Events

Last week the California senate voted 21-16 vote to approve $8 bn in funding for a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Naturally there will be some privateering and incompetence, because this is America: Until the end of last year, SNCF, the developer of one of the world's most successful high-speed rail systems, proposed that the state use competitive bidding to partner with it or another foreign operator rather than rely on construction engineers to design a sophisticated...

Before Saturday's game at Citi Field, I wandered around Flushing Meadows Corona Park, site of the 1939 World's Fair (and an alien spaceship crash in 1997): About two dozen kids played in the fountain and in the spray blown off it: (The post title comes by way of Aimee Mann.)

By Wednesday afternoon I'd migrated two Web sites from the loud and hot server rack in my home office to Microsoft Azure web sites. Then I popped off to New York for last night's game, and when I got back to my hotel room I encountered yet another reason I like the Cloud: I couldn't get to any of the sites back home. It turned out that a brief power failure had caused the firewall to reboot—I think a UPS didn't last as long as expected—and in the process it caused the Web server's network adapter to...

I visited my 22nd baseball park last night, the quasi-retro Citi Field, to see the bottom-ranked Cubs take on the second-place Mets: The Cubs got their first run on the Mets' second pitch and by the bottom of 5 they were up by 5 runs. At the point I took this photo, the bottom of the 6th, it was still 7-2 Cubs and the Mets' so-called "fans" were leaving the park like something on the field stank worse than...well, the two teams on the field: Then, in the bottom of the 9th, still leading by 4, Carlos...

It's pretty warm in New York right now: 33°C. That's cooler than 38°C, the current official temperature in Chicago, making it the third day in a row that Chicago has gotten that hot: July's opening 5 days the hottest in 101 years The month is young—just 5 days old. Yet it's 30.2°C average temperature is 7.3°C above normal and makes it the warmest July open since 1911 when the period averaged 31°C. Apparently relief is coming with temperatures predicted to fall into the mid-20s (mid-70s Fahrenheit)...

2:15 pm: 4:10 pm: And why am I here? That, at 7pm tomorrow:

I'm not just complaining; heat accounts for more deaths than any other kind of weather. Yesterday the temperature hit 39°C in Chicago; today and tomorrow the forecast calls for the same. Good thing it doesn't happen often: The 39°C peak reading marked only the second time in 142 years an Independence Day has recorded a triple digit [Fahrenheit] temperature here. The rarity of Chicago temperatures at that level can't be overstated. Of 51,465 daily temperatures which have been archived over the 142 years...

Yes, Azure is hot, but not like this: Chicago's official (O'Hare) temperature has passed 38°C and may go up a degree or two more this afternoon. My apartment is up to 27.5°C, the point where the server rack starts sending me whiny emails. And not that I called it or anything, but so far this is the hottest summer in my lifetime.

I've finished two complete migrations from my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center to Microsoft Windows Azure web sites. Astute readers may remember that in one case I moved to the Web site offering and then moved it to a full-fledged Web role. Well, today, I moved it back. Even though I'm still on the free trial, it turned out that the Web role would cost $15 per month, which, for a site that gets one or two visitors per day, simply wasn't worth it. Moving the second site, a...

The temperature at O'Hare just hit 35°C, and it's still rising. This is the 7th day in a row of above-32°C temperatures, and it looks like we're in for another 4 more days of it—including 38°C tomorrow and 39°C Thursday. But that isn't the main weather story of the day; the drought is: The latest USDA Illinois Weather and Crops report was released this afternoon. The topsoil conditions were rated at 52 percent “very short” and 37 percent “short” and only 11 percent adequate. Soil moisture conditions...