The Daily Parker

Via Sullivan, scholar John Suiter discovered a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" at Oregon's Reed College in 1956:

It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on trial for obscenity. Apparently, phrases like “cock and endless balls” did not sit well with the authorities. But the court vindicated them all.

The recording [linked above] sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.

That's almost sixty years ago; the poet was 30. For what it's worth, I bought my copy at City Lights many years ago.

As I promised four weeks ago, I have the final data on moving all my stuff to Windows Azure. I delayed posting this data because Azure pricing recently changed, as a number of services went from Preview to Production and stopped offering 25% discounts.

The concrete results are mixed at the moment, though increasing within the next couple of months. The intangible results are much, much improved.

First, electricity use. Looking at comparable quarters (March through May), my electricity consumption is down two thirds—even before air-conditioning season:

Consumption from March-May 2013 was 1028 kW/h, compared with 3098 kW/h over 2012. But this explains why the concrete benefits will improve: during June-August 2011, when all of the servers were running and so was the air conditioner, use was 4115 kW/h. I'm expecting to use less than 1800 kW/h this summer, just a little more than the one-month consumption in June 2011.

Costs, alas, have not fallen as much as hoped, unless you add the replacement costs of the servers. I'm currently running 3 SQL Database servers (consuming 2 GB), 3 extra-small cloud service instances, 1 small virtual machine, and 55 GB of storage. Total cost: $150.

Electricity in June 2013 was $55, compared with $165 in June 2012.

Don't forget the Office 365 subscription to replace my Exchange server at $26.

Finally, DSL and phone service went down from $115 to $60, because I dropped the phone service. Temporarily I'm supplementing the DSL with a FiOS service for $30. In a few months, when AT&T bumps the FiOS from 1.5 Mbps to 30 Mbps (they promise!), FiOS will go up to $50 and the DSL will go away.

So, cash flow for June 2012 was $279, and for June 2013 was $289. Factoring in the variability of electricity costs means Azure costs exactly the same as running my own rack.

What about the intangible costs? Well, let's see...I no longer have 8U of rack-mounted servers spinning their cooling fans 24/7 in my Chicago apartment. When I shut them off, the place got so much quieter I could hardly believe it. And I no longer worry about the power going out and losing email while I'm out of town.

In other words, I'm literally sleeping better.

Also, moving to Azure forced me to refactor my demo site Weather Now so extensively that I can now add a ton of really cool features that the old design couldn't support. (Once I have free time again. Someday.)

When you consider as well the cost of replacing the three end-of-life servers ($6000 worth of hardware), the dollars change considerably. Using 60-month depreciation, that's $100 per month savings on the Azure side of the ledger. I'm not counting that, though, because I may have limped along for a couple more years without replacing them, so it's hard to tell.

So: dollars, same; sleeping, better. A clear win for Azure.

In the last couple of days:

• The Atlantic Cities blog pointed to a mapping tool that uses census data to show county-level data about the U.S. For instance: where are all the Welsh people?
• Cranky Flier is happy, as am I, that American Airlines' new management team will look a lot like US Airways' team.
• Chicago will most likely break its tourism record this year, as we're on track to have more than 46 million visitors this year.
• Because student loan debt is skyrocketing, hard to refinance, and impossible to get out of, it's starting to look like a new form of indenture. At the very least, it's one of two awesome transfers from Generations X, Y, and whatever the kids are calling themselves these days, up to the Boomers. You're welcome, Boomers.

If I have time in the next couple of days, I'll return to the student loan problem, because I think it will become the fight of the ages in a few years. Shortly, I would guess, after I've paid off my MBA.

I also have some thoughts noodling around my head about how right-wing politics works. The ongoing student-loan crisis fits right in, as does the book I just finished.

On this day in 1977, the Apple ][ went on sale.

The base model had 4 kB of RAM, a 1 MHz 6502 processor, and could display 24 lines of 40 columns in 8-bit color. You could buy one for $1,298 ($5,029 today), or if you wanted to upgrade to 48 kB of RAM you would pay $2,638 ($10,222 today). It came with a cassette interface at first, then later with a 5¼-inch, 160 kB floppy disk drive.

I learned how to program in assembly language on one. Ah, memories.

Yeah, one of those days:

• Has the NRA fatally over-reached?
• Niel deGrasse Tyson examines whether Superman can really fly.
• How visionary is Eric Schmidt, really? (Could it be instead survivorship bias?)
• Can we stop worshiping Reagan, please?
• What happens when a rural town dies?

I'll get to these eventually...

National Public Radio has created an interactive map that uses Google Maps and new satellite images Google obtained yesterday to show 10-meter images of the Oklahoma tornado's destruction:

This may be the best, most timely use of geographic information in a news presentation I've ever seen.

The images are stunning. I can only imagine what life must be like in Moore right now—and with the NPR app, it's a lot easier to understand.

I have 21 hours of budget to finish a substantial project at work, and then another project to finish by the end of May. Posting may be iffy the next couple of days.

Coming up, the final figures on how much moving to Azure saved me.

Snicker:

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

But since when have the masses listened to critics?

After a lot of really difficult work and evaluating a half-dozen 3rd-party libraries, I've finally gotten a round-trip between a local ASP.NET application and SalesForce. This is the first victory in two big battles against the SalesForce integration model I've been fighting for the last two weeks.

The next hurdle will be to get the SalesForce API to accept my application's SAML assertion after the user is authenticated. I really have no idea how to do that yet—and no one I've spoken with knows, either.

Still, this was a good way to end a long work-week. And soon: pizza.

As a large part of my brain noodles on how to get multiple IDPs to work with a single RP, a smaller part of my brain has looked out the window and realized Chicago is having a normally crappy April:

• The are 5-13 after allowing a run in the bottom of the 13th last night in Milwaukee;
• It's 13°C 7°C and raining, which is great because we need the rain and cool weather; and
• ...well, that's all I got right now.

I had a third thing, but SAML got in the way, I guess.