The Daily Parker

The week between when we used to switch back to Standard Time and when we do so now (since 2007) makes me want to stay in bed.

This morning sunrise happened at 7:18 and will slouch out to 7:25 on Saturday morning. It's the latest sunrise we'll have for three years, and it's 45 minutes after I usually get up in the morning.

I know a lot of people prefer more light in the afternoon. I don't care, really. Sunday the sun sets at 16:42; but it rises at 6:26, and gives me another month before the sun rises after 7 again. Then, of course, there's the slog from December 2nd to February 4th...but what can you do?

Just having a moan. You can ignore this post.

Programming languages have come a long way since I banged out my first BASIC "Hello, World" in 1977. We have great compilers, wonderful editors, and strong typing.

In the past few years, jQuery and JSON, both based on JavaScript, have become ubiquitous. I use them all the time now.

jQuery and JSON are weakly-typed and late-bound. The practical effect of these characteristics is that you can introduce subtle, maddening bugs merely by changing the letter case of a single variable (e.g., from "ID" to "Id").

I've just spent three hours of a perfectly decent Sunday trying to find exactly that problem in some client code. And I want to punch someone.

Two things from this:

1. Use conventions consistently. I'm going to go through all the code we have and make sure that ID is always ID, not Id or id.

2. When debugging JSON, search backwards. I'll have more to say about that later, but my day would have involved much more walking Parker had I gone from the error symptom backwards to the code rather than trying to step through the code into the error.

OK, walkies now.

I'm going to see one of them next month.

I just got this email:

On Saturday Nov 30th, the Panmunjom tour is confirmed for 1 adults as English tour, and your reservation number is #XYZ.

Please check Panmunjom (JSA) dress code.
1. No the color has faded or the hole jeans. (Regular jeans are OK).
2. No training wear, Military style.
3. No short pants, mini skirt
4. No open toed shoes, flip-flops.
5. No sleeveless, round neck t-shirt and leather pants.

So, no champion boxer, H-Bomb, or Soviet spies in my future, but I will be going to the DMZ next month. The whole package is ₩78,000 (about $72), and includes transportation to and from Panmunjom plus an English translator. I hope the weather works out. And that I don't get kidnapped by the DPRK army.

Once again, here's a list of things I'm sending straight to Kindle (on my Android tablet) to read after work:

• The Republican committeeman who made boneheaded comments earlier this week on The Daily Show, and who subsequently got fired, doesn't get it;
• WBEZ takes us back to the 1893 World's Fair;
• What is Chicago getting from US Airways and American after the merger?;
• Economist Tyler Cowan says don't go to restaurants with long waits;
• Microsoft makes Azure easier to buy (and thus harder to avoid);
• A British man has died from a caffeine overdose; and
• Krugman does not like Greenspan's new book. Nor does he like fear-mongering.

Back to work. All of you.

Ezra Klein eviscerates the GOP:

On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan became the latest Republicans to call for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down because of the Affordable Care Act's troubled launch. "I do believe people should be held accountable," he said. Okay then.

How about House Republicans who refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare?

The GOP's strategy hasn't just tried to win elections and repeal Obamacare. They've actively sought to sabotage the implementation of the law. They intimidated the people who were implementing the law. They made clear that problems would be exploited rather than fixed. A few weeks ago, they literally shut down the government because they refused to pass a funding bill that contiained money for Obamacare.

I actually do think Sibelius should resign. If this were the UK, she would have done. She can spend a year in the weeds getting speaking engagements or consulting somewhere, then return to politics in a year. At least she would have taken some responsibility.

But the rest of the GOP's shrieking about Obamacare is just ridiculous. Klein is right: these guys have chutzpah.

WBEZ explains:

The 22-minute film was a bid to show the benefits of living in cities, using Chicago as an example. There are shots of Chicago's early midcentury skyline, a parade down State Street (Streets and San's space-age float at the 5:53 mark is worthy of pausing and replaying) and good footage of old buildings being demolished.

But the documentary's framers are also pushing for a more humane and inclusive city.

"The promise of the city is not always fulfilled," narrator George Ralph intones. "Often one becomes a statistic in an unemployment office."

The cameras venture out into white, black and Latino neighborhoods--and the level of poverty and dilapidation is alarming by today's standards. Race and class are noted in the documentary.

Watch:

Through the magic of Facebook I learned who created one of yesterday's WRHU spots: Jim Vazeos wrote and produced "Uh-Uh Contraceptives" and voiced the last third of it. Christin Goff voiced the bulk of it, including the "I said NO" at the end.

He didn't confirm the date (1984), but that's consistent with other information he provided. Thanks for your input, Jim, and thanks to the other WRHU alumni who chimed in.

This is my 4,000th blog post.

Of course, that's counting from the first braverman.org entry from May 1998, which disappeared entirely for ten years and predated the concept of a "blog" by an interval. The first Daily Parker post was on 8 November 2005.

Which points out, the total doesn't include two non-public entries. The first public entry was 13 November 2005.

So, really, this is only the 3,803rd Daily Parker posting—but only the 3,801st visible one.

Yeah, this wasn't the highlight of your day either. Still: milestone.

Cranky Flier explains:

Dallas is an increasingly large hub of business, and it sees no flights to Hong Kong today. It can also provide connections to a lot of places around the Midwest and South that don’t have single stop connections today. Look no further than joint venture-partner Qantas to see how that works. Qantas abandoned San Francisco and decided to run a flight to Dallas instead. It’s such a long flight that a stop in Brisbane is required on the westbound trip, but it’s apparently worth it.

That all sounds good, but there’s an even bigger benefit when it comes to Asia flying… Latin America.

Flying from Asia to Latin America is really far and requires stopping somewhere. To give you an idea, connecting the two financial capitals of Hong Kong and Sao Paulo would require flying more than 9,700 nautical miles. You know the longest route in the world today, Newark to Singapore? That’s 1,500 nm shorter. So you need to stop somewhere. And today, the options aren’t great. But Dallas provides a real opportunity to make for simple connections between Hong Kong and Latin America.

I'll be a beneficiary of this new strategy this autumn. More on that later.

I found another batch of tapes including a mix tape I made in the WRHU two-track studio in May 1990. Yes, two-track: we recorded two audio tracks onto 1/4-inch tape at 7.5 inches per second (or 15 ips if we needed to do some music editing). We then cut the tapes with razor blades and spliced them together with splicing tape.

Eventually I graduated to the misnamed 4-track studio, which by then not only had a 4-track quarter inch deck but also a 1-inch, 16-track system that only the General Manager was allowed to play with.

Now that you know the technical limitations, listen to this teaser promo from May 1990. As a bonus, here is the Uh-Uh Oral Contraceptives spot that my predecessors created in 1984 or 1985.

Enjoy.