Events

In the last hour, we've gotten another 25 mm of snow, with more on the way: The initial stages of snowfall will come in bands this morning (check weather radar pic above) – moving from southwest to northeast. A few locations are observing a mix of snow and sleet and this will continue on and off for the next couple hours, but the precipitation will change over to all snow and increase in intensity late morning and afternoon. Homewood in Cook County reported an inch of snow in an hour with a mix of...

I spent 4½ hours today upgrading three low-traffic websites in order to shut down an Azure database that cost me $10 per month. The problem is this: I continually improve the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture as I learn better techniques for doing my craft. The IDEA began in 2002, and the industry changes rapidly, so every so often it changes significantly enough that things using earlier versions break when they're upgraded. About a year ago, version 2 ended and version 3 came out, breaking...

I remember, back in .NET prehistory (2001), that one of .NET's biggest benefits was to be the end of DLL hell. Yet I spent half an hour this afternoon trying to get a common package (Entity Framework 6) to install in a project that never had that package in the first place—because of a version conflict with .NET itself. When I tried to install EF6, the NuGet package installer failed the installation with the message "This operation would create an incorrectly structured document". A quick check of...

The Great Lakes have more ice cover than at any point in the last 20 years. Here's the view on the flight in last Monday morning: If you don't mind a 150 MB download, NASA took a photo of the Great Lakes (and, incidentially, me) at almost that exact moment. The ice today (also 150 MB) looks about the same.

I got gas today, which isn't that interesting in itself, except that it's only the third time I've gotten gas in the past four months. Like the last time, I decided to fill up in case it got cold (a full tank is better for your car in winter), so really I've only gotten about 2½ tanks of gas since the beginning of November. It's perfectly valid to wonder why I even own a car. I didn't for most of the time I lived in New York. Still, today I had about a half-dozen errands to run, and having a car made a...

Yesterday, Chicago Midway Airport recorded a high temperature of 1.1°C, the first time it has seen a temperature above freezing in 15 days. Unfortunately for our weather records, O'Hare is our official station, and it only got to 0°C yesterday. So officially we still have not had a day above freezing since January 30th, with a forecast for continued below-freezing weather through Monday at least. Plus, we've had measurable snow on the ground for 47 days now, and we're all frankly sick of it. That's why...

Today seemed like the right moment to recollect this short poem from Luis d'Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: Raseuse arrête, valet de Tsar bat loups, Joues gare et suite, et sot voyou. As van Rooten's commentary makes clear, the wolves were really at fault.

So how do people at Maho Beach know when planes are landing? They check the surfboard: And now my final Maho Beach photo for this trip, a US Airways A330 coming in from Charlotte: We now return to your regularly-scheduled winter, already in progress...

First, to give you a better sense of what it actually looks like, here's a Delta 737 approaching SXM normally: And here's a (gorgeous) Air France A340 landing normally: And here's an American 757 landing two meters above people's heads: Sorry about the image quality—I had a long lens on the camera, and it was set for a different kind of photo than this. We didn't realize how low he was until just a few seconds before this happened. The entire beach yelled "Whooooooaaaaa!" and then broke into applause. I...

My dad highlighted a Washington Post article from the weekend outlining why Accenture may have been a bad choice (as I pointed out at the time) to manage the healthcare.gov project: At the University of Michigan, students and faculty members are protesting the school’s use of Accenture to help cut costs, citing a report by a committee of alumni and graduate students that said the firm has “a disturbing pattern of problematic past performance.” In North Carolina, glitches in an Accenture-configured...