Posting will be light the next couple of days as I'm back in San Francisco for a convention. More on that later. For now, I'm adjusting to the time change and hoping that tomorrow I have the energy to write about how good dinner was tonight.
Read or look at these:
Oh, and the Cubs lost, which feels somehow familiar.
Yes, even with a new blog engine, sometimes link happens:
The new blog engine does have one key advantage: putting that list together took about 1/3 the time it used to take.
A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why:
At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck.
Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical during peak hours, they contend.
Well, yes, on average it will handle 5% of flights. But it will handle most of those flights during periods of low visibility, when the flights would otherwise be stacked up all the way to Janesville. In other words, the new runway boosts capacity at O'Hare when it's most needed (during bad weather) and doesn't actually hurt anything when it's not needed.
The Sun-Times goes on to quote critics of the new runway who, perhaps not being pilots or aviation engineers, want to lengthen the diagonal runways that cross the east-west runways already in place. Since crossing runways increases the separation between planes on approach, extending 4R/22L and 4L/22R would do nothing to alleviate delays during low visibility.
The Sun-Times own graphic shows that the 5% figure is quite a different story when you look at all of the runways together.
I'm happy for the increased capacity. It should cut weather-related delays at O'Hare significantly, though I'm not wild about the 20-minute taxi time, and I understand residents of Wood Dale and Bensenville aren't wild about the noise.
Cranky Flier this morning has a note about Southwest Airlines' latest ad campaign. I'll let him explain:
[W]hat Southwest is trying to do is distract you from paying attention to the actual total cost of your ticket and instead trying to make you focus just on the fees. It gives examples on the website showing how Spirit can charge you up to $294 in fees while Southwest has none. But the reality is that you probably aren’t paying that much in fees, and you’re starting off a much lower base fare. Even if the fees are higher than Southwest’s (as they nearly always are), the total cost often won’t be.
What Southwest is trying to show here is that its fares remain below the industry fare level in 2000, but that’s not what I see. What I see is that in 2000, Southwest’s average fare was 43 percent less than industry average. Fast forward to today, and the fare gap has shrunk dramatically. Now its average fare is only 13 percent less.
The point here? Southwest’s fares have just gone up a lot more than those of everyone else.
I shared this with my friend over at Deeply Trivial—she's a Ph.D. researcher and statistician—and she responded with this:
That about sums it up.
Back in the office, doing expense reports, following up on email, all that. Regular posting probably to resume tomorrow.
I did receive the book I reviewed though. I'll have more about that later, too.
I'm camped in a familiar spot, SFO Terminal 2, on my way home. Traveling Saturday morning means no traffic, no lines at security, and sometimes no sleep. That fortunately isn't a problem today; in fact, had I gotten up half an hour earlier, I might have made the 8am flight home instead of the 9:15 I'm on.
Longtime reader MJG just sent me this to pass the time waiting for my flight to board:
After last night's Killers and Foo Fighters concert-slash-corporate-party—and the free Sierra and Lagunitas Salesforce provided, more to the point—today's agenda has been a bit lighter than the rest of the week.
Today's 10:30 panel was hands-down my favorite. Authors David Brin and Ramez Naam spoke and took questions for an hour about the future. Pretty cool stuff, and now I have a bunch more books on my to-be-read list.
At the moment, I'm sitting at an uncomfortably low table in the exhibit hall along with a few other people trying to get some laptop time in. So I will leave you with today's sunrise, viewed from the back:
Patrick Smith was appalled by the British Airways incident last week. Not as much by the plane catching fire as by idiot passengers evacuating with their luggage:
Aboard British Airways flight 2276, the evacuation process may have seemed orderly and calm. How would things have unfolded, though, had a fuel tank exploded, or had the smoke and fire suddenly spread inside the plane? Now people are screaming. There’s a mad rush for the exits, but the aisle is clogged with suitcases dropped by panicked passengers. Your computer, your Kindle, your electric toothbrush, your underwear and your Sudoku books — all of those things can be replaced and aren’t worth risking your life over — not to mention the lives of the passengers behind you, who can’t get to the door because your 26-inch Tumi is in the way.
Perhaps most reckless of all is taking a bag down one of the inflatable escape slides. You can’t always see it in videos or photos, but those slides are extremely steep. They are not designed with convenience — or fun — in mind. They are designed for no other purpose than to empty a plane of its occupants as rapidly as possible. You’ll be coming down from over two stories high in the case of a widebody jet, at a very rapid clip, with others doing the same in front of you and right behind you. Even without bags people are often injured going down the slides. This is expected. Add carry-ons to the mix and somebody is liable to be killed, smacked on the head by your suitcase or baby stroller.
As the CNN story points out, "[a] majority of the injuries came as passengers slid down the inflatable chutes to evacuate the Boeing 777, Clark County Fire Department Deputy Chief Jon Klassen said."
So if you're ever in the unfortunate position of having to leave a plane whose right engine has disassembled itself during takeoff, leave your crap behind.
I haven't traveled nearly as much this year as I did the past few, but only a week after my last trip, I'm away from home again. For a few days I'll be in San Francisco for Dreamforce '15, where the Force is with me dreams are forced upon you I'll learn about Salesforce and hobnob with other nerds.
Unfortunately, I left all of my laptop power supplies in Chicago. And, having had the same basic Dell model for the last five computers, I have quite a few. Fortunately, my office is sending me one.
So, today's entry will be mercifully short. Photos, and musings about cloud-based CRM, to follow when I have power.