Events

Some asshole with a gun and an arrest warrant has blocked the entire length of North Lake Shore Drive as every cop in Illinois tries to prise him from his car: A car chase through the South Side and downtown involving a man wanted in connection with a murder in Georgia ended with a standoff between the man and police after the vehicle crashed on Lake Shore Drive on the Near North Side, officials and witnesses said. According to Harvey Police Department spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado, the man in the vehicle...

As predicted last week in private Kremlin memoranda, today's referendum in Crimea has determined that more people on the peninsula support union with Russia than actually live on the peninsula. As someone once said more eloquently than I: But here's the BBC: Some 95.5% of voters in Crimea have supported joining Russia, officials say. after half the votes have been counted in a disputed referendum. Crimea's leader says he will apply to join Russia on Monday. Russia's Vladimir Putin has said he will...

The news recently and Krugman this morning have brought Tennyson to mind: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death   Rode the six hundred. Heroism has its place, but not when it takes everyone else through hell.

I've just picked up Bob Martin's The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers. I'm just a couple chapters in, and I find myself agreeing with him vehemently. So far, he's reinforcing the professional aspects of the profession. Next chapters will TDD, testing, estimation, and a bunch of other parts of the profession that are more difficult than the actual coding part. More later.

All four are dead: Quiznos, the Denver-based sandwich chain, said Friday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, the second quick-service restaurant chain in a week to do so. Quizno's bankruptcy filing comes just days after Sbarro, the New York-based pizza chain, filed for court protection in Manhattan on Monday, the second time in three years. Hot Dog on a Stick, another purveyor of quick-service food, in February also filed for bankruptcy protection. This is unfortunate especially for...

Calumet Photo, one of the last real photography stores, has closed abruptly: Calumet Photographic, a Chicago-based camera supply and photo services provider that first opened 1939, has abruptly closed its doors and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Calumet said on its Facebook page that it was closing its stores in the United States, but that its European stores would remain. In its Chapter 7 filing, in which a company prepares to liquidate, it listed between $50 million and $100 million in...

Even though we have snow on the ground once again, the sun came out this morning, so my bus stop didn't look as grim as it did yesterday:

First, we get the worst cold and the most snow of any winter in the last 32 years. It even alienates many of its allies with its stubbornness in the face of popular (and meteorological) opposition, refusing to give up a fight it can't win. Finally, warm weather finally prevails, ending the snow's doomed effort to hold ground it will never be able to keep. This is Monday morning: Then, just when we were loosening our scarves, Arizona hit this morning: Winter, you're just making people despise you more....

I just did a dumb thing in Mercurial, but Mercurial saved me. Allow me to show, vividly, how using a DVCS can prevent disaster when you do something entirely too human. In the process of upgrading to a new database package in an old project, I realized that we still need to support the old database version. What I should have done involved me coming to this realization before making a bucket-load of changes. But never mind that for now. I figured I just need to create a branch for the old code. Before...

One of the funnier things I've seen recently: