The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Leg #2

Cooling my heels (just what does that cliche mean, anyway?) at JFK. I miss New York. I don't want to live here again, but I do like visiting.

I mean, look:

That might look a little better if I could get Lightroom to work on my Surface Pro. Time to reinstall it, again.

Let the mileage run commence

For the next 52 hours, I'll be traveling, for a really horrible reason. I'm not traveling for work, nor really for vacation, though I will admit to enjoying it (in a way my friends don't really understand).

No, I'm trying to keep my American Airlines elite status for another year, because so far in 2015 I have traveled less than in any year of the past 10. So tonight I'm flying to New York, tomorrow to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago on Saturday evening, about 5,500 miles total.

The routing provided not only the best ratio of miles to dollars I could find, but also the chance to fly on American's new A321T and B787-8 airplanes. So far it looks like I'll be in coach on both, as AA3 on a Friday may be one of American's most profitable (read: both premium cabins are paid for rather than upgrades) and the 787 is new enough that lots of dweebs like me are flying on it even if it takes us out of the way. (I'll be taking it on a LAX-DFW segment Saturday afternoon.)

I did bring my real camera, and also I scheduled a full 24 hours in L.A., so this won't be a completely intangible trip. I've also got a couple of books with me. And I really do love flying. So it's not torture, and if I can eke out Platinum for one more year, not pointless.

Next report from New York.

More meetings, less reading

More things I haven't read yet:

And a customer technician spent 90 minutes over two days worth of conference calls denying that something obviously his responsibility was not, in fact, his responsibility, until a network tech from his own company said it was.

Too much to read

I'm totally swamped today, so here are the things I haven't read yet:

Twenty minutes until my next meeting.

 

The politicization of time zones

The CBC weighs in on one of this blog's perennial topics:

Going by the sun's position in the sky, Saskatchewan should be on mountain time, the same as Alberta. The border city of Lloydminster gets it right and uses mountain time but the rest of Saskatchewan is effectively on daylight time year round, while the province says it's on standard time.

Lots of places do the same, and some by more than an hour.

And Newfoundland, where the clocks are 30 minutes ahead of the ones in most of Labrador and the rest of the Atlantic time zone, can claim to be in minute-sync with all sorts of places.

The 30-minuters added another one to their list this year.

They also have a listicle of facts about daylight saving time, for those who are not already completely exhausted by this topic.

Changing the clocks

If you live in the parts of the U.S. and Canada that observe Daylight Saving Time, don't forget to move your clocks back an hour tonight. It couldn't come soon enough, though this is the soonest it can come under the 2007 changes to DST observance.

This morning's 7:22 sunrise in Chicago is the latest we'll have to endure until next November 1st, but tonight's 5:47 sunset is the latest we'll get to have until March 6th. Tomorrow the sun rises at 6:23 and sets at 4:45, as our available daylight shrinks from 10 hours, 24 minutes today down to 9 hours, 7 minutes on December 21st.

I'm not a fan of the 2007 changes. I like switching to DST in the spring and switching back in the fall, but I also believe that mid-October (or even the end of September as they do in Europe) makes a lot more sense. At least mornings aren't so gloomy in the fall. (Not a lot we can do about the post-7am sunrises from December 2nd through February 5th, but we expect those two months to be gloomy.)

Of course, I'm not in Chicago at the moment, and it's plenty sunny here...

Turkey time

No, not Thanksgiving; the time of day right now in Turkey. Even though I follow time zones pretty carefully, I really can't tell you what time it is right now in Ankara, and it seems no one else can, either:

Following a decree originating from the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s government has officially delayed the start of daylight saving by two weeks. Like the rest of Europe, the country was supposed to turn back its clocks in the early hours of Sunday, October 25. Elections coming up on November 1 prompted the move, as the government reckoned that more evening light might ensure a better turnout.

But even in a country with a tradition of occasionally delaying daylight saving a day or so, the two-week delay has come across as more than a little Pharaonic in its ambition. There’s another problem: no one seems to have informed the country’s automatically adjusting clocks. This means almost every cellphone and computer jumped out of sync on Sunday morning, causing minor chaos as Turks struggled to work out whether their clocks had changed automatically or not. On Twitter the hashtag #saatkac—“What’s the time?”—trended as people reveled in Erdoğan’s King Canute moment.

The IANA Time Zone Database pushed out a change on October 1st. While some sites, including this blog and Weather Now, updated our copies of the database immediately, apparently not everyone else has. Typically it takes a few weeks to get changes pushed to millions of cell phones.

This is a minor, but telling, example of how authoritarian governments encourage incompetence. If Donald Trump gets elected president, expect this sort of thing to happen here.