Events

This weekend, I built the Production assets for Weather Now v5, which means that the production app exists. I haven't switched over the domain name yet, for reasons I will explain. But I've created the Production Deploy pipeline in Azure DevOps and it has pushed all of the bits up to the Production workloads. Everything works, but a couple of features don't work perfectly. Specifically, the Search feature will happily find everything in the database, but right now, the database only has about 31,000...

Josh Barro and Saray Fay get to the heart of the time-change issue: The first thing I want to note is something I’m amazed many participants in this debate don’t seem to know: We have tried this policy before. In January 1974, the US entered what was supposed to be a two-year “experiment” with permanent daylight saving time. Unfortunately, daylight saving time does not add daylight to the day, it only shifts the daylight into the afternoon from the morning. And once people realized that — that daylight...

I just finished upgrading an old, old, old Windows service to .NET 6 and a completely different back end. It took 6.4 hours, soup to nuts, and now the .NET 6 service is happily communicating with Azure and the old .NET Framework 4.6 service is off. Meanwhile, the Post published a map (using a pretty lazy algorithm) describing county-by-county what sunrise times will look like in January 2024 if daylight saving time becomes permanent. I'd have actually used a curve tool but, hey, the jagged edges look...

I mentioned yesterday that I purged a lot of utterly useless archival data from Weather Now. It sometimes takes a while for the Azure Portal to update its statistics, so I didn't know until this afternoon exactly how much I dumped: 325 GB. Version 5 already has a bi-monthly function to move archival data to cool storage after 14 days and purge it after 3 months. I'm going to extend that to purging year-old logs as well. It may only reduce my Azure bill by $20 a month, but hey, that's a couple of beers....

The Tech Forum goes on. Tomorrow, though, I don't need my work laptop, and so will bring my personal one, enabling me to post a little more. I've also thought about finally writing my own blog engine. Or, at least, forking an existing one (maybe even this one?) and going to town on it. During some downtime today I purged a lot of crap from my Microsoft Azure subscriptions, but I still have old applications (like this blog) running in old workloads. Tonight: the Fun Dinner. Oh, boy.

As if from nowhere, the US Senate yesterday unanimously voted to pass S.623 (the "Sunshine Protection Act of 2021"), which would end daylight saving time by making that the new standard time, effective 5 November 2023. This blew up the Time Zone Committee mailing list, mostly with the implementation problems around time zone abbreviations. One of the maintainers listed four separate options, in fact, including moving everyone to a new time zone (Chicago on EST? New York on AST?), or possibly just...

A year ago today, Cassie and I adopted each other, which was obvious even on the drive home from PAWS: Right now she's sulking on the couch because she didn't get breakfast this morning. That's because in about 15 minutes she's going to the vet to get her teeth cleaned. Pobre perrita.

We had two incredible performances of Bach's Johannespassion this weekend. (Update: we got a great review!) It's a notoriously difficult work that Bach wrote for his small, amateur church chorus in Leipzig the year he started working there. I can only imagine what rehearsals were like in 1724. I'm also grateful that we didn't include the traditional 90-minute sermon between the 39-minute first part and the 70-minute second part, and that we didn't conclude the work with the equally-traditional pogrom...

I surprised a colleague by suggesting that it won't get as cold as it did yesterday for the rest of 2022. The temperature bottomed out at -12°C around 6am (with a wind chill of -21°C), a record low. Plus, the climate normal low only goes below freezing until the 20th. The upshot? I will now take Cassie on a 20-minute walk and enjoy the above-freezing temperatures as long as they last, which is currently forecast through...October?

Even as the East Coast gets bombed by an early-spring cyclone, we have sunny skies and bitter cold. But the -12°C at O'Hare at 6am will likely be the coldest temperature we get in Chicago until 2023. The forecast predicts temperatures above 10°C tomorrow and up to 16°C on Wednesday, with no more below-freezing temperatures predicted as far out as predictions can go. Meanwhile, I'm about to leave for our first of two Bach Jonannespassion performances this weekend. We still have tickets available for...