Events

They're interesting if you like, for example, airplanes: The Wright Amendment is finally gone, helping make Southwest Airlines more profitable. Cranky Flier goes over American Airlines' plans for its fleet and says some uncharitable things about the 767-300ERs that I was on this week. James Fallows digs into the fatal aviation accident in Maryland that happened over the weekend. That's it for now.

Because I stayed in the Airport Sheraton, had only carry-on bags, and got my boarding pass last night, I got on my flight home less than half an hour after leaving my hotel room this morning. Then, at O'Hare, because of the aforementioned lack of checked baggage, a New York-style walking speed, and Global Entry, I got from the airplane to my car in exactly half an hour. Parker was in the car half an hour after that. Compare that to the trip out, when I left my house at 7, the plane finally left the gate...

I had a pretty good blog entry to post a couple of hours ago, and I forgot it totally. This is because I was wrestling a virtual machine to the ground because it had gone somewhere HTTP requests could not follow. I'd have posted about that nonsense, too, except the VM hosts The Daily Parker, you see. I am therefore reduced to a link round-up, though this time I will embed, rather than link to, two of the things that people have sent me in the past day and a half: I had an excellent dinner tonight....

It's 7:35, and pitch black outside. When people talk about permanent daylight saving time, because they don't want to switch clocks twice a year, they should consider that France is an hour ahead of the "correct" time zone for its longitude and therefore has sunrises at 8:30 in the morning this time of year. If there were daylight right now, I'd upload a photo of all the airplanes taxiing past my hotel window. It's kind of cool. Tomorrow, when I can sleep in.

Chris Hughes responds to accusations that he killed The New Republic: At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity. There is much experimentation in nonprofit journalism – ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are proving the...

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...

Psy's surreal Gangnam Style video got so many views on YouTube that Google had to change their database schema to count them: YouTube said the video - its most watched ever - has been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times. It has now changed the maximum view limit to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more than nine quintillion. YouTube's counter previously used a 32-bit integer, which is a unit used to represent data in computer architecture. This means the maximum possible views it could count was...

After Jack Conte got an ass-kicking by the Internet this week, he and Nataly Dawn posted two links to their defenders, who I think are correct: As a tour manager, I have settled shows and handled finances for bands big and small. Some of these bands played the smallest and shittiest venues in the country, and some of them played arenas and the main stage at large festivals. I have slept on people's couches and had bands with big enough budgets to put their crew up at the Ritz. I have read a lot of the...

One of my favorite publications, the century-old New Republic, died today: There was a telling moment at the New Republic’s centennial celebration last month in the stately Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium. New CEO Guy Vidra, recently appointed by owner (and Facebook co-founder) Chris Hughes, took the podium to discuss the magazine’s challenges and opportunities in a digital age, just as any modern-day media mogul would do. When he referenced the name of The New Republic’s top editor, however, he...

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...