One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:
The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.
All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:
Garmin periodically challenges its users to get active. About once a month they put out a distance challenge for walkers. This month, the challenge was to do a 4.8 km walk this weekend. Cassie and I just did that, as it turns out Jimmy's Pizza Cafe is conveniently 2.6 km away. It helps that we haven't had temperatures this warm (4.0°C) since just after 1pm on the 3rd.
Butters, however, did not like getting left behind. According to my security camera, she spent 18 minutes crying by the front door, took a quick stroll around my lower level, then went back to cry by the front door for another 10 minutes before going upstairs to cry in the living room. She gave up for a while, then returned to the front door for another 15 minutes, alternately crying and sitting quietly. I haven't watched the whole 54 minutes but I'd bet she was quiescent for less than 10.
I am sorry for my neighbors. Fortunately, the neighbor to the north is out of town. And frankly, the neighbors to the south have a 3-year-old boy who makes far more noise in the aggregate than any dogs I've ever owned (or looked after).
Tomorrow I'll go back to complaining about world events. Right now, I'm taking both dogs and my friend Kat's new book to Spiteful Brewing.
Butters, possibly traumatized by Cassie and me leaving her alone for almost half an hour yesterday, has decided to stake out my office:
Incidentally, this is what Cassie and I walked past in the local park yesterday:
We've had progressively warmer days since the temperature bottomed out Monday morning. We might even get above freezing today! I hope so, because I need a 5 km walk to meet a Garmin challenge this weekend. (Cassie will help with that; Butters, not so much.)
Yesterday afternoon, houseguest Butters found a sunbeam:
This morning, she found a corner of the couch:
Then this afternoon, after I took both her and Cassie on a let's-sniff-everything 15-minute walk around the block, I decided to take Cassie directly on a let's-get-real-exercise 25-minute walk. I could hear Butters protesting this action halfway down the block on our departure, and also halfway down the block on our return. My poor neighbors.
She hasn't left me alone all afternoon, either. She needs to know where her humans are at all times. Unfortunately for her, her real humans are about 2,800 km away and not coming back until Monday. I hope she copes.
Last night I released Weather Now v5.0.9183, with a few bug fixes including a patch to the Gazetteer that recognizes the UK's four constituent parts (example). I've spent a few evenings the past week and a half fixing everything I could think of in the Gazetteer code, plus integrating with Azure Maps to allow me to correct time zones and parent places.
Then, starting around 5pm yesterday, I re-imported the existing data from fresh sources, including the NCDC update Monday and the FAA update yesterday. And just now I've completed importing all 970,000 USGS names records for the 50 United States plus DC and Puerto Rico. The Gazetteer now has 1.6 million records, and there are still a lot of places to import from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
If you're curious, you can go to the About the Gazetteer page to see what all I've imported. I plan to start importing the NGIA country files this afternoon, once I've downloaded them.
The Azure Search indexer that populates the full-text search for the application runs every three hours, so most of the USGS records won't show up in the search feature until just after noon US Central time (a bit more than an hour for now).
Also, after lunch, I'll have a Butters update. Spoiler: she sleeps 21 hours a day.
Time got away from me this afternoon. I might read all this tomorrow morning:
Finally, On Tour Brewing, a Brews & Choos Top 10 brewery, will close this spring. A new brewery and a resurrection of one of my favorite pre-pandemic bars, Links Tavern, will open in its place. Can't wait!
My friends have gone to a tropical beach for the week, which means I get a second dog for a few days. She has been here many times before (most recently on Saturday), so she knows the drill. Still, five minutes after her people left, Butters seemed resigned to never seeing them again:
By the time I woke up this morning, however, she seemed to have settled in just fine:
Walking the two of them together in this cold doesn't actually work, however. Butters hates cold weather; Cassie loves it. So Cassie wound up dragging Butters for half of this morning's walk, making all three of us miserable. After lunch I'll walk them again...separately.
I threw a party for a few friends last night. Cassie's friend Butters came by and ensconced herself on the couch for most of the night. Cassie, for her part, got oo-mox from one of the guests:
Cassie has spent most of today sleeping, as I would like to be doing. At some point I may even get the motivation to read. First I have to tweak a feature of Weather Now that will help re-import all the data I mentioned yesterday.
I promised snow photos.
So far, it looks like we've gotten only about 25 mm of snow, though it continues to fall and will probably keep falling until the early morning. Cassie and I went out around 1pm, and I gave her a bit of off-leash time in the courtyard:
That is a happy dog. And we're about to go out again, because she insists on metabolizing food and water.
Tomorrow she gets to go to day camp and I get to go to my downtown office. One of us will have a lot more fun than the other.
We got a lot of outdoor time yesterday, and more than an average amount so far this morning.
Yesterday we took a 5.5 km walk from downtown Elmhurst to the Prairie Path, with a sojourn at a big field where Cassie and her friend Kelsey found big sticks:
Then this morning I had to get my butt down to the University of Chicago, so Cassie got to be a Big Dog on Campus for a bit:
The forecast calls for 6°C today and 9°C tomorrow, so I imagine we will get a lot more walkies before the cold front comes in Monday night. With the dreaded "wintry mix" forecast for Wednesday, we need to get all the outside time we can.