Events

Via Microsoft guru Raymond Chen, news that tourists continually block traffic outside Abbey Road Studios: Apparently the studio also has a webcam. The famous zebra crossing is here.

Brilliant:

The Paris Observatory has announced a leap second between June 30th and July 1st this year: A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s 2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s 2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s ... Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December or June, depending on the [available rotation data]. Leap seconds occur from time to time because the earth's rotation on its axis doesn't...

A couple of us have come to Brown Deer, Wis., to work with a vendor on an upcoming software release. (Brown Deer is about 160 km north of Chicago.) The vendor has been über-cooperative, the trip up (for me, anyway) took less than two hours, and we're getting everything done we weren't able to do from our respective offices in other states. Two of the guys are from Texas, one is from Delhi, and I'm from the Greatest City in North America. So the only thing we're having any difficulty negotiating is food....

Via Sullivan, writer Mike Konczal reviews economist Donald Schoup's book about parking pricing with a clear enunciation of good and bad parking schemes: We now have two ways to distinguish changes in the provisioning of government services. On one axis, there’s who controls the provisoning and the residual – is it in public hands or private hands? On the second axis there’s how much competition and market reforms are driving the reform versus how much there’s monopolies and single firms dictating the...

I caught a mention of this on the Marketplace Open this morning, and now Gulliver has picked it up. Apparently the Department of Transportation now requires more transparency in airline price advertising: Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a...

Welcome to the semi-annual update of the Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2012 4 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 28th 07:19 16:33 9:14 28 Jan 5pm sunset 07:07 17:00 9:52 5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:10 21 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:39 17:31 10:52 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:38 11:08 10 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr. 15th Earliest sunset until Oct. 27th 06:10 17:52 11:42 11 Mar...

In 2011, I: took 8,198 photos, including 4,352 in Chicago, 881 in Japan, 588 in Portugal, and 337 in the U.K. (and only 71 of Parker). This is almost as many as I took in 2009 and 2010 combined (9,140), and more than I took in the first 8 years I owned a camera (1983-1991, 7,671). flew 115,845 km but drove less than 4,500 km visited 5 countries (the UK, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Japan) and 8 states (California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin)...

First photo of the year, in fact:

It's 2012 everywhere from Cairo to points east, and I've got a lot to do between now and tomorrow, so I will postpone whatever end-of-year summaries, year-in-review posts, photos of Parker, and looks forward to next year until tomorrow. Suffice to say, I didn't accomplish everything I'd hoped to do today, this month, or this year, but I'm satisfied. Mostly. And I think 2012 will improve upon 2011, which improved upon 2010, and so on back to 1999, which, for a variety of reasons, hasn't been topped. So...