Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXXXVIII

[quackhandle]

Enjoyed the Clipper story, thanks.

qh

[Bunk]

Just downloaded Capo Touch. Will see how well it works tonight.

[NickFitz]

Terrible night's sleep last night. Wish it'd cool down a bit

• My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers - Caity Weaver goes on an important assignment: ”Last Monday TGI Friday's unveiled a new promotion (available at many TGI Friday's locations, but none on the island of Manhattan) whereby customers can gorge themselves on unlimited appetizers—without fear of punishment, embarrassment, or ostracization—for a one-time payment of $10. The promotion is called "Endless Appetizers.”… I wanted to call their bluff and eat appetizers until they kicked me out, to seek the limit of this supposedly limitless publicity stunt. I soon learned the limit does not exist.”
  
  
• Too Weird for The Wire - How a group of Baltimore drug dealers sought to evade prosecution for a series of murders using a legal fiction originally invented by white supremacists opposed to the abolition of slavery: ”The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial.”
  
  
• Paul McCartney: The Long and Winding Q&A - "An in-depth conversation about Sir Paul's latest dance-music experiments, why he has no plans to retire from touring, and what it was really like to be a Beatle"
  
  
• NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life - Bit of a day for Beatles lyrics in titles Following on from the NYC Taxi data release I mentioned a few weeks ago, here’s an app which shows the activity of a random NYC taxi in one day in 2013. ”See where it operated, how much money it made, and how busy it was over 24 hours.”
  
  
• Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Looove Debugging) - ”Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this… This causes bash to behave in a way that makes many classes of subtle bugs impossible. You'll spend much less time debugging, and also avoid having unexpected complications in production.” Useful tips from Aaron Maxwell.
  
  
• A Round-the-World Trip Home - The remarkable story of the PanAm flying boat that found itself on the way to New Zealand when the war with Japan began in 1941, and had to go the long way round to get back to the USA: ”NORMAL RETURN ROUTE CANCELED STOP PROCEED AS FOLLOWS… PROCEED WESTBOUND SOONEST YOUR DISCRETION TO AVOID HOSTILITIES AND DELIVER NC18602 TO MARINE TERMINAL LAGUARDIA FIELD NEW YORK STOP GOOD LUCK STOP”
  
  
• Chord Intelligence - Writing an app that can analyse a piece of music and work out what the chords are: ”Chord Intelligence is trained from a collection of music and applies its knowledge to what it hears in an audio recording."
  
  
• Why do we have blood types? - "More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t really know what blood types are for. Do they really matter? Carl Zimmer investigates."
  
  
• The 6 Most Disastrous Attempts at Internet Damage Control - "They call it the Streisand effect, and it happens any time people try to suppress Internet criticism, then see it blow up hilariously in their faces." Amazing that people and companies still do this sort of thing. (These are all pre-2011, but I’m sure you can think of quite a few since then.)
  
  
• don't say industry - Carlie Lazar offers ”A list of things I don't want you to say.” Glancing through it, it seems reasonable

Happy invoicing!