Events

As if the 10-year-long wholesale theft of wealth from the middle class to the parasite class financial services sector weren't insult enough, it turns out Mitt Romney's tax plan would injure us even more: The study was conducted by researchers at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate. His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by...

According to Jeff Atwood, today's the day: When you're hired at Google, you only have to do the job you were hired for 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, you can work on whatever you like – provided it advances Google in some way. At least, that's the theory. Although the concept predates Google, they've done more to validate it as an actual strategy and popularize it in tech circles than anyone else. Oddly enough, I can't find any mention of the 20% time benefit listed on the current Google...

It's not just Chicago; the Illinois State Climatologist has pronounced this year hotter than hell: This year so far is the warmest and third driest on record. The statewide average temperature for January-July 2012 was 56.9 degrees, 5.5 degrees above normal. The statewide average precipitation for January-July was 357 mm, 249 mm below normal or 59 percent of normal. Statewide Average Temperature Rankings for January-July 2012: 13.8°C 1921: 13.4°C 1987: 12.3°C 1998: 12.2°C 2006: 12.1°C Statewide Average...

The month ended with Chicago Midway reporting its warmest July ever, while our official O'Hare station had the second-hottest ever: Of all the summers on the books over Chicago's official observational record dating back to 1871, only the 1921 season managed a temperature higher than the 25.3°C reading on the books to date this year. That makes this the warmest opening two-thirds of a meteorological summer season here in 91 years. The bleak rainfall situation continues across the area as this year's...

Billionaire Jeff Greene wants to pay more taxes, and wants his neighbors to do the same: [O]ver the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid. Sometimes it feels like this was the main accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street: a whole lot of tightened sphincters. It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes...

Chicago's average temperature this July will probably wind up at 27.2°C, making it the third-warmest in history behind 27.3°C 1921 and 27.4°C 1955. (Normal is 23.3°C.) Along with the near-record heat we've had more 32°C days so far than ever before. And it's not over: Never before, over the term of Chicago's 142 year observational record, have so many 90s accumulated at such an early date. July alone produced 18 days at or above 90---far beyond the seven considered normal, yet just shy of the 19 days of...

Via Sullivan, entrepreneur Kyle Wiens won't hire people who use poor grammar (and neither will I): Good grammar makes good business sense — and not just when it comes to hiring writers. Writing isn't in the official job description of most people in our office. Still, we give our grammar test to everybody, including our salespeople, our operations staff, and our programmers. Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer...

Despite having two Atlantic named storms before June 1st, so far the tropical storm season has been eerily quiet with 4 named storms. Then I did a little poking around on the Intertubes and realized that no, we usually don't have that many by the end of July. With all the energy in the Northern Hemisphere atmosphere this summer, September might be more interesting than usual. But so far in July, we seem to be about average.

In every developer's life, there comes a time when he has to take all the software he's written on his laptop and put it into a testing environment. Microsoft Azure Tools make this really, really easy—every time after the first. Today I did one of those first-time deployments, sending a client's Version 2 up into the cloud for the first time. And I discovered, as predicted, a flurry of minor differences between my development environment (on my own computer) and the testing environment (in an Azure web...

I hope to finish moving my websites into the cloud by the end of the year, including a ground-up rewrite of Weather Now. Meanwhile, I've decided to try moving that site and three others to an Azure Virtual Machine rather than trying to fit them into Azure Cloud Services. For those of you just tuning in, Azure Cloud Services lets you run applications in roles that scale easily if the application grows. A virtual machine is like a standalone server, but it's actually running inside some other server. A...