Events

Tomorrow afternoon I'm flying to Phoenix to visit Park #26. Fortunately, Chase Field is air-conditioned, because the forecast calls for 38°C at game time after a high temperature of 41°C earlier in the day. Photos and a frank assessment of the weather conditions to follow this weekend.

Jeff Skilling at the Chicago Tribune updates us on the equatorial Pacific: The current El Nino comes together against a backdrop of warming oceans and oceans which are growing more acidic as they observe mass quantities of CO2 produced through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere this produces. More on the rate at which the planet’s oceans are warming here. It’s estimated that the warming which has taken place in the world’s oceans since 1990 is the equivalent of having...

Not a lot of time to write today because I'm spending most of the day as CTO and the rest of the day as Lead Developer. The context switches are horrible. Tomorrow should be a little easier.

Stuff I found on the Interwebs this week: Apparently, un-schooling is still a thing. Now that we're removing sanctions from Iran, maybe they'll be able to maintain their airplanes? Illinois has been very wet and very cool for a while now, thanks to a hot ridge of high pressure in the western U.S. That's all for now.

During the first half of 2015, I took four trips, slightly fewer than the 22 I took in the second half of 2014. As of today I have four scheduled in the next three months—still not a huge number by historical standards. This coming weekend I'm restarting the 30-Park Geas. Then from mid-August to mid-September I've got trips planned to downstate Illinois, London, and San Francisco, the last one to attend the Dreamforce conference. It's still murder on my EQM numbers. It will hurt in 2016 if I can't...

At the new Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, we have Xfinity Internet provided by Comcast. In the last couple of weeks, citing competition from just about everyone, Comcast upgraded Internet speeds in many of their markets, including Chicago: Comcast announced Monday that it is raising the speed of its Blast Internet service to 75 Mbps, at no additional charge. The 50 percent increase will benefit about half of the company's high-speed Internet customers in Chicago, effective immediately. For...

The Atlantic's CityLab blog looks at the historic buildings and shares a 1965 video about its construction: The city has granted Marina City preliminary landmark status. Final approval could take a few weeks.

Seventy years ago today, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear weapon: On Thursday, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, will commemorate the 70th anniversary of its greatest scientific accomplishment: the first successful test of an atomic bomb. The anniversary of that explosion, which happened about 210 miles south of here at a site named Trinity, will be marked in a low-key fashion at the lab. There will be a roundtable discussion in an auditorium....

I'm reviewing a book I read about nine years ago, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David Platt. It feels like re-reading Keynes in 2008: really much more familiar than one would want, because no one seems to have learned much. From Chapter 1: As with many areas of computing, user interface design is a highly specialized skill, of which most programmers know nothing. They become programmers because they're good at communicating with a microprocessor... But the user interface, by...

Meanwhile, this: Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute