Events

"I'm Goin' Alone," my trivia team, is 11-2 since we banded together in March. Can we go 12-2? Or are we goin' home alone? Tonight's topics: Picture Round: Game Show Hosts General Trivia Audio Round: Songs From Musicians With 1 Name Current Events Random Trivia Speed Round: Crayola Crayons The speed round requires us to list up to 30 things in that category for one point each. Last week we lost one point on the speed round and two other points overall that brought us in second place. Tonight, we plan to...

Nine years ago today I adopted Parker: I didn't post his annual Parker Day photo last year because I was out of town, and I didn't have time to take the photo this morning on the way to work. So, if I'm not too lazy, look for it tomorrow.

Because Microsoft has deprecated 2011-era database servers, my weather demo Weather Now needed a new database. And now it has one. Migrating all 8 million records (7.2 million places included) took about 36 hours on an Azure VM. Since I migrated entirely within the U.S. East data center, there were no data transfer charges, but having a couple of VMs running for the weekend probably will cost me a few dollars more this month. While I was at it, I upgraded the app to the latest Azure and Inner Drive...

Today is the Summer Bank Holiday in the UK, which has the same cultural resonance to the British that Labor Day has to us. It marks the psychological end of summer over. August 31st also marks the end of meteorological summer in the northern hemisphere. Over the next month in Chicago we'll see days shrink by almost two hours and temperatures fall by almost 6°C. I hope, also, that by the beginning of winter, The Daily Parker will have a new home and infrastructure, and the ENSO will have pushed the storm...

Via TPM, Rick Perlstein says that the race-baiting tactics the GOP uses to block voting reform started as Reagan's reaction to Carter's proposals: Everyone loved to talk about voter apathy, but the real problem, Carter said, was that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restricted voter registration laws”—a fact proven, he pointed out, by record rates of participation in 1976 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where voters...

Bloomberg analyzes the reasons that British Airways continues to invest in its Boeing 747 fleet when everyone else is retiring the model: A clue to BA’s lingering love affair with the 747 lies in the model’s ability to eke out capacity from scarce operating slots at its London Heathrow hub at a time when lower fuel prices make retaining older planes an option. The revamped jets, the first of which returns next month from a refit center in Cardiff, Wales, will also get 16 extra business-class seats...

Chicago has five of the 20 most-congested roads in the U.S.: Drivers in the northeastern Illinois-northwest Indiana region suffered the misery of 61 extra hours behind the wheel on average in 2014 — equivalent to a week and a half of work — because of delays caused by gridlock, construction zones and collisions that tied up traffic, according to the Urban Mobility Scorecard released late Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The Los Angeles area took the top three spots on the congestion...

Krugman writes, and I agree, that Donald Trump scares the Republican establishment precisely because he's too honest: Conservative religiosity, conservative faith in markets, were never about living a godly life or letting the invisible hand promote entrepreneurship. Instead, it was all as Corey Robin describes it: Conservatism is a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace. The...

Since development of DasBlog petered out in 2012, and since I have an entire (size A1) Azure VM dedicated solely to hosting The Daily Parker, I've been looking for a new blog engine for this blog. The requirements are pretty broad: Written in .NET Open source or source code available for download Can use SQL Server as a data source (instead of the local file system, like DasBlog) Can deploy to an Azure Web App (to get it off the VM) Still in active development Modern appearance and user experience See?...

Twenty years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It's hard to explain how revolutionary the OS was at the time. To celebrate the anniversary, Microsoft is offering a free Rolling Stones song. Trust me; it makes sense. And here, for your listening enjoyment, is the Microsoft sound.A And C-Net's coverage of the day: