Events

The Economist's Gulliver blog thinks so: THE merger of US Airways and AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, looks set to be concluded this week. The new company, which will be called American Airlines, would be one of the world’s largest airlines by capacity and become the third full-service carrier in America. We wrote about this a month ago, when AMR's board met to examine US Airways’ proposal. (Tom Horton, AMR’s boss, had promised a decision in “a matter of weeks”.) The airlines are seen as a...

I always prefer heading west for business trips and east for fun trips because the time shifts work better that way. Sometimes I go to London for a long weekend and stay on Chicago time, meaning I go to sleep at 4am (10pm in Chicago) and sleep until noon (6am). (On any trip longer than 3 days I shift to local time.) Similarly, coming to the West Coast—I'm in Vancouver at the moment—lets me sleep in a bit (5:30 here is 7:30 at home) and get adequate caffeine before starting my business meetings. Today...

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...