Events

The Pope has announced his resignation: Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign on Feb. 28 because he was simply too infirm to carry on — the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years. The decision sets the stage for a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March. "After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry," he told the...

Did you know that Los Angeles is on the way from Chicago to Vancouver? I didn't either. I forgot that, when you have hubs in Chicago and Los Angeles, and no flights at all into the actual destination airport, layovers happen. Good view from the Admirals Club though: As much as I like flying, I'm not wild about the seven flight segments in 10 days—none of them less than 3 hours. (Next week, apparently, Dallas is on the way from Chicago to San Francisco. Same hub-and-spoke problem.) I also don't like...

Last night I made the mistake of testing a deployment to Azure right before going to bed. Everything had worked beautifully in development, I'd fixed all the bugs, and I had a virgin Windows Azure affinity group complete with a pre-populated test database ready for the Weather Now worker role's first trip up to the Big Time. The first complete and total failure of the worker role I should have predicted. Just as I do in the brick-and-mortar development world, I create low-privilege SQL accounts for...

Looking at Poynter's roundup of storm front pages, I'm struck that the New York Post called the storm "Nemo." Two things: 1. Winter storm names are an invention of The Weather Channel, a move the National Weather Service has explicitly repudiated. 2. Nemo is Latin for "nobody." So the Post's headline yesterday, "Nemo Bites"—i.e., "no one bites"—just reinforces the stupidity.. Anyway, I know my friends out east have unprecedented disastrous a bit of snow to survive endure inconvenience them today. Enjoy...

Taking a brief rest from my temporary insanity, I read Sullivan: Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite...

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen for a while. I'm going to spend a lot of time in airplanes over the next 11 days, including a long weekend with the folks. Good thing wifi is ubiquitous, even on airplanes, because it also looks like I'm going to burn at over 120% of utilization again this month. (Last month I was 118% billable, but if you add non-billable time I actually worked 134% of full time.) The madness ends soon. We're hiring, projects are gelling, other projects are winding down, and at...

This is alarming: A new and worrisome benchmark has been reached with the announcement Tuesday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Lakes Michigan and Huron have dipped to new record lows. It’s been a 14 year journey. That’s how long water levels have been below historic averages--the most extended run of below normal water levels in the 95 year record of Great Lakes dating back to 1918. The numbers are as stunning as they are disturbing with serious implications to shipping interests, all manner of...

More things I gotta read later: The New York Times has a thorough look at their recent security problems, and security writer Nick Selby takes Symantec to task for its response. The Atlantic posted photos of Grand Central Station commemorating its 100th birthday this month. Sarah Goodyear imagines drone-proof cities in the Middle East. Now, back to rewriting an authentication provider...

The UK's Conservative government has passed a marriage equality bill by 400 to 175: [UK Prime Minister David] Cameron, who described gay marriage as “an important step forward for our country”, smiled broadly as the result was revealed. [Deputy PM] Nick Clegg called the vote “a landmark for equality in Britain”. [Opposition leader] Ed Miliband said it was “a proud day”. However, the details of the vote quickly showed that Mr Cameron’s decision to push through the legislation has left him in a minority...

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read: The Atlantic Cities blog has an analysis of class in Chicago by census tract. Seth Godin doesn't like airports, because they're organizationally horrible. Best bit: "There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones." Liz Keogh advocates Behavior-Driven Development as a new way of looking at Test-Driven Development. I will get to them...soon...