The Daily Parker

Wow, this weekend was busier than I anticipated.

You know what's coming. Links!

• From the Washington Post, the IRS will have a helluva job enforcing the ACA;
• The Sun-Times has yet another example of government capture in Chicago;
• We're almost out of effective antibiotics, and that's not good;
• Charlie Trotter died of a stroke brought on by high blood pressure; and
• Note to self: Don't let Parker eat a pile of cheese unless you're prepared to walk him every three hours the next day. Oh, and we're out of Nature's Miracle.

Only a few more hours before I leave for the weekend. Time to jam on the billables...

Tomorrow afternoon is the Day of the Doctor already, and then in a little more than four days I'm off to faraway lands. Meanwhile, I'm watching a performance test that we'll repeat on Monday after we release a software upgrade.

So while riveted to this Live Meeting session, I am pointedly not reading these articles:

• A Times editorial about soil bacteria and how we screwed up the prairies;
• John Gray eviscerating Malcom Gladwell;
• Alec MacGillis praising Harry Reid; and
• Scott Hanselman explaining node.js support in Visual Studio.

Perhaps more to the point, I'm not finishing up the release that will obviate the very performance test I'm watching right now. That is another story.

I had enough time during today's 8-hour meeting to queue up some articles to read later. Here they are:

• From August 2012, Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Reader
• From today, Sam Harris on the high cost of tiny lies and an interview with Paul Bloom
• The New Republic reminds us that Rob Ford may be awful, but Mel Lastman paved the way for him, and how bad a burst pipeline really is to your community
• Split family portraits, by artist Ulric Collette, are really cool
• Anita Sarkeesian has another installment in her series "Tropes v Women in Video Games"
• Only four more days until the Day of the Doctor
• Scott Hanselman has new stuff about Windows 8.1

As for today's meeting, this.

Parker got about 3 hours of walks this weekend because of weather and apartment showings. And I had about 6 hours of work to do for my real job. And I had lunch with people way the hell across town for Día de la Papusa. So I completely forgot to post anything.

I've also added Evanston back into the mix for my apartment search. Essentially, it suits my personality pretty well (aging Gen-X quasi-intellectual progressive), and you can get more apartment for less money than in any comparable neighborhood in Chicago. On the other hand, association dues and property taxes in Evanston are much higher than in the city, so you wind up spending the same amount of money overall. On the third hand, it's simultaneously farther from downtown Chicago and a quicker commute, thanks to Metra. Plus, as long-time readers know, I've lived there off and on for my entire life. So it's not what one might call a radical move.

At some point I'll be less busy than I've been the past week.

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 new crest? I'm totally getting a tote bag.
• Speaking of Canada, Molson's Beer has put beer coolers in Europe that only Canadian passports can open.
• When is the best time of day to drink coffee?
• Should we not only ditch Daylight Saving Time but just have two time zones in the U.S.?
• The Azure Scheduler is now in preview.

That is all for now.

Once again, here's a list of things I'm sending straight to Kindle (on my Android tablet) to read after work:

• The Republican committeeman who made boneheaded comments earlier this week on The Daily Show, and who subsequently got fired, doesn't get it;
• WBEZ takes us back to the 1893 World's Fair;
• What is Chicago getting from US Airways and American after the merger?;
• Economist Tyler Cowan says don't go to restaurants with long waits;
• Microsoft makes Azure easier to buy (and thus harder to avoid);
• A British man has died from a caffeine overdose; and
• Krugman does not like Greenspan's new book. Nor does he like fear-mongering.

Back to work. All of you.

Through the magic of Facebook I learned who created one of yesterday's WRHU spots: Jim Vazeos wrote and produced "Uh-Uh Contraceptives" and voiced the last third of it. Christin Goff voiced the bulk of it, including the "I said NO" at the end.

He didn't confirm the date (1984), but that's consistent with other information he provided. Thanks for your input, Jim, and thanks to the other WRHU alumni who chimed in.

I found another batch of tapes including a mix tape I made in the WRHU two-track studio in May 1990. Yes, two-track: we recorded two audio tracks onto 1/4-inch tape at 7.5 inches per second (or 15 ips if we needed to do some music editing). We then cut the tapes with razor blades and spliced them together with splicing tape.

Eventually I graduated to the misnamed 4-track studio, which by then not only had a 4-track quarter inch deck but also a 1-inch, 16-track system that only the General Manager was allowed to play with.

Now that you know the technical limitations, listen to this teaser promo from May 1990. As a bonus, here is the Uh-Uh Oral Contraceptives spot that my predecessors created in 1984 or 1985.

Enjoy.

The Chicago technology scene is tight. I just had a meeting with a guy I worked with from 2003-2004. Back then, we were both consultants on a project with a local financial services company. Today he's CTO of the company that bought it—so, really, the same company. Apparently, they're still using software I wrote back then, too.

I love when these things happen.

This guy was also witness to my biggest-ever screw-up. (By "biggest" I mean "costliest.") I won't go into details, except to say that whenever I write a SQL delete statement today, I do this first:

-- DELETE
SELECT *
FROM MissionCriticalDataWorthMillionsOfDollars
WHERE ID = 12345

That way, I get to see exactly what rows will be deleted before committing to the delete. Also, even if I accidentally hit <F5> before verifying the WHERE clause, all it will do is select more rows than I expect.

You can fill in the rest of the story on your own.

The American Idol 2010 runner-up Crystal Bowersox played City Winery Chicago last night:

Another:

Anna Rose opened for her; I was impressed:

Tough shooting conditions. I forgot my seats were right against the stage. I wound up shooting everything with a 50/1.8, trying to get around the enormous monitor just to my right. It sounded great, though.