The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Brussels Airlines routes around the damage

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 for much else.

Meanwhile, Liege, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Brussels Airport, picked up a bunch of flights with the A319/A320 fleet. Liege is the cargo hub of Belgium, but it doesn’t usually do much in the way of passenger flights. The airline is offering free shuttle bus service to both airports from Brussels.

The next day, Friday, Brussels Airlines got at least a piece of its long haul network off the ground. With those flights service a fair bit of connecting traffic, Liege wasn’t the best option. Instead, Brussels moved those flights to operate from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt hub as well as from the Swiss hub in Zurich. (Swiss is owned by Lufthansa as well.)

This was a brilliant move. It allowed Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada travelers to continue to connect on to these African destinations. And for those who were starting or ending in Brussels, Lufthansa-operated flights were added from Frankfurt and Munich to Liege to help feed people into the new network. Brussels Airlines is flying from Antwerp to Zurich as well.

I'm always encouraged to see a business responding effectively after a major event, especially in aviation.

Hackers attacking law firms

Interesting. A Ukrainian criminal has essentially announced his intention to attack 50 law firms worldwide in order to get insider information on securities:

The mastermind, a broker named "Oleras" living in Ukraine, has been attempting since January to hire hackers to break into the firms' computer systems so he can trade on insider information, according to a Feb. 3 alert from Flashpoint, a New York threat intelligence firm.

Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin, McDermott Will & Emery and Jenner & Block all were listed on a spreadsheet of potential marks. It named 46 of the country's largest law firms, plus two members of the UK's Magic Circle.

In this latest scheme, Oleras posted on a cyber criminal forum a plan to infiltrate the law firms' networks, then use keywords to locate drafts of merger agreements, letters of intent, confidentiality agreements and share purchase agreements. The list of targeted law firms also included names, email address and social media accounts for specific employees at the firms.

Now, having worked in both law and IT, I am a bit worried about this. Attorneys, bless their hearts, are not the most technically-savvy group of people, usually. I hope the targeted law firms have really good IT staffs—but that won't matter if the attorneys themselves get targeted in spear-phishing attacks.

Maybe we just need to make them liable for information disclosure. That will get their attention.

In the Navy

At trivia (pub quiz) on Tuesday, we had this question: Name 4 of the 6 U.S. presidents who have served in the Navy or Naval Reserves. We got it wrong, unfortunately, and the answer surprised me.

All six of the men in the list served in WWII, and all six served in the White House successively: Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush. (Bush was Reagan's vice president, remember.)

So...was there a secret conspiracy of Naval officers in the 1960s to take over the U.S. government?

Nah. But it's an interesting pattern.

(One of our team explained how Reagan didn't really break the pattern; "He was in McHale's Navy.")

Roméo, Roméo

I really, really like the Original Pronunciation movement started by David and Ben Crystal. Through analysis and performance, they're trying to understand Shakespeare's plays as audiences 400 years ago would have understood them.

The Crystals are back in the news with the upcoming publication of the Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation this June. The Atlantic has the story:

It’s a book, a guide to Shakespeare’s first folio, that Crystal has been working on for 12 years (on and off, because, as he notes, “it’s deadly boring” to put a dictionary together). That work involved, essentially, linguistic sleuthing: Crystal started by looking at the words that might have originally rhymed, based on rhyme schemes and the words’ current pronunciations, and then cross-referenced them against other appearances of those same words in Shakespeare’s corpus.

The resulting dictionary is meant, he explains, as a resource for anyone who wants to understand Shakespeare’s plays and poems not as amber-frozen relics of literary history, but as works that have evolved along with English itself. “I’m not suggesting for a moment that Original Pronunciation replaces other approaches to Shakespeare,” Crystal says. “It simply is an extra tool in the kit that you use when you’re putting on a play.”

And OP doesn’t simply add dimensions to Shakespeare’s work (or, for that matter, to Marlowe’s, and Jonson’s, and Webster’s). It can also help modern audiences simply to parse the plays, to tease out basic meanings that have been eroded in time. In Henry IV Part I, for example, Falstaff tells Hal, “Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.” The line would seem, Crystal points out, to make very little sense—unless you understand that “reason” was pronounced, in Shakespeare’s English, as “raisin,” and that “raisin” was a synonym for “blackberry.”

I have, of course, pre-ordered the book.

Here are the Crystals giving a demonstration:

What Amazon looked like when I was a kid

I have a couple hours to kill in the Loop after having lunch with a friend. I don't really want caffeine or alcohol right now, which rules out the two classes of places to where I would most likely go. Then I remembered: there's a great big library here.

And yep, it looks like a library on the inside: shelves full of books, people reading, literary quotes on the walls, free WiFi. OK, that last bit isn't something I remember from the 1980s, but everything else is. They even have a shelf full of phone books.

OK, I've been here before, but still, I'm laughing at myself for not considering hanging out here before.

Warm, but still a miss

Yesterday's temperature at O'Hare got up to 21°C, which we last hit on November 5th, and is the normal temperature for May 15th. It was quite a lovely day, in fact. Tom Skilling pointed out that this was the earliest 21°C day in 16 years, and was 3 weeks earlier than the average date of its first occurrence based on 145 years of data.

I tried, I really tried, to hit 30,000 steps, but...well:

Crap. I missed 30,000 by 225 steps, and missed my record by only 721:

2015 Apr 26 30,496
2016 Mar 8 29,775
2015 Jun 15 28,455
2015 May 2 26,054
2015 Sep 5 24,771

Note that on September 5thalso missed a goal by almost the same amount. Quite irritating. Still, yesterday's step count was fully 4.86 standard deviations above my mean daily count of 12,660, so it was a pretty good effort. (At this point today I'm already up to 9,534, so the week is looking pretty good.)

And Parker got over 90 minutes of walkies.

Need to post more

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday:

The blue line is average posts per day per month; red is the all-time average; and green is the past 12 months moving average.

There are a couple of blogging milestones coming up in the next few days, so more on this later.

Freakin' NuGet

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow:

Back to work. At least my build is succeeding now.

Too many things to read during lunch

A medium-length list this time:

And this brings me to lunch.

What is it with weekends?

It's odd that I haven't posted on a Saturday since January 23rd, and I haven't posted on both weekend days since December 5th-6th. I'm not sure why, really.

This time, it's because last night I had a big party, so I didn't have any time to post. Today I have no creativity. But I still wonder at the pattern.