Events

Completely swamped today by a production error on an application I hardly ever work on. The problem was around something I'd written, but not caused by anything I wrote; still, it fell to me to fix the problem, which caused me to fall behind in everything else. I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open with things I probably can't get to today: Andrew Sullivan thinks Forbes is ridiculous elevating Putin to "most powerful person." Someone forwarded me a short film called The Signal. How about giving Canada a...

Aw, buggre alle this for a Larke. I'm all in favor of upgrades, but for Foucault's sake, don't break things. I'm trying to upgrade a .NET project to Entity Framework 6, and I want to smack the developers. Under previous versions, you could set the retry manager through configuration. This was really helpful for unit testing, when you might want to change the configuration and have the application block load a transient fault handler automatically. With Entity Framework 6 (EF6 — yes, this is blatant...

Since we moved the end of Daylight Saving Time to the first week of November, sunrises at the end of October are later than those in mid-December. Yesterday's sunrise was the latest sunrise in a year, and will be the latest until 2016. (The sunrise on 6 November 2010 was the latest until 2021, so it really could be worse.) In Chicago this morning, the sun rose at 6:26, the same time it rose on September 12th. It won't rise this early again until March 3rd—but then a week later we shift the clocks again...

Sometimes, Canadians and Americans seem so much alike. The problem becomes trying to determine which Americans and Canadians you mean. Exhibit: Police in Toronto have recovered a video they allege shows mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. (Ford's lawyer said it was pot—even though weed may also be illegal in Ontario.) A friend who lives there just sent me new polling data that shows Canadians have a sense of humor: A new poll released Friday shows Mayor Rob Ford’s approval rating has actually climbed since...

...brings us Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, the NPR news quiz hosted by actor and playwright Peter Sagal. Last week, one of the panelists presented an extended joke about Poland. Never mind that the panelist is probably of Polish descent; the piece annoyed the Polish consulate: Peter Grosz, an actor and TV writer who has appeared as a panelist and guest host on "Wait Wait," offered a supposed news item referencing a joke asking how many Poles it takes to screw in a light bulb. Host Peter Sagal revealed the...

Gulliver harrumphs: For this observer, it's too long (around 90 seconds longer than Air New Zealand's "Bare essentials", for example) and actually quite annoying. Also, I don't think it does a particularly good job of fulfilling its primary purpose, which is to explain the safety-related features of the plane. With all the pizzazz and robot rappers, passengers will end up watching the dancing and admiring the production values, without actually digesting the message. It tries so hard to entertain the...

This was one of the funniest things I've read in a while: PLAY-BOOK FACTS OF LIFE: If the president can convince the public that he emancipated slaves simply to preserve the union, the story will blow over. If it emerges that he actually issued the proclamation because he believes involuntary bondage is an immoral affront to human dignity, we could be looking at months of hearings. NEW BATTLEGROUND POLL: Lincoln’s negatives are “through the roof” in Va., N.C., S.C., Ga., Miss., Ala., Louisiana, Ark....

This rocks: The so-called "Starpath" is a type of solar-enhanced liquid and aggregate made by Pro-Teq Surfacing, a company headquartered southwest of London near the awesomely titled town of Staines-upon-Thames. It's in the prototype phase, with a test path running 460 feet in a Cambridge park called Christ's Pieces. (The British and their delightful names!) The material works by absorbing UV rays during the day and later releasing them as topaz light. In a weird feature, it can somehow adjust its...