Events

Just checking the local news in Chicago a moment ago I see a weather forecast of -2°C and blowing snow for Tuesday, rain for the rest of the week, and a crash at the O'Hare subway station: Thirty people were injured after a CTA Blue Line train derailed and hit a platform at O'Hare International Airport about 2:55 a.m. Monday. The injuries are not life threatening, according to early reports from the scene to Chicago Police Department headquarters, Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Ron...

It's 11pm on Sunday and everything is closed, so I'm taking a break from my break. My body still seems to think it's on Chicago time, which will help me rejoin American civilization on Tuesday, though at the moment it means my body thinks it's 6pm and wonders what it will do for the next three and a half hours or so. I have accomplished what I set out to do this weekend. I visited the British Museum, the Southampton Arms, and another pub a friend recommended, The Phoenix. I've also finished Clean Coder...

I debated this question with someone at a dinner a couple weeks ago. She suggested higher megapixel numbers told you more about the ego of the camera buyer than about the quality of the images. I said it depends on how you're using the photos, but generally, more data yields more useful photos. Here's an illustration, using a vaguely-recognizable landmark that I happened to pass earlier this weekend, and just happened to have photographed with three different cameras. All three photos are from...

The equinox, when the sun appears directly over the equator so that night and day is approximately equal all over the planet, happened Thursday. Today comes the consequence to the earth continuing in its orbit as the south pole appears to point farther away from the sun, as it's done since the last solstice. In just about two hours, at 17:09 UTC, the sun sets on the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and doesn't rise again until around 01:18 UTC on September 20th. Good luck to the over-winter crew at...

Thursday morning: Thursday evening: More photos tonight.

I had planned to post some photos tonight showing the evolution of digital cameras, using a local landmark, but there's a snag. The CF card reader I brought along isn't showing up on my computer, even though the computer acknowledges that something is attached through a USB port. As I'm visiting one of the most sophisticated and technological cities in the world, I have no doubt I can fix this tomorrow. Still, it's always irritating when technology that worked a few days ago simply stops working. For...

I believe I made record time from my house to my final stopping point in the Ancestral Homeland. Most importantly: I got here before all the curry places closed. More later.

The repercussions from Monday's data-recovery debacle continued through yesterday. By the time business started Tuesday morning, I had restored the client's application and database to the state it had at the moment of the upgrade, and I'd entered most of their appointments, including all of them through tomorrow (Thursday). When the client started their day, everything seemed to be all right, except for one thing I also didn't know about their business: some of their customers pay them based on the...

At 8:16 this morning, a long-time client sent me an email saying that one of his customers couldn't was getting a strange bug in their scheduling application. They could see everything except for the tabbed UI control they needed to use. In other words, there was a hole in the screen where the data entry should have been. Here's how the rest of the day went around this issue. It's the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an engineer, in the same way the guys who built Galloping Gertie were proud. It...

Here are about 30 reasons, just from the last 48 hours: CWB estimates that 21 people were taken into police custody during Wrigleyville's Saturday-into-Sunday St. Patrick's binge. But there was only one tazing. (Rats!) 28 batteries were witnessed or otherwise confirmed by police. Few were formalized with police reports. Ambulances took at least 17 people to area hospitals and officers were tied up with at least 19 calls from cab drivers who had disputes with their passengers over payment. Here, now, are...