Events

A quorum: With tonight's debate at my alma mater, Hofstra, everyone needs to hear this again. The BBC reports that creativity is linked to mental illness. Or, put differently, people who lack creativity have no other way of explaining it. Five Thirty Eight has an interactive graphic showing how state-level politics has shifted since WWII. Discover interviews physicist Geoffrey West about urban planning. The New Republic thinks Ben Affleck's Argo is brilliant. The Economist's Gulliver blog examines Qatar...

Well, that was a fun demo. Fortunately we have four more Agile iterations before we're done. So, now that I have precisely thirteen minutes to catch up on my email and the news of the day, I will note this lede that could only come from a left-leaning British newspaper: BAA is to drop its name in favour of plain Heathrow after concluding that the initials, derived from the old British Airports Authority, no longer fit a foreign-owned company with no authority that has been forced to sell off half its...

I still haven't moved everything out of the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center to Microsoft Windows Azure, because the architecture of Weather Now simply won't support the move without extensive refactoring. But this week I saw the first concrete, irrefutable evidence of cost savings from the completed migrations. First, I got a full bill for a month of Azure service. It was $94. That's actually a little less than I expected, though in fairness it doesn't include the 5–10 GB database that...

So far this month, I've worked about 110 hours (no exaggeration), in part preparing for a pair of software demos on Monday. Normal blogging will likely return tomorrow or Monday. Meanwhile, here's a picture of Parker: That's from six years ago this week. Everyone together, now: "Awwwwwwww."

My latest entry is up on the 10th Magnitude tech blog: We've taken a little more time than we'd hoped to figure out how to deal with Azure deployment credentials and profiles properly. In an effort to save other development teams some of our pain, we present our solution. First, the general principle: Publication profiles are unique to each developer, so each developer should have her own management certificate, uploaded by hand to each relevant subscription. When you deploy a project to a Windows Azure...

My nephew, Conner:

I am officially an uncle. Good morning, Conner. Welcome to the world. Don't let your last 13 hours turn you off to it. It gets better. Nick, Jeanine: congratulations, you crazy kids. Let me know when you're ready to have me corrupt him.

Yes, more links: Qatar Airways has joined the oneworld alliance. The Economist's Gulliver blog has the story; Cranky Flier had analysis yesterday. Fun and games for the election with an endorsement of Mitt Romney that is either subtle satire or true hathos, and bad lip reading of the debate. Russia goes back and forth about daylight saving time, to the confusion of all. Later today I'll also have a new post on the 10th Magnitude blog.

I have just inflicted this on my friends; you're next: After the "incident" with Esmerelda, the Cathedral of Our Lady in Paris—Notre Dame—needed a new bell-ringer. A man showed up for the job. The bishop in charge of hiring noticed he had no arms. "Pas de problème," said the man. "I hit the bells with my head, like this." He then proceeded to play a magnificent carillon using only his face. As he reached a crescendo, the glorious music reaching out across Paris, he slipped, fell from the bell tower, and...

I haven't any time to write today, but I did want to call attention to these: Parker is fine, though it appears likely he pulled a hind leg muscle on Sunday. He spent much of Sunday crying and really, really hating the stairs; today he was able to stand up and grab a treat from my hand. Tomorrow he'll get a 3 km walk in the morning. Alex Brown, my boss, has a new blog entry up. The Smithsonian wrote about a CIA burglar who went rogue. Reuters' Felix Simon argues against high-frequency trading. Andrew...