Events

Weather Now 3.5 is now the official, public version of my 9½-year-old demo. I first launched the site in September 1999 as a scripted ASP application, and last deployed a major update (version 3.0) on 1 January 2007. As threatened promised, I'll have a lot more to say about it in the next few days. But I should address the first obvious question, "Why does it look almost identical to the previous version?" Simply: because my primary goal for this release was to duplicate every feature of the existing...

This passage from Almost Perfect, Pete Peterson's autobiography of his days at WordPerfect Corp., inspired me to get out of bed, walk to my computer, and post a blog entry: We on the Board had no one to blame for the delays but ourselves. The project directors we had chosen were inexperienced managers, and they made the mistakes inexperienced managers make. They were prone to overly optimistic forecasts and had trouble chewing people out when they missed their deadlines. Another of our mistakes was that...

The new Weather Now demo is feature-complete, meaning it has all of the pieces required for release. I will push it out to production, replacing the current demo, tomorrow morning, after I make some configuration changes to the web server it's going on. But because you read this blog, you've got a sneak preview. Over the next few days I'll be writing about the demo, why it's completely new even though it looks an awful lot like the old version, and what I'll be doing in the next few months to improve it.

I haven't finished all of Almost Perfect yet, but I think I understand now what happened to WordPerfect Corp.: they had accidental success, naïvely thought they authored the success, and never thought strategically. Now, possibly, I'm imputing Pete Peterson's own failures to the entire company, but I have to assume the other board members condoned his approach or they wouldn't have kept him on for so long. Peterson himself seems hopelessly without self-awareness, stumbling from decision to decision...

Quick update: The Titanic dinner at Mint Julep Bistro was wonderful. Rich's wine pairings especially rocked—as did his beef tournedos in port reduction. Mmm. Not so much fun was Metra's return schedule (featuring a 3-hour gap between 21:25 and 0:35), nor my reading of it (I did not remember this three-hour gap). The fine for taking public transit out to the suburbs (because driving to a 10-course, 9-wine-plus-apertif dinner seemed irresponsible) was $80, paid to the All-Star Taxi Service. I did, in...

American Airlines, my carrier of choice, will finally replace its fleet of awful MD-80s, many of which it inherited from TWA: The acquisition of 76 Boeing 737-800s through early 2011 represents a doubling of that airplane model flown by Ft Worth-based American. All the new planes will be based at O'Hare International Airport. The move also will lead to the eventual retirement of American's McDonnell Douglas MD-80s--a reliable but noisy aircraft that gulps 35 percent more fuel than the 737-800. American...

Via Calculated Risk, a really scary graph from the Oregon State government: Oregon’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose to 12.1 percent in March from 10.7 percent (as revised) in February. The state’s unemployment rate has risen rapidly and substantially over the past nine months, from a rate of 5.9 percent in June 2008. The U.S. seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose to 8.5 percent in March, from 8.1 percent in February. In March, Oregon’s seasonally adjusted nonfarm payroll employment...

The Chicago Tribune has a photo history of the disaster that shut down Chicago's Loop 17 years ago today. Worth a look.

Emirates A340-500 came centimeters from crashing on takeoff from Melbourne, Australia over the weekend: The plane -- carrying up to 215,000 liters of highly flammable aviation fuel -- was less than 70 cm off the ground when it crashed through lights almost 200 m from the end of the runway. ...The fully-laden Airbus A340-500 was believed to have been travelling about 280 km/h when it reached the end of the runway without becoming airborne. At the last minute, the two pilots "rotated" the plane [too...

After some experimentation, I may have found a setup that works: It has the added advantage of showing the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center in the background.