Events

Principally, it means not having to commute in 15 cm of snow. It also means several uninterrupted hours of working on stuff. And, unfortunately, not reading all this yet: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died, finally. Americans are weird, bringing a lot of economics research into question. SimCity 5 came out today, to some criticism. Bad Lip Reading hits SpiderMan. Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...

Netsch was Illinois' first female nominee for governor and the Illinois controller in the 1990s. She died this morning at age 86 from complications from ALS: She was one of the first female law professors in the United States. A liberal Democrat, she defeated the Machine-backed incumbent state Sen. Danny O’Brien to win a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1972 that she held for 18 years. Elected comptroller in 1990, she was the first woman elected to statewide office in Illinois and, four years later, the...

On list 2013-02-20

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...