Sorry, Hawai'i. Your UTC-10 is a full day behind Kiritimati, where it's already coming up on Saturday. But happy new year regardless!
And to the few sailors and submariners hanging out in UTC-11, happy new year to you, too, in an hour or so.
Since my company is closed today, and I have no obligations until late this afternoon, I'm taking my time fixing a bug and deploying a software package. So I actually have the bandwidth to read these articles right now, as opposed to "someday:"
- Citylab has a list of terms and myths they'd like to retire, including "Artisinal" and "Wider roads = less traffic." (They also have a list of traffic myths that need retiring too.)
- Back in November, Paris' Orly airport couldn't give pilots runway visual range because of a Windows 3.1 glitch. You read that right. (And notice that PC Mag's site still uses classic ASP. That, right there, is irony.)
- Cory Doctorow points out the security and legal problems with self-driving cars, from which one should draw more general lessons about the intersections of law, ethics, and code.
- Anita Sarkeesian reviews "The Force Awakens" positively. (If you're familiar with Feminist Frequency, you know why this is noteworthy.)
- Talking Points Memo has announced the 2015 Golden Duke Awards. Winners include Dennis Hastert, Kim Davis, and other people deserving ridicule.
I do have to fix this bug, though. Better get back to it now.
I have actual work to do today, so I came into the office. Since the work involves finishing a bug fix and pushing it out to a server, I really could have done this from home. But hey, it's the last day the office is open this year, so...
...everyone else stayed home.
I predict a short day.
After all the kvetching I did this morning, I'm pleased to report that I hit my step goal today (before 5pm), as I expect to do the remaining two days of the year.
There will be stats and sunrises soon. Stay tuned.
I'm having my worst week ever since getting a Fitbit: only 65,000 steps from last Tuesday through yesterday. Christmas, traveling, and yesterday's horrible weather have really hobbled my step count.
So far today I'm at 4,200 steps, and I have some errands to run this afternoon that will help. But wow, five days below 10,000? Scandal. Even Parker is bored.
I'm working from home today because I had a cable guy here for two hours, and because winter has finally arrived. The rain and sleet is also a problem because my Fitbit numbers have been off for four straight days.
I did get a lot of sleep this past weekend—but that also could be a factor today, according to new research into weekend lie-ins. (tl;dr: sleeping in on Sunday makes it harder to wake up on Monday.)
I'll have more later today. Now I have to figure out how to get a custom Microsoft Dynamics instance to play well with my company's software. That will be just as fun as it sounds.
It turns out, my Fitbit doesn't make me sad, but the numbers I get when traveling sometimes do. Despite a 3.5 km walk around Springfield yesterday, it was the second day in a row and the 4th in 10 days for which I missed my 10,000-step, 10 km goal.
On the other hand, last night I got almost 9 hours of sleep (according to my Fitbit), through several trains and a thunderstorm.
Yes, there was a thunderstorm in December in central Illinois. That's just weird. And in future, probably a lot more common.
It turns out, our neighbor to the west has a better-looking capitol building than we do. I mean, gilded roof? On a hill? We have none of these things. But we also don't have Steve King, which makes up for it and then some.
That's from October 2004. I've tried to correct what the original camera did to it, but it only provided so much data.
Apparently we have two. The old one:
And the new one:
And as a bonus, here's a squirrel: