Events

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:

After last night's Killers and Foo Fighters concert-slash-corporate-party—and the free Sierra and Lagunitas Salesforce provided, more to the point—today's agenda has been a bit lighter than the rest of the week. Today's 10:30 panel was hands-down my favorite. Authors David Brin and Ramez Naam spoke and took questions for an hour about the future. Pretty cool stuff, and now I have a bunch more books on my to-be-read list. At the moment, I'm sitting at an uncomfortably low table in the exhibit hall along...

Patrick Smith was appalled by the British Airways incident last week. Not as much by the plane catching fire as by idiot passengers evacuating with their luggage: Aboard British Airways flight 2276, the evacuation process may have seemed orderly and calm. How would things have unfolded, though, had a fuel tank exploded, or had the smoke and fire suddenly spread inside the plane? Now people are screaming. There’s a mad rush for the exits, but the aisle is clogged with suitcases dropped by panicked...

I hope Chicago has decent weather for the full moon 11 days from now: It's coming Sept. 27 at 9:47 p.m. CDT. For starters, it is what some astronomy enthusiasts call a "super" moon because it will occur when the moon is close to perigee, its nearest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit. The moon reaches perigee Sept. 28, and it will be just more than 222,000 miles away at the time of the full moon. That is about 31,000 miles closer than lunar apogee, the moon's farthest point in its orbit. The moon...