Events

My first real Euchre tournament is coming up in a little more than two hours, so I'm preparing by doing exactly what I would do anyway: listening to Weekend Edition. The last guest was Mary Norris, copy editor at The New Yorker, who has written Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen: On the best way to become a good user of English Well, a person should read. And read, and read. Preferably good things. I might suggest The New Yorker, for instance ... [Henry James] is a wizard, the master! Yes...

Guess the city by its transit stops.

I didn't post this yesterday for obvious reasons. I've just executed a lease on a new place about 5 km northwest of where I live now. I'm extra-special-happy that I won't have to move a whole damn server rack, but not especially happy that I'm renting the new place because I can't yet sell my current place. At least, not for an amount that would make me extra-special-happy. The new apartment is twice the size and has probably double the electricity bill of my current place. It also has lots of east and...

It appears that not everyone realized yesterday's post about RFRA was an April Fool, possibly because shortly after I posted it both Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson backpedaled: Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson told lawmakers on Wednesday to revise a bill that rights activists and U.S. businesses said allowed discrimination against gays, and home-state corporate giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc praised his action. Indiana's governor a day earlier said lawmakers should fix a similar Religious Freedom Restoration...

Well, this surprised me this morning: Surprising critics and supporters alike, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (R) announced today he plans to veto the religious freedom bill passed yesterday by the state legislature. The bill in Arkansas is similar to an Indiana law passed last week, with both diverging in certain respects from the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That act was passed in 1993 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, Arkansas’s most famous political son. Both bills allow...

...sort of. But that's not important right now. I'm just spiking some articles to read later: Flaking out is rampant. There's free Azure DocumentDB training next Tuesday. Indiana's "religious freedom" law is worse than you thought. Actually, the right wing's whole idea "religious freedom" is worse than you thought. I need to register for Ignite. Glad I got my Apollo After Hours tickets already—especially because I'm performing in it. OK, time for a vendor phone call...

At least there isn't any more snow:

My catching-up on the Netflix version of Michael Dobbs' House of Cards has taken a brief hiatus as the friend in question has actual work and family obligations. I'm taking advantage of the pause to go back to the original BBC miniseries with Ian Richardson in the role of F.U. You know what? It'ts better. It has a faster pace, more sharply-drawn characters, it's funnier, and it isn't sanctimonius—it's an actual satire. Francis Urquhart is evil, and doesn't care that we in the audience know it. Francis...

One of the biggest perks of being a CTO is that I get to roll out really fun initiatives every so often. Our CEO has a Microsoft Surface 2, and he's had such success with it that we decided to make it our official laptop replacement. I made one moderately-annoying error in rolling out Surface Pro 3 tablets to seven people who were waiting for laptops: I failed to give the less-technical users guidance on how to set up user accounts. We're fixing it, but we still have some confusion around the idea that...

Under international treaties, German flag carrier Lufthansa could face huge compensation claims after one of its pilots apparently intentionally crashed an A320 into the Alps on Tuesday: Under a treaty governing deaths and injuries aboard international flights, airlines are required to compensate relatives of victims for proven damages of up to a limit currently set at about $157,000 — regardless of what caused the crash. To avoid liability, a carrier has to prove that the crash wasn't due to...