Events

I didn't post a lot yesterday because (a) I had tons to do for work and (b) once I'd finished, I had to go out into this: It got all the way up to 21°C, briefly, and there were actual leaves on the trees for the first time since November. Today it's sunny and 7°C. It might get up to 14°C sometime this coming week, once it stops raining. Hey, at least it's spring.

The New York Times has an interactive map of which ZIP codes support which baseball teams, according to Facebook. Some teams, apparently, just can't catch a break. Oh, there they are, that other little team in Chicago:

Busy day, so I'm just flagging these for later: Microsoft has released new Azure Database tiers in preview, with migration required in a year. Stephen Colbert told Jon Stewart he's leaving. Via the Atlantic Cities blog, an interactive map of London rents by Tube stop. Atlantic Cities also reports on a new opera about Jane Jacobs that tells the story of her victory in 1960 over Robert Moses. Also check out the interactive Manahatta Project map showing New York in 1609 overlaid by 2014, in block-level...

I mean that literally. With the wind whipping off the lake, our shaded seats never got above 10°C, and felt a whole lot colder. We fled after the 5th inning. One of the (metaphorically) cool things was how the Cubs used the names of the two teams that played at Weeghman Park when it opened on 23 April 1914: the Chicago Federals and the Kansas City Packers. Here's the scoreboard: And here's first baseman Mark Rizzo in his historical uniform: The Cubs lost, of course, 7-5. Some things really never change.

The park is 100 years old today: The ballpark, which opened April 23, 1914, and celebrates its centennial Wednesday, is a quintessential Chicago building: practical, quietly graceful, a creature of function, not fashion. Despite those rationalist roots, it's a vessel for human emotion: hope, dreams, escapism, nostalgia, wonder — and, as Cubs fans know all too well, disappointment, disgust and bitterness. Only a smattering of those fans, I suspect, could name the original architects of Wrigley (Zachary...

We've bred wolves for 40,000 years to have social intelligence, which makes them better than chimps and cats at understanding us: [Duke Canine Center student Evan] MacLean stands near a wall with the dog on a slack leash, while a female graduate student sits on a chair in the center of the room. She sets two opaque red cups upside down on the floor, one on each side of her. Then, as [the dog] Napoleon watches intently, a third graduate student enters the room. She places the dog’s tennis ball under one...

I don't know how this little snippet of code got into a project at work (despite the temptation to look at the file's history): Search = Search.Replace("Search…", ""); // Perform a search that depends on the Search member being an empty string // Display the list of things you find First, I can't fathom why the original developer made the search method dependent on a hard-coded string. Second, as soon as the first user hit this code after switching her user profile to display Japanese, the search...

CTA service on the Skokie Swift (now Yellow Line) began 20 April 1964: The five-mile-long Niles Center branch of the ‘L’ had opened in 1925. Using the tracks of the North Shore electric interurban line, trains ran from Howard-Paulina station to Dempster Street in the suburb of Niles Center (today’s Skokie). There were seven stops between the terminals. North Shore continued to run trains after CTA service was discontinued in 1948. In 1963 North Shore itself went out of business. During the fifteen years...

I just returned from Outer Suburbistan in record time, in under an hour, which was pure dumb luck. As soon as I change I'm going out into the 25°C afternoon. We still haven't hit the 28°C we last saw November 7th, but this is close enough for me. More later, including possibly some interesting stuff about how I've started (slowly) refactoring the 10-year-old Inner Drive Extensible Architecture to use modern inversion-of-control tools including Castle Windsor and Moq. First, I need to walk the dog. A lot.

I don't usually post personal things, but in this case, I have enough psychic pain that I want to vent. After last Sunday's car-killing problem, I took the car in to get fixed. It turns out, I was right about the problem and about the estimated repair costs. But wait: the car needed routine maintenance as well. All told, it got: a new water pump; an oil change; new brake fluid; a new microfilter for the air conditioner; new wiper blades; a minor recall service; and a partridge in a pear tree. Total...