Events

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...

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...