tfl: The Flatiron Life

Rue des Saules

This is looking north from Rue Saint-Vincent where Rue des Saules begins. There are steps down in the middle of the pictures. All over the Montmartre area there are roads with these steps, many of them rather high. Obviously cars do not navigate the steps, but cars do travel on these roads. You can imagine what the terrain must be and how narrow the streets are. Even on the tourist filled street the cars are beeping their way around.

Joscelynn and I spent the first half of a day walking around Montmarte. This is where Amelie was set and filmed. It is also home to the magnificent Basilica of the Sacré Cœur.

Preparing the Bocci Throw in Paris

The first day in Paris we stumbled upon these men playing Bocci (or something similar) in this public park. This park is in the middle of Boulevard Richard Lenoir and on top of the Canal Saint-Martin which is below ground here.

Cart Racing in Paris
Originally uploaded by flatiron32.

I have uploaded all of my pictures from Paris. These are in a very raw state. Most of them have not been titled and tagged. Also none of them have been doctored to make it look like I am a photographer capable of making sound f-stop and shutter speed choices.

There are over 300 pics and I will be feturing others as the days go on.

This one is “Cart Racing in Paris”. This thille cycle cart track is in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in the Champs de Mars (Field of Mars [God of War]) between the tower and the École Militaire.

Do you see the man with the white rabbit in the shopping cart? He appeared to be slightly off and I suspected him of being a pedophile.

Jos and I were married on the 14th, when to Paris on the 16th, returned on the 23rd, and went back to work today.

We are going well, but we both have colds.

I will be posting all kinds of links with photos and stories, but I wanted to get this out there.

Thanks to everyone who was with us on our special day.

The Labor Department comes out with employment statistics every month. This months numbers were not as good as people had predicted, 51k jobs created unemployment down to 4.6 (I won’t go into how 6% was considered full employment just 8 years ago.).

What is less reported is that they revise their previous numbers. DoL upped not just the number for July and August, but for the 12 months ending March 2006. How much did they up them? 810,000! That is 67,000 a month, or 17,000 more than they said were created last month!

Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek goes into some detail about why this is, but the basic idea is that the economy is changing in ways that the Government has trouble accounting for. The initial numbers they report are from large company’s like IBM, Boeing, and Travel Web Sites.

However that is not where our economy is growing. People are creating jobs and wealth on their own small scales (and probably in the long tail). These Jobs are found later in their household surveys. Russ does not mention it in the article, but these number can also be off because you have to have a phone to count. If young people like Jos, me, and everyone else I know in Chicago with only a cell phone start a business it will not be counted in either measure.

Cafe Hayek: The Real Story of Job Growth

Last night I was watching an old episode of Tagesschau, German Nightly News, from early September. There was a story about peace keepers in Lebanon and I thought “When was the last time I heard anything about that on the news?”

Looks like there is quite a bit of news coming out in domestic back page and foreign print. Typically our mass media is not showing anything about it. Rush Limbaugh calls them the “Drive-By Media” and I think regardless of your political leaning you can agree. Our news organizations will cover a story when it is a sensation, when everyone else is covering it, or when they can just read press reports to us. This is easy stuff, how often do you hear the TV news quoting a newspaper or reading a document a government or terrorist agency has given them. Once the easy stuff is over is when real journalism should take place. Then they should go out and interview people, talk about what is going on, and find ways of presenting why the things that happened happened. Shouldn’t journalism be a deliberative occupation, not just repeating what someone else is telling you?

So, what is going on in Lebanon?

The UN force there is called United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon or UNIFIL. Don’t you love how the UN includes minor words in their acronyms. It adds a lot of vowels and makes them more pronounceable as words. Does UNIFIL rhyme with Landfill or Awful? Both are probably apt for a UN operation.

UNIFIL is increasing from 2000 troops to 15000 troop. Even thought they are called the Interim Force they have been there for 3 years already. I am guessing they saw the war coming but kept quiet a lot better than they kept the peace before the last war. Even if they cannot keep the peace they claim to be helping the economy.

“The soldiers spend a lot of money here: they visit local attractions, eat out, travel and this, in the end, helps to stimulate the economy,” UNIFIL’s acting chief administrative officer Jean-Pierre Ducharme said.

“In addition, UNIFIL employees have many visitors who will have a significant impact on tourism and this is priceless, it improves the reputation of the country,” he said.

The only thought I can put together in my head after reading that is, at least it is not direct aide from my tax dollars.

Friday is usually my slow day at work. The pace is usually just a little slower and it seem to usually be filled with irregular work. People are completing task they need to complete before the end of the week. This is also a good time to put everything in order, fill out time sheets, clean your desk and inbox, catch up with team member you might not have chatted with over the week. It can also be a hectic time. There was a release to production this weekend and I am sure folks were coding late. This release to production included the first phase of CoLo and means Travelport/Orbitz customers are using my code for the first time.

Amid the usually Friday tasks I continued adding tests to the Excel library As I was adding test I discovered how to add a feature I had been wanting to add. I had only extracted the code from a different code base and this testing was helping me understand ever facet of it. The library previously only allowed you to read an excel file and get the data out of it. If you wanted to create a file you had to use the Apache classes directly. These classes from Apache are not hard to you, but somewhat tedious. They allow you to do anything you would like with an Excel file, but I only need to create files with one sheet and a header row. I discovered that this functionality was intertwined into an error reporting section of the library. I was able to refactor this out to methods any user of the library can use. I have not had a chance to rework my existing code, but hope to soon. After work, I went to the official Orbitz bar for a couple drinks.

Yesterday started out like a typical Monday. Had to dig out of my inbox after the weekend. Also we have a weekly status meeting with Project Management where we go over the status of every project. Since there was a release on Saturday, we also went over how that went and any bugs that were found and if the need to be patched right away.

Actual work wise, I started formally working on CoLo Phase 3. This phase is adding the CoLo feature to Car Searches. Much of the day was spent investigating and informally designing what needs to be done. I have not worked on car searches and Anton added the feature to hotel searches, so this is all new to me. I am starting just by adding the feature on the search page and then will add it to the results after. I looked at what Anton had done with hotels and then looked at the similar classes in cars. Development Teams here have their own specialty. The Corporate team has to deal with all the verticals (Hotel, Air, Car, etc) but the other groups only deal with their own. As I found out the Hotel Team and the Car team have taken different approaches to what you might think could be very similar paths. To apply the same change from hotel to car I would have to do a little mental designing but not much. I was able to add a couple fields to the search bean.

Tuesday I finished up making the initial changes for the Car Search. I have promoted my code and passed it off to Abid, the Front End developer for this project. And Wednesday I helped Abid find the correct values he needed from the work I did. Then I started doing research on what was needed for the other changes for Phase 3. In Phase 1 there was a change to the hotel detail page. This is the page where you find out about more information about the hotel in the search results, like the address, a map, amenities, etc. I thought I was going to add this to Cars also, but there is no such thing. It is amazing how different Air, Hotel, and Car search and booking paths are. I then started working on adding the feature to the search results for cars themselves.

In software development there is a concept called coding by contract. Usually in Object Oriented Programming these contracts are enforced by interfaces. Often these interfaces are implemented with classes named Impl, I don’t like doing this, but it is done. In the car code I came across a few classes named in this convention, but where the interface did not exist. I don’t know how this came to be, but it was a little funny and frustrating.