Events

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...

Last week the Justice Department and several states, including Texas and Florida, sued to stop the American—US Airways merger. Today a couple of them realized their error: Political and business officials in Florida, Texas and North Carolina are asking the U.S. to reconsider its suit to block the proposed merger of American Airlines and U.S. Airways, saying the combined company would benefit their local economies. Florida, Texas and North Carolina...are home to large hubs for both airlines. American...

Chicago has recently rolled out a several hundred DIVVY bike sharing stations, similar to the Citi Bike scheme in New York. For a small annual fee, or a moderate per-hour charge, you can take a bike from any DIVVY bike station and ride it to any other station within two hours. (The two-hour time limit keeps the bikes in circulation.) The city has a hundred or so stations now, with a couple thousand bikes. Of course, not everyone is happy about the bikes, which help cut pollution, reduce traffic and...

(This is cross-posted with the 10th Magnitude Tech Blog.) Part 1: The Challenge We developed efox, a Microsoft Windows Azure PaaS application, for our customer Holden International over the course of the last year. Our biggest challenge in the first release was to integrate their flagship sales training application, efox, with SalesForce. But from the beginning of the SalesForce integration effort, we had a constraint we couldn’t ignore: Not only would efox have to integrate with SalesForce, but it...

Two more opinions this morning about the Justice Department sued to block the American-US Airways merger. First, from Cranky Flier: [I]f DOJ really wanted to settle for slots at National, it would have done so before filing such a strongly-worded, broad case. Now it has sort of pinned itself into a corner. If it settles, it sets precedent that can be used against it in the future. If it goes ahead with trial, it risks everything. See, if it goes to trial, then the judge will review the case on its...

A couple I know asked me to take some photos of their 10-month-old daughter recently. Et voilà:

Yesterday the Cardinals spanked the Boys in Blue 6-1, and I got to see the whole thing. Here's Edwin Jackson: I'll give him one thing, boy: he threw 117 pitches, the 113th at 160 km/h. Impressive. Also, I got to sit in a different section than usual, because my cousin and I got our signals crossed on which games to sell. Apparently we broke even—including the extra fee for the better (section 430) seats.