Events

Via Talking Points Memo, President-Elect Obama will announce Hillary Clinton as his nominee for Secretary of State tomorrow in Chicago: Obama plans to announce the New York senator as part of his national security team at a press conference in Chicago, [Democratic officials] said Saturday. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly for the transition team. In unrelated news, today is the last day of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Why? Why? Why? The only thing that makes sense to me: someone wants to start a war. I hope to all humanity India and Pakistan keep their senses over the next few days. So do the Indians and Pakistanis, I expect.

Today (in North America; tomorrow worldwide) is the 17th Annual Buy Nothing Day, "sponsored" by Adbusters: Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low? There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet...

Most Daily Parker readers can skip this (long) post about software. But if you're interested in C# 3.0, LINQ, or FogBugz, read on. I use FogBugz's time tracking tool to provide tracability in my billing. If I bill a client 2.75 hours for work on a bug, I want the client to see the exact times and dates I worked on the bug along with all the other details. And because I track non-billable time as well, and I often work in coffee shops or places like the Duke of Perth, I wind up with lots of tiny time...

Calculated Risk hits the nail on the head: "[W]hat happens to U.S. interest rates if China slows their investment in dollar denominated assets?" Hint: nothing good...

I've just gotten from Amazon two of the best movies ever made, worth the extra few bucks for Blu-Ray: That said, I'm under my dad's orders to finish Deadwood before watching anything else...

I had to scrutinize my logbook to figure out when I last flew at night: 26 April 2006, in Nashua, N.H. So I took a flight instructor with me this past Sunday to get "recurrent." (Regulations require that pilots make three full-stop landings at night—further defined as 1 hour after sunset until 1 hour before sunrise—within 90 days in order to carry passengers at night.) I had a good flight, they can use the airplane again, the instructor enjoyed flying with someone who knew how to fly (as opposed to a...

Via Jeff Atwood, San Francisco-based programmer Tantek Çelik's definition of Email as "Efail:" All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather...

Essay by Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis, in December's Conde Nast Portfolio: In the two decades since [1989], I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of...

Via Calculated Risk, Merriam-Webster has declared "bailout" its word of the year: The word "bailout," which shot to prominence amid the financial meltdown, was looked up so often at Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary that the publisher says it was an easy choice for its 2008 Word of the Year. The rest of the list is not exactly cheerful. It also includes "trepidation," "precipice" and "turmoil." "There's something about the national psyche right now that is looking up words that seem to suggest fear...