The Daily Parker

Via one of my classmates, and the NPR Planet Money blog, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority has started testing demand pricing for parking spaces:

The system will use electronic sensors to measure real-time demand for parking spaces, and adjust prices accordingly. When there are lots of empty spaces, it will be cheap to park. When spaces are hard to find, rates will be higher.

The range in prices will be huge: from 25 cents an hour to a maximum of $6 an hour, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Eventually, drivers will be able to find open parking spaces by going online, checking their mobile phones or reading for new electronic signs that will be posted throughout the city.

That's how to run a parking system. Not, as some might suspect, by leasing all the meters to a for-profit company which immediately raises prices to the point where people don't park on some streets at all any more.

Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen's blog often sails right over my head, but I read it anyway. He's fairly senior at Microsoft, and he's written a good bit of the Windows operating systems. Plural. So I learn from him.

This story, however, should have wider publication than just us industry geeks:

During the development of the product he was working on, the programmers needed an image for a comparatively rarely-used piece of the user interface. Since programmers aren't graphic designers, they inserted a placeholder bitmap which would be used until a real image arrived. And since programmers are nerds, they used a picture of a television character who was popular at the time.

The testers naturally ran the program through its paces, and when that piece of the user interface appeared with the placeholder bitmap, the testers smiled a little.

Time passed, and people became quite accustomed to seeing that television character's face appear when they exercised that little corner of the program. An oddly appropriate face to alert you of an unusual condition.

And then the project reached its completion, and the master CD was sent off to the factory for mass duplication.

You can see where this is going. Think: lawyers. And read the rest.

Mondays are Economist days over here. I've got myself into a rhythm of travel, school, work, and keeping sane that requires me to put things in small boxes of time; on Mondays I read the latest Economist. This week had two unusually interesting (and short) articles in the "Finance and Economics" section[1].

First, a report that numeracy predicts mortgage defaults better than any other variable:

Even accounting for a host of differences between people—including attitudes to risk, income levels and credit scores—those who fell behind on their mortgages were noticeably less numerate than those who kept up with their payments in the same overall circumstances. The least numerate fell behind about 25% of the time. For those who did best on the test, the number of payments they missed was almost 12%. A fifth of the least numerate group had been in foreclosure, but only 7% of those who were more numerically adept had.

Surprisingly, the least numerate were not making loan choices that differed much from their peers. They were about as likely to have a fixed-rate mortgage as the more numerically able. They did not borrow a larger share of their income. And loans were about the same fraction of the house’s value.

They've even got a handy quiz of the type the researchers used. Two pages on, in the "Economics Focus" column, the newspaper reported on the FCC's decision two weeks ago to treat ISPs as common carriers for their last-mile service. This is a big deal:

A medieval innkeeper, for example, often offered the only lodging in town; a boatman could cross only with the king’s writ. Second, the state sometimes offers favours of its own to transporters—public lands and roads, say, or the seizure of private property to make way for new infrastructure—and expects a certain level of public service in return. Third, transport is essential to commerce. It represents an input cost to almost all businesses, and to restrict access or overcharge is to burden the entire economy.

All these arguments applied in spades to 19th-century rail. Like a medieval town’s sole inn, a railway line is a perfect example of a natural monopoly: it is tremendously expensive to build and it is difficult to justify more than one set of tracks on any route just to guarantee competition. ...

Telecoms operators argue that America does not need common carriage for internet access, because the country’s unique network of local cable monopolies competes against its last-mile copper-wire monopolies. ... The FCC’s current plan—to ask last-mile providers to subsidise rural service, and to ensure equal treatment of packets of information—is a mild intervention by global standards.

Time now to review, once again, the team's finance assignment due tonight, and then collapse in a heap. The Daily Parker will probably continue to have slightly less velocity than usual for a week or so as I twist myself into a small knot of anxiety over my finance midterm. If only it could be as engaging as a class as it is in a newspaper.

[1] Yes, the topic interests me in the abstract, but at the same time I can't wait until the end of doing concrete finance—e.g., working out CAPM calculations—once my finance class ends next month.

We all scratched our heads today as the Dow plunged almost 1,000 points in 15 minutes...then rebounded. Still no explanation:

Traders and Washington policy makers struggled to keep up as the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1,000 points shortly after 2:30 p.m. and then mostly rebounded in a matter of minutes. For a moment, the sell-off seemed to overwhelm computer and human systems alike, and some traders began referring grimly to the day as “Black Thursday.”

But in the end, Thursday was not as black as it had seemed. After briefly sinking below 10,000, the Dow ended down 347.80, or 3.2 percent, at 10,520.32. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 37.75 points, or 3.24 percent, to close at 1,128.15, and the Nasdaq was down 82.65 points, or 3.44 percent, at 2,319.64.

But up and down Wall Street, and across the nation, many investors were dumbstruck. Experts groped for explanations as blue-chip stocks like Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris and Accenture plunged. At one point, Accenture[1] fell more than 99 percent to a penny. P.&G. plunged to $39.37 from more than $60 within minutes.

More:

The height of panic on Thursday was reached shortly after lunchtime in the United States. First some currencies began to fall rapidly, with the euro suffering especially against the Japanese yen.

That could have been an indication that some large traders were unwinding positions. It has been popular to borrow yen at low interest rates and then use the money to speculate in higher yielding assets denominated in other currencies. Anyone unwinding such a trade would buy yen to repay the loan.

Then there's the U.K. election, which didn't go as planned for the Liberal Democrats:

The swing so far from Labour to Conservatives with 250 results in the bag is a little lower than before, at 5.6%. The Tories' share of the popular vote is 34.9%, Labour is on 28.3% and the LibDems on 21%. Compare that with the average of nine main pollsters' final predictions before the elections: 35.6% for the Tories, 27.6% for Labour and 27.4% for the Liberal Democrats. The Tories a little down, Labour a little up and Lib Dems bafflingly down. Still more than half of all seats to go, though.

That was about an hour ago. It's dawn in London right now, and no one knows who'll be in Number 10 at dusk. If no party has an outright majority in Parliament at the end of voting, Gordon Brown will have the right to form another government—but you can bet the UK will have elections again in a few months. This is the most exciting UK election since 1974.

[1] Disclosure: Accenture owns most of Avanade, my employer.

My new employer requires that I get an appropriate Microsoft certification by February 2012. This requires that I take six certification tests. I've started preparing, after not having bothered in four years. And, as I was in 2006, and 1999, and 1996, and 1993, the last times I jumped into the MCP Pit of Despair, I am unhappy.

Why, pray, have I not bothered to get certified? Why only one test in the last 10 years? Because I really, honestly, truly, hate these exams. The last time I took one, I literally walked in off the street and winged it. This didn't work. Not, I assert, because I lack the skills the test purported to measure. No, because the exams, for reasons of economics and volume, don't demonstrate ability; they screen for something else entirely. (I'm still trying to work out what.)

Having just taken a practice test, I am saddened to see things haven't improved. Here's an example, which I first demonstrated in 2006. Imagine you want to get a "Chicago Certified Driver in Stick-Shift Transmissions (Automobile)" badge. This credential establishes that you are certified by the city of Chicago to drive cars equipped with manual transmissions. To get this credential, you take a computerized, multiple-choice test. Here is question 1:

You're driving from 1200 West Fullerton Parkway to 741 West Cornelia Avenue. What is the route you follow?

A. East on Fullerton, North on Halsted, West on Cornelia.

B. East on Fullerton, North on Clark, North on Sheffield, East on Cornelia.

C. West on Fullerton, North on Western, East on Addison, South on Halsted, East on Cornelia.

D. East on Fullerton, North on Clark, North on Broadway, West on Cornelia.

Do you know the answer? You have 60 seconds, closed book.

The correct answer is C, because the other three are illegal. Of course, no one would ever, ever, ever, choose C in real life, because it takes you three miles out of your way. But that's not the point. Certified Chicago Drivers may not know how to use a manual transmission, but they absolutely know all the one-way streets in the city.

See, in order to get this question right you need to know several things. First, Halsted is 800 West, so you need to be East of it to get to 741 W. Cornelia. Second, Cornelia is a one-way street that goes East and West from Halsted. In other words, if you're on Halsted, you can go either East or West on Cornelia, away from Halsted.

Further, if you got the question wrong, so what? So you're going up on Halsted and you turn the wrong way on Cornelia. Oops: you're on the 800 block of Cornelia, the numbers are getting bigger, so you waste maybe 15 seconds turning at the next street and trying again in the other directon.

And even more: Anyone who has ever spent time in that neighborhood knows you won't find a parking space on the 700 block of Cornelia unless you get really, really lucky. So you may want to turn West on Cornelia anyway, because it's sometimes easier to find parking over there.

You may be wondering, why would anyone who wants to demonstrate mastery of driving stick-shift cars (a) take a multiple-choice test requiring him to (b) memorize all the one-way streets in Wrigleyville? Good question. And I have the one and only answer that should ever, ever make you do this:

Because someone is paying you to do so.

That is a good enough reason for me.

The Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters now has a bigger desktop:

2400 pixels wide and 1920 pixels high, baby. Kewl.

Or: How I learned to stop being irrational and give up a piece of history.

I'm about to mail (yes, use postal mail) a termination order to Earthlink, with whom I have had an account since they acquired Mindspring, with whom I had an account since they acquired Pipeline. That means I've had my Mindspring email address since 1998 (I got the Pipeline address in 1997, but Mindspring converted everyone over), and I've kept it as my spam account since I set up my own email server in 2000.

So, I'm feeling a little twinge. It's a piece of history, a connection to the days of dial-up and modems, of Outlook 1997 and Pine. It's also $7 a month, and every last scrap of email it receives with the exception of Earthlink payment receipts is junk. I've kept it because it seemed like a trivial expense to remain connected with the early days of the Internet. But you know what? The Wayback Machine does that too, and it's free.

Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. Literally: Time flees while we hold on to insignificant details.

I had hoped, as I hoped about Post #1,000, to write something lengthy and truly self-indulgent.

This will disappoint many readers, but I don't have time to do that. Instead, just a quick update: even though Inner Drive Technology still exists (as does all of its software and ongoing maintenance), I'm now working for Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.

And, in the spirit of the season, on my way to Avanade's Chicago office yesterday, I noticed something...odd...about the Daley Center:

Gotta love Chicago. And tomorrow they dye the river green. Thursday they show up to work late.

Software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky says that's a good start, but only part of it:

[L]et’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

And that’s when you discover that:

• The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
• The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn’t backed up
• The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
• Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can’t get another LTO drive for three days
• And a million other things that can go wrong even when you “have” “backups.”

The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.

As someone who's got reliable, clockwork backups running, and has had them fail for one of the reasons Spolsky listed (and others that he didn't), I think this is tremendously good advice.

Just a few quick things today:

• The temperature hit 13°C today, not a record but definitely a pleasant day in December. In Chicago. Because, of course, there are parts of the world where that temperature on any day of the year would cause alarm.
• Matthew Yglesias thinks mutual funds are stupid. I'm linking because of his two clear charts. His recommendations: index funds. (But...is any of this news?)
• The local pizza place around the corner folded last week. This was Parker's favorite summer hangout. We'll miss it.
• Comcast and AT&T are fighting public broadband in areas that don't have it. Common sense suggests that the government subsidy would ultimately go to them, but their first reaction is that of any monopolist. As Duke University economist Leslie Marx put it only yesterday, "remember that everywhere a firm looks, it is obligated to look for profits, and I would challenge anyone to show me an industry where the suppression of rivalry is not profitable."

More later. Possibly a Parker photo, too.