The Daily Parker

Temporarily confined to the U.S.

2010-07-29T16:16:37.4198913+00:00

Every nine and a half years, I'm unable to leave the country for a few weeks because I've sent my passport off to be renewed. I just did that today. Not that I'm planning to flee into exile this month or anything, but still I hate not having the document. Right now the Department of State estimates 4 to 6 weeks to renew it. I guess I'll hang out here until September.

Still, it boggles my mind that only 28% of U.S. citizens have passports. That's far fewer than any other OECD country, though other rich countries have higher rates because they're surrounded by other countries.

I'm also getting extra pages right from the start. I hope to fill them before 2020.

My, what big ears you have

2010-07-28T15:15:38.365+00:00

My friend DC's puppy Rex:

Full size at The Daily Parker.

Not on my holiday list

2010-07-26T20:12:23.094+00:00

Via Sullivan, an unfortunate product from Scotland:

AdFreak writes:

If the Old Spice guy really wants to prove his manliness, he should switch allegiances and endorse BrewDog, a Scottish craft brewery that has just released perhaps the most masculine product ever invented: a beer that contains 55 percent alcohol and comes packaged inside a taxidermied rodent. It costs £500 (about $760) per bottle and is called The End of History. PETA has yet to weigh in, but an Advocates for Animals rep calls the brew "a perverse idea" and adds: "People should learn to respect [animals] rather than using them for some stupid marketing gimmick." UPDATE: Despite the steep price tag, all 12 bottles of the beer sold out on Day 1.

Today's XKCD is unrelated to this, but still worthy of linking.

She also has a penetrating wit

2010-07-26T16:29:35.7274293+00:00

A friend drove through the squall line that hit the East Coast yesterday and got extremely lucky, when you think about it:

She's fine, and so is her car, though she had to have the windshield replaced in the dark because of the widespread power outages out there.

Then there's the heat. Cities all up and down the East Coast hit record high temperatures over the weekend, including 38°C in Raleigh, 41°C in Richmond, and 37°C in Washington.

How freeways kill communities

2010-07-24T20:29:05.2325655+00:00

Via Sullivan, Timothy Lee describes how freeway construction destroyed the center of St. Louis:

Planners in St. Louis, as in most American cities, decided that the new expressways would run directly through the cities’ downtowns. One of them (I-44/I-70) now runs North to South between the park and downtown. Not surprisingly, if you visit the park today you’ll find a light sprinkling of tourists, but nothing like the throngs of locals you’ll find in successful urban parks like New York’s Union Square, Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, or DC’s Dupont Circle. Whatever “revitalizing” effects the park might have had on the rest of the city were undermined by the fact that the park isn’t really accessible to pedestrians in the rest of the city.

Planners pursued the same basic scheme in other American cities. And in almost every case, they encountered fierce resistance from people already living where the freeways were supposed to go. [Author Jane] Jacobs herself was a key player in the famous, and ultimately successful, effort to stop a proposed freeway through lower Manhattan. After decades of bitter conflict, similar plans were defeated in Washington, DC. Urbanists were partially successful in Philadelphia. They killed the Crosstown expressway, which would have cut through South Philly, but they failed to stop the Vine Street Expressway, which ran north of downtown and contributed to the destruction of Philly’s Chinatown.

In Chicago, the Eisenhower and U of I combined to destroy Little Italy; and the Dan Ryan sliced right through the principal middle-class black community, scattering black professionals to the winds.

Monsoon season

2010-07-24T15:33:01.2522223+00:00

Chicago got a bit of rain yesterday, after what seemed like a few weeks of drought:

Emergency personnel from Chicago and several suburbs headed to Westchester this morning after flooding caused by heavy overnight rainstorms forced the evacuation of a nursing home in the west suburb.

Overnight weather left many people and vehicles stranded on roadways as thunderstorms hit north central and northeast Illinois with intense lightning and winds up to 80 km/h. A flash flood warning [was] in effect until 7 p.m.

And it's not over:

Thunderstorms were on the decline by mid-morning, but as the day heats up and the front pushes into the state, thunderstorms should develop again by early afternoon. The National Storm Prediction Center has northeast and central Illinois and much of Indiana in the outlook area for potential severe storms.

With the front approaching from the west mid-afternoon, from that point on, it appears the biggest threat of severe storms in the Chicago area is south, then northwest Indiana late afternoon and evening.

Overnight it got down all the way to 21°C, briefly. Someday soon it'll get all the way up to 21°C, and I'll be happier.

Roll on, October

2010-07-20T21:02:06.614511+00:00

Chicago is having a one-day respite from the longest streak of 32°C weather in four years:

Powerful thunderstorms bypassed Chicago Monday -- and so did 90-degree heat. It marked the first time in six days the mercury failed to reach 90 degrees here and ended the area's longest string of consecutive 90-degree days in four years. Not since July 28 through Aug. 2, 2006 had the Chicago area logged more 90-degree temperatures than in the five days leading up to Monday.

Incredibly, July 2010, with an average temperature of 25.6°C degrees on the books to date, is running 5.6°C warmer than the same period a year ago and nearly 2.8°C above the long-term average. Using temperature data as a guide, it appears air conditioner use for the month may be outpacing last year's usage by a whopping three and a half times!

The twelve 90-degree temperatures on the books this year is four times as many as had occurred by this time a year ago.

The more seasonable brand of warmth is to continue its dominance in the area Tuesday and Wednesday. Both days are likely to see highs in the mid 80s over the vast majority of the Chicago area. But a new round of 90-degree heat -- including the possibility of 2010's hottest temperature to date -- is in sight.

My air conditioners struggle to keep the temperature below 27°C. I am not happy. Parker has decided that sleeping on the hardwood floor directly under one of them is preferable to sleeping on his comfy bed. I'm beginning to agree.

Note to phishers

2010-07-19T13:21:09.1935674+00:00

A good friend woke up this morning to find her email and Facebook accounts hacked, with a message sent out to everyone in her address book that she'd been robbed at gunpoint while visiting London and desperately needed a credit card to get on the plane back home.

Other than the story's baseline implausibility (a gun robbery in London being about as likely as getting trampled by a moose in Atlanta), there were other clues it was a phisher. For one thing, my friend is an American lawyer, not a Nigerian criminal, so she has a direct, concise, and moreover punctuated writing style not immediately in evidence in the phishing message.

The take-away, to all the would-be phishers reading this: you'll get farther with your frauds if you learn better English. Next time, instead of asking for credit-card numbers, write this: "Help! I am being held captive unless I can draft a 500-word essay on epistemology, and they'll only allow me one reference book! Please, I'm desperate, send me Strunk and White before I use unnecessary words!"

Oh, and also try hacking your victim's spouse's account, which will make it harder for people to verify the dodge.

Where has all the time gone?

2010-07-18T22:39:05.4293832+00:00

In the past seven calendar days[1], I have worked 40.3 hours[2], traveled 39.8 hours through four countries and six states, and, so far as I can tell, slept for about 40 hours. I am not sure what happened in the remaining few minutes, though part of it included walking Parker and part of it included staring into space dazedly. Fortunately traveling wasn't entirely wasted time, including as it did four episodes of This American Life and two complete novels.

This is all a long way of saying I apologize for the reduced velocity of The Daily Parker, and I expect to resume my usual average of 1½ posts per day in short order.

N.B.: Don't ask how I know all this. I will say only that sitting in a car, train, bus, or airplane for more than 40 hours in one week gives one a lot of time to think about irrelevant crap.

[1] Since 17:30 CDT last Sunday.

[2] Plus another 4.4 hours commuting to and from my client site.

Back in the US

2010-07-14T13:12:12.8232294+00:00

The first day or so back is always hectic and exhausting. I still marvel that the 11½-hour time change from India was easier than the 9-hour change from St. Petersburg (or, come to think of it, the 8-hour change from Dubai.)

I'm still getting back into my life, so I'll end here, but for this non-sequitur: I have t oget these cookies.

Hero-City Leningrad

2010-07-11T11:02:33.24+00:00

The monument to the heroes of the seige of Leningrad:

More photos at The Daily Parker.

St. Petersburg Residency, Day 8

2010-07-11T00:37:33.191+00:00

Ah, the quandry. Quandries, in fact: there are two.

The biggest is that it's 4:30am in St. Petersburg but only 7:30pm in Chicago. I need to be back on Chicago time by Tuesday morning. Thus, I'm staying up very late in order to remain conscious at work in three days. I hope it works.

The other is that I took some photos of my classmates at the end-of-term party tonight, but I haven't secured permission for general publication yet. On Facebook, only Dukies and my family can see the Duke photos (if I've set up the permissions right). Here, on The Daily Parker, anyone on the Intertubes can see them. So I tend to publish photos of Parker instead of my classmates, because he has no privacy rights and they do.

So there are a ton of photos I'd like to publish to show off my photo skillz, but this is the only one for which I have permission to publish so far:

Yeah, they're that cute together. Before prospective CCMBA students get all excited after Googling the program, I should point out that they've been engaged for quite some time, and only one of them is in my class. Still, this is the kind of shot that makes the photographer blow on his fingernails, so I just had to publish it.

St Petersburg Residency, Day 7

2010-07-09T13:51:47.1932968+00:00

The Culture Dash took me back to Kazan Cathedral today, only this time, I went inside:

Dehli Terminal 3 completed

2010-07-08T17:43:26.698552+00:00

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 about the scale of the thing. Nobody seems able to decide whether it will be the world’s third-, fifth-, or eighth-biggest airport terminal. But it seems pretty certain that it will be a vast improvement over what came before (that’s a low bar, I suppose). Perhaps readers can help resolve this issue: in terms of floor area, which are the world's biggest airport terminals, and how big are they? (The most reliable stuff I've seen puts Delhi T3 in roughly the same ballpark as Madrid's T4, the Mexico City airport, Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi, and a couple of others—around 500,000 square meters—and about half the size of Beijing's new terminal, and a third that of Dubai's).

Of course, however spiffy the building, there is always scope for Heathrow T5-style shenanigans with baggage and so on to mess things up. I’m curious, therefore, to hear from any readers travelling through Delhi after July 15th. Do let us know how you found the new terminal. I myself won’t be passing through until mid-October. I am timing my annual visit home until after the Commonwealth-Games madness, such as it is, is over. By then, teething troubles will hopefully have been sorted out.

Kazan Cathedral

2010-07-08T17:13:33.0072586+00:00

Only a couple blocks from the hotel:

St Petersburg Residency, day 6

2010-07-08T11:21:58.5363074+00:00

Unavoidable, I suppose. And looking increasingly like an real option after nearly a week of British-inspired Russian cooking:

Good news, bad news

2010-07-08T07:01:13.9704328+00:00

The good: Spain beating Germany last night. The bad: The sound of "¡Olé olé olé olé!" ricocheting around my aching head this morning. The ugly: Receving a (hopefully-mail-merged) message from the program reminding me of the importance of attending class after I missed for the second time in my MBA program.

Walking (and boating) in St Petersburg

2010-07-07T14:26:36.1135369+00:00

I've got KML files of the boat tour and walk from which I took some of the photos posted already in the blog. Of course, as GPS receivers are illegal in Russia, I spent a lot of time meticulously figuring out the coordinate pairs in these files, including the zig-zag lines that perfectly simulate the distorted readings someone would get walking in a heavily-urbanized area.

St Petersburg Residency, Day 5

2010-07-07T13:32:38.692+00:00

I took a walk yesterday around 9pm, down Nevsky Prospekt to the Hermitage (about 8 km round-trip). Like today, yesterday it was about 30°C outside. And like today, the sun never quite set. This is from half past midnight:

More photos at The Daily Parker.

St Petersburg Residency, Day 4

2010-07-06T12:25:42.592+00:00

I didn't come to Russia for the food.

This is fortunate. The lunch buffet yesterday had pork filets, penne with cream sauce, white rice, salmon roulades, roasted carrots with butter. Then the dinner buffet had pork roulades, spaghetti with cream sauce, black and white rice, salmon filets, roasted carrots with butter. Same Sunday, same Saturday, though there was a minor stir when we found out the Halal meal was lamb chops, which the Muslim students eagerly devoured leaving none for the rest of us.

A Ukrainian friend asked, "This does not sound like traditional Russian food to me. What hotel are you based in?" Ah, here's where the story takes a particularly grim turn: we're in the British-owned Corinthia Nevskij Palace. British-owned. Which is odd, because our food in London was actually pretty good, especially breakfast.

Russia does, however, have tasty things to drink. But we'll leave that aside for now.

And another thing, which is keeping me in the building for the time being: It's bloody 30°C outside. Yecch. I'm hoping it cools off a bit before I head out for more photography and meeting up with my team to watch the Dutch beat Uruguay.

St Petersburg Residency, Day 2

2010-07-04T05:59:11.769+00:00

They started us off beautifully this term, with one class yesterday followed by four hours of free time and a tour of the city. Then they gave us the morning off today. I wish all the residencies had started so easily.

This gave me a chance to get some photos processed, starting with the train ride from Helsinki. This is near Vyborg:

More at The Daily Parker.