The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Free money!

The Illinois State Treasurer sent out an email blast this week trumpeting the new ICash portal, which enables anyone to search for unclaimed property held by the State. Curious, I ran a couple of searches and discovered that yes, the State has money owed to me or to people whose estates I'm the beneficiary of.

In total, I have four claims to lost property going back to 1999. Three of the people owed this money have died, most recently in 2007. But only one of the three estates has wound up, while the other two remain active trusts. So in order to get the money, I need to find 20-year-old estate documents, establish the identities of all three dead people and my relationships to them, swear out notarized affidavits to all of that, and wait for the State to process the forms.

The total amount owed to me or my ancestors? $185.

So, for approximately $1,000 in copying fees, research fees, legal fees, and postage, not to mention several hours of my time (I charge my good clients more than that per hour), I can recover enough unclaimed property to take a friend to a nice dinner.

If only they had a checkbox for "it's not worth it, let it escheat."

Head (and kittens) exploding!

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts.

Meanwhile, in reality:

  • A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven retail pot prices above $8,800 per kilo. For comparison, the group alleges that retail prices in California are just $660 per kilo. (Disclosure: The Daily Parker is a GTI shareholder.)
  • Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), one of the indirect defendants in the pot suit, signed a $46 billion budget for the state that includes $1.8 billion in temporary tax relief. Apparently, I'll get a $50 check from the State that I can apply to the $600 increase in property taxes Cook County imposed this year, which is nice, but I think the state could have aimed a bit lower on the income cap for that rebate and given more help to other people.
  • Shortly after US District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle (a 35-year-old who never tried a case and who graduated summa cum mediocrae laude from the legal powerhouse University of Florida just 8 years ago and earned a rare "not qualified" rating from the ABA upon her appointment in 2020 by the STBXPOTUS) ruled against the CDC in a case brought by an anti-masker, the DOT dropped mask mandates for public transport and air travel in the US. In related news, the Judge also said it's OK to piss in other people's swimming pools and up to the other swimmers not to drink the water.
  • While the Chicago Piping Plovers organization waits for Monty and Rose to return to Montrose Beach, another one of the endangered birds has landed at Rainbow Beach on the South Side. He appears more inclined to rent than buy, but local ornithologists report the bird has a new profile on the Plōvr dating site.
  • NBC breaks down the three biggest factors driving inflation right now, and yes, one of them is president of Russia. None, however, is president of the US.
  • Along those lines, (sane) Republican writer Sarah Longwell, who publishes The Bulwark, found that 68% of Republicans believe the Big Lie that the XPOTUS won the 2020 election, but "the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose." Makes me proud to be an American!

And finally, via Bruce Schneier, two interesting bits. First, a new paper explains how a bad actor can introduce a backdoor into a machine learning training session to force specific outcomes (explained in plain English by Cory Doctorow). Second, an attacker used a "flash loan" to take over the Beanstalk crypto currency voting system and stole $182 million from it. Because Crypto Is The Future™.

The artist and her work

Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300 only in 2016, and neither Parker nor Cassie tried to destroy it until this spring.

Here's Cassie's final expression of the piece. Note not only the center section, which Cassie exfiltrated from the house a small bit at a time, but also the left edge, where she expressed a more compelling feeling of the interplay between organic lines and straight edges:

Early afternoon roundup

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories:

Finally, Michelin has handed out its 2022 stars for Chicago. Nothing surprising on the list, but I now have four more restaurants to try.

* Except that I volunteered to help a church choir do five Messiah choruses on Easter Sunday, so I've got two extra rehearsals and a service in the next 12 days.

Bonus update: the fog this morning made St Boniface Cemetery especially spooky-looking when Cassie and I went out for her morning walk:

Updated photos

Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time.

Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen.

Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch:

Berea College:

One of the ranch's permanent residents:

Down the road from the ranch:

Cinnamon, who rather preferred that I keep Cassie outside the pasture, thank you very much:

I've got a couple more from the past two weeks I'll post after lunch.

Weather Now 5 is Live!

I've just switched the DNS entries for wx-now.com over to the v5 App, and I've turned off the v4 App and worker role. It'll take some time to transfer over the 360 GB of archival data, and to upload the 9 million rows of Gazetteer data, however. I've set up a virtual machine in my Azure subscription specifically to do that.

This has been quite a lift. Check out the About... page for the whole history of the application. And watch this space over the next few months for more information about how the app works, and what development choices I made (and why).

Just for posterity, here's what the v4 Current Weather page looked like:

Good night, v4. You had a good 8-year run. And good night, Katie Zoellner's lovely design, which debuted 15 years ago.

My day so far

The day started like this:

Then it became this:

And returned to this:

But because of this:

It is now this:

As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way.

Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out where to have dinner later, I'm going to head back and hope that Cassie hasn't figured out how to open doors.

(Also, I'll edit the photos properly when I get home and possibly re-post them.)

On the road

Cassie and I are at a lovely ranch in Kentucky where tomorrow she'll meet goats and tonight I've met a 1990s-era Internet connection. Well, I didn't come here to surf the Web, so I'll just deal.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting outside listening to frogs. Lots of frogs. And a hound somewhere down the road.