Events

I almost forgot: the Inner Drive demonstration site, Weather Now, got a significant upgrade this weekend, to version 3.6. I added two new features that are part of long-term plan of improvements. They don't sound like much, but they're pretty important bits that other features will depend on. First, the lists of weather stations that appear on the home page are now generated dynamically from a database table. This means that I can change them, remove them, add them, or schedule them without having to...

About five hours ago I finished everything required to earn my MBA. I still have one (option) follow-up lecture for one class, so I can't mark the whole thing "resolved and closed" in FogBugz yet. Thus the precise language: I'm done with all the requirements. No more Saturday-morning CENTRA sessions. No more papers and exams lurking under the bed. No more residency calendar on my fridge (first attached there 18 months ago). I feel like Robert Redford's character at the end of The Candidate: "What do we...

Ah, how lovely to be at the beach in Chicago tonight. Just look at it: Oh, just kidding. That's actually Miami Beach at sunrise in January 2007. This is what Lake Michigan looked like this evening: The video's resolution isn't high enough to show the snowflakes proceeding in a generally horizontal fashion to the south. Nor does it show my dog, who couldn't decide whether all that snow and water was freaky or fun. (He ultimately decided the water was freaky, the snow was fun, and getting toweled off...

Just let him off leash in a blizzard:

Cartoon Copyright ©2010 Adam Zyglis. Licensed via politicalcartoons.com.

In Chicago, we get about 10 days a year like this against about 20 leave-work-early-it's-too-gorgeous-out days: Current conditions at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters: 1°C, winds from the north at 46 km/h gusting to 57 km/h, with snow. Oh, it gets better, according to the National Weather Service: Today: Snow and areas of blowing snow. Temperature falling to around -4°C by 5pm. Very windy, with a north wind between 45 and 65 km/h, with gusts as high as 90 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 100%....

After 16 months, 16 classes, six countries (including North Carolina, which still seems a bit foreign), and 1435 hours of work, I'm down to my last assignment. It's a group paper, for which I've already done the bulk of my part, though the team has nominated me to assemble the final draft. It's due at 11 am Monday; expect to see something around then. This will all make sense to me in a few weeks. Right now a part of my poor brain insists I have something to do that I'm not doing right now...while the...

James Fallows nails the dispiriting "business-as-usual" of Peter Orszag's new job: [T]he decision of Peter Orszag, until recently the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama, to join Citibank in a senior position [is both damaging and shocking. ]. Exactly how much it will pay is not clear, but informed guesses are several million dollars per year. Citibank, of course, was one of the institutions most notably dependent on federal help to survive in these past two years....

Yesterday, it took me longer to fly home (8½ hours) than it would have taken to drive (6 hours). This almost never happens; and throughout my flight cancellation and delay at Cincinnati's Terminal 2, I remained sanguine and peaceful. (Beer helped.) Because no matter what flight delays I encountered, no matter what kind of snow blew all over the roads causing the taxi to crawl at a modest walking speed, no matter anything, at least I wasn't in Suburbistan, Ohio: No, my life wasn't that bad anymore. This...

I can't quite grasp that I'll finish my MBA sometime before next Tuesday. My Duke to-do list (I actually use FogBugz for school and for work) has had, over the past two years, 573 items on it. Today I've got just 7 active items, including "Confirm CCMBA degree is conferred" which is due on the 30th. One paper left. One PowerPoint dreck. Er, deck. One case to read. Two classes. I have no idea what I'm going to do without all that stress and bother, or with all the time I'll suddenly have. Oh, right: I'll...