Events

My day became a non-stop parade of context shifts and meetings, so now that the temperature has dropped to -20°C (with a wind chill of -31°C), I'm wondering just how important having cream in my coffee will be tomorrow morning. Two other thoughts: First, I lived through the winters of 1983-84 and 1984-85, the first notable for giving us 100 hours of sub--18°C temperatures ending Christmas morning, the second for giving us the all-time-lowest temperature in Chicago (-33°C). I didn't go to school on that...

The temperature tumble that began yesterday evening seems to have leveled off. From 6pm yesterday to 6am today we had the steepest decline (17°C) with an abrupt plateau at sunrise this morning, now holding at -19°C. I might have to leave the house this afternoon to pick up a couple of necessities, like cream. (Yes, it's worth braving the Arctic to get cream for my coffee tomorrow.) Otherwise, my office is closed for two days, and Parker's at day camp, so until his 9pm walk tonight I really have no...

I'm torn. Or I'm a dinosaur. Or I'm a Perceiver. Or I'm a senior software development manager who's sick of changing technologies. My current drama is between continuing to use Mercurial on one hand, and switching to Git on the other. Both are distributed version control systems, so both enable a load of flexibility in single- or multi-developer workflows. I know that sounds like jargon, so let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up: If you don't have to share every little change you make to a...

Yesterday I wrote that I'd spend this morning setting up the Inner Drive Website as a continuous-delivery application running in Windows Azure cloud services. Well, that was a bit optimistic. Here's what I did instead: Shook my head sadly that the last time I published the site at all was last March. That's a little dis-continuous, I think. Upgraded the application to .NET 4.51, the Azure SDK 2.2, Azure Storage 3.0, and the latest Inner Drive Extensible Architecture build. Moved the master code...

The worst winter in 30 years continues in Chicago. This morning we woke up to another 50 mm of snow on the ground (fortunately light and fluffy) and -12°C cold. The good news: today the forecast calls for a seasonable -3°C. Then, starting around 3pm, this happens (click to expand): If you compare that forecast to the one on January 4th, you will see that today's has a lower bottom. Yes, not content to give us the coldest temperatures recorded in Chicago since 1995 already, this winter is about to give...

This is just a note to myself, really. Last weekend I spent an hour setting up continuous deployment of an Azure website using Git. At work, we're moving towards doing the same thing with Azure cloud services, which has a different set of problems to solve. I'll have more to say about this once we've done it. Meanwhile, here are a few of the resources we're reading to get started: Martin Fowler's paper on continuous integration. Microsoft's own overview of continuous delivery on ASP.NET. Food Fight's...

Briefly, overnight, the temperature at O'Hare hit 1°C before beginning its slow slide to -9°C just now. And it's getting colder, with a forecast -18°C tonight, then a spurt up to -2°C tomorrow afternoon, then an inexorable slide all day Monday to the depths of hell. Between dawn Monday and noon Wednesday—60 straight hours—we'll have temperatures below -18°C just like two weeks ago. Of course, two weeks ago, it got a little bit warmer on Tuesday. Not this time. And yet, it still won't be as bad as...

I've said it before: In Chicago, you're not allowed to complain about the cold until it's below 0°F. If you're too cold, you're just dressed incorrectly. Well, we've now had 16 days that cold this season (including 4 in December), tying the horrible 1978-79 and 1976-77 winters for third place. Only two winters, one of them in the 19th century, had more days this cold. To add insult, yesterday Anchorage, Alaska, had record-high warmth (9°C), and most of the state was warmer than Chicago. The dome of hot...

Why? Because as the value of currency goes down, it becomes easier to pay off fixed debts. As a compensation, interest rates tend to rise with inflation, because the cost of money—if I give you a dollar today, I want more tomorrow—goes up with it. The flipside is that creditors hate inflation. Raising interest rates kills inflation dead. In fact, raise interest rates at the wrong time, and you get deflation, which makes it harder to pay off debts. This tells you everything to know about why the very...

Today we might get up to -10°C, but even though this part of January is normally the coldest bit of the year, it might continue to cool down over the next couple of weeks. The 8-14 day look-ahead suggests below-normal temperatures through the beginning of February. This winter is already 2°C below normal on average. Plus, with the 150 mm of snow we got last night, we've now tied the winter of 1977-78 for third-snowiest-ever with a seasonal total of 1138 mm. It could be worse; parts of Michigan have...