Events

Exhibit 1, yesterday at 4:58pm:

I don't know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I've just deployed the completely-redesigned Weather Now application. I feel 10 kilos lighter. Check out the preview on Windows Azure. The application started in mid-1997 as a feature of the now-defunct braverman.org, my proto-blog. The last major changes happened in 2006, when I gave it a face-lift. I've occasionally pushed some bug fixes, but really, until today it has looked and acted essentially the same way for 6 years. (The GetWeather...

James Fallows has a thoughtful piece looking back at the start of the Iraq War, ten years ago this month: Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago. I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind. I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the...

I've just finished—I mean, finished—the Weather Now worker role. The worker role runs in the background and performs tasks like, for example, downloading the weather from outside sources, parsing it, and storing it. I have three tasks left to enable me to publish the new version of Weather Now to its new home in Windows Azure: Create a script to initialize the lists that appear on the site's home page; Upgrade the existing ASP.NET website to an ASP.NET web application; and Create an Azure Cloud Service...

I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in: Andrew Mason got fired from his billion-dollar CEO job at Groupon. Because of human-caused climate change, the National Aeronautic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will start mapping more of the ice-free arctic soon. WBEZ wonders if our recent snow is...

After a couple of days in which I'm glad we keep bourbon in the 10th Magnitude office, Scott Hanselman's examination of working remotely seems timely: I see this ban on Remote Work at Yahoo as one (or all) of these three things: A veiled attempt to trim the workforce through effectively forced attrition by giving a Sophie's Choice to remote workers that management perceives as possibly not optimally contributing. It's easy to avoid calling it a layoff when you've just changed the remote work policy...