The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Nataly Dawn in Chicago

The female half of Pomplamoose, Nataly Dawn Knutsen, played a venue four blocks from my house yesterday, so I just had to go.

She and her touring partners Lauren O'Connell and Ryan Lerman were as charming and talented in person as their music makes them seem. Dawn is also tall (178 cm in flats), which isn't readily apparent from her videos.

The tour moves east through April before going back to California at month's end. Also, Knutsen assured me that Pomplamoose will continue.

Things I might have time to read this weekend

Too much going on:

Now, I will go back to drafting documentation while I wait for AT&T to reconfigure my DSL and kill my landline. I've had a POTS ("plain old telephone service") twisted-pair line longer than most people on earth have been alive. After today, no longer. I don't think I'll miss it, either. I only have it because I have a business-class DSL, which I don't need anymore, and the only people who call it want money from me.

Exhaling mentally

That's the problem. People inhale and exhale mentally, and right now, I'm exhaling. This means I get a lot of work done, but not a lot of reading. This, in turn, means more lists like this:

Lunchtime!

The efficiency of working from home

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:

Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...

March? What do you mean, March?

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:

Watch this space for a sneak preview of Weather Now 4.0, possibly tomorrow. The GetWeather utility has run with only minor hitches for a week, and with two more (quick) bug fixes it's ready for production. That just leaves about 6 hours of work to move the ASP.NET application up to Azure...and then, you get to beta test it. If all goes well I'll cut over to Azure on the 9th or 10th, and finally—finally!—retire my last two servers.

The reading list expands...

Two guys on vacation, new guys not starting yet, my day began at 7:25 this morning. At least Parker got a taxi to day care, sparing me the need to drive home tonight in a blizzard.

So I'll just add these to Instapaper and hope I have to fly somewhere soon:

Oh, and don't miss Jennifer Lawrence answering stupid questions after her Oscars win Sunday night.

Amazon music pricing puzzlement

Why does Amazon charge 30% less for some CDs ("includes free mp3 version of this album!) than for just the mp3s? Case in point, a back-catalog Dixie Chicks album, $9.99 for just the mp3s but $6.99 for the mp3s plus CD.

My only hypothesis is that they want to get rid of the physical inventory, and they're willing to take a loss to do so. Any other guesses out there?

(Yes, Dixie Chicks. I didn't know I liked them until Pandora sent them my way. In the last three months I've bought about a dozen albums from groups I never knew I liked because of Pandora, which I hope helps the musicians a little bit.)