Events

Have I mentioned how much I love TSA Pre-Check? Oh, yes. Home to O'Hare, 55 minutes. Curb to inner terminal, 7 minutes, on an international itinerary with checked baggage. Next stop: Montreal, thence the Ancestral Homeland.

I'm just about 18 hours from leaving the country. I'm at that stage where I have nothing to do regarding the trip, but it's close enough to make concentrating on software development a little iffy. It didn't help that my day got broken in half by a regular medical checkup that stretched to unusual lengths because my doctor has a new computer system. Gotta finish this code, though... Oh, and: ...ation.

Chicago's answer to the New York Highline is the Bloomingdale Trail (now renamed the 606, a 5 km stretch of abandoned railroad on Chicago's near-west side. After much delay, the city broke ground yesterday: Complete with shovels and dirt, the ceremony took place 16-feet above the ground, on the section of the trail adjacent to ''Park 567'' at 1805 N. Milwaukee Ave., just north of Milwaukee Avenue and Leavitt Street in Bucktown. The park is one of five ground-level neighborhood parks that will link up to...

Former law professor Barack Obama makes the case: “This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck, I’m in my second term so I can say it,” Obama said during a stop at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years because [….] in the first two years young people are learning in the classroom.” In the third year, he said, “they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm...

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman has published one: IAAS Infrastructure as a Service. This means, I want the computers in my closet to go away. All that infrastructure, boxes, network switches, even software licenses are a headache. I want to put them somewhere where I can't see them (we'll call it, The Cloud) and I'll pay pennies an hours. Worst case, it costs me about the same but it's less trouble. Best case, it can scale (get bigger) if some company gets popular and it will cost less than it does now....

Google Maps now shows a familiar-looking blue box parked in front of the Earls Court tube stop. And you can go inside... Cool.

After lunch I thought Parker and I could pop around to my second-favorite bar in Chicago, Bucktown Pub, which is about 3 km away. It's a little warm (31°C), so by the time we got there, I was looking forward to cooling off with air conditioning and a gin & tonic. We left home around 1:15 and got there at 2. They open at 3. Oops. I will now take a shower, and Parker has installed himself directly below the air conditioner.

I'm pulling the public repository for Orchard again, because I made a mistake with Git that I can't seem to undo. I've set up my environment to have a copy of the public repository, and then a working repository cloned from it. This allows me to try things out on my own machine, in private branches, while still pulling the public bits without the need to merge them into my working copy. Orchard, which will soon (I hope) replace dasBlog as this blog's platform, recently switched from Mercurial to Git, to...

A couple weeks back I moved an Azure Virtual Machine from one subscription to another. Since then, I haven't been able to connect to the FTP sites that were running on it. I finally spent some time today to figure out why. First, I forgot to change the FTP firewall support in IIS. The IP address of the VM changed, so I needed to update the VM's external IP address here: Then, I had to change the FTP firewall support for the FTP site itself. (It looks the same, just on the FTP site instead of on the IIS...

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates is learning French: [T]there's no getting away from the basic feeling of complete idiocy. You are aware of being spoken to as though you were a three-year old, even though you have all the pride of an adult. Worse, if you are like me--a monolingual American in a class where virtually everyone speaks a second language and is now working on their third or fourth--you will be the slowest person. When it comes to comprehension. the Spanish and the Italians are going to just...