The Daily Parker

I've just finished—I mean, finished—the Weather Now worker role. The worker role runs in the background and performs tasks like, for example, downloading the weather from outside sources, parsing it, and storing it.

I have three tasks left to enable me to publish the new version of Weather Now to its new home in Windows Azure:

• Create a script to initialize the lists that appear on the site's home page;
• Upgrade the existing ASP.NET website to an ASP.NET web application; and
• Create an Azure Cloud Service Web role to house the application.

I believe I will be done today sometime. But first, Parker is demanding a trip outside.

I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in:

• Andrew Mason got fired from his billion-dollar CEO job at Groupon.
• Because of human-caused climate change, the National Aeronautic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will start mapping more of the ice-free arctic soon.
• WBEZ wonders if our recent snow is helping our drought; Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel weighs in as well.
• Air New Zealand has a new safety video.
• Antje Duvekot has a new song out.

Watch this space for a sneak preview of Weather Now 4.0, possibly tomorrow. The GetWeather utility has run with only minor hitches for a week, and with two more (quick) bug fixes it's ready for production. That just leaves about 6 hours of work to move the ASP.NET application up to Azure...and then, you get to beta test it. If all goes well I'll cut over to Azure on the 9th or 10th, and finally—finally!—retire my last two servers.