Events

I think I had a better time than the people freezing to death at Wrigley:

In my profession, I get to sit at Peet's Coffee at 6:30am and watch action-packed videos like this: I know what you're thinking: "slow down, tigerblood. Slow down." I'm also pushing a new build of customer software up to production, and waiting for my coffee to kick in. At least I'm not blowing three runs in the 10th with a damned balk, like other people I could name.

...or, how I took advantage of the Middle Class Housing Subsidy but skipped an important step. In December 2011, I reduced my home mortgage interest rate from 6.25% to 3.125%, which thanks to the commutative property of multiplication, reduced my home mortgage interest by 50% year-over-year. What I forgot to do, however, was reduce my tax withholding allowances for 2012, which increased the taxes I owe for 2012 by an amount equal to 1/3 of the amount I saved on mortgage interest. Well, I just filed my...

One consequence of leaving my computer off for a day and a half: 320 emails. Granted, many of these are status messages and blog postings in my RSS feeds. But still—yikes.

I used not having my charger with me as an excuse to leave my laptop off for 36 hours. That didn't prevent me getting email, of course. (Who can live without email?) Because of some family scheduling, while I'm in the Bay Area this weekend the Giants are at Wrigley, meaning I'm missing games there and at AT&T Park. I listened to the game yesterday driving down from the city to the peninsula, catching the Cubs 2-run homer in the 7th, followed by the nausea-inducing announcement that they brought Carlos...

Only after passing through the TSA checkpoint at O'Hare just now did I realize I've forgotten to bring a laptop charger. Fortunately my folks have a Dell at home. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to do any work for four whole days. How awful would that be? Of course, there's always my tablet, my phone, their computers and iPad... How much again is a ticket to Sint Maarten?

Via Sullivan, a new Google Chrome plugin that allows you to embed secret messages in photos you post on Facebook: That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring...

We've had a bit of rain this month. In fact, we haven't seen the sun since Monday: Our abundant April showers have made this the 20th wettest April to date on record. O'Hare has seen rain 6 out of the opening 11 days this month totalling 48.5 mm or 18.3 mm above average. Saturday is the only dry day in our 7 day forecast with the active April pattern continuing next week. The good news is that recent rain has helped alleviate the dry conditions that existed over northern and northwest Illinois. For the...

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) gave a speech at Howard University yesterday in which he reminded the students that Republicans founded the NAACP. They already knew this, just as they already knew that the GOP before 1960 was a completely different party than the GOP after 1960. Paul seemed to ignore that nuance: As Rand Paul acknowledged in his speech, he may not be the most obvious choice to spearhead the GOP’s outreach to African Americans. His first foray into national news came in 2010 when he...

Krugman summarizes the GOP's worst, but last remaining, argument against Obamacare: There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom. Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a...