Events

I've got outside meetings every day this week, and those tend to compress my days. So there might be more link lists like this one coming up: When I get some free time again, I can catch up on my HBO shows. Here's the list of what's coming when. Does it matter what Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange believe? We atheists aren't out to destroy civilization. Really. The right wing are never wrong, no matter what evidence you have. Back to the mines.

The Chicago Forestry Department removed a tree near my house back in October but left the stump. No one could figure out why—until they tried to remove it a few days ago: I'm not an arbologist, but it seems to me that the tree had bionic parts. Actually, it looks like it grew through a steel grating in the parkway and then absorbed the grating. In any event, I hope no one got hurt when they tried sawing through the stump.

I recently had a routine checkup, and my doctor suggested revisiting the allergy tests I had way back in 1988. Only now, they have a blood test for most allergies, obviating the uncomfortable patch test I had to go through way back when. Nothing has really changed except my sensitivity to cats, which has gone down. When I was a kid they made me sneeze; now, they just make my eyes water if I forget myself and forget to wash my hands after patting a cat. That's all a long setup for this bit of doggerel...

A co-worker sent around this post from Iris Classon explaining how to set up continuous deployment in Azure. She used Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server. I spent about two hours this morning doing it with Visual Studio 2013 and Bitbucket. There are a couple of gotchas the way I did it: First, I made a mistake, and started with the Visual Studio 2012 MVC template. There's actually a VS2013 MVC template that has better authentication features, but, well, sometimes you miss things, right?...

In two and a half weeks, I'll be on a beach doing nothing of value to anyone but myself. Meanwhile, here are all the things I won't have time to read until someday in the future: The NOAA Climate Prediction Center has forecast essentially normal temperatures for the Midwest during February, March, and April. This is the same organization that predicted normal temperatures for January, so, you know. In Chicago, when there is snow, there are dibs. The practice has become more objectionable than ever to...

Just getting a server rack out of one's apartment is only half the battle. Disposal takes a little effort, too. Fortunately there's Craigslist. Unfortunately, people are flaky. So on the second attempt, the former Inner Drive Technology International Data Center found a new home in a small Loop family law firm. I actually felt a little twinge. The rack, the servers, the peripherals...they're actually gone. But: Inner Drive Technology is now 100% Cloud.

This is a big deal for shops like 10th Magnitude, my employer, especially given that we developed the API for Arrow Payments. PCI compliance means banks—who have skin in the game—have certified Azure is secure enough for credit-card processing: The PCI DSS is the global standard that any organization of any size must adhere to in order to accept payment cards, and to store, process, and/or transmit cardholder data. By providing PCI DSS validated infrastructure and platform services, Windows Azure...

Andrew Sullivan tops my reading list every day. He and his staff post sometimes 100 items a day on The Daily Dish, and even if I only read a tenth or them, my day is better. He's infuriating, fascinating, informative, conservative, Catholic, gay, mercurial, level. I don't agree with him about a third of the time, but one of his best characteristics is his willingness to listen to arguments and change his mind. So last February, when he jettisoned a paid gig with The Atlantic to become a professional...

Tomorrow will be quieter than today, I hope, or I might not get time to think until next week. I didn't miss these meanwhile: The corporations have won massively: network neutrality might be really and truly dead. Chicago has banned indoor "vaping", for some reason. Spend 100 seconds with the demon baby of New York. When a convention wants to come to your hotel, don't insult them. 9,135 out of 9,136 scientists agreee: global warming is happening. Next meeting...

A century ago, engineers cut the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Basin. It might be time to close the canal: Over the last decade or so, a huge range of interests — from environmental groups to fishermen to shipping experts to politicians — have raised the alarm over just how much this artificial connection has created an opening for invasive species such as the Asian carp to make their way through North America’s waterways. And the costs associated with...