Events

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...

Parker and I haven't yet left for Ribfest because I've just spent two and a half hours debugging an application. After upgrading the application to the current version of the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ the thing wouldn't start. I simply got an error message in plain text, "The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred." The Windows Application Log supplied this clue: The worker process for application pool 'a177c227-f36e-4874-aefe-9b41ca0d14ec' encountered an error...

Thursday at lunchtime I caught some bridge maintenance in downtown Chicago:

Today is the annual Ribfest in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago. Parker and I will be heading out there for the 6th time, and enjoying the amazing weather (sunny and 22°C). Here's our history so far: 2013: Mrs Murphy's ***½ Wrigley BBQ **** Corner 41 **½ Uncle Bub's *** Real Urban BBQ ** 2012: Mrs Murphy's Chicago BBQ Corner 41 Smoke Daddy 2011: Mrs Murphy's The Piggery Pitchfork Chicago BBQ 2010: We didn't go to Ribfest because of my sister's wedding. A fair trade, I think. 2009: Lincoln...

The Daily Currant's business model, explained: [I]n The New Republic, Luke O'Neil argued that such stories "could do actual damage to political discourse and the media in general... Juicing an already true-enough premise with more unbelievability simply adds to the informational noise pollution—without even the expected payoff of a laugh."  All legitimate gripes, but perhaps that's overthinking it for a site that's the product of under-thinking. The Daily Currant is trying to maximize clicks and shares...

Microsoft Azure is having some difficulties today in its East data center. It's causing hiccups. Nothing more. Just hiccups. But these hiccups are peculiarly fatal to the Weather Now worker process, so it keeps dying. Before dying, it texts me. So in the last 18 hours I've gotten about 30 texts from my dying worker process. Maybe it's just telling me to go see Edge of Tomorrow? Update, 15:15 CDT: Microsoft has finally updated the service dashboard to reflect the horkage.

Long-time readers know I rarely post directly about my personal life, but this one is kind of big. After nearly three years, I'm moving from 10th Magnitude to take a new position as a .NET Architect with West Monroe Partners. I've learned a lot working with 10th, and I wish everyone there the best in the future. I'll have more to say about this in the coming weeks. I'm excited about the change, and looking forward to some totally new challenges with WMP.

What's the ugliest thing you can do to a downtown city? Cut down all the buildings and put up a parking lot: This seems kind of obvious, doesn't it? But then again, about 800 years ago someone cut down the last tree on Easter Island, so it's hard to underestimate the ability of people to make good decisions about land use.

Yesterday I mentioned three things that weren't connected except they all ended recently. This morning Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal has an op-ed about one of them: HomeMade Pizza Co. was in the right business and exactly the wrong place. We consumers indeed are buying more fresh prepared meals to eat at home or elsewhere, like the take-and-bake pizzas HomeMade hawked from 1997 until its abrupt closing Friday. These kinds of meals have become a $26 billion business in this country and are...

This is overdue, but I'm very happy about it: When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest (FTB) was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O'Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle. Now the judge overseeing the case has ruled (PDF) that it's Lumen View, not FindTheBest, that should have to pay [FTB's $200,000 legal] expenses. In a...