Events

Apparently, extroverts will have to sit out the initial exploration of Mars: [E]xtroverts tend to be talkative, but their gregarious nature may make them seem intrusive or demanding of attention in confined and isolated environments over the long term, the researchers say. "You're talking about a very tiny vehicle, where people are in very isolated, very confined spaces," said study researcher Suzanne Bell, an associate professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago. "Extroverts have a little...

Everyone outside the U.S. use chip-and-PIN credit cards. That we still use magnetic strips explains how the U.S. accounted for half of all fraudulent transactions worldwide in 2012. Come October 2015, we'll get to the worldwide standard: The switch will cost retailers hundreds of millions of dollars. But credit card companies have pushed for the change for years. Beginning in October 2015, they will start leaning harder on banks and merchants by shifting the legal liability for fraud to the party with...

As of yesterday around 4:15pm, I'm no longer with 10th Magnitude. I start a new role as an architect with West Monroe Partners' technology practice a week from Monday. So, I'm technically unemployed for nine days. Which means I have lots of free time, right? Well, later this morning I have a three-hour rehearsal for tomorrow's performance of Verdi's Requiem in Evanston. Tonight I'm going to see Dar Williams Honesty Room tour. And Monday I'm going to Europe for four days. Maybe I should have scheduled a...

I was losing by 118 points to a really good Scrabble player. Then this happened: That was fun.

The SR-20 was the first GA airplane with a parachute. It means emergencies are a lot less likely to kill you, as an instructor and student pilot discovered yesterday: Yesterday there was another dramatic save, near the very busy suburban airport Hanscom Field in the western suburbs of Boston. As you can see in a TV news report here (not embeddable) the plane for some reason had an engine failure; the woman who was serving as flight instructor calmly reported the situation to the tower, directed the...

We've been using Microsoft Azure virtual machines for development for a while. This means we run our Visual Studio instances in the cloud up on special virtual machines that have nothing on them except the bare minimum required for writing software. This keeps different projects separate from each other, and also speeds up network access, which is useful for network-intensive applications. We started noticing, however, that going to MSDN or Google or other big sites became...challenging. All of these...

A whole list of interesting articles crossed my inbox overnight, but with only two days left in my job, I really haven't had time to read them all: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, himself a Tea-Party stooge, lost his primary election last night to a Tea-Party wing nut. However, it appears that 18,000 Democrats may have voted against him in the open election, throwing into doubt the Tea Party's claims that this presages a right-wing resurgence. Officials in Chicago have released 30,000 catfish in the...

Via the Atlantic, how far could the Proclaimers actually walk? [W]hile "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" does a great job of laying out the folk-rockers' intentions to complete the full thou', it is lousy about providing the specifics of their journey. What direction are they walking, for instance – south toward London, or north to the frigid, rocky shores of the far Highlands? Then there's the problem that if they walked 500 x 2 miles in a straight line from any point in the U.K., they'd hit water. Would they...

When I set up the appointment for Comcast to come out and install a new internet connection at IDTWHQ, I explained to them that (a) I have a satellite dish and (b) my building has common cable. In fact, they needed the building's account number to set up the service. So when the installer got here at 11:45 (still between 8 and noon, at least) and noticed that (a) I have a satellite dish and (b) my building has common cable, he explained that he couldn't actually install my new Internet service because...

Parker and I walked up to Ribfest yesterday (11 km round-trip). I had four 3-bone samplers: Mrs. Murphy's Irish Bistro, of course. Fall-off-the-bone, tasty meat with a tangy, spicy whiskey-Guinness sauce. Yum. 3½ stars. Wrigley BBQ, my favorite from last year, was a little less impressive this time. Tug-off-the-bone, well-smoked meat, not a lot of sauce. Still yum, but only 3 stars this year. Smokin' Woody's: tug-off-the-bone, lean, smoked meat, with a good sweet/smoky sauce. 3 stars. BBQ King...