Events

After a year at sea, a sailor returns to his home port and walks into his favorite bar, and everyone turns to stare at him because his head has shrunk to the size of a grapefruit. Finally, one of his oldest friends asks him what has happened. And the sailor tells this story: "We were at sea, and it was fine weather with a fair wind, and there wasn't much to do that day, so I decided to do a little fishing. I felt this immense tug on the line, and when I reeled in my catch, what had I caught but the most...

Security guru Bruce Schneier warns about the lack of trust resulting from revelations about NSA domestic spying: Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative. There's much more to come. Right now, the press has published only a tiny percentage of the documents Snowden took with him....

I can scarcely imagine how much a team of Thames Water maintenance workers enjoyed removing this: Last week, officials at Thames Water removed a 15-tonne lump of lard from a trunk line sewer beneath the London suburb of Kingston. It was the fattest fatberg ever recovered from the London sewers, and by extension, probably the largest subterranean grease clump in U.K. history. "A fatberg," says Simon Evans, media relations manager at Thames Water, "is a vile, festering, steaming collection of fat and wet...

Via Microsoft's Raymond Chen, a real-life example of how a batter can get three strikes on one pitch: Chen explains: During his plate appearance, Vinnie Catricala was not pleased with the strike call on the first pitch he received. He exchanged words with the umpire, then stepped out of the batter's box to adjust his equipment. He did this without requesting or receiving a time-out. The umpire repeatedly instructed Catricala to take his position in the batter's box, which he refused to do. The umpire...

The journalist and blogger's beagle Daisy died today at the age of 15. I'm getting sniffly just posting this: This was not like waiting for someone to die; it was a positive act to end a life – out of mercy and kindness, to be sure – but nonetheless a positive act to end a life so intensely dear to me for a decade and a half. That’s still sinking in. The power of it. But as we laid her on the table for the final injection, she appeared as serene as she has ever been. I crouched down to look in her...

WTF? The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the...

About a week ago, Chicago Public Media CEO Torey Malatia got fired. Crain's has more information today: The Chicago Public Media board, led by Baird & Warner Inc. CEO Stephen Baird, last month requested the resignation of CEO Torey Malatia, 61, who gained national prominence with program hits such as “This American Life” and “Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me” early in his 18-year tenure. Lackluster ratings and fundraising at the nonprofit precipitated his downfall. Mr. Malatia declines to comment. Meanwhile...

James Deen tries Google Glass and...well...don't play this at work: That has to be one of the only porn trailers I've ever laughed through.

This past week, my company put me in charge of operations. The job includes responsibility for our tools and technologies: bug tracking, client request tracking, code repositories, internal knowledge sharing, and Agile process management. Right now we use a collection of tools that we've used for three years: Beanstalk, Sifter, Zendesk, Yammer, and a home-grown Agile tool called Storyboard. Well, Storyboard runs on the Azure SDK 1.4, which Microsoft will stop supporting at the end of November....

Parker and I have walked about 90 minutes today, and we'll probably walk some more half an hour from now. It's 23°C and crystal clear, with a forecast for more of the same all weekend. I may not get anything done until Monday. Pity.