Events

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...

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...

Finished in Seoul

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...

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....

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....

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...

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....