Events

Not only does my time evaporate into multiple projects these days, but the number of context switches I've experienced over the past few days hurts. Here's today's timesheet: Yeah, but I shoot with this hand. I worked from home Wednesday so that I could jam on some documentation. How'd that work out? Blogging, by the way, helps me switch contexts. I think.

Something about the Seder I went to last night and the marriage equality cases currently before the Supreme Court got me thinking along these lines: The wise son asks, "What are the statutes, the testimonies, and the laws that the Constitution has commanded you to do?" To the wise son, you say: The 14th Amendment gives every citizen equal protection under the law. The 10th Amendment reserves powers to the States that aren't specifically granted to the Federal Government. And the First Amendment...

Via Sullivan, a description of how Maxwell House Coffee got its brand on 50 million Passover tables: Maxwell House decided to publish a book, specifically a Haggadah, and offer it to customers for free with the purchase of a can of coffee. (A Haggadah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, comprised of prayers, songs, and stories which guide the Passover Seder.) The Maxwell House edition was an instant hit. Today, it’s the most popular Haggadah in the world, with over 50 million printed. Why has this piece of...

Yeah, it's Passover. Time for this: Same people who brought you this last year:

Quick time-out from my generally useless day (long overdue and appreciated): A sign of a good book is that you spend more time thinking about it than actually passing your eyes over the pages. More on which book in a later post.

Just a quick note about debugging. I just spent about 30 minutes tracking down a bug that caused a client to get invoiced for -18 hours of premium time and 1.12 days of regular time. The basic problem is that an appointment can begin and end at any time, but from 6pm to 8am, an appointment costs more per hour than during business hours. This particular appointment started at 5pm and went until midnight, which should be 6 hours of premium and 1 hour of regular. The bottom line: I had unit tests, which...

At last night's performance, the venue used dim, magenta lighting on the stage that made poor Lauren O'Connell look like a pink ghost. Here's one image exactly as it came out of my camera: Fortunately, I shoot raw photos, which take up lots of room (about 22 MB each) but with the benefit of lots of uncompressed image information. It's therefore relatively easy, using Adobe Lightroom, to correct for it. Magenta lights are pretty grim, though; the only reasonable correction was to make it black and white...

The female half of Pomplamoose, Nataly Dawn Knutsen, played a venue four blocks from my house yesterday, so I just had to go. She and her touring partners Lauren O'Connell and Ryan Lerman were as charming and talented in person as their music makes them seem. Dawn is also tall (178 cm in flats), which isn't readily apparent from her videos. The tour moves east through April before going back to California at month's end. Also, Knutsen assured me that Pomplamoose will continue.

Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel reports our 12-month drought has finally ended: According to the US Drought Monitor, Illinois is now drought free for the first time since April 3, 2012. Most areas in Illinois have seen positive responses in soil moisture, stream flows, lake levels, and groundwater levels since the fall. A small area of northwest Illinois remains as abnormally dry due to some lingering concerns about subsoil moisture and groundwater levels in that area. It was pretty grim for a...

Too much going on: Paul Murphy at Financial Times thinks Cyprus will do the right thing Microsoft released figures about national security letters the FBI has sent it .NET 4 introduced the System.Numerics.Complex type Microsoft's Channel 9 posted a video about migrating applications to Azure virtual machines Jeff Atwood makes a case for the Ruby language BuzzFeed imagines Twitter's 7th anniversary promo video with the Inception theme No one really cares about LinkedIn endorsements T-Mobile has put up an...