Events

Principally, it means not having to commute in 15 cm of snow. It also means several uninterrupted hours of working on stuff. And, unfortunately, not reading all this yet: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died, finally. Americans are weird, bringing a lot of economics research into question. SimCity 5 came out today, to some criticism. Bad Lip Reading hits SpiderMan. Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...

Netsch was Illinois' first female nominee for governor and the Illinois controller in the 1990s. She died this morning at age 86 from complications from ALS: She was one of the first female law professors in the United States. A liberal Democrat, she defeated the Machine-backed incumbent state Sen. Danny O’Brien to win a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1972 that she held for 18 years. Elected comptroller in 1990, she was the first woman elected to statewide office in Illinois and, four years later, the...

Exhibit 1, yesterday at 4:58pm:

I don't know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I've just deployed the completely-redesigned Weather Now application. I feel 10 kilos lighter. Check out the preview on Windows Azure. The application started in mid-1997 as a feature of the now-defunct braverman.org, my proto-blog. The last major changes happened in 2006, when I gave it a face-lift. I've occasionally pushed some bug fixes, but really, until today it has looked and acted essentially the same way for 6 years. (The GetWeather...

James Fallows has a thoughtful piece looking back at the start of the Iraq War, ten years ago this month: Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago. I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind. I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the...

I've just finished—I mean, finished—the Weather Now worker role. The worker role runs in the background and performs tasks like, for example, downloading the weather from outside sources, parsing it, and storing it. I have three tasks left to enable me to publish the new version of Weather Now to its new home in Windows Azure: Create a script to initialize the lists that appear on the site's home page; Upgrade the existing ASP.NET website to an ASP.NET web application; and Create an Azure Cloud Service...

I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in: Andrew Mason got fired from his billion-dollar CEO job at Groupon. Because of human-caused climate change, the National Aeronautic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will start mapping more of the ice-free arctic soon. WBEZ wonders if our recent snow is...

After a couple of days in which I'm glad we keep bourbon in the 10th Magnitude office, Scott Hanselman's examination of working remotely seems timely: I see this ban on Remote Work at Yahoo as one (or all) of these three things: A veiled attempt to trim the workforce through effectively forced attrition by giving a Sophie's Choice to remote workers that management perceives as possibly not optimally contributing. It's easy to avoid calling it a layoff when you've just changed the remote work policy...

Two guys on vacation, new guys not starting yet, my day began at 7:25 this morning. At least Parker got a taxi to day care, sparing me the need to drive home tonight in a blizzard. So I'll just add these to Instapaper and hope I have to fly somewhere soon: Via Fallows, a long analysis of our complete bollixing of Afghanistan; Via Scott Hanselman, a Tumblr of 99 life hacks; and Nate Silver on the electoral college and the Democratic Party, partially explaining why Republicans, who have no policies to...

I don't have time to read these must-read articles: Noam Schreiber on Aaron Swartz Marlene Zuk on our fascination with the paleolithic Sean Flynn on Pope Benedict's butler Microsoft on the Azure outage a year ago (interesting because it may be related to last week's outages Jennifer Lawrence rocks Back to the mines...