The Daily Parker

Yesterday I posted a shot of the Cincinnati Reds clinching the National League Central Division title. Here's the whole park, from the cheap seats:

And here's a little nerd humor for you. Why can't anyone hit a home run over Cincinnati's center-field wall? Because no one can find it:

More Cincinnati photos after my 1pm meeting...

Yesterday afternoon, I saw this happen:

That's the Cincinnati Reds just after they beat Los Angeles to become the National League Central Division champions this year. And because they beat L.A., they helped San Francisco clinch the West, making it an all-around fun afternoon. (N.B.: I wore a Giants hat to the game.)

More Cincinnati and Great American Ball Park photos when I get back to Chicago.

It's a beautiful afternoon for a ballgame, at least here in Cincinnati, where I hope to see the Reds become the first team this season to clinch its division outright. I'll actually be wearing a Giants hat, as a Cincinnati win against the Dodgers today moves San Francisco's magic number to 1—and I want to see them in the playoffs.

Anyway, it's 21°C, partly cloudy, and Oktoberfest is right outside my hotel room. I am optimistic about this trip to the 24th park in the Geas.

Update: O noes! I missed the world's largest chicken dance!!!11!1

As a person with a bachelors degree in history, this compilation of Republican ideas about history made me laugh. And cry:

1500s: The American Revolutionary War begins: “The reason we fought the revolution in the sixteenth century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown.”—Rick Perry

1619-1808: Africans set sail for America in search of freedom: “Other than Native Americans, who were here, all of us have the same story.”—Michele Bachmann

1812: The American War for Independence ends: “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’…that song—written during the battle in the War of 1812—commemorates the sacrifice that won our liberty.”—Mitt Romney

Oh, my eyes.

Via writer Daniel Vergara, the Guardian U.K. newspaper posted a quiz on Mitt Romney's gaffes:

Who said:

1. On making the case for greater consumer choice in health insurance: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

• Mitt Romney
• John McCain

Et cetera. Well, it seems Mitt made a cracking impression on the Brits, what what!

Deny thy boardroom and refuse thy chiefs,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn on-time,
And let the Cactus purchase you!

Sorry. For those joining our program in progress, "Cactus" is the callsign of US Airways, who are now in merger talks with the airline I fly all the time, American. Today American's pilots are trying to make that merger happen more quickly, but they have come to bury American, not to praise it.

American's pilots, who spurned management's "last best" offer before the company went into bankruptcy protection, have gotten surly that management has gone ahead with its rule changes anyway. Pilots picketed outside O'Hare yesterday, while coincidentally finding an unusual number of "maintenance problems" over the past few weeks that caused flights to be delayed or cancelled. This has dropped American's on-time rate to 54% and prompted a nervous but defiant Air Line Pilots Association to deny in a statement yesterday that this is a work action:

One area of increased operational unreliability we have observed is in mechanical delays, which isn’t surprising. Although American Airlines operates the oldest fleet of any major U.S. carrier, management has decided to furlough a large number of mechanics and close one of its largest maintenance facilities. Management also decided some time ago to reduce its inventory of spare parts.

In addition, management halted the recalls of furloughed pilots late last year, which has resulted in an insufficient number of pilots to maintain the schedule properly.

It’s also important to remember that management chose to reject the APA-American Airlines Collective Bargaining Agreement, which served as an operating manual for our pilots. Management’s action has generated significant uncertainty for our pilots with respect to employment protections and operating rules, which are now under management’s unilateral control.

APA members are experienced professionals who conduct themselves as professionals under whatever circumstances they encounter. Any negative impact on our airline’s operational integrity is of management’s own making.

I'm going to watch this closely, particularly while finalizing plans to visit the UK next month. I'm outbound from Atlanta on British Airways, and getting to Atlanta isn't a problem at all if American cancels tons of flights; but returning from the UK might be. Now, where did I put my Tums?

Update, 10:49am: The president of American's frequent-flyer program has just sent an email announcing some changes to the company's schedule through October: "We are proactively reducing the rest of our September and October schedule by approximately one to two percent. These schedule adjustments will enable us to provide our customers with more reliable service while minimizing impact to travel plans. Additionally, we are increasing staffing of maintenance, reservations and airport personnel to offer you more flexible travel options." Let's see how that affects my trip.

Before I forget, and get lost in my work again today:

• Exelon Energy's power outage SMS notifications actually work. You should sign up.
• Loyola University ethics professor Al Gini wonders why college students cheat.
• WBEZ has yet another 'Chicago has Great Craft Breweries' article that I couldn't resist reading.
• Mitt Romney has the distinction of being the only presidential candidate since before 1988 with net unfavorable ratings in mid-September. Every other candidate, Democratic or Republican, who has run since 1988, had net favorable ratings from voters.

All for now...

Last night, around 11:30pm, the power went out in my apartment building and the ones on either side. I know this because the five UPS units around my place all started screaming immediately. There are enough of them to give me about 10 minutes to cleanly shut down the servers, which I did, but not before texting the local power company to report it. They had it on again at 1:15am, just after I'd fallen asleep. I finally got to bed around 2 after bringing all the servers back online, rebooting my desktop computer, and checking to make sure no disk drives died horribly in the outage.

But unlike the last time I lost power, this time I did not lose email, issue tracking, this blog, everyone else's site I'm hosting, or the bulk of my active source control repositories. That's because they're all in the cloud now. (I'm still setting up Mercurial repositories on my Azure VM, but I had moved all of the really important ones to Mercurial earlier in the evening.)

So, really, only Weather Now remains in the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center, and after last night's events, I am even more keen to get it up to the Azure VM. Then, with only some routers and my domain controller running on a UPS that can go four hours with that load, a power outage will have less chance of waking me up in the middle of the night.

My latest 10th Magnitude blog post is up, in which I dig into Microsoft's changes to Azure Web Sites announced Monday. The biggest change is that you can now point your own domain names at Azure Web Sites, which solves a critical failing with the product that has dogged them from its June release.

Since this Daily Parker post was embargoed for a day while my 10th Magnitude post got cleared with management, I've played with the new Shared tier some more. I've come to a couple of conclusions:

• It might work for a site like Inner Drive's brochure, except for the administrative tools lurking on the site that need SSL. Azure Web sites still have no way to configure secure (https://) access.
• They still don't expose the Azure role instance to .NET applications, making it difficult to use tools like the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ to access Azure table storage. The IDEA™ checks to see whether the Azure role instance exists (using RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable) before attempting to access Azure-specific things like tables and blobs.
• The cost savings isn't exactly staggering. A "very small" Web Role instance costs about $15 per month. A Shared-level Web Site costs about $10. So moving to a Shared Web Site won't actually save much money.
• Deployments, however, are a lot easier to Web Sites. You can make a change and upload it in seconds. Publishing to a Web Role takes about 15 minutes in the best circumstances. Also, since Web Sites expose FTP endpoints, you can even publish sites using Beyond Compare or your favorite FTP client.

I did upgrade one old site from Free to Shared to move its domain name off my VM. (The VM hosted a simple page that redirected users to the site's azurewebsites.net address.) I'll also be moving Hired Wrist in the next few days, as the overhead of running it on a VM doesn't make sense to me.

In other news, I've decided to go with Mercurial for source control. I'm sad to give up the tight integration with Visual Studio, but happy to gain DVCS capabilities and an awesomely simple way of ensuring that my source code stays under my control. I did look at Fog Creek's Kiln, but for one person who's comfortable mucking about inside a VM, it didn't seem worth the cost ($299).

Crain's Chicago Business yesterday ran the first part in a series about How Chicago became one of the nation's most digital cities. Did you know we have the largest datacenter in the world here? True:

Inside the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. printing plant on East Cermak Road, next to McCormick Place, is the world's largest, most-connected Internet data center, according to industry website Data Center Knowledge. It's where more than 200 carriers connect their networks to the rest of the world, home to many big Internet service providers and where the world's major financial exchanges connect to one another and to trading desks. "It's where the Internet happens," Cleversafe's Mr. Gladwin says.

Apparently Chicago also hosts the fifth-largest datacenter in the world, Microsoft's North Central Azure hub in Northlake. (Microsoft's Azure centers are the 5th-, 6th-, 9th-, and 10th-largest in the world, according to Data Center Knowledge.) And then there's Chicago's excellent fiber:

If all of the publicly available fiber coming in and out of the Chicago area were bundled together, it would be able to transmit about 8 terabits per second, according to Washington-based research firm TeleGeography. (A terabit per second is the equivalent of every person on the planet sending a Twitter message per second.)

New York would be capable of 12.3 terabits, and Washington 11.2 terabits. Los Angeles and San Francisco are close behind Chicago at 7.9 and 7.8 terabits, respectively. New York is the primary gateway to Europe, and Washington is the control center of the world's largest military and one of the main connection points of the Internet.

Chicago benefits from its midcontinent location and the presence of the financial markets. "The fiber optic lines that go from New York and New Jersey to Chicago are second to none," says Terrence Duffy, executive chairman of CME Group Inc., who says he carefully considered the city's infrastructure when the futures and commodities exchange contemplated moving its headquarters out of state last year because of tax issues. "It benefits us to be located where we're at."

Now, if I can just get a good fiber to my house...