a few lakes, the very occasional small settlement and a few roads. For nearly a hundred miles I didn't pass within ten miles of a town. The last part of the flight, over the high plains, was very bumpy, too much for the autopilot, so I hand flew. Finally Alturas came into sight. It's a tiny place and the runways are narrow, so it took a while to find the airport. Needless to say I was the only person flying.

It was with great relief that I pulled up to the fuel pump and stopped. It had been an enjoyable flight but it's a long time to sit in the same position. The airport was completely deserted - a sign gave the number to call for fuel, and it took about 15 minutes for the fueller - who is also the county building inspector - to show up. Later the airport manager showed up too. I ended up spending nearly an hour on the ground, which allowed me to witness the arrival of another airplane. It's a quiet place, and beautiful in a Swiss, mountainous kind of way.

It would have been nice to walk into the town, which is only about a mile away, but it would all have been closed by then and anyway I wanted to get back before dark. Alturas would make a nice destination for a quiet weekend, except that unfortunately there is no car rental. Without a car there is really not much you could do, and as far as I can tell the nearest are at Klamath Falls, over 60 miles away.

So after saying my farewells - it's hard to imagine I'll ever go back, although it's a pretty place - I set off on the next leg. I'd decided to hop over the mountain to Cedarville. It's only about 30 miles but the Warner Mountains are in the way, ascending to 9000 feet, so the whole flight is spent first climbing then descending. Cedarville is an even tinier place, population 514 - the kind of place you'd retreat to when you just couldn't stand the bustle and crowds of Alturas (pop 2827). It's in the centre of a long narrow valley mainly occupied by three large alkali dry lakes, imaginatively called the Lower, Middle and Upper Alkali Lakes. Unsurprisingly, the airport was deserted, the narrow runway further limited by high weeds at the edges. I turned straight around and set off on my next leg, to Susanville.

I chose to fly down the eastern side of the mountains, just for a change of view. At the end of June there was still plenty of snow above 8000 feet. Once out of the valley I quite literally saw no human presence until I was close to Susanville, a hundred miles south.

Susanville has a huge prison, like so many small, remote California towns. California of course has the highest per capita prison population in the world, higher than China or Soviet Russia, thanks to some seriously misguided right-wing politics and the even more misguided "war on drugs". The state is bankrupt and can't afford to run even the most basic services, but is still not willing to reduce its prison population. But that's not really a topic for this post.

The prison did however make a convenient visual aiming point. When I landed there were still a few people around the airport, and a very friendly dog. But I didn't linger - I was getting hungry as well as tired.

The rest of the flight was uneventful - back across the slightly scary mountains, then over Sacramento, to the left of Mount Diablo, and so home. The landing was spectacularly beautiful - by good luck I landed exactly as the sun set, disappearing under the horizon as I descended on short final.

When not flying, I'm working on my written - actually a computer based multiple-choice test. Fortunately, all the possible questions are published by the FAA, and assembled into a book called Gleim, which also has (one hopes) the correct answers and the reasons behind them. The majority of the questions are perfectly reasonable, having to do with things like the airspace rules and how to read charts. But others are ghosts of a former age. There is not a single question about the use of GPS, even though probably 90% or more of long flights are made using it. But there are dozens of questions on a nearly-obsolete device called the "Automatic Direction Finder", a miracle of 1940s vacuum-tube electronics. The operational side of the FAA is busy closing down the corresponding radio beacons as fast as it can. New planes (sold in the US anyway - the rest of the world is a different story) haven't had ADF equipment in them for well over a decade. Mine had one when it was new, in 1980, but I had it removed when it developed a fault about five years ago.

Not only is the ADF obsolete, but the questions are about ways of using it that nobody has ever done in flight, complicated trigonometric exercises to do with angles of intercept. Flying a plane looks easy enough but it actually takes a lot of concentration. The idea of doing complicated mental math at the same time is as absurd as it would be to do the crossword. (Airline pilots do of course, but they have at least one extra pilot and three autopilots which they are obliged to use in cruise. And they are not constantly looking for reasonable places to land if the engine stops, since they have several of them).

My pilot friend Bill thinks that a lot of the regulations, and the questions that go with them, are just a thinly-veiled intelligence test. For example, there are three definitions of "night" (sunset, civil twilight which is about 30 minutes later, and one hour after sunset). There are many things you must or must not do at night, but which definition applies to which activity is pretty much random and just something you have to learn off by heart. The same applies to the various sources of aviation weather information. These exist both on the ground (via phone and now the Internet) and in the air, from various different places. Each one provides slightly different permutations of all the available information, without rhyme or reason. There are of course numerous questions on these. And, as you probably guessed, there are no questions at all either on Internet data sources, or on in-flight satellite based weather - which between them probably account for 90% of what pilots actually use nowadays.

The written will be my next step, in another few weeks - whatever one may think of it, it just has to be done. I don't expect it to be as enjoyable as my cross country flight to Alturas. More pictures from the trip here.