The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Not something you see every day

Yes, it's nerdy, but when this happened over the weekend I had to snap a photo:

It might even have been more interesting if I'd just sat there and waited for half an hour or so (27 minutes, actually), but even I have a nerd threshhold.

By the way, because I live in the middle of Chicago, it might surprise readers to know that I bought the car new in January 2002. In 2008, actually, I drove less than 5,000 km. Really, public transportation rocks.

End of the longest-running series

CBS has pulled the plug on Guiding Light, which they first broadast (over radio) in January 1937:

The radio show, which had its debut on January 25, 1937, was broadcast from Chicago until 1946, when production moved to Los Angeles and later New York. It was introduced as a 15-minute CBS TV show on June 30, 1952, with actors doubling up on both TV and radio until the end of the series' radio run four years later. It expanded to 30 minutes in 1968, a year after it began being broadcast in color.

... Cast members over the years included Christopher Walken, Billy Dee Williams, Hayden Panettiere, Joseph Campanella Sandy Dennis, Cicely Tyson, James Lipton, Ruby Dee, Barnard Hughes, JoBeth Williams, Chris Sarandon, Ruth Warrick, James Earl Jones, Sherry Stringfield, Christina Pickles, Melina Kanakaredes, Anna Marie Horsford, Ed Begley Sr. and Patti D'Arbanville.

I'm not a fan, and I don't think I've seen the show since that time I had chicken pox in the mid-19—er, a while ago. But the show is a piece of history. And, on September 18th, it will become completely historic.

Beginning of Quarter Round-up

All of these are true, and all of these are appropriate for April Fool's day:

  • Punzun Ltd., my software firm, proudly announced record earnings yesterday, earning a net profit of $0 on $0 of gross revenue and ($0) expenses (all figures in millions). It's the best quarter we've ever had, 11% better than our last record in 4th quarter 2004.
  • Mark Morford, on GM's "recovery:" "Behold this weird new Camaro. It is, in sum, exactly the wrong car at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong attitude attached to exactly the wrong hopeless hope for a return to a rather crude automotive golden era that never really existed in the first place."
  • The Justice Department is halting its prosecution against former U.S. Senator Stevens (R-AK), figuring he's suffered enough. This, you remember, comes after the conviction. Yes, it's April Fool's day, but no, this isn't a prank.
  • Congress is set to repeal the ban on travel to Cuba. The loudest opposition came from U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who said the measure would prop up the Castro regime, though one expects not for any longer than the Castro brothers' walkers would, given they're both in their 80s.

Finally, the creaking, old Weather Now demo project is getting an injection of mojo. I'll have more when I release it for real, but meanwhile you can check out the Beta version. (It's actually a ground-up re-write, even though it looks the same. Really. It's cool.)

Sun-Times beats Tribune in race to entropy

The Chicago Sun-Times has filed for Chapter 11 protection:

The publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and other Chicago-area papers emphasized that it will continue to operate its newspapers and online sites as usual "while it focuses on further improving its cost structure and stabilizing operations" during the Chapter 11 financial reorganization.

Tuesday's filing can't be characterized as a surprise. Many observers have marveled that the company has been able to stay on its feet as long as it has, given the pressures it faces.

What will replace newspapers? I orry that too many people forget why we have newspapers in the first place.

CTA Bus Tracker

Despite recently complaining about public transit in Chicago, I have to say I like ctabustracker.com, the Chicago Transit Authority's online bus tracker. It's a public-private venture with Google, and I think everyone benefits.

In fact, I'm writing this blog entry because I have 11 minutes before my bus comes, and it only takes me 4 minutes to shut down my laptop and get to the bus stop. This, I think, is the epitome of efficient labor markets.

All right, maybe not the epitome, but certainly a good example of them.

When stupidity just isn't a complete answer

Via TPM Muckraker, the Boston Globe reports today that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation moved from bonds into stocks just before the market fell last fall:

The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent - and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent - as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest.

... Charles E.F. Ponzi Millard, the former agency director who implemented the strategy until the Bush administration departed on Jan. 20, dismissed such concerns. Millard, a former managing director of Lehman Brothers, said flatly that "the new investment policy is not riskier than the old one."

...The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation may be little-known to most Americans, but it serves as a lifeline for the 1.3 million people who receive retirement checks from it, and the 44 million others whose plans are backed by the agency.

The agency was set up in 1974 out of concern that workers who had pensions at financially troubled or bankrupt companies would lose their retirement funds. The agency operates by assessing premiums on the private pension plans that they insure. It insures up to $54,000 annually for individuals who retire at 65.

Josh Marshall pointed out two things: first, this is akin to an insurance company taking out hurricane policies and investing the premiums in beachfront property; and second, perhaps most relevant, Charles Millard was formerly the head of Lehmann Brothers.

Now imagine if Shrub had gotten his wish to privatize Social Security....

Kindle zeitgeist

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote this evening about his own thoughts about physical books vs. Kindle:

I've always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me.

... Don't get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn't realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.

I thought about this also. I love books. I have two shelves yet to read, in fact, and it would be a lot easier to take them on trips with me if they weighed 290 grams instead of, say, 100 times that. Still not completely sold, though. Maybe next month.

Ah, Chicago in the spring

This morning, consistent with other early spring mornings I remember from years past, Chicago is having a blizzard. We're on the backside (in so many ways) of a low-pressure center, getting some fresh spring breezes (41 km/h gusts out of the north), delightful spring warmth (0°C with a windchill of -6°C), and a gentle sodden wet heavy snowfall.

In other happy news, the New York Times health blog yesterday reported 86,000 emergency room visits each year by people who tripped over their pets:

That translates into about 240 people who are treated for injuries caused by pets every single day in the United States, [a CDC] study found.

Cats are involved in some of the falls, but dogs — man's best friend — are the real culprits, responsible for seven times as many injuries as cats, often while they’re being walked, the report found.

I can attest that dogs bolt sometimes, surprising both dog and owner when the dog's increased kinetic energy encounters the owner's dug-in heels.

An unexpected beneficiary of economic slowdown

The Economist reports that traffic to Internet dating sites is up:

[A]long with discount retailers and pawnbrokers, online-dating sites such as eHarmony.com and OkCupid.com have seen business look up. There are several theories to explain why. It may be that people have more time to devote to their private lives as the economy slows; that uncertain times increase the desire for companionship; or that living alone is expensive, whereas couples can split many of their costs.

At OkCupid, which is aimed at a more casual, youthful crowd, there has been a jump in membership ... says Sam Yagan, OkCupid's boss. ... OkCupid has the advantage of being free, which has proved popular with people looking for partners for what Mr Yagan euphemistically calls "cheap entertainment." After all, if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, he says, "you can just play Scrabble instead of going out for the evening."

(Is that what people call it these days? "Hey honey, wanna get a triple word score?")

The dangers of cut-and-paste coding

Last night, while studying for an economics exam, I took a moment to execute the following SQL against a client's production database:

UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Equipment', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Boojums'
GO

UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Borfins', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Nerfherders'
GO

The client called this morning to ask why the application suddenly had two different types of equipment, one which looked suspiciously like a collection of borfins.

You can see what I did, of course. I copied the first statement and forgot to change the copy's second argument. And I quite deservedly looked stupid.

What makes this even funnier: I executed the statement against a staging server first, carefully (I thought) checked the results, and then executed it against the production server. This is why having someone else do quality assurance is a good thing for most programmers.