Events

Regular blog readers know that since moving to my current apartment in February 2008, the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center has occupied a couple square meters of my home office. I've also mentioned lower energy use since I started to move everything out of the IDTIDC and into Microsoft Azure. Something else has happened to my electricity bill. In November, we citizens of Chicago voted to pool our electricity buying to get the lowest electricity cost possible. Well, the new regime kicked...

As I look out my window and see snow falling, I can't help thinking back to last March, in which we'd already had the third record-warm day in a row (27.8°C) on our way to the warmest spring in Chicago history. This March, not so much: So far, March has been both colder than average across all of Illinois and wetter than average across western and northern Illinois. The statewide temperature for March 1-14 was 0.2°C degrees, 3.0°C below average. That stands in stark contrast to last March when the...

Via Hanselman, an explanation of straight, white, male privilege in terms a straight, white, male gamer might understand: Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start...

The Atlantic Cities blog has two nicely-juxtaposed stories today: "A brief history of Suburbia" and "If Your City Were Wrecked by Totalitarian Urban Planners." The first: [C]ity historian Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia...begins with the birth of modern suburb in the early-to-mid 19th century. By the 1830s, he writes, cities like London and new industrial towns like Manchester were beginning to expand outward, stretching the boundaries of the original cores. One observer in 1843 noted...

After four years or so, I've changed the Daily Parker's skin. Looking back at my other, dead blog enticed me to play with the theme control for a few minutes. And then I decided, you know, Mads Simple looks really clean and elegant, but I'm kind of tired of it. So? Blue enough for you?

Years ago, I had two blogs: one for work, and one for everything else. Eventually I stopped having two blogs because...well, laziness? The old blog is back. I discovered I had dead links, and it was simple enough to drag the old blog out of archives and throw it onto my general-purpose VM. Actually, I cheated. I only threw the content up there. I used The Daily Parker's blog engine with all its customization and just copied the old content up to the VM. It's kind of interesting, looking back on the...

I'm paying 90% of my attention right now to a Windows Azure online training class. I already knew a lot of the material presented so far, but not all of it. It's like re-taking a class you took as an undergraduate; the 10% you didn't know is actually really helpful. Like next week's class, which will go over Infrastructure as a service: a lot has changed in the last year, so it should be valuable. Apparently, though, my homework is to build an Azure web site this week. Not a multi-tier application with...

Early this morning, the city re-opened the Wells St. bridge to El traffic after replacing a 250 ton section of it. Here's how it looked Thursday morning: The old south half of the bridge, being dismantled: This morning, from neighboring LaSalle St.: The city started replacing the bridge in November, and aims to finish this year. They will close the bridge to El traffic again from April 26th to May 6th in order to replace the north leaf.

Via Sullivan, imagine if we could watch natural selection work on our ancestors:

Some amusing police work this week: Chicago cops arrested three men for stealing a dozen school buses for the simple reason that the buses had GPS devices: The owner of a scrap company where the remains of several school buses were found after being stolen from the Far South Side has been charged with illegal possession of auto titles, police said. Police searched the scrap dealer starting about 7 a.m. Thursday, and about 2:15 p.m., they found Quintero in the false ceiling of the parts yard's office...