Events

Via Sullivan, the European Union has given Cyprus the weekend to get itself put together...or else... Cypriot negotiators have lots of perfectly sensible things they can tell the European purse-string holders about why this obsesssion with debt sustainability is silly. They can point to future natural-gas revenues, for instance, which give Cyprus the potential ability to pay of debts which seem huge right now. They can also point to the denominator here: if failure to reach a deal results in GDP...

The WGN Weather Blog explains it: The unseasonably chilly pattern which has descended on Chicago and the Midwest is being driven by a new round of atmospheric blocking in the arctic. The so-called Greenland block has returned and is predicted by global forecast models to dominate the closing weeks of March and spill over into early April.... Blocking patterns in the arctic, like the one now in place, occur when vast pools of warmer than normal air take up residence aloft. As the planet's arctic regions...

Odd that I'm finding this out through the Chicago Tribune: Amazon.com has introduced a way for users to quickly save and send news articles as well as other items to their Kindle devices for later, off-line reading. The new feature can be added by users in a variety of ways. Amazon has made it possible for users to send items to their Kindles through Web browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox, as a feature that can be installed on Macs or PCs, from Google Android mobile devices, or from users'...

You wouldn't guess it, though. With the temperature at -8°C and winds gusting to 49 km/h, it feels more like January than March. The prediction of cooler-than-normal weather appears to have come true. In contrast, a year ago today the low temperature was 16°C, and the (record) high temperature was 26°C—33°C warmer. At least it's a sunny day.

Yeah, I kind of saw this coming, but it still pisses me off: The U.S. trustee overseeing American Airlines' bankruptcy has asked the carrier to justify its offer of $19.9 million in severance pay to Chief Executive Tom Horton, part of compensation linked to its merger with US Airways Group. American spokesman Andy Backover said in a statement the carrier did not believe the objection filed by the U.S. Trustee's office had merit. The matter is scheduled to be considered by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on...

It scarcely feels like a decade since we invaded Iraq. Well, to me, sitting here in the middle of North America, it doesn't. I imagine it feels like more than 10 years to the people we invaded. Among the articles I've read the past week or so, John Judis' post at New Republic stands out. He was one of the few insider journalists who opposed the war at the time; his recollection explains what it cost him: I opposed the war, and didn’t listen to those who claimed to have “inside information” probably...

I've fixed seven annoying bugs and added three minor features to Weather Now, including: Fixed searching from the search box so you can enter an airport code directly; Fixed the Last 24 hours page to show day and night icons properly; Added a status page so users can peek under the hood; and Tweaked a few things in the background worker process around logging and status update alerts. A minor bug fix release like this used to take a couple of hours to deploy, because I had to update the code running on...

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...