You wouldn't guess it, though. With the temperature at -8°C and winds gusting to 49 km/h, it feels more like January than March. The prediction of cooler-than-normal weather appears to have come true.
In contrast, a year ago today the low temperature was 16°C, and the (record) high temperature was 26°C—33°C warmer.
At least it's a sunny day.
Yeah, I kind of saw this coming, but it still pisses me off:
The U.S. trustee overseeing American Airlines' bankruptcy has asked the carrier to justify its offer of $19.9 million in severance pay to Chief Executive Tom Horton, part of compensation linked to its merger with US Airways Group.
American spokesman Andy Backover said in a statement the carrier did not believe the objection filed by the U.S. Trustee's office had merit. The matter is scheduled to be considered by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on March 27.
The company said the proposed employee arrangements were found to be reasonable by pay consultants retained by its unsecured creditors committee.
Let's review. Horton's contributions to American Airlines included:
Well, that's all I can see, and I've spent about 300 hours on their airplanes since he took the job. Seems like he's worth $20 million to me!
And those "pay consultants?" Three guesses who signed the checks. Any "pay consultant" who finds that the executive paying him is himself paid too much doesn't deserve the title.
Given events like these, it boggles the mind that people think corporate executives are thieves.
It scarcely feels like a decade since we invaded Iraq. Well, to me, sitting here in the middle of North America, it doesn't. I imagine it feels like more than 10 years to the people we invaded.
Among the articles I've read the past week or so, John Judis' post at New Republic stands out. He was one of the few insider journalists who opposed the war at the time; his recollection explains what it cost him:
I opposed the war, and didn’t listen to those who claimed to have “inside information” probably because I had come of age politically during the Vietnam War and had learned then not to trust government justifications for war. I had backed the first Bush administration’s Gulf War, but precisely because of its limited aims. Ditto the Clinton administration intervention in Kosovo. George W. Bush’s aims in Iraq were similar to American aims in South Vietnam. During those months leading up to the war, I kept having déjà vu experiences, which failed to interest my colleagues. Still, I wavered after Colin Powell’s thoroughly deceptive speech at the United Nations in February 2003, where he unveiled what he claimed was evidence of Iraqi nuclear preparations. I had to have an old friend from the anti-war days remind me again of the arguments against an invasion.
My own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. Those months before the Iraq war testify to the importance of letting the public have full access to information before making decisions about war and peace. And that lesson should be heeded before we rush into still another war in the Middle East.
I wish I'd been blogging back then, because I would like a record of my own contemporary opposition to the war. At the time, I was working on a project in Richmond, Virginia, with some good ol' boys who really didn't like even the limited things I had to say about it. At least I didn't have to defend myself against the entire Washington press corps.
Ten years on, is our politicians learning have we learned anything? For our sake—and Iran's—I truly hope so.
I've fixed seven annoying bugs and added three minor features to Weather Now, including:
- Fixed searching from the search box so you can enter an airport code directly;
- Fixed the Last 24 hours page to show day and night icons properly;
- Added a status page so users can peek under the hood; and
- Tweaked a few things in the background worker process around logging and status update alerts.
A minor bug fix release like this used to take a couple of hours to deploy, because I had to update the code running on the web server file-by-file. I got the process down to about an hour—but I still had to bring the application offline to make the update.
Since I put it up in Microsoft Windows Azure, publishing an update takes about 15 minutes, is completely automated, and doesn't require taking the site down. The great Inner Drive migration continues to pay dividends.
Regular blog readers know that since moving to my current apartment in February 2008, the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center has occupied a couple square meters of my home office. I've also mentioned lower energy use since I started to move everything out of the IDTIDC and into Microsoft Azure.
Something else has happened to my electricity bill. In November, we citizens of Chicago voted to pool our electricity buying to get the lowest electricity cost possible. Well, the new regime kicked in last month, and the 660 kw/h I used in February cost 25% less than the 610 kw/h I used in January—which was the lowest use ever for this place.
It helps, also, that since moving my email to the cloud in June, I've used an average of 224 kw/h less electricity each month year-over-year.
I can't wait to see my bill for March. They read my meter on the 7th or 8th to prepare the bill I just got; the IDTIDC shut down on the 10th.
As I look out my window and see snow falling, I can't help thinking back to last March, in which we'd already had the third record-warm day in a row (27.8°C) on our way to the warmest spring in Chicago history.
This March, not so much:
So far, March has been both colder than average across all of Illinois and wetter than average across western and northern Illinois. The statewide temperature for March 1-14 was 0.2°C degrees, 3.0°C below average. That stands in stark contrast to last March when the statewide temperature for March 1-14 was 7.3°C, 4.1°C above average. That is a 7.1°C difference between the two periods.
The latest NWS forecasts show that rains of 25-50 mm or more could fall in the southern third of Illinois over the next five days. Also their 6-10 day and 8-14 days forecast show that colder and wetter than average conditions will prevail for the rest of March. Because of recent rains and melting snow, the NWS has issued flood warnings today on portions of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Wabash Rivers.
The next 8-14 days don't look so hot either:
Did I mention it's snowing right now? Happy St. Patrick's day.
Via Hanselman, an explanation of straight, white, male privilege in terms a straight, white, male gamer might understand:
Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.
Nicely put.
The Atlantic Cities blog has two nicely-juxtaposed stories today: "A brief history of Suburbia" and "If Your City Were Wrecked by Totalitarian Urban Planners."
The first:
[C]ity historian Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia...begins with the birth of modern suburb in the early-to-mid 19th century. By the 1830s, he writes, cities like London and new industrial towns like Manchester were beginning to expand outward, stretching the boundaries of the original cores. One observer in 1843 noted that unlike Paris (which was wilderness outside the city center) and Rome (which was desert), London was made of concentric sub-communities "like onions fifty on a rope."
Davison argues that it wasn't just "sheer pressure of population" that encouraged this early form of sprawl. Many factors played a role in the change, including improved rail transit that facilitated movement inside and outside town centers. Davison also points to four major ideologies—one each in the realms of religion, science, the arts, and social life—as critical sources of the shift....
The second:
Romanian authoritarian ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu infamously left a heavy mark on the capital city of Bucharest with a massive urban planning scheme known as the Centrul Civic. In the 1980s, the project displaced 40,000 people, demolished churches and monasteries in the way, and replaced it all with 8 square kilometers of communist-era concrete buildings and government complexes in the heart of what had been a historic city.
One of the new monuments, the 3.7 million square-foot Palace of the Parliament, is thought to be the largest administrative building in the world, and it anchors the Centrul Civic along a dramatic axis in much the same way that the U.S. Capitol does in Washington, D.C. To this day, the palace and the brutally rebuilt urban fabric around it remain “perhaps the most violent scar left by a totalitarian regime,” in the words of Bogdan Ilie and Dan Achim.
I will finish reading them...someday...
After four years or so, I've changed the Daily Parker's skin.
Looking back at my other, dead blog enticed me to play with the theme control for a few minutes. And then I decided, you know, Mads Simple looks really clean and elegant, but I'm kind of tired of it.
So? Blue enough for you?
Years ago, I had two blogs: one for work, and one for everything else. Eventually I stopped having two blogs because...well, laziness?
The old blog is back. I discovered I had dead links, and it was simple enough to drag the old blog out of archives and throw it onto my general-purpose VM.
Actually, I cheated. I only threw the content up there. I used The Daily Parker's blog engine with all its customization and just copied the old content up to the VM.
It's kind of interesting, looking back on the things I was working on seven years ago. I am particularly happy, given everything I did this past weekend, to link back to November 2006, when I built my last data center.