Events

Last night, Canada tossed out its anti-climate, pro-business-owner Conservative party and elected the Liberals in a landslide. The Liberal party won an outright majority of 184 seats to the Conservatives' 99 (out of 338). Stephen Harper is stepping down, which Canada's system requires in order for Justin Trudeau to be elected Prime Minister by the next Parliament, which should resume November 9th. The left-leaning Toronto Star is overjoyed: Cheers broke out across the land as Canadian voters chased...

Tonight's pub quiz got cancelled because of some sports game. Long-time Daily Parker readers may remember I used to go to lots of Cubs games. Then I got season tickets, after which they lost 185 games in the following two seasons. So we didn't re-up, and this year, the cubs won 97 and tonight will play game 3 of the NLCS. This year I've been pretty annoyed with myself, and with the team, so I'm just not into the playoffs. Not to mention, this season feels a lot like 2008 or even 2003, both of which...

You may not have known that the "Contact Us" page failed in almost all cases to send messages, but it's fixed now. Please don't make me enable Captchas.

Yes, even with a new blog engine, sometimes link happens: A new opera about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is in the works You want this T-shirt Chicago Tribune transportation writer John Hilkevitch has 5 ways to improve O'Hare Do you like Corgis? Of course you do Pentatonix recently performed on the Tonight Show Malcom Gladwell is wrong, this time about school shooters The new blog engine does have one key advantage: putting that list together took about 1/3 the time it used to take.

We have a crystal-clear, crisp October morning, perfect for spending three hours in a rehearsal for the Apollo Chorus...sigh. It's also a good morning to test the new blog engine and posting from my friend's car.

The Daily Parker v3.1 is here. We have officially launched on BlogEngine.NET. And this is the 5,000th post since May 1998 (but only the 4,804th since November 2005, when the blog launched independently of braverman.org.) I've maintained a pretty consistent posting rate since finishing my MBA in December 2010. Posting nearly every day is how you get to 5,000 entries: There are still a number of bugs, but nothing really horrible except for the Production instance not being able to properly respond to old...

It's finally here: the Daily Parker running on BlogEngine.NET 3.1. This is, in fact, the first native post on the new platform, visible (for the time being) only to the select few who know the temporary URL. So why did it take me eight weeks to get the new engine up and running? A few reasons: BlogEngine.NET 3.1 is still in development, with the main open source team making changes almost daily. I've made some serious customizations (outlined below) on my own private fork of the source code. I have a...

A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why: At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck. Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical...

The (new) Daily Parker is code-complete for the first launch. There are a few steps to go, like launching the production site and migrating nearly 5,000 blog entries. But maybe, just maybe, it'll launch tomorrow. (Note that the beta site only has the last six weeks of entries, and doesn't include any since yesterday, because I didn't re-run the migration for the last bits of testing.)

Yesterday I successfully ran a complete import of the entire Daily Parker, all the way back to May 1998, and promptly discovered a couple of problems. First, a recent change broke the app's ability to add or edit blog posts; and second, because BlogEngine.NET reads the entire blog into memory when it starts up, it took nearly five minutes for the home page to load on my debugging machine. That means the beta site will only have a few dozen entries up at any point, so I can actually fix the Javascript...