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I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

I remember 2025 like it was yesterday...and in that long-forgotten year: I posted 459 times on The Daily Parker, down 21 from 2024 and 41 from 2023. But the blog had it's 10,000th post sometime in August, which is something. I flew less in 2025 than in the previous three years, with only 7 flight segments totaling 8,371 flight miles. I didn't leave the US in 2025, about which I am sad. And I only visited five states: Tennessee,  Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and California. Strangely, I didn't even make...

I don't enjoy taking 6 am flights, of course, but they do have advantages. I left my hotel at 6:11 am and was through SFO security by 6:25. That's even faster than last year! I'm a little less enthused about this, however: URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Chicago IL 224 AM CST Sun Nov 9 2025 Northern Cook-Central Cook-Southern Cook-Eastern Will- Including the cities of Chicago, Peotone, Northbrook, Crete, Evanston, Lemont, Park Forest, Schaumburg, Cicero, Oak Park, La Grange, Des...

I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here. Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the...

I posted too soon. Obviously, I tempted the wrath of the whatever high atop the thing, and it noticed: Here's the ironic part: the government shutdown has (almost) nothing to do with this delay. The plane is broken. And because of the capacity controls today, the airline can't simply swap in another 737-800. Fortunately, I live in Chicago, so I'll just go home for a few hours. Updates as the situation develops.

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee. So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly...

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

Somehow, tomorrow is July 1st. As far as I can tell, this is because today is June 30th, and yesterday was June 7th, and last week was sometime in 2018. And yet, I have more stuff to read at lunchtime from just the last day or so: Josh Marshall distinguishes between the energy and engagement of the Democratic Party (i.e., the actual voters) and the torpor of the Party's leadership: "[It's] not a nightmare. Certainly not for the party. It may be a nightmare for some incumbents." The Washington Post digs...

The pilot and journalist, who wrote clear and readable articles and books about complex topics, has died at age 70: For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard. Mr....

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories: Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And...

Cassie and I walked 14 km yesterday, giving her almost 3 hours of walks and 8 hours continuously outside with friends (including Butters). The walk included a stop at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. (It's possible Cassie got a bit of pizza.) She's now on the couch, fast asleep. I would also like to be on the couch, fast asleep, but it is a work day. I also wish some of the people in today's stories were asleep on the couch instead of asleep at the switch: The Qatari government has offered the OAFPOTUS a naked bribe...

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime: From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist. Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him. Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way...

Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval (I) will face Republican Cory Bowman in the November election after the two won 83% and 13%, respectively, of yesterday's primary vote. Bowman is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance, whose endorsement of Bowman appears to have led to Pureval's enormous vote total. When you're the least-popular vice president in history, no one wants your endorsement, dude. Also, today is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies in Reims, France. What that has...

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses! We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times: Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of...

The markets started slightly up this morning, but whatever optimism traders had before noon has evaporated. Both the S&P and DJIA are technically up, but less than 0.5%, while the OAFPOTUS continues to act like the demented old man he is. And to think, Twin Peaks turned 35 today. Meanwhile... The Biden Treasury official who co-wrote the research the OAFPOTUS cited to justify his malignantly stupid tariffs explains how malignantly stupid the OAFPOTUS is. Catherine Rampell waits in vain for the little boy...

Business travel on Sunday evening brings some good, some not so good. For starters, I got from the curb through security to the terminal in 12 minutes, because there aren't a lot of business travelers. On the other hand, getting to the G Concourse lounge involved a lot of near-collisions as the leisure travelers shuffled around without looking where they were going. I'm impressed with what they've done to the lounge, though. I haven't been in G Concourse since August 2016, so I was pleasantly surprised....

Stuff to read: Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border. The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and...

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS: Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will...

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election! Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the...

James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss: In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can...

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this: The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy. As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from....

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people: James Fallows makes it clear the aviation accidents over the past few weeks are not the Administration's fault—but the ones a year from now will certainly be. Jeff Maurer likens Elon Musk's wrecking crew to the drunk and sleep-deprived Assemblée Nationale of 4 August 1789; you know, the one that led directly to the French...

Wednesday night saw the worst air-transport crash in the US in 19 years. The National Transportation Safety Board won't have a preliminary report until at least March 1st, but that didn't stop the OAFPOTUS from blaming everyone he doesn't like for it: In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former...

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today: An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.) Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders...

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th. Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering: The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered. Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our...

Today marks the middle of winter, when fewer days remain in the (meteorological) season than have passed. Good thing, too: yesterday we had temperatures that looked happy on a graph but felt miserable in real life, and the forecast for Sunday night into Monday will be even worse—as in, a low of -20°C going "up" to -14°C. Fun!. (Yesterday's graph:) Elsewhere in the world: Israel and Hamas have reached a cease-fire agreement, with the US and Qatar signing off. OAFPOTUS Defense Secretary nominee, former...

Despite getting back to a relative normal in 2023, 2024 seemed to revert back to how things went in 2020—just without the pandemic. Statistically, though, things remained steady, for the most part: I posted 480 times on The Daily Parker, 20 fewer than in 2023 and 17 below the long-term median. January and July had the most posts (48) and April and December the fewest (34). The mean of 40.0 was slightly lower than the long-term mean (41.34), with a standard deviation of 5.12, reflecting a mixed posting...

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.) Meanwhile: Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling...

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic... I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy." Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully." Molly...

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.) Meanwhile, the world continues to turn: Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years...

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday. In other news: Hussein Ibish says Hezbollah got caught in a trap of its own making when it attacked Israel a year ago. A Chicago ordinance takes effect next Tuesday that will grant the...

The forecast still predicts today will be the hottest day of the year. Last night at IDTWHQ the temperature got all the way down to 26.2°C right before sunrise. We have a heat advisory until 10pm, by which time the thunderstorms should have arrived. Good thing Cassie and I got a bit of extra time on our walk to day camp this morning. Elsewhere in the world: The Fifth Circuit has ruled that broad, geofenced searches violate the 4th Amendment, contradicting the Fourth Circuit, and setting up a likely...

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer. Meanwhile: Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president. The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported...

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday: Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe. Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable." In her dissent in...

I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we introduced on June 20th last year, but only now got reported. Oh, also: it's 25°C and sunny. At least it's Friday. And I guess I can read some of these tomorrow morning: Tara Palmeri examines the Beltway reactions to the convicted-felon XPOTUS's 34-count felony conviction. (But Josh Marshall says of this...

Oh, so many things: Ankush Khardori lays out how "the Alito scandal is worse than it seems." US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, has a plan for how to get Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) to recuse themselves in any January 6th case. The non-disclosure agreement The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt signed to work on the show recently expired, and wouldn't you know, he has tapes. Pass the popcorn. Matthew Yglesias describes his drift from left to center-left....

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole. Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up: The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the...

Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first production deployment, which always terrifies the dev team and always reminds them of what they left out of the Runbook. The staging pipelines have already started churning, and if they uncover anything, the Dev pipelines might also run, so I've lined up a collection of stories from the last 24 hours to keep me...

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman (D, maybe?–CT) and Al Gore's running mate in 2000 has died: Joseph I. Lieberman, the doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died March 27 in New York City. He was 82. The cause was complications from a fall, his family said in a statement. Mr. Lieberman viewed himself as a centrist Democrat, solidly in his party’s...

My flight from Munich landed at Charlotte about 40 minutes early, and I got through customs and back through TSA in 34 minutes. Sweet! And now I'm watching the plane that will take me to Chicago pull into my gate. Sweet! Really, I just want to hug my dog and get 10 hours of sleep tonight. I have a feeling one of those things will happen and the other won't.

The weather forecast for Munich doesn't look horrible, but doesn't look all that great either, at least until Saturday. So I'll probably do more indoorsy things Thursday and Friday, though I have tentatively decided to visit Dachau on Thursday, rain or not. You know, to start my trip in such a way that nothing else could possibly be worse. Meanwhile, I've added these to yesterday's crop of stories to read at the airport: Deciding to be "stabbed, to live to see another day," the Republican-controlled...

As I'm trying to decide which books to take with me to Germany, my regular news sources have also given me a few things to put in my reading list: Jamelle Bouie points out that the XPOTUS "owns Dobbs and everything that comes with it." A group of app users have sued the company that owns Tinder and Hinge for predatory business practices. Tyler Austin Harper reviews Molly Roden Winter's memoir about polyamorous life, and concludes polyamory "is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity...

I learned this morning that I have a meeting at 6am Wednesday, because the participants will be in four time zones across four continents. Since I'm traveling to Munich later that day, I'll just comfort myself by remembering it's 1pm Central Europe time. I'm already queuing up some things to read on the flights. I'll probably finish all of these later today, though: Jennifer Rubin highlights four ways in which the XPOTUS has demonstrated his electoral weakness in the past few weeks. Republican pollster...

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st. Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it....

She's in this photo, trust me: A bit closer, after we got home:

I'm watching my plane arriving from Chicago to get all of us going back there on it, a little remorseful that I couldn't spend more time in Seattle. I last visited in 2013 to watch the Cubs hold their own against the Mariners for 9 whole innings, only to lose with no outs in the bottom of the 10th. On that June day Seattle had sunny 30°C weather. This morning we had sunny weather, I'll give it that: But warm? No. In the 38 hours of my trip it only got above -6°C once I got to the airport to go home....

My five-and-a-half-hour-delayed flight got to Seattle in the usual amount of time, but the door-to-door duration—my house to my friend's house—set a new record for domestic travel: 15 hours and 20 minutes. That's the longest travel duration for any flying trip since I had a long connection going from Chicago to London two years ago and longer than any domestic trip I can recall. But at the end of the voyage, Hazel was very glad to see me: My friend has an all-day meeting that neither of us is...

Welp. My 10:00 flight has become a 3:00 flight: But at least when I get on board the plane, I'll have a good seat: Obviously if they had predicted the delay more accurately, I'd have slept longer, left later, and probably not dropped Cassie off with my friends until this morning. She seems to be settling in just fine, though: Hooray for air travel in January. My guess is that if the original crew had flown on to Seattle, they'd have timed out. So they probably moved my plane's crew to a shorter flight...

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November. That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day: Economic historian Guido Alfani examines the data on the richest people to live...

Wouldn't that be nice? Alas, people keep making them: Harvard University president Claudine Gray finally threw in the towel. Researchers at Rutgers University have identified clear patterns in TikTok hashtags that suggest direct Chinese Communist Party interference with the app. Though the WMO and NCDC haven't confirmed it officially, 2023 appears to have been the hottest year on record—and 2024 will be warmer. Vishaan Chakrabarti, the former director of planning for Manhattan, outlines a plan to make...

Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022. I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

May your solstice be more luminous than these stories would have it: Chicago politician Ed Burke, who ruled the city's Finance Committee from his 14th-Ward office for 50 years, got convicted of bribery and corruption this afternoon. This has to do with all the bribes he accepted and the corruption he embodied from 1969 through May of this year. New Republic's Tori Otten agrees with me that US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest schmuck in the Senate. (She didn't use the word "schmuck," but it...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles: Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel. Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home. Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?" Paul Krugman bemoans the...

I woke up this morning feeling like I'm fighting a cold, which usually means I'm fighting a cold. One negative Covid test later, I'm still debating whether to go to rehearsal tonight. Perhaps after a nap. And wearing an N-95. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Kenyan runner Kelvin Kiptum ran the world's fastest marathon yesterday in Chicago, finishing the race in 2:00:35, 36 seconds faster than Eliud Kipchoge's 2:01:09 set last year in Berlin. David Ignatius reflects on the massive intelligence...

I tried something different yesterday after watching Uncle Roger's stab at adobo: Ng's basic outline worked really well, and I got close to what I had hoped on the first attempt. Next time I'll use less liquid, a bit more sugar, a bit less vinegar, and a bit more time simmering. Still, dinner last night was pretty tasty. Much of the news today, however, is not: US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set the XPOTUS's Federal criminal trial for next March 4th, two years earlier than he wanted it. Writing for The...

My home office sits at the top of my house as a loft over the floor below. I think it could not have a more effective design for trapping hot air. (Fortunately I can let a lot of that out through this blog.) This afternoon the temperature outside Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters didn't quite make 25°C, and it's back down to 23°C with a nice breeze coming through the window. Wednesday and Thursday, though, the forecast predicts 36°C with heat indices up to 43°C. Whee. (It gets a lot better...

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime: In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months. A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets. James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation...

Boarding pass from Chicago to Heathrow in app? Check. Boarding pass from Heathrow to Prague in app? Check. Packed? Uh...sure, once this laundry is done...

I spent all day updating my real job's software to .NET 7, and to predominantly asynchronous operation throughout. Now I have four stubbornly failing unit tests that lead me to suspect I got something wrong in the async timing somewhere. It's four out of 507, so most of today's work went fine. Meanwhile, the following stories have backed up: The Economist wonders what our friends should think of the XPOTUS's dog and pony show. Alex Shephard worries that television and cable news just don't have the...

Once again, I have too much to read: After Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) tried to end Disney's control over the municipal area around Disneyworld, the outgoing board added a series of restrictive covenants completely neutering DeSantis' hand-picked replacements, including a rule-against-perpetuities clause tying the covenants to the last living descendant of King Charles III. Robert Wright observed ChatGPT expressing cognitive empathy. An anonymous source provided a German reporter with 5,000 pages...

After having the 4th-mildest winter in 70 years, the weather hasn't really changed. Abnormally-warm February temperatures have hung around to become abnormally-cool March temperatures. I'm ready for real spring, thank you. Meanwhile... ProPublica reports on the bafflement inside the New York City Council about how to stop paying multi-million-dollar settlements when the NYPD violates people's civil rights—a problem we have in Chicago, for identical reasons—but haven't figured out that police oversight...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories: James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well. Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things. Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League...

Eli Dourado takes a deep dive into the engineering and economics that could raise a fleet of 25,000 autonomous cargo airships, each two Chicago city blocks long floating just 1,500 meters over your head while carrying 500 tons of cargo: Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km. That would equal $650 billion in annual revenue for cargo airships, notably much bigger than the $106 billion Boeing reports for the entire global...

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later: A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign. Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election? National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression. Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021. Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza. James Fallows describes...

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Arden, just resigned unexpectedly, which is a much more surprising story than any of these I queued up: President Biden quietly made a big move on immigration that the opposition either didn't notice or can't really criticize. Julia Ioffe understands the same thing the White House understands: Putin has no incentive to negotiate for peace. Newly-sworn-in US Representative "George Soros" (R-NY) stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe meant to pay for life-saving surgery for a...

I'm on hold with my bank trying to sort out a transaction they seem to have deleted. I've also just sorted through a hundred or so stories in our project backlog, so while I'm mulling over the next 6 months of product development, I will read these: Via Schneier, credit-reporting service Experian patched a security hole in December that allowed anyone to view someone's credit report with "the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number." It turned out, an exciting software...

I got a lot done today, mostly a bunch of smaller tasks I put off for a while. I also put off reading all of this, which I will do now while my rice cooks: The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service determined that 2022 was the fifth-hottest year on record, once again making the last 8 years the hottest on record. As North America sees record warmth and record-low snowfall this winter, we can guess how 2023 will end up. In no small irony, Illinois was actually cooler than normal last year. I've said...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days. Meanwhile: How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway? Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to...

We've now got two full years between us and 2020, and it does look like 2022 got mostly back to normal. The Daily Parker got 487 posts in 2022, 51 fewer than in 2021 and 25 below median. As usual, I posted the most in January (46) and fewest in November (37), creating a very tight statistical distribution with a standard deviation of 3.45. In other words: posting was pretty consistent month to month, but down overall from previous years. I flew 10 segments and 16,138 flight miles in 2022, low for...

Speaking of loathsome, misogynist creeps, former Bishop of Rome Joseph Ratzinger died this morning, as groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters did yesterday. In other news showing that 2022 refuses to go quietly: The House Ways and Means Committee released the XPOTUS's tax returns for tax years 2015 through 2020, re-confirming his incompetence, malfeasance, and incompetence at malfeasance. One looks forward to the Justice Department's take on them. Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows digs into the...

We get one or two every year. The National Weather Service predicts that by Friday morning, Chicago will have heavy snowfall and gale-force winds, just what everyone wants two days before Christmas. By Saturday afternoon we'll have clear skies—and -15°C temperatures with 400 mm of snow on the ground. Whee! We get to share our misery with a sizeable portion of the country as the bomb cyclone develops over the next three days. At least, once its gone and we have a clear evening Saturday or Sunday, we can...

What a delight to wake up for the second day in a row and see the sun. After 13 consecutive days of blah, even the -11°C cold that encouraged Cassie and me to get her to day care at a trot didn't bother me too much. Unfortunately, the weather forecast says a blizzard will (probably) hit us next weekend, so I guess I'll have time to read all of these stories sitting on the couch with my dog: The House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection referred the XPOTUS to the Justice Department on four...

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone...

I do love traveling Saturday mid-days, because it's the quietest time at O'Hare. There was no line at the Pre-Check security gate, and I only have a backpack, so it took less than 3 minutes to clear TSA. Wonderful. Unfortunately, every single economy parking space has a car in it. (I would have taken public transit but I had a meeting run until 12:30, with a 3pm flight. Couldn't risk the 90 minutes or so.) In any event, my plane is here, it appears to be on time, and the latest weather is VFR the whole...

So, what's going on today? Emma Green explains "how the Federalist Society won," which actually kept awake in the middle of the night on Tuesday. As a reminder that the true goal of the Federalist Society—and right-wing governments in general—is actually to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, the Times explains how Alabama's criminal justice system essentially creates indentured servants from impoverished inmates. David Jolly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Yang have formed a centrist...

I will definitely make time this weekend to drool over the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's kind of sad that no living human will ever see anything outside our solar system, but we can dream, right? Closer to home than the edge of the visible universe: Josh Marshall highlight's a reader's note explaining how the historic conservatism of the Executive Branch legal team won't work any more. The President's conservatism doesn't work either, as recent polls and Democratic-party...

The most interesting (to me) story this afternoon comes from Cranky Flier: American Airlines has a new software tool that can, under specific circumstances, reduce weather-related cancellations by 80% and missed connections by 60%. Nice. In other news: American pharmacies have wasted 82 million (11%) of the 900 million or so Covid-19 vaccine doses we've produced since December 2020—a number that the World Health Organization sees as completely normal for a mass-vaccination campaign. Progressives...

Today I learned about the Zoot Suit Riots that began 79 years ago today in Los Angeles. Wow, humans suck. In other revelations: Service and restaurant workers in Chicago have accelerated their pushes for unionization after their bosses showed just how much they valued their workers during the pandemic. Funny how that works. The President can't do much about global food and gasoline prices, but voters will probably blame him anyway come November. I agree with Josh Marshall that preserving the current...

Sheesh: Eriq Gardener provides four reasons not to think a Supreme Court insider leaked Justice Alito's (R) draft opinion. NPR reports that Justice Thomas (R) of all people complained about people losing respect for the Court. Alex Shephard agrees with me that the GOP caught the car with the Alito leak, but that won't stop them from threatening every other privacy-based right Americans have. Military analyst Mick Ryan examines where the Ukrainian army might engage the Russians next, and how they have...

Just a few: Jerusalem Davis bemoans how community input has become “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Max Boot says we shouldn't fear Putin. An Air France B777 captain and first officer both tried to fly the airplane at the same time on short final into DeGualle, but fortunately only one of them succeeded. The City of Chicago plans to plant 75,000 trees in the next five years. Finally, James Fallows rolls his eyes at the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner, but praises Trevor Noah's...

Some odd stories, some scary stories: Microsoft has released a report on Russia's ongoing cyber attacks against Ukraine. Contra David Ignatius, military policy experts Dr Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds call Russia's invasion of Ukraine "the death throes of imperial delusion" and warn that Putin will likely escalate the conflict rather than face humiliation. Russia historian Tom Nichols puts all of this together and worries about World War III—"not the rhetorical World War III loosely talked about now...

Winter officially has another week and a half to run, but we got a real taste of spring in all its ridiculousness this week: Yesterday the temperature got up to 13°C at O'Hare, up from the -10°C we had Monday morning. It's heading down to -11°C overnight, then up to 7°C on Sunday. (Just wait until I post the graph for the entire week.) Welcome to Chicago in spring. Elsewhere: Republicans in New York and Illinois have a moan about the redistricting processes in those states that will result in...

After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures: In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five segments came in 3rd lowest, ahead of only 2020 and 1999. I only visited one other country (the UK) and two other states (Wisconsin and California) during 2021. What a change from 2014. In 2020, I posted a record 609 times on The Daily Parker; 2021's 537 posts came in about average for the modern era....

Via reporter Stephen Watson, the US Coast Guard attempted a daring rescue from a car stuck less than 100 meters from the American Falls in the Niagara River—which unfortunately became a daring recovery: The harrowing effort by a Coast Guard diver to reach an occupied vehicle caught in the churning Niagara River just 50 yards from the brink of the American Falls drew international notice Wednesday. The rescue attempt ended with the somber news that the woman in the vehicle was already dead before the...

I'm troubled not only that it's already November but also that it's already 5pm. I've been heads-down coding all day and I've got a dress rehearsal tonight. I did, at least, flag these for later: The Times reports on how traffic stops turn deadly for a lot more people than one might think, and certainly a lot more than one would want. Josh Marshall worries about the proportion of the Republican Party who believe political violence solves all problems. I need to check out this new feature in Adobe...

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning: Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court. A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how. The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly. Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines'...

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one. Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues: Ukrainian police arrested members of the Cl0p ransomware gang, seizing money and cars along with the...

I spent the morning unsuccessfully trying to get a .NET 5 Blazor WebAssembly app to behave with an Azure App Registration, and part of the afternoon doing a friend's taxes. Yes, I preferred doing the taxes, because I got my friend a pile of good news without having to read sixty contradictory pages of documentation. I also became aware of the following: The FBI and Australian police completely pwned hundreds of criminals through a black-market "encrypted" cell phone app that they wrote and monitored, in...

The deployment I concluded yesterday that involved recreating production assets in an entirely new Azure subscription turned out much more boring (read: successful) than anticipated. That still didn't stop me from working until 6pm, but by that point everything except some older demo data worked just fine. That left a bit of a backup of stuff to read, which I may try to get through at lunch today: Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (aka "Coach K"), the winningest basketball coach in NCAA...

Travel in the US just got slightly easier now that the Department of Homeland Security has extended the deadline to get REAL ID cards to May 2023. Illinois just started making them a year ago, but you have to go to a Secretary of State office in person to get one. Due to Covid-19, the lines at those facilities often stretch to the next facility a few kilometers away. Reading that made me happier than reading most of the following: The Washington Post has two op-eds today that interested me for reasons...

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth: The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet. Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100. Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA...

This morning, around 2:30 Chicago time, we flew an aircraft over an alien planet: At about 3:30 a.m., the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet, reaching an altitude of about 10 feet, where it hovered, turned and landed softly in an autonomous flight that lasted just 30 seconds, the space agency said. Inside the flight operations center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into...

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter: US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate. Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy. Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake...

Now in our 46th hour above freezing, with the sun singing, the birds coming up, and the crocuses not doing anything noteworthy, it feels like spring. We even halted our march up the league table in most consecutive days of more than 27.5 cm of snow on the ground, tying the record set in 2001 at 25 days. (Only 25 cm remained at 6am, and I would guess a third of that will melt by noon.) So, what else is going on in the world? The Atlantic's Joe Pinsker says life could feel almost normal this summer, but...

Aditya Singh never left O'Hare after arriving on October 19th: Singh, 36, lived in the secure area with access to terminals, shops and food at O’Hare International Airport until his arrest Saturday after two United Airlines employees asked to see his identification, prosecutors said. He showed them an airport ID badge that an operations manager had reported missing on Oct. 26. Police said Singh told them that the coronavirus pandemic left him too afraid to fly and so he instead remained in the airport...

What a bizarre year. Just looking at last year's numbers, it almost doesn't make sense to compare, but what the hell: Last year I flew the fewest air-miles in 20 years; this year, I flew the fewest since the first time I got on a commercial airplane, which was during the Nixon Administration. In January I flew to Raleigh-Durham and back, and didn't even go to the airport for the rest of the year. That's 1,292 air miles, fewer than the very first flight I took (Chicago to Los Angeles, 1,745 air miles). I...

Today's news stories comprise a mixed bag: Famed test pilot and Air Force General Chuck Yeager died yesterday, on the 4th anniversary of astronaut John Glenn's death and the day before the 40th anniversary of John Lennon's. Michael Gerson takes Evangelical Christian leaders to task for supporting the president's attempted autogolpe. Chef Edward Lee, writing in Bon Appétit, frets that Covid-19 could end the renaissance of independent restaurants we experienced in the last 20 years. Chicago alderman Tom...

It could be worse. It might yet be: Covid-19 cases have started to climb once again in the US, passing 8 million just three weeks after passing 7 million. In Illinois, we hit a second consecutive record, with 4,554 new cases today. (There were a record 4,015 yesterday.) TNR's Alex Shepherd says NBC did the Biden campaign a huge favor by booking the president, forcing a direct comparison between the two candidates in real time. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance compares the absurd conspiracy theory QAnon...

I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up: Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly. The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting. Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it." Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore. Garmin's entire production...

Just a few things have cropped up in the news since yesterday: President Trump has threatened to send federal agents to "assist" with Chicago's efforts to curb gun violence, which no one except the Trump-supporting head of our police union wants. Michelle Goldberg calls the presence of federal agents in Portland a harbinger of fascism, while the ACLU calls it "a constitutional crisis" and has filed suit to reverse the policy. Also in Portland, an unidentified woman wearing only a hat and face mask...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 14-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2019, and the world has changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 20 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many...

It's day 88 of my exile from the office, but I recently found out I may get to go in for a day soon. Will this happen before the 24th (day 100)? Who's got the over/under on that? Meanwhile, outside my bubble: A new book alleges that Melania Trump remained in New York during the first few months of her husband's presidency as a tactic in renegotiating her prenuptial agreement. Michael Tomsky asks, "Why does Trump lie?" Cellphone data shows that people in some parts of the country are gathering at...

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up: Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate. Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad." Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula...

Long day, with meetings until 8:45pm and the current sprint ending tomorrow at work, so I'll read most of these after the spring review: Tara Smith warns about the unholy alliance of anti-vaxers and Covid-19 quarantine protesters. Libby Watson calls it a "deranged civil religion." You think President Trump firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was about walking Mike Pompeo's dogs? Uh, no. It was about the $8 bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia that Linick was about to expose. Why is Trump...

Today I'll try to avoid the most depressing stories: The North Shore Channel Trail bridge just north of Lincoln Avenue opened this week, completing an 11 km continuous path from Lincoln Square to Evanston. Experts warn that herd immunity (a) is an economic concept, not a health concept and (b) shouldn't apply to humans because we're not herd animals. Wisconsin remains in total chaos today after the state supreme court terminated Governor Tony Evans' stay-at-home order, approximately two weeks before...

Today's Covid-19 news roundup highlights how no one in the White House should go anywhere near this crisis response effort: President Trump ordered a halt to payments to the World Health Organization as part of his effort to blame them for his botched response to the pandemic. He also delayed sending relief checks to tens of millions of people because he wants his name to appear on them. Kellyanne Conway, while criticizing the WHO for not knowing anything about Covid-19, demonstrates she doesn't know...

No, I don't mean Kenny Rogers, who died last night at age 83. I mean that Royal Dutch Airlines KLM has decided to remove all their 747s from service nine months early because of the pandemic: The current date of the final flight is March 26, though even that date could get moved up if more flight cancellations ensue. Generally speaking, fleet retirements are met with large fanfare. The last two major airlines to retire the 747-400, United and Delta, both in 2017, had large send-off parties and several...

What an exciting 24 hours. President Trump made a statement from the Oval Office last night about the COVID-19 pandemic that completely failed to reassure anyone, in part because it contained numerous errors and misstatements. By announcing a ban on travel from the Schengen area of 26 European countries that applies to non-US residents, he enraged our European allies while doing nothing to stop the spread of the virus for the simple reason that the virus has already spread to the US. Not to mention...

Daredevil "Mad" Mike Hughes, who either believed the world is flat or merely played the role of a Flat Earther, died Saturday trying to launch a home-made rocket in an effort to "prove" the belief: In December, buttressed by his conviction and advances in homemade rocketry, “Mad” Mike Hughes flipped on a camera and fantasized about the moment when he shows mankind that it lives on a verdant disk. The plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high...

Not just articles today, but also a whole HBO mini-series: Starting Monday, HBO will air a 6-part series on the infamous McDonald's Monopoly fraud, about which I have posted previously. That interesting new take-out place you saw on GrubHub? It might not exist. Republicans voting in favor of President Trump's abuse of power and obstruction of Congress will be remembered. The Atlantic calls Facebook's new data-privacy tool "a data landfill." Airlines have slashed flight schedules in and out of China as a...

...that I finally passed my private pilot checkride and got my certificate. I finished all the requirements for the checkride except for two cross-country flights for practice on 18 July 1999. Unfortunately, the weather in New Jersey sucked on almost every weekend for the next six months. I finally took a day off from work in early December, took my checkride...and failed a landing. (I was too far off centerline to pass, but otherwise it was a perfectly safe landing.) It then took another six weeks to...

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post: Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers. James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book. Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security. And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order. I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

With only two weeks left in the decade, it looks like the 2010s will end...bizarrely. More people have taken a look at the President's unhinged temper tantrum yesterday. I already mentioned that Aaron Blake annotated it. The Times fact-checked it. And Jennifer Rubin says "It is difficult to capture how bizarre and frightening the letter is simply by counting the utter falsehoods...or by quoting from the invective dripping from his pen." As for the impeachment itself, Josh Marshall keeps things simple...

First, it turns out, my Surface didn't die; only its power supply shuffled off its lithium coil. I got a new power supply and all is well. Which means I can take a moment to note a proposed flight on QANTAS* that even I would struggle to take. Starting in 2022, the Australian airline proposes a 16,000 km non-stop flight from New York to Sydney that will take 20 hours: Qantas wants to begin flying the time-saving route commercially as soon as 2022, so the airline used this test trip to explore ways to...

Queued up a few articles to read after work today: The Tribune has a short guide to Chicago's brewpubs aimed at the perplexed. Marvel has announced a bunch more superhero movies, coming on the heels of Avengers: Endgame becoming the highest-grossing film ever. Cranky Flier looks at Tijuana's new terminal—on the American side of the border. Nathan Heller asks, "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?" Greg Sargent cautions the press not to buy into Attorney General William Barr's framing of former FBI...

If only it weren't another beautiful early-summer day in Chicago, I might spend some time indoors reading these articles: On the 40th anniversary of the Flight 191 disaster in Chicago, Ask the Pilot draws comparisons between the troubles of the DC-10 and the 737-MAX. Does ride-sharing increase traffic congestion? Uh, yeah. Duh. Yesterday was the Chicago El's 127th birthday. Scott Hanselman remarks on "clever little C# features" that make him happy. A 68-year old survey, the Public Policy Mood estimate...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

The day after a 3-day, 3-flight weekend doesn't usually make it into the top-10 productive days of my life. Like today for instance. So here are some things I'm too lazy to write more about today: More evidence that living on the west side of a time zone causes sleep deprivation. Over the weekend, at 2pm on Saturday, Chicago set a record for the lowest humidity on record. A software developer and pilot looks at the relationship between the software and hardware of the Boeing 737-MAX. The grounding of...

Today actually had a lot of news, not all of which I've read yet: About 60,000 commuters couldn't get home tonight after Amtrak signaling at Union Station, Chicago, broke down. Writing for New Republic, Matt Ford calls Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress today "the art of the deal you can't refuse."  David Frum (among others) points out that for all the GOP's impugning of Cohen's character, no one actually refuted the facts of his testimony. The Economist's Gulliver column speculates that US carriers...

Beth Moses describes her first flight on the Virgin Galactic space ship on Friday: I mean. C'mon. That's cool.

From a longtime reader in the UK comes the story of British Airways (callsign: "Speedbird") celebrating the airline's 100th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of the Boeing 747 by painting one in its 1964-to-1974 BOAC livery: Large crowds turned out at Heathrow on Monday to welcome the plane, decked out in livery not seen for four decades. The plane will keep flying in its retro BOAC design until 2023, British Airways said in a statement. Tuesday's flight retraces the first route a Boeing 747 took in...

I'm under the weather today, which has helped me catch up on all these stories that I haven't gotten to yet: The Chicago Tribune announced their critics choice dining awards for 2018. Yum. Megan Garber explains why female Democratic representatives wore white to the State of the Union address. Matt Ford says the actual speech was a waste. Chicago History Today compares North Michigan Avenue today with 1931. Josh Marshall says the president is scared—and should be. Jeff Bezos calls the National...

Some questions: Why did 16 members of my party threaten to make a Republican Speaker of the House? Why didn't the White House Staff Secretary prevent a ridiculous statement about the Khashoggi killing from going out? Is it because many of the most-qualified rats have already jumped ship? Why don't builders think about how their buildings will come down when they're putting them up? How can we fix our country's broken immigration system? Can Chicago's Greektown survive? How badly have Uber and Lyft hurt...

The Economist's Gulliver blog this morning asked exactly the same question I did when I woke up: how likely is it to get ill from flying on an airplane? Not very: Planes are widely regarded as flying disease-incubators. If one passenger is sick with a contagious disease and coughing those germs into the air, it makes sense for fellow-flyers to feel that the germs will simply be inhaled by everyone else on the flight, since there is nowhere else for the things to go. In reality, though, the situation is...

This coffee shop, on Bermondsey Street: And this airplane: Actually, the A380 was pretty cool inside, though I may have erred getting an upper-deck seat. Next trip to London, I'll go for a lower-deck seat if I can. (Or even business class...hmmm...)

Most people starting college this year were born in 2000. Let that sink in. Then read this: They are the first class born in the new millennium, escaping the dreaded label of “Millennial,” though their new designation—iGen, GenZ, etc. — has not yet been agreed upon by them. Outer space has never been without human habitation. They have always been able to refer to Wikipedia. They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too. People loudly conversing with themselves in public...

I didn't have a chance to read these yesterday: Boxer Joe Louis had a home in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. As of yesterday, none of the 4 major U.S. air carriers has propeller-driven airplanes in service anymore. Juggalo makeup can reliably defeat facial recognition software. Contra this article by Franklin Foer, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior really is annoying. Now I'm off to work. The heat wave of the last few days has finally broken!

Elon Musk's Boring Co. has gotten approval to start work on a high-speed underground connection between O'Hare and downtown Chicago: The promised project: A closed-loop pair of tunnels from Block 37 in the central Loop to the airport that would whisk passengers to their flights in 12 minutes, using autonomous pod-like vehicles, or electric skates, that would depart as frequently as every 30 seconds and carry up to 16 passengers and their luggage. If all goes as it should, [Deputy Mayor Robert] Rivkin...

British Airways has started daily service between Chicago and London on the Airbus A380: Last year, British Airways said it would begin using the A380 on one of two daily flights between Chicago and London. The aircraft seats up to 469 passengers in four cabins, including 14 first-class suites, 97 lie-flat business-class seats and 55 premium economy seats, with the remaining 303 in coach, British Airways said. It’s only within the past couple of years that O’Hare has had facilities to accommodate the...

In the last seven days, these things have happened: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the worst Secretary of State in modern history?) got kicked out in typical Trump Administration fashion (i.e., without notice and on Twitter). This may have had something to do with him stating firmly that... ...Russian operatives attempted to assassinate a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, resulting in... ...the UK government expelled 23 Russian diplomats after determining that the assassination attempt...

I drove up to Milwaukee and back today for work, so not a lot of time to write today. I will only point to pilot Patrick Smith's observation that 2017 was the safest year ever for commercial aviation—and this had nothing to do with the president: One. Of the more than two billion people who flew commercially last year worldwide, that’s the number who were killed in airline accidents. One person. That unfortunate soul was a passenger on board an ATR turboprop that crashed after takeoff in Canada in...

Photographer Mark Holtzman flew a Cessna 206 over the Rose Bowl on Monday—and captured one of the coolest aerial photos I've ever seen. He explains the shot in The Atlantic: I’m always talking with them. It’s run under the Pasadena Police, so I get a clearance. They don’t want anybody just flying around during a big event like that, even though you theoretically can. So I was on a discreet frequency, the same frequency as the B-2, talking to them. They know me now. Unlike film, the way you shoot digital...

I'm under the weather today, probably owing to the two Messiah performances this weekend and all of Parker's troubles. So even though I'm taking it easy, I still have a queue of things to read: NBC is reporting that the President was warned in August that Russians would try to infiltrate his transition team. Josh Marshall thinks Trump will try to fire Robert Mueller at some point in the near future. Atlanta's Hartsfield airport—the busiest in the world—had no power for 12 hours yesterday. CityLab goes...

I'm about to head to SFO after this very-quick trip to California. My sleeping Surface will have these articles waiting for me to read: The Economist's Gulliver blog grumbles about airlines squeezing bathrooms to make room for more seats on planes. The Atlantic has a history of how the Agile Manifesto came about. In this era of heightened awareness about sexual harassment, it's comforting to know some Silicon Valley companies continue quaint traditions like hiring models to pose as party guests. New...

Pilot Patrick Smith writes an ode to Maho Beach, Sint Maarten, which remains closed after being partially destroyed by Hurricane Irma three weeks ago: St. Maarten — or St. Martin — is part French and part Dutch. Princess Juliana (SXM) is in the Dutch section, and Maho sits just off end of runway 10. And when I say “just off,” I mean only a few hundred feet from the landing threshold. As arriving planes cross the beach, they are less than a hundred feet overhead. For an idea of close this is, you can...

Via AVWeb, a company in Seattle is making an old kind of drone: Two brothers in Seattle, working as Egan Airships, have built a drone that combines features from both fixed-wing aircraft and blimps to create an aircraft that can hover, take off and land vertically, and fly at up to 40 mph. The 28-foot-long aircraft weighs less than 55 pounds and uses a patented streamlined envelope design, rotational wings and an extended tail. It’s powered on both the wings and the tail. The inflated portion of the...

This turns out to be my 35th trip to Heathrow this century. Of those, 20 have flown from O'Hare, and of those, 11 were on American flight 90. This is, however, the first time I've flown on AAL90 in something other than a Boeing 767, and I have to say I really like the business class in American's 787-8 planes. This is not my first time in a 787, nor is it my first time in business class on one. (It's my second for both.) I flew from London to Montreal in British Airways' coach class in 2013, and from...

Chicago-based Boeing tested new engines on a 787-8 Wednesday, and chose an imaginative flight path: Quartz has the story: Without context, this seems like a publicity stunt. The distance covered in the flight is estimated to be about 25,400 km (15,800 miles). By one estimate, the 787-8 dumped more than 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide in the process. The endeavor was not a complete waste. A Boeing spokesperson told Quartz that today’s flight was to test the endurance of new engines and it was required by...

Through a number of circumstances mostly beyond my control, I didn't fly anywhere between last December 26th and this past Saturday, a total of 208 days. I have to go all the way back to 2006, when I didn't fly for 154 days, to get even close to that interval. On average, since 1 January 2001 I've taken a flight every 10.6 days. Even last year, in which I flew the fewest miles since 2003, I flew every 25 days on average. Well, the next five weeks will bring the 2017 average up a bit. But still, I miss...

Among the browser windows I have open are these: An AI is getting inspirational posters horribly wrong...or is it? An 80-year-old woman wanted good luck on her flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou threw coins in one of the engines, causing a 5-hour delay and $140,000 in damage. Crain's looks at census data in an interactive feature on Chicago's wealth divides. Republicans still refuse to acknowledge that the goal of their Obamacare repeal efforts is to get millions of people off government-backed health...

Following up on last week, Ask the Pilot weighs in on exactly why the heat in Phoenix is grounding airplanes: Extreme heat affects planes in a few different ways. First, there are aerodynamic repercussions. Hotter air is less dense than cooler air, so a wing produces less lift. This is compounded by reduced engine output. Jet engines don’t like low-density air either, and don’t perform as well in hot weather. Together, this means higher takeoff and landing speeds — which, in turn, increases the amount...

Phoenix hit a record high temperature yesterday of 48°C, and it's already that hot again today. And right now, it's 50°C in Needles, Calif. In fact, it's too hot for airplanes to take off: As the Capital Weather Gang reported, the Southwest is experiencing its worst heat wave in decades. Excessive heat warnings have been in effect from Arizona to California and will be for the remainder of the week. And it was so hot that dozens of flights have been canceled this week at Phoenix Sky Harbor International...

Paul Allen has funded development of an airplane designed to launch satellites into space. It's...huge: Called Stratolaunch, the plane has some impressive stats: a wingspan of 117 m, or longer than a football field, and a height of 15.24 m. Unfueled, it weighs 226,800 kg. But it can carry 113,400 kg of fuel, and its total weight can reach 590 tonnes. But, really ... how big is it? It’s so big that it has 28 wheels and six 747 jet engines. It’s so big that it has 96 km of wire coursing through it. It’s...

Some articles: Jeet Heer writes about President Trump's catastrophic first 100 days. Josh Marshall says that Trump's "religion of 'winning'" is the problem. Crain's Joe Cahill thinks that the best thing to come out of the United Airlines passenger-removal fiasco is that Oscar Munoz won't become chairman. John Oliver on Sunday warned the world about the deficiencies and scary realities of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Harvard professor David Searls, in a post from September 2015, calls ad blocking "the...

The United Airlines debacle at O'Hare last week underscored how much people really hate airlines: The severity of the situation really dawned on me last Thursday as I sat in an interview with a local Fox reporter. We started talking about the Chicago Aviation Police, and that’s when it hit me. Over the last few years, police violence has been a hot-button issue. It has spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has polarized people around the country. And here was a textbook example of what people...

Apparently we're now frightened of everything: Passengers on foreign airlines headed to the United States from 10 airports in eight majority-Muslim countries have been barred from carrying electronic devices larger than a cellphone under a new flight restriction enacted on Tuesday by the Trump administration. Officials called the directive an attempt to address gaps in foreign airport security, and said it was not based on any specific or credible threat of an imminent attack. The Department of Homeland...

Tabs open but not read in my browser: Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Education Secretary, knows almost nothing about public schools. Trump probably knows almost nothing about NATO, but is still a danger to the alliance. Republicans in general know almost nothing about health insurance. Sixty members of the House are skipping the inauguration, including mine. A drone operator managed to get a $1.2m fine reduced to $200,000. But they're still in trouble. There was one more item, but it's too big to...

Starting May 1st, general aviation pilots like me will have an easier time getting aviation medical endorsements: Starting on May 1, pilots will have the option to maintain their 3rd class medical, or opt to use the BasicMed rule. Under BasicMed, a pilot will be required to complete an online medical education course every two years, undergo a medical exam every four years, and comply with aircraft and operating restrictions. The medical exam will include a four-page FAA form to be completed by your...

Yesterday's flight to London took only 6 hours, 37 minutes from wheels-up to landing. That is, in fact, the fastest I've ever gotten from O'Hare to Heathrow, by 8 minutes. I am impressed.

It's not all about PETUS today: Via AVWeb, the FAA has issued an airworthiness directive requiring owners of Boeing 787-8 airplanes to reboot them at least every 21 days. I am not making this up. Trump, never a fan of intelligence of any kind, is sticking his fingers in his ears about Russian hacking of our election. Jeet Heer warns that this yet another way Trump is very dangerous. Plus, he's lying about the CIA's role in the Iraq WMD fiasco. It wasn't the CIA who lied; it was the Administration. By...

Folks, if you have to evacuate a burning 767, leave your fucking bags in the plane. That would have prevented most of the injuries sustained when this happened yesterday at O'Hare: The plane's 161 passengers and nine crew members scrambled down emergency chutes on the left side of the plane while flames flared and thick black smoke billowed from the wing on the right side, according to the airline and video from the scene. Twenty people were taken to hospitals with minor injuries, mostly bruises and...

All of these articles look interesting, and I hope I get to read them: 538 explains how the Cubs beat Cleveland last night, and how they might do it 3 more times. Richard Florida explains how the class divide in the US is only getting worse. The DNC is suing the RNC over voter intimidation tactics. London's Heathrow is one step closer to getting a third runway. Trying to get to Wrigleyville this weekend? The Tribune has a guide for you. There's new data about what happens in your brain when you lie....

Amazon this month launched the first of what it plans to comprise a fleet of 40 cargo planes to support its Prime delivery service. From their blog: Now, we see the same opportunity to innovate in transportation. I'm very excited to introduce Amazon One, a Boeing 767-300 that is our first ever Amazon branded plane which will serve customers by adding capacity to support one and two day package delivery in the US. Adding capacity for Prime members by developing a dedicated air cargo network ensures there...

WBEZ's Curious City audio blog explains that Chicago hoped to be America's aviation hub all the way back in the 1920s—for airships. But it's not the ideal environment in which to dock them: When it comes to Chicago buildings that may or may not have had airship docking infrastructure, we encounter only a few leads. One involves the Blackstone Hotel. In a 1910 article from Chicago’s Inter-Ocean newspaper, the Blackstone’s manager confirms plans to build “Drome Station No. 1” on the rooftop — big enough...

Cranky Flier points out that while tourism to the UK is really a great deal right now (as I'd attest), it's going to be a lot more expensive if Brexit actually happens: Today the UK is part of the European Common Aviation Area (CAA). That means that UK-based airlines can fly anywhere within Europe they want, just as if they were based in any of those other European countries. The same goes for European airlines flying within the UK. It also means that bilateral agreements negotiated by the EU with third...

Too many things to read before lunchtime: Chicago's NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has a new mobile app. There's a new mobile device that functions like a Babel fish. Republicans really don't care about your unborn baby. Serbian authorities colluded with a Dubai-based property developer to illegally destroy an entire neighborhood overnight. A snarky Republican writing for Bloomberg actually makes a good point about why the TSA may be taking much longer to screen you than before. It looks like your brain naturally...

Pilot Patrick Smith wishes Boeing would update the 40-year-old aircraft instead of pushing the 737 into ungainly configurations: What I think about the 737 is that Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry fewer than a hundred passengers — and has pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and pushed the thing to the edge of its envelope, through a long series of derivatives, from the -200 through the -900, and now onward to the 737 “MAX.”...

Cranky Flier thinks Brussels Airlines has done a remarkable job keeping its passengers moving after its principal hub closed for repairs last week: Two days after the bombing, Brussels Airlines started to get things running, but only on its short haul network. It deployed its Avro RJ100 aircraft to Antwerp, a mere half hour north of Brussels Airport, to fly within Europe. That may sound ideal, but the airport has a runway less than 5,000 feet long. The Avro can handle that with ease, but it’s not great...

Stuff: Deeply Trivial explains a haunting using Occam's Razor. Delta Airlines apologized for a fistfight between two flight attendants. The Chicago Public Schools have been in trouble for a while, but it just got worse. Krugman predicted two horrible people would top the GOP results in Iowa last night, and he was right. New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority will roll out new "open gangway" subway cars by 2020. Hey, brewers, stop these horrible craft brewing trends. Please. Someone call lunch...

The Dept of Homeland Security says we can still use our drivers licenses at airports until 2018: The shift gives breathing room to Illinois, which had expected its driver's licenses and IDs to be inadequate for air travel, including domestic flights, as early as this spring. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last fall declined to give Illinois a third deadline extension for meeting the Real ID Act standards put into place in 2005. As a result, it was expected that Illinois travelers by the middle...

As I mentioned Thursday, I'm on a mileage run. But because I'm an aviation geek, not only am I trying to hold onto elite status for 2016, but also I'm trying out American Airlines' newest airplanes. Yesterday's flight from JFK to LAX got me on the A321 Transcontinental (along with, no kidding, both Laura Linney and Natalie Dormer). Today's gets me from LAX to DFW on this gorgeous thing: They're seamless, you know. If you look at the fuselage of any other passenger airplane, you see rivets, welds, all...

The Boston Globe thinks it's time to do away with the TSA: Let’s face it: The Transportation Security Administration, which annually costs taxpayers more than $7 billion, should never have been created. The responsibility for airport security should never have been federalized, let alone entrusted to a bloated, inflexible workforce. Former TSA administrator Kip Hawley calls it “a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic” and warns that “the relationship...

First, Pabu Izakaya, early Saturday night (pre-party): The inscription reads, "One Time, One Place." Second, yesterday, on approach to Chicago: That's approximately over Devon Ave., on approach to 27R, as I predicted.

A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why: At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck. Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical...

I'm camped in a familiar spot, SFO Terminal 2, on my way home. Traveling Saturday morning means no traffic, no lines at security, and sometimes no sleep. That fortunately isn't a problem today; in fact, had I gotten up half an hour earlier, I might have made the 8am flight home instead of the 9:15 I'm on. Longtime reader MJG just sent me this to pass the time waiting for my flight to board:

Patrick Smith was appalled by the British Airways incident last week. Not as much by the plane catching fire as by idiot passengers evacuating with their luggage: Aboard British Airways flight 2276, the evacuation process may have seemed orderly and calm. How would things have unfolded, though, had a fuel tank exploded, or had the smoke and fire suddenly spread inside the plane? Now people are screaming. There’s a mad rush for the exits, but the aisle is clogged with suitcases dropped by panicked...

I lost my Kindle on the flight to London last week, and only just got its replacement yesterday afternoon. Good thing, too, because I'm loading it up with articles I can't read until later: Anthropologists have discovered a new human species and it's weird. A Federal investigation into New Jersey politics that led to United Airlines' CEO resigning started with an unprofitable weekly flight that the airline allegedly scheduled to bribe an official. (Aviation, politics, and corrupt Republicans...total...

I happened to notice just now that the plane I'm on passed within a few hundred meters of 50°N and 50°W, just over the Grand Banks east of Newfoundland. That I was able to notice this goes in the category of things called "I love living in the future," as it involved a mobile phone with GPS and enough memory to store a kilometer-resolution map of the entire hemisphere in its Google Maps app cache. Within five years we'll have ubiquitous Internet worldwide, and this will seem as quaint as one of Darwin's...

The ink on the Iranian nuclear deal isn't dry yet, but already American and European companies are starting to benefit: Iran plans to buy as many as 90 planes per year from Boeing and Airbus to revamp its antiquated fleet once Western sanctions are lifted, its state news agency IRNA quoted a senior aviation official as saying on Sunday. "Iran will buy a total of 80-90 planes per year from the two aviation giants in the first phase of renovating its air fleet," said Mohammad Khodakarami, the caretaker...

Security guru Bruce Schneier, writing for CNN, is not surprised that TSA screeners missed 95% of guns in a recent drill: For those of us who have been watching the TSA, the 95% number wasn't that much of a surprise. The TSA has been failing these sorts of tests since its inception: failures in 2003, a 91% failure rate at Newark Liberty International in 2006, a 75% failure rate at Los Angeles International in 2007, more failures in 2008. And those are just the public test results; I'm sure there are many...

South Africa Airlines will no longer transport your trophies: Shooting a marvel of nature and shipping its carcass home seems an odd practice to many. But business is roaring. An estimated 1,000 captive lions are shot dead by mostly American and European tourists on South African ranches annually. That's nearly double the number of wild lions felled across the entire continent. Killing beasts in fenced-off, private property is easier than gunning them down on their own turf. It's also much cheaper...

In the reading queue: DUKE WON. Air Canada and Porter Air are squabbling over Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport. Hard to tell who's winning. A sad tale of how it really is possible to run out of integers in a badly-designed program. What is this new quick-fired pizza thing? My most culinary friend said it's pretty good. Guess I'll have to try it. James Fallows and The Atlantic have published online a story he wrote in 1982 about the dawning age of personal computing. Did I mention that DUKE WON?!

Sigh. I just don't have the slacker skills required to read these things during the work day: Pilot/Journalist James Fallows has thoughts on the apparent mass murder by a Germanwings pilot on Tuesday. The Economist has thoughts on how the strong dollar affects tourism in both directions across the Atlantic. (Hint: I'm not sad I'm going to Italy in seven weeks.) Our local NPR affiliate investigates Chicago's rabbit infestation, currently at about 30 rodents per hectare (which is about 12 per acre)....

With a little more than five days until my next international flight, I'm stocking up my Kindle: Richard Florida looks at youthification instead of gentrification. Cranky Flier talks about Korean Airlines code-sharing with American. American Airlines, meanwhile, is becoming the sole Chicago Cubs airline sponsor, displacing United. Should we migrate JavaScript to TypeScript? UAT release this afternoon. Back to the galley.

In other news, American Airlines took delivery of its first Boeing 787-8 yesterday: The airplane, N800AN, is scheduled to leave Paine Field at 10 a.m. and arrive at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport at 4:21 p.m.. It’ll be parked at an American hangar there. “Once the plane arrives, the Tech Ops team at our DWH maintenance base at DFW will begin the acceptance process and prepare the airplane for flight training and other readiness activities, including putting the final touches on the interior and...

Interesting things to read: Climate change deniers, take note: even though 2014 was really cold in part of the U.S., it was still the warmest year ever worldwide. Two posts on the Microsoft Azure blog: how to add auto-complete suggestions using Azure Search, and how to tune Azure DocumentDB performance. Could airlines start giving landing preference to their own high-value flights? Chicagoist has their best brunches list up. Yum. We might start using JetBrains TeamCity for continuous integration. More...

The trouble with holiday parties on Wednesday is that you have to function on Thursday. So, to spare my brain from having to do anything other than the work-related things its already got to do, here are things I will read later: Dick Cheney is a monster. Police subterfuge is a security problem, and can have very bad unintended consequences. There are some new improvements in Microsoft Azure automation. Our policy on Cuba, which the president just ended, was colossally stupid. Chicago's winter may not...

Business travel sometimes presents contradictions. Here are mine today: Good news: I got assigned to do a technical diligence in Paris. Bad news: We'll be at the airport for two days, with only one opportunity to see the city. Good news: Hey, it's an all-expense-paid trip to Europe. Bad news: In coach, which is really grim on an overnight flight such as one from Chicago to Paris. Good news: There's a 9am flight to London and the Eurostar to get me to Paris the next morning. Bad news: I have to get up at...

Well, little time today. Since I'll be on an airplane for 8 hours on Sunday, I will probably have time to catch up on these: The Chicago Tribune's John Kass doesn't like the Episode 7 lightsaber. Chicago Public Media's Jim DeRogatis doesn't like Pomplamoose. Cranky Flier wonders why American Airlines doesn't like profit-sharing. I will probably really like Microsoft Azure DocumentDB partitioning (but it's a pretty esoteric topic for most Daily Parker readers). Your solid-state drive (SSD) probably likes...

Cranky Flier, a nerd after my own heart, sees so much missed potential with the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, an airplane that makes its last commercial passenger flight this weekend: This week marks the final commercial flight of the last of the Douglas widebody aircraft. When KLM flight 672 from Montreal touches down in Amsterdam at 635a on Sunday, the era of the trijet in airline service will officially end. I’ll miss the MD-11, but today I’m going to focus on the negative. The MD-11 was a symbol of...

The apotheosis of modern aviation's intersection with modern communications—in-flight internet service—is a tease sometimes. For $50 a month, I get unlimited in-flight internet on American an U.S. Airways. And I'm on a brand-new 737-800, with a functioning seat-back entertainment unit that says I'm over south-central Utah. However, because I planned to have in-flight internet on this flight, and the internet connection appears to have dropped completely, I now have no way to communicate with my team and...

As the summer has turned into fall the last couple of years, I've carefully monitored my air travel to ensure that I keep my elite status on American Airlines. One technique, which I may have used this year if I didn't work for West Monroe, is a mileage run: flying one or more low-cost legs to boost your mileage. Via the Economist's Gulliver blog, the Times' Josh Barry says mileage runs are going away: In the last year, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines have made two major changes to their reward...

The Chicago Air and Water Show may not happen today because of rare weather conditions: [T]he Chicago National Weather Service said "rare low clouds" are impacting the Air and Water show. Low clouds have a ceiling height of 1,000 feet, the weather service said. Only 2 to 3 percent of August days have had low clouds since 1973, the weather service said. Now, skipping the foggy understanding of weather terms and government agencies the ABC reporter showed in that paragraph, it doesn't look good for the...

I'm back in Chicago today, but catching up on all the things I couldn't do from Cleveland. Regular posting should resume tomorrow. Also, at 6 hours and 15 minutes to get from the client site to my house door-to-door, plus renting a car in Cleveland and having to schlepp bags hither and yon, I'm wondering if I should just drive next time.

Via the Economist's Gulliver blog, Airbus has taken out a patent on the worst airplane seats imaginable: Airbus’s patent says that traditional seats cannot be narrowed any further, or the pitch reduced much more, in order to accommodate extra passengers. Therefore, carriers will have to redesign the seats if they want to cram in more flyers. Its suggestion is a fold-down saddle, a small backrest and a couple of retractable armrests. Certainly no tray-tables, underseat storage or pockets to keep your...

To lose one partially-completed airplane is unfortunate; to lose six smacks of carelessness: Nineteen cars in a 90-car BNSF Railway Co train loaded with six 737 narrow-body fuselages and assemblies for Boeing's 777 and 747 wide-body jets derailed near Rivulet, Montana on Thursday. Oops. At least no one was hurt. Photo: Kyle Massick, Reuters

I love the night buses in London. Given my habit of staying on Chicago time, I've ridden my share of them. (If American 90 arrives after 11:30pm, I'm guaranteed to do so.) So today's story in the Atlantic's CityLab blog about the phenomenon made me smile: You see, London’s night buses are actually the great, unsung glory of the city’s travel network. Compared with cabs, they’re dirt cheap (they cost the same as a regular daytime bus), come extremely frequently and cover a wide area, and go quickly...

My bag has arrived at Gatwick. This means, instead of sleeping in, getting a leisurely brunch, and hopping on the Eurostar at St. Pancras (just a few blocks away), instead I have to get up now, hop the Victoria line from St. Pancras to Victoria, spend £40 on a needless trip to Gatwick, then reverse the process back to St. Pancras. And brunch will be some kind of pastry and some tea on the run. My friends assure me this is why they hate traveling. I don't think this has anything to do with traveling per...

The SR-20 was the first GA airplane with a parachute. It means emergencies are a lot less likely to kill you, as an instructor and student pilot discovered yesterday: Yesterday there was another dramatic save, near the very busy suburban airport Hanscom Field in the western suburbs of Boston. As you can see in a TV news report here (not embeddable) the plane for some reason had an engine failure; the woman who was serving as flight instructor calmly reported the situation to the tower, directed the...

...these: An infographic series explaining Game of Thrones. How much Cliven Bundy benefited from the government. Yet another 5-4 Supreme Court decision, this one allowing prayers at public meetings. Aircraft traffic-avoidance software got confused when a U-2 spy plane flew over Los Angeles. Since arguing with creationists is pointless, how can we preserve science education in vulnerable regions? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing VP Selena Meyer, teams up with real VP Joe Biden in this introduction to the...

Just checking the local news in Chicago a moment ago I see a weather forecast of -2°C and blowing snow for Tuesday, rain for the rest of the week, and a crash at the O'Hare subway station: Thirty people were injured after a CTA Blue Line train derailed and hit a platform at O'Hare International Airport about 2:55 a.m. Monday. The injuries are not life threatening, according to early reports from the scene to Chicago Police Department headquarters, Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Ron...

It's 11pm on Sunday and everything is closed, so I'm taking a break from my break. My body still seems to think it's on Chicago time, which will help me rejoin American civilization on Tuesday, though at the moment it means my body thinks it's 6pm and wonders what it will do for the next three and a half hours or so. I have accomplished what I set out to do this weekend. I visited the British Museum, the Southampton Arms, and another pub a friend recommended, The Phoenix. I've also finished Clean Coder...

If I have time, I'll read these articles today: Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things, which is actually just his version of this kind of link round-up; Cranky Flier on American Airlines fare changes following the merger; The Daily WTF's CodeSOD of the Day; Now that Windows Azure SQL Database has launched page compression, a review of best practices around the technology; and Confirmation that the meterological winter ending last Friday was the third coldest and third snowiest in recroded history....

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in September 2011, more than 1,300 posts back, so it's time for a refresh. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 13 years. That site deals with raw data and objective...

So how do people at Maho Beach know when planes are landing? They check the surfboard: And now my final Maho Beach photo for this trip, a US Airways A330 coming in from Charlotte: We now return to your regularly-scheduled winter, already in progress...

American Airlines and US Airways are now legally one company: While we’ve legally combined as one company, we'll continue to function as two separate airlines for quite some time, and very few changes will happen immediately. This is especially important throughout the busy holiday travel season, as our first priority will be delivering a smooth operation for customers of both airlines. There is no impact to any existing travel reservations you may have with American Airlines or US Airways at this time...

Oh, so this is the world's greatest airport. All right, I can go to aviation heaven now, and shop on the way. Don't get me wrong: less than 10 minutes after I checked in, I was through security and immigration. Kind of like at O'Hare the day I left, it turns out, but Incheon extends that efficiency to everyone, not just those of us who have gotten our Pre-Check clearances. And I do appreciate the "best shopping chance" advertised on the train, in the check-in area, on the escalators, and in the loo....

Yesterday, on the Siberia side of the Bering Sea: Our flight path yesterday followed the terminator as the earth turned. The sun stayed right on the tip of the left wing for about 90 minutes before we jogged slightly west over Kamchatka.

Not one bit: They took a somewhat entertaining idea and made a monster out of it. The video runs for an excruciating five minutes. Imagine being a Virgin America frequent flyer — or employee — and having to listen to that thing over and over and over and over. The cabin crew are going to need counseling. Airline safety briefings are a kind of legal fine print come to life. They do contain some important and useful info, but it’s so layered in babble that people tune out and ignore the entire thing....

US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane has approved American Airlines' bankruptcy plan—mostly: Judge Sean Lane approved the plan at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, but denied a clause that would pay Tom Horton, AMR's outgoing chief executive, $19.9 million in severance. But on Thursday, after nearly two weeks of consideration, Lane concluded his job was to determine whether the plan meets standards of feasibility under bankruptcy law, independent of the lawsuit. "The question is whether it will...

He had a little more hassle than I did. Only a little: So back in July I decided to give it a shot. If you’re a US citizen/permanent resident, Dutch citizen, South Korean citizen, or Mexican national, you can join the program. (Canadians can join via the Nexus program.) I went online and filled out the extensive application. I mean, this thing looks at your history going back for several years. It requires previous residences, everywhere you’ve traveled, and more. Once you finish filling it out, you pay...

I rarely buy plane tickets this far out, but something made me think buying holiday tickets right now might be a good idea. Things, for example, like this: The Department of Justice’s somewhat surprising lawsuit to stop the merger of American Airlines with US Airways may not offer much help for passengers hoping that competition among the majors will keep a ceiling on airfares. Like any commodity, airfares are a function of supply and demand — and carriers have been removing supply from the market. Some...

Two more opinions this morning about the Justice Department sued to block the American-US Airways merger. First, from Cranky Flier: [I]f DOJ really wanted to settle for slots at National, it would have done so before filing such a strongly-worded, broad case. Now it has sort of pinned itself into a corner. If it settles, it sets precedent that can be used against it in the future. If it goes ahead with trial, it risks everything. See, if it goes to trial, then the judge will review the case on its...

...because I didn't have time to read them today: Today's Tales from the Interview on TDWTF July's climate writeup from the Illinois State Climatologist Sam Harris on free will and love Scott Hanselman recommends everyone get a "digital will" Azure SDK 2.1 is out today How to make frequent-flyer programs better Andrew Sullivan on the best opening lines in novels Mental Floss lists things we no longer see in airplanes but leaves out the most important one: hijackers I will now go home and read these...

First, a Boeing 787 caught fire at Heathrow this afternoon; fortunately, no one was aboard: Video footage showed the plane surrounded by foam used to quell the flames. The airport said in a statement that it was an on-board internal fire, but didn’t offer more details. It said the plane was empty, parked in a remote area and there were no reported injuries. All flights in and out were temporarily suspended Friday afternoon -- a standard procedure if fire crews are called out. Ethiopian Airlines said...

The Chicago Tribune reported this morning that, 8 years into the O'Hare Modernization Project, some nearby residents are horrified to learn they might get more noise: Residents of Edgebrook, Sauganash, Forest Glen, North Park and other Northwest Side Chicago communities are up in arms over the impending increases in noise pollution, which were forecast in Chicago Department of Aviation environmental impact documents in 2005, the same year the Federal Aviation Administration approved the city's O'Hare...

Yesterday American's scheduling and ticketing systems went offline around 11:00 CDT. By noon CDT, the Dallas Morning News had this: “American’s reservation and booking tool, Sabre, is offline,” American spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said at midday. “We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.” (American subsequently absolved Sabre of any blame. ”We apologize to Sabre & customers for confusion.”) She confirmed that the problem is causing some...

First, TPM on why the FAA closed contract towers and how this is in fact the fault of the very people complaining about them: Sequestration is hitting the Department of Transportation like almost every other cabinet-level department. But unlike other departments, most of its employees work for one agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — and most of that agency’s employees are air traffic controllers. Because of that, sequestration is forcing FAA to furlough employees, institute a hiring freeze...

Some links: James Fallows annotated SOTU is an annual must-read. Crain's sniffs out a letter from the Illinois Congressional Delegation to AMR and USAirways along the lines of, "nice merger you've got there, shame if something were to happen to it." I'm way behind on Paul Krugman's blog. Wired examines the Battle of Hoth in strategic terms. Lots to do in the next 19 hours...including a conference call with a data center at 10:30 tonight.

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read: The Atlantic Cities blog has an analysis of class in Chicago by census tract. Seth Godin doesn't like airports, because they're organizationally horrible. Best bit: "There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones." Liz Keogh advocates Behavior-Driven Development as a new way of looking at Test-Driven Development. I will get to them...soon...

...and it's pretty hideous: Reactions have been a mixed bag of negative and scathing. Here's Patrick Smith: Simply put, I cannot believe how awful a makeover this is. It’s so disappointing that it pains me even to write about it, and how anybody signed off on this I’ll never understand. The body and tail manage to be boring and garish at the same time, with a cheap, downmarket lilt to the whole thing. The typeface is the strongest aspect of the whole mess, and that’s not saying much. Those are (almost)...

Finally! Reuters reported about 90 minutes ago that US Airways has made an offere to buy bankrupt American Airlines, which would create an $8.5 bn airline: Under the all-stock proposal US Airways made in mid-November at a meeting with AMR's unsecured creditors committee, the bankrupt airline's creditors would own 70 percent of the merged company and US Airways shareholders 30 percent, the person said. US Airways and AMR are negotiating toward a potential merger agreement that could come as soon as...

Last month, United Airlines and the Star Alliance held a multi-day outing for some frequent fliers that included a couple legs on a 787: They were bankers, lawyers, programmers, film distributors, entrepreneurs and all-around aviation buffs or, as they lovingly call themselves, geeks. Most were men. All of them had signed up for a MegaDo, a retreat organized by and for travel fanatics who scour Web sites like Milepoint, particularly frequent fliers for whom it is a hobby to accrue miles and learn every...

A French appeals court has ruled that neither Continental nor mechanic John Taylor bears criminal responsibility for the 2000 Air France Concorde crash outside Paris: According to the original ruling, mechanic John Taylor fitted the wrong metal strip on a Continental DC-10. The piece ultimately fell off on the runway in Paris, puncturing the Concorde's tire. The burst tire sent bits of rubber flying, puncturing the fuel tanks, which started the fire that brought down the plane. On Thursday, Judge...

The long-time aviation blogger thinks the movie was a disservice: I’ll be told, perhaps, that I need to relax, and that the movie ought be judged beyond its technical shortcomings. Normally I would agree, and for the average lay viewer it will hardly matter at all. I’m happy to allow a little artistic license. We should expect it, and some light fudging of the facts can be necessary, to a degree, for a film like this to work. Honestly, I’m not that much of a fussbudget. The trouble with Flight is that...

I'm in London this weekend, having used a bunch of frequent-flyer miles to get here. And because they were frequent-flyer miles, I decided to fly British Airways first class. Usually, when I fly to London, I take American Airlines flight 90, a 767 (my favorite plane in American's fleet) that leaves Chicago around 9am and arrives at Heathrow around 10:30pm. That schedule completely eliminates jet lag for me. On arriving in London, I have dinner at a takeaway curry place or something around midnight, stay...

Two aviation articles this morning. The first, via the Economist's Gulliver blog, examines how checked baggage tags have cut lost luggage down to nearly zero: In July alone, 53 million passengers boarded domestic flights. Only about one-third of 1 percent reported a mishandled bag. Given the phenomenal scale of American aviation (measured in seats and miles, the U.S. market is three times larger than any other) and our reliance on luggage-juggling hub airports, that’s an excellent result. Even caged...

American Airlines and US Airways announced this morning that they've signed a non-disclosure agreement, a concrete step towards merging the corporations: The non-disclosure agreement also means the companies won't be providing more announcements regarding the status of discussions until there's a merger deal or they call off talks, the airlines said. The airline companies said they would work in "close collaboration" and "good faith" to evaluate a merger, including working with the creditors committee...

I'm not sure what to make of this: Inside, the capsule's sole passenger would ride in a near-standing position, wearing a G-suit to help force blood to the head during acceleration. The passenger's head would sit in a transparent hemispheric dome topped with an aerospike for better supersonic performance. It gets better. Dimensions of the capsule's cabin area are roughly two feet (diameter) by 7.5 feet (length). There will be no room in the capsule for movement once the vehicle goes weightless. After...

Home to O'Hare: 39 minutes Taxi to the other side of security: 6 minutes TSA checkpoint to free drink at the club: 9 minutes The weather is nearly perfect (for flying, anyway; I think it's too hot already), so I don't anticipate any delays flying out. And Air Force One doesn't get here until tonight, six hours after I leave. So, depending on Route 92, this might be one of my easiest trips ever. (It's got to be easier than the last time I flew.) So, after hearing non-stop for a week about the massive...

We almost made it from SFO to ORD. The pilots executed a "missed approach" and diverted to Rockford, where we now sit. The First Officer told me they had a wind-shear alert indicating a 20kt change in windspeed right on our approach path. That could, in aviation parlance, ruin your day. So here we sit...and wait... At least we're getting granola bars, water, and frequent updates. And we're getting obnoxious passengers. More tomorrow.

Over the weekend it came out that US Airways had started discussions with pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants at rival American Airlines. The unions are encouraging the companies to merge: The first thing to know is that this doesn't mean that the two airlines are merging—it's a step towards a merger, but a deal is far from certain. AA, for its part, has said that it wants to emerge from bankruptcy as an independent airline. But industry analysts have long discounted that as an unrealistic goal—as...

I've just boarded a flight to London, but it was a lot closer to a miss than I've had in years. Fortunately, the cab to the Blue Line (after trying to flag one down for 10 minutes), the El, and even the friendly TSA pat-down in the "Discrete Room" weren't enough to stop me from boarding this plane. I will, however, take a few moments to calm down before settling in.

Via James Fallows, here is the FlightAware track (and the KML) for yesterday's Boeing 787 test flight: That. Is. Cool.

The international airline consortium oneworld, which includes American Airlines and British Airways, this week lost one member and had an applicant postpone membership. On Thursday, Hungarian flag carrier Malév suspended operations: Malev, the state-owned Hungarian airline, ceased flying with debts of €205 million after the government withdrew financing. The airline, which was placed under bankruptcy protection earlier this week, stopped operating all fights at 06.00 this morning. Ryanair today...

I caught a mention of this on the Marketplace Open this morning, and now Gulliver has picked it up. Apparently the Department of Transportation now requires more transparency in airline price advertising: Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a...

Just now, going into hour 32 of the (technically) longest day of my life, I noticed that the blog's comment view feature isn't working. This is Case #2869 in FogBugz, and will be fixed as soon as possible. Not tonight, though. Just like Saturday, my goal is only to make it to 9pm. If I can do that, I will defeat jet lag in one stroke. I must not fail. Sleep deprivation leads to pointless blog entries, and we can't have that, can we?

I'm 10,500 m over the Yukon on a Japan Air Lines 777-300.[1] In the last couple of hours, I have started to understand, rather than just "know," that Japan is the most technologically advanced country in the world. I'm also wondering why my main carrier, American, can't learn how to do some of these things. First, the plane is spotless inside and out. I mean, immaculate. I mean, if you wanted to give visitors a good feeling about your country, you would start by making your airplanes really attractive...

Today marks ten years since the last time a mainline U.S. air carrier had a multi-fatality accident: There have been several terrible accidents involving regional planes — all of which have been discussed in this column, from the Air Midwest crash in 2003 to the 2006 Comair crash at Lexington, to the Colgan disaster outside Buffalo in 2009. And in 2005 a young boy in a car was killed when a Southwest Airlines 737 skidded off a snowy runway at Chicago’s Midway airport. Yet amazingly, an entire decade has...

I just posted this on as a comment to an unfortunate friend's Facebook status. Forgive me; I'm at O'Hare, and kind of punchy: I left my keys in Boston, My phone at SFO, My shoes and belt, I lost 'em too, But where I just don't know. I think I saw my keychain last In Logan's Terminal B. I only hope the TSA Will get them back to me. I'd call them now, those helpful guys Who kept me from my gate, But like I said, my phone's long gone, And now's no time to wait. At least I know my keys are safe At Logan's...

Chicago-based United Continental Airlines followed this week's ANA publicity with a me too: Jeff Smisek, head of the parent company for United and Continental airlines, on Thursday said he was last told by Boeing that the first of the 50 aircraft ordered by the company will be delivered to have in service in the second half of 2012. "We ordered that aircraft in December 2004. So I've been a very patient person," said Smisek, the president and CEO of United Continental Holdings Inc. I'm writing this from...

All Nippon Airlines, which took possession of the world's first 787 Dreamliner today, has announced the first routes for the new airplanes: The Dreamliner's first regular domestic service will be the Haneda-Okayama route starting on November 1, with a flight on the Haneda-Hiroshima route also departing the same day. As previously announced, ahead of its regular services, ANA will also operate a special charter flight between Narita and Hong Kong on October 26 and 27. It will be the world's first flight...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's...

I somehow missed this last week: The first officers at the controls of Air France 447 (the captain was initially on his rest break when the troubles began) were not apprentices. They were fully rated, Airbus A330 pilots with thousands of hours of experience. Of course they were trained in "manual aircraft handling"! And yet again we have the suggestion that a "manually" flown plane is some sort of oddity, and that pilots aren't used to it. This is bollocks. That the pilots lacked this training is worthy...

I mentioned yesterday morning needing to blow some frequent-flyer miles this autumn. So far, I've whittled the list down to Scotland, Budapest, Madrid, and Tokyo. (It turns out Canada only costs 30,000 miles round-trip, so I might just go to Montréal for a weekend instead of making a big thing about it.) Any other places people would strongly recommend for a 4- or 5-day trip in late November or early December? (If you're wondering why I care about this in July, then obviously you haven't tried to book...

Via AVWeb, French investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the crash site: The investigation team localized and identified the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) at 21h50 UTC on Monday 2 May, 2011. It was raised and lifted on board the Ile de Sein by the Remora 6000 ROV at 02 h 40 UTC this morning, on Tuesday 3rd May, 2011. AVWeb adds details: A remotely operated vehicle retrieved the CVR from the ocean floor, 3,900 m down, on Tuesday morning, and it appears to be intact and in good...

An Air France A380 collided with a commuter jet at JFK yesterday: The tip of the left wing of the Air France Airbus 380 - the largest passenger plane made - bound for Paris hit the tail of a stationary Delta Comair Regional Jet 7 at 8:08 p.m., officials and witnesses said. The Delta flight, which had just landed from Boston, was a connection to JFK for many London passengers. Those onboard exited onto the tarmac. The NTSB press release reported no injuries among the 537 passengers and 29 crew members...

Sometimes you get a happy combination of flight plan, weather, and seating on an airplane. Today, on departure from O'Hare: A few moments later: On approach to LaGuardia:

Here's a brain-teaser: take one part Heathrow, one part Iberia Airlines, and a sixty-five minute connection at Madrid Barajas. I'll give you a moment to work your sums. If you got "no, really, a 2-hour connection," you're correct! Instead of walking at a normal pace between two gates (that, it turns out, are 600 m apart) inside one terminal to make a fairly routine domestic connection, I walked at a normal pace off my flight from Heathrow right to the nearest Iberia service desk. We all shrugged. "Es...

(Insert witty one-liner here.) But, really, the Airbus 380...I mean, yikes: How can you not be impressed?

Yesterday, it took me longer to fly home (8½ hours) than it would have taken to drive (6 hours). This almost never happens; and throughout my flight cancellation and delay at Cincinnati's Terminal 2, I remained sanguine and peaceful. (Beer helped.) Because no matter what flight delays I encountered, no matter what kind of snow blew all over the roads causing the taxi to crawl at a modest walking speed, no matter anything, at least I wasn't in Suburbistan, Ohio: No, my life wasn't that bad anymore. This...

For the first time I can recall—going back more than two years, at least, and probably longer—I don't have a flight booked to anywhere. I started realizing this as I got closer to flying to Boston last weekend. Combine that with the brand-spanking-new passport I just got, and I feel oddly confined. So, possessed of a ton of frequent-flyer miles but with no possibility of making the next level of elite status this year, and also facing a dramatic shift in my work-life balance in just over 110 days, I...

Back in February, some of us got the opportunity to tour Indira Gandhi Airport Terminal 3, then under construction. It opened this week: The new terminal—Terminal 3—was "inaugurated" on July 3rd (Saturday) with India's great and good in attendance, and flights will start from July 14th. Mumbai’s airport is also getting a new terminal, but I don’t think it’s nearly as far along as Delhi’s, which needed completing before the Commonwealth Games this October. There is much excitement in the Indian media...

I just got in to Helsinki. I wrote the following on the flight: 29 June 2010, 18:33 EDT, 10,500 m over the Maine-New Hampshire border Finnair’s A330 business class is the most comfortable experience I’ve ever had on an airplane[1]. First off, the plane is brand-new. It’s quiet, clean, and (not surprisingly) very European-looking. But this isn’t your grandfather’s Airbus. Dig it: Finnair has introduced new seats in business class. The left side alternate 2-1-2, the middle are all paired, and the right...

Exhibit the First: This morning on NPR, a "retired banker from Eagle River, Wis.," when interviewed about the retirement of Rep. David Obey (D-WI) claimed, "I think the majority of people up here are independent thinkers." Exhibit the Second: via Gulliver, a study of airfare fluctuations in the U.S. market found airfares fluctuate millions of times per year for some city pairs in the U.S. For example, airfares between Atlanta and Las Vegas changed almost 2.5m times last year. Gulliver pointed out that...

First, a housekeeping note. This is the one of three entries posted after the fact. Almost always, a post time you see on The Daily Parker accurately records when I first posted the blog entry. At this writing I’m on an airplane over Canada’s Northwest Territories, so the post time shows when I took notes about the entry that follows. This all may seem, as my dearest friend might say, “a bit Asperger’s-y.” Perhaps. Another very close friend blogs retrospectively, because she wants her entries to...

These are kind of cool: Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar's busiest road, cuts directly across the runway. Railroad-style crossing gates hold cars back every time a plane lands or departs. "There's essentially a mountain on one side of the island and a town on the other," Schreckengast says. "The runway goes from side to side on the island because it's the only flat space there, so it's the best they can do. It's a fairly safe operation as far as keeping people away," he says, "It just happens to be...

It's just dawn in London, about five hours before my flight takes off, and this is the headline on the WGN Weather Blog: Entire Chicago metropolitan area upgraded to winter storm warning The entire Chicago metropolitan area is being placed under a winter storm warning effective from this evening through noon on Wednesday. Previous the winter storm warning had been in effect only for counties close to Lake Michigan where lake-enhanced snowfall was expected to boost snowfall total and surrounding areas...

I've stopped briefly in London to take two days with no responsibility whatsoever. Along the way I got a brief glimpse of Kyiv, but tantalizingly the cloud cover started right over the city. (For the half-hour we flew over Eastern Ukraine the weather was perfectly clear.) No, really, that's Kyiv: I'm not entirely sure I'll get back to Chicago tomorrow, though. They're expecting a snowstorm: The snow may cover the area over a 24-hour period beginning late Monday, according to the National Weather Service...

I have about another hour to complete a statistics quiz, which requires reading the materials for it, but I did promise photos of the Indira Gandhi International Airport Terminal 3 construction site. Here they are: The departure/retail area between the domestic and international arms: The arrivals concourse: More later.

A group of us went on a tour of Indira Gandhi International Airport today, including the unfinished Terminal 3 building. Sadly, the art and description will have to wait for a bit. My work has piled up (as happens mid-residency) and I have two items due tonight. One thought, though: if the sun hasn't peeked through the clouds all day in Punxsutawney, how is it possible Phil saw his shadow? I think they're putting words in the groundhog's mouth over there.

Apparently it gets foggy in Delhi. My four-hour connection at Heathrow unexpectedly turned into a 13-hour connection, so I took my sleep-deprived self out of the airport for a while. Yep, definitely not Delhi: And when in London, why not have a traditional breakfast? It was as good as it looked. Only one problem: my coat was in my checked bag, somewhere in the bowels of the airport. No problem: I now own a passably warm Reebok starter jacket, bought on sale for £22. It's 3pm now, and my flight is...

After American Airlines raised fares last week, all the other majors followed—for about three days. Delta bolted first, and yesterday United and American caved: The increase, which was from $6 to $16 round-trip, was initiated last week by AMR Corp's American Airlines and later matched by rivals, including Delta Air Lines and Continental Airlines, said Farecompare Chief Executive Rick Seaney. The airline industry has been groping for pricing power after demand for business travel sagged during the...

I travel a lot, both in the U.S. and overseas. Last year I flew about 93,000 km, including three trips to the U.K., one to Ukraine, one to Dubai, and another dozen in the U.S. So I'm pretty sanguine about travel in general, and thanks to the American A'Advantage program, I get a few perks along the way that make it even easier. Tomorrow, though, I'm going to India for the first time. This has given me a kind of pre-travel jitters I don't ordinarily experience. First, most obviously, it's the farthest...

By this time next Sunday, I'll have gone through O'Hare five times in eight days. I actually don't mind—yet—possibly because this is only my second visit of the week. The flight to DC isn't horribly delayed, and I've got a good perch to watch the planes: Gotta run. Time to wait on the plane instead of in the club...

A high court in the U.K. has ordered British Airways cabin crews not to strike over Christmas: The dispute at BA centres on its desire to cut costs by reducing cabin staff on most flights and limiting wage increases. The airline’s pilots and engineers have already accepted austerity measures; cabin staff, notified of the proposed changes in July, are less inclined to compromise (though some have taken voluntary redundancy). On December 14th Unite, the union which represents almost all of the company’s...

Pilot and author James Fallows is thankful for the reasonable and minimal changes to New York City airspace the FAA announced last week: When regulators and security officials address a problem through minimal rather than excessive rule-setting and interference or panicky over-reaction, that is worth our thankfulness too. Building toward a crescendo of things to be thankful for at this time of year. By the way, it's a very fun trip for private pilots: (From a flight I took in March 2000.)

From the Economist's Gulliver blog: The Germans said in a letter to the Dubai-based carrier that under European law it was not allowed “to engage in price leadership” on routes from Germany to non-EU locations. Emirates, which condemned the decision as “commercially nonsensical”, responded by raising prices by 20% on some routes. Andrew Parker of Emirates told the Financial Times, "We are adamant this is selective and clearly an attempt by Lufthansa [Germany's national carrier] to pursue Emirates versus...

Reader EB has passed along Travel & Leisure's "World's Scariest Runways," including one of my favorites, Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maarten: Why It’s Harrowing: The length of the runway—just 2,180 m—is perfectly fine for small or medium-size jets, but as the second-busiest airport in the Eastern Caribbean, it regularly welcomes so-called heavies—long-haul wide-body jetliners like Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s—from Europe, which fly in improbably low over Maho Beach and skim just over the perimeter...

This is about the coolest aviation-related thing I've seen in years.

Now that I have a functioning monitor once again, I can post a few photos. Despite American's mess-up with my seat assignments, a lovely British Airways flight attendant found an empty upper-deck window seat, so I did, in fact, get to have a total aviation-nerd-heaven trip: P.O.V. shot: A couple of things: first, the text on the screen is in Arabic, which makes sense if you're flying to Dubai. Second, the screen shows the plane has just gone over Italy's big toe. We had great views of the Alps and the...

Having a six-hour layover in between two seven-hour flights really, really sucks. I know I'm at Heathrow, in Terminal 5, but I'm not entirely clear on what day or time it is. I do know that somewhere in my future, probably in about 9 hours, there's a bed....

I generally love American Airlines, to the extent that I fly oneworld carriers unless there simply isn't another way to get there. But today, in an effort to be helpful, an AA ticket agent actually made an error that may have dashed a dream I've carried since I was six. I'm on my way to Dubai for school, and to get there I'm going through London. (Faithful readers may recall I tried going through Amman, but that didn't quite work.) Going through London means British Airways, which doesn't let you choose...

I pack in the morning, which means, five hours before my flight takes off, I have yet to dig my bags out of the closet. Everything to be packed is either on my desk or hanging in my closet; Parker's food is already in the car; and I have nothing else to do but get out of town. One little niggle: why does British Airways not allow people to pick their seats more than 24 hours ahead unless they have the equivalent of American Airlines Platinum status? Not that I had any difficulties, as the flight doesn't...

The CCMBA Dubai residency starts in just over 3 days, and I'm leaving in 53 hours. I hope I've learned from the mistakes I made in the London residency, so I can make all new mistakes. Some observations so far: I do not need the one-kilo power converter; I only need a couple of UK-US adapters. This is because, as I realized in London, everything I have with a plug accepts all international power characteristics. (The U.S. is 110 volts, 60 Hertz; the U.K. and U.A.E. both use 220 volts, 50 Hertz, with...

The state of Illinois mysteriously doubled its funding request for upgrading the Chicago-St. Louis rail corridor to handle moderately-high-speed trains. First, of the $4.5 bn now requested, only $1.2 bn will go to the actual track upgrades; the state now wants additional funds to build a second track along the route. Second, the upgrades will increase the route's top speed from 126 km/h to only 176 km/h, not exactly a serious rival for other HSR projects worldwide (like, for example, Shanghai's MagLev...

First, via AV Web, a report that a Delta 767 landed just a bit off the runway centerline returning from Rio de Janeiro Monday: A couple of Delta Airlines pilots have been suspended after the Boeing 767 they were flying from Rio de Janeiro landed on a taxiway at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport early Monday morning. The FAA reported there were no other aircraft on the taxiway and the landing and rollout were normal. Spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said the crew was dealing with a medical emergency on board and had...

Mayor Daley found another $500m hole in the city's budget this year, so he's proposing...nothing new: Mayor Richard Daley unveils his new budget this morning, and he's going to call for spending more money from the controversial parking meter lease, slashing the tourism promotion budget and ending Chicago's longest-running public party, Venetian Night. A key labor union that bankrolled challengers to Daley's council allies in the last election praised the mayor's decision to raid reserves from the $1.15...