Events

Last year, as in five of the six years before, I only went to Ribfest once, owing to the 11 km round trip distance. This year I only live 1.8 km away, so dammit, I'm going all three days. Here's the report from this evening. I went with a friend so we could split samplers, and try more of them. Mrs. Murphy's Irish Bistro. Like last year, excellent sauce. Unlike last year, they kind of gooped it on mediocre bones. So they only get 3 stars for 2016. Mr. B's BBQ. You'd think that, because they're right on...

Startup founder Tim Romeo decided to kill his startup right before they would have gotten a check for $500,000. Sounds crazy? No; he did the right thing: [S]omething was wrong. It seemed trivial at first, but it bothered me. Despite glowing praise, our users were only using ContractBeast to create a small percentage of their total new contracts. I spent the next two weeks visiting our beta users, looking over their shoulders as they worked, and listening to them explain how they planned on using the...

After yesterday's epic walk (from which Parker recovered in just a couple of hours) I realized it wouldn't be that difficult to get another 10,000 steps. So I did: That's a new PR. It was also 27.08 km—another PR. So the top 5 (as I mentioned back in March) are now: 2016 Jun 8 32,315 2015 Apr 26 30,496 2016 Mar 8 29,775 2015 Jun 15 28,455 2015 May 2 26,054 I'm not moving as quickly today as I did yesterday, but I'm pretty happy about blowing past my previous PR. Now I have plans for some day in the next...

The weather today is the kind that we only get about 15 or 20 days of the year in Chicago. It's 19°C and totally sunny with a light breeze from the east. And I'm actually able to take advantage of it today. That's why Parker and I just got back from a 2½ hour, 14.5 km walk. Yes. We walked that far. He's now out cold, and I'm having a spot of lunch. And shortly a shower. The total damage was 14.51 km in 2:24:57 (not including two stops at Starbucks along the way), for a pace of 9' 59" per kilometer—just...

The Cranky Flier blog noted American Airlines' changes to its frequent-flier program (which I also noted yesterday) but thinks they dropped the ball on it: Are you as unimpressed as I am? I get that there’s something to be said for conformity. It makes it easier for travelers to compare what they’ll get from each airline, but it also means that nobody’s program stands out. (Well, nobody except for Alaska Airlines, which is keeping its old style of program and will probably win even more fans.) The...

Senior Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen describes a feature in Windows 10 that is unusually useful: Windows 10 brings the Xbox Game DVR feature to the PC. The Game DVR feature lets you record yourself playing a video game, so you can share the recording with your friends. Suppose you have some program that you want to record, say for a bug report or for an instructional video. Just pretend it's a game: Put focus on the program you want to record. Press Win+G to open the Game Bar. If it asks whether you...

There was a bit of Karmic balancing today, if you believe in those things. Even though I got some really good news after lunch, I also experienced something that broke a little piece off my heart before lunch. I've been freelancing from my home office for a while, so Parker has had a lot of walks. And this morning, after my coffee, he got a good 40-minute, 4½ km walk around the neighborhood. No worries there; he loves his walks. Except, just after lunch, I wanted to go outside again, and he didn't. This...

I just got some great news that, unfortunately, is embargoed possibly for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

American Airlines is changing the way it apportions miles and awards tickets. As predicted, they're moving to a dollars-per-mile system that rewards travelers for spending more money on the airline. Instead of just needing 50,000 miles to get to Platinum, you also need 6,000 elite qualifying dollars. They're also adding a new level, Platinum Pro, at 75,000 elite-qualifying miles, which would have helped me more than once. In all, the system seems fair, and pretty much everyone new it was coming. I'll be...

Richard North Patterson, writing in Huffington Post, outlines one more time how Donald Trump's obvious personality disorder disqualifies him from political office of any kind: There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder. The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of...