Events

For the record, I hate Hartsfield-Jackson airport. More specifically, I hate the people who are responsible for signage here. Mostly, they forget to put up the last sign in a sequence, both inside and outside the airport. Say there's a turn, followed by a straight path, then a Y-shaped fork, then another straight path to the destination. At ATL, they'll have a sign telling you which way to make the first turn, a sign along the straight path, and then...nothing. I know now what lies along every fork at...

I did another technical diligence today. Obviously I can't comment on what company we looked at, why we looked at it, or even precisely where it is (though I can say I'm in Atlanta right now). I can say that this guy observed the whole process: Also, I may have another diligence effort next week that is too cool to jinx by writing about. I'll find out in a couple of hours if it's going forward. Stay tuned.

American Airlines announced today the details of how it will absorb US Airways' Dividend Miles program into their A'Advantage program. Cranky Flyer calls it a smart hybrid: American announced the details of the 2015 AAdvantage frequent flier program today, and I was given a sneak peek yesterday. The details of the new program are a big deal because it’s the first one that combines the old US Airways Dividend Miles and American AAdvantage programs. As expected all along, AAdvantage is the surviving...

The New Republic yesterday declared the British men's suit to be the island's greatest invention: We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colors of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck. It said something and it meant something to men around the world; it said and meant so much that they would discard their local dress, the costumes of millennia, their culture and their link to their ancestors, to dress up like English...

John Judis explains: In 2014, about 46 percent of Hispanics are eligible to vote. The rest are not citizens or are under 18. By contrast, voter eligibility among whites is in the high seventy percent and among African Americans is in the low seventy percent range. The other factor is turnout. In 2012, only about 39 percent of eligible Hispanics voted compared to a little over sixty percent of Anglos and African-Americans. So in the 2012 election, and most likely in the 2014 election, in spite of...

The final score from my FitBit challenge over the weekend was: friend, 33,800; me, 37,800. Yesterday I gave Parker 3 hours of walks and also walked home from dinner instead of taking public transit or a Divvy, which got me almost to 23,800 steps (and 17.7 km) for the day. There was a cost. My feet hurt, Parker was lethargic this morning, and I ate too much. And this week it's not likely I'll get 10,000 steps in every day this week because I've got an all-day meeting Wednesday. Which is probably a good...

A couple weeks ago I updated SourceTree and discovered I could no longer connect to my Bitbucket repositories through SSL. This is because of the Poodle defect in SSL 3.0. (I'll skip the explanation.) The failure looked like this: In any event, the only Atlassian forum entry on the subject gave me only partial guidance. The problem, which took me some time to uncover, turned out to be that I had Mercurial 2.7 lurking on my machine. Uninstalling it and SourceTree, then installing Mercurial 3.0 and...

Following a friend's example, I got a FitBit this week. The same friend has challenged me for the weekend, getting 15,300 steps to my 14,000 yesterday, and going hiking this afternoon. Ah, but I have a dog, you see. And the weather is perfect. So far today I've walked 15,400 steps (11.6 km), almost all of it with Parker, and we're about to go out for another walk. Here's walk #1, this morning, in Lincoln Park: And walk #2, at lunchtime, down the Lakefront Path: I got my 15,000-step badge on Friday, my...

The Nag's Head, Angel: Coincidentally, this pub has the same name as my go-to pub when I lived in Hoboken, N.J., 15 years ago.

I'm a little busy today, preparing for three different projects even though I can only actually do 1.5 of them. So as is common on days like this, I have a list of things I don't have time to read: Jeff Atwood suggests ways of minimizing online douchery. The Economist Gulliver blog maps how many times French people kiss when greeting each other. Hint: It's more than Americans. Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows explains yesterday's aviation accident outside D.C. involving a helicopter and a small plane....