Events

I should really learn to estimate networking and migration tasks better. The last time I upgraded my FogBugz instance on my local web server, it took about 20 minutes. This led me to estimate the time to migrate it to a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine at 2 hours. Well, 2½ hours later, I'm a little frustrated, but possibly closer to getting this accomplished. The point of a virtual machine, of course, is that it should appear the same as any other machine anywhere. But using an Azure VM means either...

Goose Island beer will start distributing to all 50 states by November: The move will continue remarkable growth for what began as a small brewpub in its current Clybourn Avenue location in 1988, and has arguably become the beer most synonymous with Chicago. But a national reach also seemed inevitable once brewery founder John Hall sold the company to AB at a time when craft beer sales were soaring and macro breweries were struggling to enter the marketplace. Production of Goose Island's biggest-selling...

Three projects and a head cold have robbed me of time and energy this week. I've only got a few minutes this afternoon to list some of the more interesting things I've read in the past day: Andrew Sullivan had two back-to-back posts this morning looking at Obama's strategy at the Democratic Convention and admiring him as a Tory leader for America. Ta-Nahesi Coates dug into Obama's role as a post-racial figure and how he stumbled over Trayvon Martin. Jared Bernstein wrote last week on whether Americans...

Chicago music critic Jim DiRogatis questions Paul Ryan's reasoning skills in light of his views about Rage Against the Machine: Beyond the hypocrisy of the representative from Wisconsin’s love for Rage Against the Machine is evidence of an even more troubling problem, however. Portrayed as the new driving force of the Republican party, intellectually and philosophically (and here, The New Yorker’s recent pre-announcement profile was amazingly prescient and full of insight), you have to question the...

Krugman this morning dug a little into Paul Ryan's infatuation with Ayn Rand, specifically around Ryan's admission that he likes her monetary policy. Through a character in Atlas Shrugged, Rand yearned for the days before "fiat" money replaced good, hard specie. In other words, before the 18th Century: Aside from revealing just how much of a Rand fanboy Ryan is — urban legend, my foot — this is interesting because that 23 paragraph speech isn’t just a call for the gold standard; it’s a call for...

The National Hurricane Center predicts that Tropical Storm Isaac, currently smashing through the windward islands, may strike Tampa during the GOP convention: Of course, five days out the forecast has tremendous uncertainty. The storm could change course or dissipate before hitting Florida, for example. But Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, speaking about next week's GOP convention, is absolutely willing to call it off if they need to evacuate Tampa: So, my question is, now that the religious right has all but...

At least according to the Onion:

Groupon, now trading somewhere around 25% of its IPO value, continues to unimpress people: The disclosure that I found most revealing in last week's financial report was the relationship between Groupon's marketing spending and its growth rate. Traditional daily-deal revenue declined 6.9 percent from the first quarter to the second, as Groupon dialed back marketing outlays by 24 percent. Hawking Groupon shares in the IPO roadshow, Mr. Mason said the company eventually would be able to cut back on...

This is impressive:

Stephen Wizenburg, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoans his students' lack of boundaries: Posting and tweeting intimate life details are now so normal for them that they think nothing of cavalierly giving too much information to surprised professors. Allison walked into my classroom apologizing for missing two weeks of classes by saying she had been in rehab for alcoholism. Stan's excuse, stated in front of the class, was that drugs he was taking for a psychological disorder had caused...