Events

It just never gets old:

Yesterday I showed Alfonso Soriano stealing third. Here's the result: Man, those were great seats. $80 at Petco; $251 at Wrigley; $450 at New Yankee. My last one this morning is the last one I took of Petco Park: Now if only the Cubs had won...

The 30-Park Geas took me to Petco Park last night, where the 4th-place Padres beat the 4th-place Cubs: I thought the park was OK. Like some of the other 21st-century parks, it seemed to lack character. It felt more corporate than, say, Camden Yards or even AT&T Park. The fans seemed to agree, as only about 27,000 showed up (out of a capacity of over 42,000. But the lack of demand for seats let me get an 8th-row field box for under $80. And that, in turn, let me get photos like this one of Alfonso...

I'm in San Diego for tonight's Cubs game. Both teams are near the bottom of their divisions, and both have had solid losing streaks lately, so this should be a fascinating game. While here, I took the advice of one of my oldest-surviving friends—really, she'd inflict violence if I said how long we've known each other—and went over to Coronado for lunch at Alexander's Pizza. Good advice; it was one of the best slices of pie I've had in years. Coming back, I couldn't help notice this passing by: That is...

If one of the developers on one of my teams had done this, I would have (a) told him to get some sleep and (b) mocked him for at least a week afterwards. Saturday night I spent four hours trying to figure out why something that worked perfectly in my local Azure emulator failed with a cryptic "One of the request inputs is out of range" message in the Cloud. I even posted to StackOverflow for help. This morning, I spent about 90 minutes building a sample Cloud application up from scratch, adding one...

While trying to move a customer's app into the cloud yesterday (and well into this morning), I encountered a problem that doesn't make any sense. I now very much want to find the guys who wrote Microsoft Azure's error handling and punch them in their faces. When you access an Azure storage container, you have to use only lower-case letters, or Azure will throw a StorageClientException with the thoroughly unhelpful message "One of the request inputs is out of range." So, in all the code I've written that...

Remember all those Azure migrations I've done over the past month? Well, I have another one that I wasn't expecting, and for a variety of reasons including a failed web server, it must be completed by Monday morning. Remember I'm going to San Diego tomorrow? Good thing the airplane has WiFi. And people wonder why I eat chalk a lot...

Sometimes things just work. Last weekend, I wrote about moving my last four web applications out of my living room the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center and into the cloud via a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine. Well, if you're reading this blog entry, then I've succeeded in moving The Daily Parker. Except for transferring files (the blog comprises 302 megabytes over 13,700 files), which happened in the background while I did other things, it only took me about 45 minutes to configure the...

Lots of interesting articles hit my inbox today, and I don't have time to plagiarize write about them: Matt Taibbi takes down Sam Weill brilliantly: "Now, what Sorkin actually meant to say here was, 'Hey, asshole, we had to repeal Glass-Steagall just to make your Citigroup merger legal, remember? And now you’re pontificating, telling us we need to bring it back? Are you joking?' " Jared Diamond wishes Romney had read his book before talking about it. WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) explains how the Kennedy...

My latest missive for my employer, "When to use Microsoft Azure’s IaaS instead of PaaS", is now available on the 10th Magnitude blog. It's similar to a post from last weekend, but with better writing and editing.