Events

Long flights give me a chance to catch up on reading. In between disposing of all the back issues of whatever magazines I haven't opened in weeks, and Kindling the novels I've had queued up for months, I also get to read through the emails I've cached for days in anticipation of the downtime. This morning's cache included the daily Crain's Chicago Business update, whose first article is about how my cost of living is going up. It turns out, the city owes retired municipal employees so much money that...

I happened to notice just now that the plane I'm on passed within a few hundred meters of 50°N and 50°W, just over the Grand Banks east of Newfoundland. That I was able to notice this goes in the category of things called "I love living in the future," as it involved a mobile phone with GPS and enough memory to store a kilometer-resolution map of the entire hemisphere in its Google Maps app cache. Within five years we'll have ubiquitous Internet worldwide, and this will seem as quaint as one of Darwin's...

Traveling today. More posts tomorrow, including (possibly) some deferred posts from the air.

I'm still doing some R&D with BlogEngine.NET, and I keep finding strange behaviors. This is, of course, part of the fun of open-source software: with many contributors, you get many coding styles. You also don't get a lot of consistency without a single over-mind at the top. My latest head scratch was about how labels work. I won't go into too many details, except to say, re-saving a code file with no changes in it shouldn't change the behavior of the code file. I'm still puzzling that out. In any...

"I'm Goin' Alone" did win last night, giving us a 12-2 record and another gift certificate that we are certain to plow right back into the bar next time. (It's quite a scam, really, but we're happy to participate. Also, as promised, here is my annual Parker Day portrait from last night: He's getting a little greyer around the muzzle, but he's otherwise a happy, healthy mutt. I'm hoping for another half-dozen Parker Days in the future.

"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...