Events

In the last 48 hours, I've upgraded my laptop and surface to Office 2016 and my phone to Android 5.0 and 5.1. Apparently T-Mobile wants to make sure the Lollipop update works before giving you all the bug fixes, which seems strange to me. All four update events went swimmingly, except that one of my Outlook add-ins doesn't work anymore. Pity. I mean, it's not like Outlook 2016 was in previews for six months or anything...

New York Times science correspondent Carl Zimmer explains how Penicillium molds have given us yummy cheeses: By comparing the genomes of different species of molds, Dr. Rodríguez de la Vega and his colleagues have reconstructed their history. On Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported that cheese makers unwittingly have thrown their molds into evolutionary overdrive. They haven’t simply gained new genetic mutations to help them grow better in cheese. Over the past few...

First, Bruce Schneier warns about living in a Code Yellow world: The psychological term for this is hypervigilance. Hypervigilance in the face of imagined danger causes stress and anxiety. This, in turn, alters how your hippocampus functions, and causes an excess of cortisol in your body. Now cortisol is great in small and infrequent doses, and helps you run away from tigers. But it destroys your brain and body if you marinate in it for extended periods of time. Most of us...are complete amateurs at...

WGN's Tom Skilling is optimistic about seeing Sunday night's eclipse: While the first vestiges of Sunday evening’s full moon will begin at 7:40pm, the partial eclipse stage is to be reached at 8:07 pm Chicago time moving toward the “total eclipse” phase at 9:11pm. The disc of the moon will take on a dim rusty-red cast in the total eclipse phase for 1 hour and 12 minutes (through 10:23pm Sunday evening). The partial eclipse phase is to be reached at 11:27 pm and the eclipse ends at 11:55 pm. The early...

It's a little warmer today than it was yesterday in Chicago, but it's still gorgeous. Here's the river yesterday afternoon: I'm glad I took that walk, because I actually had some trouble getting steps with my schedule yesterday. Today, not as much of a problem—and also several degrees warmer. My office right now is north of 26°C. Opening a window hasn't helped much as the wind is blowing out. Back to the mines anyway...

I just Googled a problem I'm having setting up a continuous-integration build, because I've had this problem before and wanted to review how I solved it before. Google took me to my own blog on the second hit. (The first hit was the entry I cross-posted on my old employer's blog.) Why even bother with my own memory?

Despite just complaining about everything I've got to do this morning, here's Crain's on why craft breweries are selling out: At least 23 U.S. craft brewers and cider producers have sold all or part of their companies within the past 12 months, with buyers ranging from big brewers to private-equity firms to employee stock ownership plans. While the financial terms of the majority of those deals were not disclosed, industry insiders say more than $2 billion has changed hands, with valuations spiking in...

Back in the office, doing expense reports, following up on email, all that. Regular posting probably to resume tomorrow. I did receive the book I reviewed though. I'll have more about that later, too.

Wired does yeoman work: It’s hard to overstate how massive the conference is. The annual event, now in its 13th year, draws 160,000 attendees—about a fifth of San Francisco’s population—all hoping to network and strike deals with other enterprise companies. With many of the city’s hotels booked at full capacity, Salesforce even brought in a cruise ship to accommodate more bodies. The 965-foot-long Dreamboat, docked at San Francisco’s Pier 27, provided an additional 1,073 cabins, priced at $250 to $2000...

I'm camped in a familiar spot, SFO Terminal 2, on my way home. Traveling Saturday morning means no traffic, no lines at security, and sometimes no sleep. That fortunately isn't a problem today; in fact, had I gotten up half an hour earlier, I might have made the 8am flight home instead of the 9:15 I'm on. Longtime reader MJG just sent me this to pass the time waiting for my flight to board: