The Daily Parker

Here's a brain-teaser: take one part Heathrow, one part Iberia Airlines, and a sixty-five minute connection at Madrid Barajas. I'll give you a moment to work your sums.

If you got "no, really, a 2-hour connection," you're correct!

Instead of walking at a normal pace between two gates (that, it turns out, are 600 m apart) inside one terminal to make a fairly routine domestic connection, I walked at a normal pace off my flight from Heathrow right to the nearest Iberia service desk. We all shrugged. "Es Londres, es normal" we had to agree. Up to the lounge[1] I go, to check my email and write a blog entry.

Ah, but, this is no ordinary Western European capital airport. This is Madríd. The lounge has delicious Spanish wines, fresh olives, tasty sausages and cheeses, and no freaking WiFi. The conversation at check-in went something like this:

— ¿Como se puede conectar por el WiFi?

— Ah, desculpe, no tenemos el WiFi; es de pago.

— ¿Verdad? ¿De pago? No free WiFi?

— Sí, ¿es curioso, no?

— Sí, es curioso. Gracias.

So, here I sit, snacking on olives, brie, toast, sausages, a fruity Ribera del Duero number ("Condado de Haza Crianza, 2007: La Recomendación del Sumiller"), and probably in a moment those dates I see over there, composing a blog entry in flipping Notepad.

But let me review, just to keep things in perspective. Yesterday morning I woke up to a healthy snowfall in Chicago and tonight I'm going to bed in Lisbon, having spent the better part of the day in London. The total cost of this trip will come in somewhere around one month of housing (just housing, not groceries or electricity or anything else). And unlike the situation that existed even in my lifetime, getting a visa to anywhere in Western Europe requires presenting my passport to the bored guy at the arrival gate and getting a stamp.

Late update, in Lisbon: It seems the free Internet we take for granted in the U.S. and Northern Europe does not extend to Southern Europe. My hotel has free WiFi—in the bar and lobby. In the room it costs €22 per day.

[1] As a happy consequence of (or sorry consolation prize for) flying all those miles last year, I get access to all oneworld business-class lounges worldwide. I would like to note again, just because it really annoys me at the moment, that a principal benefit of every other business-class lounge that I've ever visited is free bloody WiFi. Dear Spain: ¿WTF?

Throughout my career in software development, I have spent many, many hours in meetings. Endless meetings. Soul-sucking meetings. Insurance companies are the worst, and they hire lots of developers, which just increases the aggregate lifetime meeting time-suck of the average developer.

It's fun to figure out after the meeting not only how much time just disappeared from the universe, but also how much it cost. So I am overjoyed to discover that Scott Adams sells this on his website:

When meetings are running nearly four hours long and your coworkers are sharing tales of their weekend escapades or botched nose jobs and you'd rather just be sitting at your cube getting some actual work done, motivate people to stay on task with TIM...Time Is Money calculator.

I'm not alone in wanting this. The item is on backorder until—I am not making this up—groundhog day.

I'm not entirely sure what I think of this:

Amazon is working on a solution that could revolutionize digital gift buying. The online retailer has quietly patented a way for people to return gifts before they receive them, and the patent documents even mention poor Aunt Mildred. Amazon's innovation, not ready for this Christmas season, includes an option to "Convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred," the patent says. "For example, the user may specify such a rule because the user believes that this potential sender has different tastes than the user." In other words, the consumer could keep an online list of lousy gift-givers whose choices would be vetted before anything ships.

The proposal has also brought into focus a very costly part of the e-retailing business model: Up to 30 percent of purchases are returned, and the cost of getting rejected gifts back across the country and onto shelves has online retailers scrambling for ways to reduce these expenses.

Amazon's patent is 12 pages long, with numerous diagrams, including a "Gift Conversion Rules Wizard" that shows how a user could select rules such as, "No clothes with wool." The document makes for curious reading, reducing the art of gift giving to the dry language of patentry.

So, someone buys you a gift through Amazon, who in turn send you an email warning you about the gift, so you can take the money the other person paid and apply it to something you would prefer. That seems kind of...rude, don't you think?

On the other hand, it might cut economic deadweight loss around the holidays....

The patent is number 7,831,439.

Chicago Public Radio analyzes losing Bump to Silicon Valley as a demonstration of the lack of VC and incubator support here:

David Lieb and his friend Jake Mintz hatched [Bump] at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when they discovered in that flurry of the first few weeks of school that they really, really hated manually typing all their new friends’ contact information into their phones.

So, along with their friend Andy Huibers, they figured out a way to “bump” two phones together to transmit that contact info. And their new smartphone application was born on March 27th, 2009. Things moved fast from there - they won the school’s New Venture Challenge business plan competition and in the summer of 2009, just like Gold Rush era miners of yore, they packed up and headed to California.

They didn’t go with the intention of staying. ... [And] just because they got [a $3m VC infusion] there didn’t mean they had to stay. They could have come back to Chicago. But they didn’t. They opened their headquarters in Mountain View, California, and now have 15 employees there and are “aggressively hiring.”

Lieb says the main reason was because Huibers lived in California already. But there was another reason that speaks to Silicon Valley’s dominance.

"We knew we needed to hire a bunch of people, and being here in the Valley is really where all that technical talent is," Lieb said in an interview.

Chicago has lots of talent as well, and it has amenities that the suburbs of San Jose simply can't offer. But I also have found some limitations on the Chicago startup scene, and that many startups here have to be self-funded for the reasons Ashley Gross mentions in her story. (I'll publish my paper later this week.)

Yesterday, it took me longer to fly home (8½ hours) than it would have taken to drive (6 hours). This almost never happens; and throughout my flight cancellation and delay at Cincinnati's Terminal 2, I remained sanguine and peaceful. (Beer helped.)

Because no matter what flight delays I encountered, no matter what kind of snow blew all over the roads causing the taxi to crawl at a modest walking speed, no matter anything, at least I wasn't in Suburbistan, Ohio:

No, my life wasn't that bad anymore.

This was, I think, my last flight of 2010. And for those keeping score at home: this year I flew in or out of O'Hare 43 times. I'm not sure when I'll do that again, either.

I've recently had the opportunity to work on-site with a client who has a strong interest in protecting its customers' privacy. They have understandably strict policies regarding who can see what network data, who can get what access to which applications, etc. And they're interested in the physical security of their buildings.

At some point, however, process can stymie progress, and this client recently added a physical security measure that can stand as a proxy for everything else about how they function. Not content with having a full-time security guard at each lobby entrance, and with doors that require an ID to open, they now have a man-trap-style revolving door system. Only one person can enter the door at a time, or alarms sound. The doors move slowly enough that even the slowest walkers—and this is far Suburbistan, so there are many—can get through without hurrying. And to make extra-special-certain, these doors require a second ID badge.

Now, the client building is 30 km from the nearest city of any size, and that city doesn't even rank in the top 50 by population. In order to get to the building you have to drive some distance from anyplace you'd ever want to be, then cross a parking lot whose area, according to Google Maps, is four times greater than the building's footprint. In other words, they're protecting the building from...nobody. Nobody will ever lay siege to this place.

This aptly demonstrates the philosophy throughout the organization: they have immense barriers that have no purpose except to prevent any actual work from happening. My effort for this particular client lasted several long weeks and produced, in the end, about fifteen lines of code. They brought 60 developers onto the project to speed it up, with the result that 60 developers tripped over procedures and project management at immense cost to the company to produce something four guys in a garage could have done in the same length of time.

There's a punchline, a poignant one for the day after Elizabeth Edwards died: the client is a major health-insurance company.

Do you want to know why the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country? I think I have the answer.

N.B.: The title of this post comes from one of my favorite quotes, usually ascribed to Napoleon Bonaparte but probably coined by Robert Heinlein: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Sitting in a cube farm outside Cincinnati, Ohio, I start to wonder...is jail anything like this?

Researchers have documented the soul- and productivity-sucking effects of cubicles for about 20 years, with other related research going back to the 1950s. Someday I will understand why no one acts on this research...

Guys are installing new windows at IDTWHQ, completing the project begun in March 2009. (I split it into two phases to spread the cost over two years.) I ordered this set mid-August. We thought they'd be done in October, but no such luck.

Here's the effect, according to the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center Monitor:

The bottom axis shows local time, the vertical shows degrees Celsius. Also keep in mind that servers produce heat, so the server rack usually runs about 2°C warmer than the rest of the apar—World Headquarters. And for those keeping score at home, right now it's -1°C outside.

I'll have more art later in the day.

My new Kindle arrived just now, only (let's see) about 30 hours after I ordered it. Amazon pre-registered it, so from opening the box to reading a book I'd previously purchased took less than two minutes. Add five minutes to hook it up to my home WiFi (complete with 26-byte WPA password), two minutes to go to amazon.com to change the thing's email address, fifteen seconds to buy the next book I want to read, and—I am not kidding—fifteen seconds to download it to the device.

What does that come to? Less than 10 minutes after UPS left, I've got my next book ready to go.

Oh, and: it remembered all the books I've already bought, not counting the ones I'd saved to my local hard drive, so replacing them took just a minute or two longer.

Clearly, Amazon understands the cardinal rule of new technology: If you make it easy, they will buy it.

Update: Add another 30 seconds to find and download the $4.99 Scrabble Kindle edition.

My Kindle 2 died last week. Its battery, drained of every last electron, could no longer provide even enough power to recharge.

Two calls to Amazon customer service later, and I got an $89 credit towards the purchase of a Kindle 3, applied instantly to my account. I'll have the new one tomorrow, for about 1/4 what I paid for the original.

Everybody wins: I get a good deal, they sell a new item. They even refunded the last Kindle book I bought, since I discovered the Kindle-bricking when I tried to download it.