The Daily Parker

I spent part of the afternoon at Spiteful Brewing yesterday and made good progress in Iain Banks' second Culture novel, The Player of Games. It was a lovely fall day:

Cassie enjoys going to the brewery but she does not understand that the treat bag sometimes runs out:

But she does make friends everywhere she goes:

We have unusual wind and sunshine for mid-November today, with a bog-standard 10C temperature. It doesn't feel cold, though. Good weather for flying kites, if you have strong arms.

Elsewhere in the world:

• The right wing of the US Supreme Court has finally found a firearms restriction that they can't wave away with their nonsense "originalism" doctrine.
• Speaking of the loony right-wing asses on the bench, the Post has a handy guide to all of the people and organizations Justice Clarence Thomas (R) and his wife claim have no influence on them, despite millions in gifts and perks.
• NBC summarizes the dumpster fire that was the XPOTUS and his family lying testifying in the former's fraud sentencing hearings.
• Alexandra Petri jokes that "having rights is still bewilderingly popular:" "Tuesday’s election results suggest that the Republican legislative strategy of 'taking people’s rights away for no clear reason' was not an overwhelming success at the ballot box."
• Earth had the warmest October on record, setting us up for the warmest year in about 120,000 years.
• Could the waste heat from parking garages actually heat homes?
• John Scalzi has a new film review column for Uncanny Magazine, with his first entry praising the storytelling of the Wachowski's 2008 Speed Racer adaptation.

Finally, Citylab lays out the history of San Francisco's Ferry Terminal Building, which opened 125 years ago. I always try to stop there when I visit the city, as I plan to do early next month.

I've had a few things on my plate this week, including a wonderful event with the Choeur de la Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris at Old St Patrick's Church in Chicago. We had a big dinner, they sang for us, we sang for them, and then some of us hosted some of them in our homes. Tonight I'm hearing their real performance at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston.

Sunday night I saw comedian Liz Miele at the Den Theater. I'm totally crushing on her and highly recommend you catch her on this tour:

And naturally I have a few photos of Cassie that got imported into Lightroom this morning:

Real post later today, probably around the time the cold front hits.

It's 22°C and sunny right now, making me wonder what's wrong with me that I'm putting together a software release. I probably should fire off the release, but I'm doing so under protest. I also probably won't get to read all of these things I've queued up:

• Peter Hamby expresses concern about the rise of the illiberal left in the younger generation.
• Despite the ravings of Fox News and other right-leaning propagandists, the US economy is actually doing better right now than at any point since Obama was in office, says Paul Krugman.
• Greg Sargent slow-claps "the quiet vindication of Hakeem Jeffries."
• Writing in Lawfare, Susan Landau rolls her eyes that law enforcement has turned to scaring people about child sexual abuse in their latest gambit to break end-to-end encryption.
• Archaeologist and sculptor Oscar Nilsson has reconstructed the face of a 14-year-old Inca girl ritually sacrificed in the Andes about 500 years ago.
• An off-duty pilot riding in the jumpseat of an Alaska Airlines E175 attempted to trigger the fire suppressors on the plane's engines Sunday. No one knows why.
• A literature review study has shown convincing evidence my generation really did have a lot more autonomy growing up.
• Google has changed its maps colors for some users—they're still rolling out the changes.
• Today is the 20th anniversary of the Concorde's last revenue flight. Maybe Virgin Galactic will get its SST off the ground someday?

Finally, Stan's Donuts will open a new store just three blocks from the apartment I moved out of one year ago today. I might have to stop in soon. I will not, however, wash them down with CH Distillery's latest abomination, Pumpkin-Spice Malört.

Yesterday I complained that some combination of factors had made it impossible for me to evaluate an expensive tool for my day job. The manufacturer responded overnight:

First, we want to express our apologies for experiencing login problem. This is really uncommon and is usually related to OS restrictions. We also want to thank you very much for your interest in Telerik products. We are sure you will be able to build beautiful applications with lots of rich functionality really easy with guaranteed support, demos and documentation, etc.

Back to the login problem. The trial installer is an application that provides web login flow. This means that when you click on Login, your default web browser will be launched landing on the login page. If your system is configured to block applications to launch the default browser, the flow will be interrupted. From the provided error, we can see that System.Diagnostics.Process.Start fails to launch the browser. This information, however, is insufficient to know what the exact reason for this failure is.

We did a quick research and found a solution for a similar problem - OpenWith.exe error. Could you please let us know if that resolves the problem on your side?

Well, then. That's helpful and articulate. They suggested a few options, one of which is simply to use their private NuGet feed, so I will try that first.

I did a thing yesterday:

Yes, the pizza at Barnaby's in Northbrook, Ill., is really that good.

Today will be a bit lighter.

A person who reads The Daily Parker regularly asked me if I read any fiction, since many of my posts highlight news and opinion (non-fiction) articles I've read in the past day or two. And my annual statistics round-up have only mentioned the number of books I've read, not their names and authors.

So for the reader's benefit, and my own in posterity, here are some of the books I've read recently, in no particular order:

• James Fell, Sh!t Went Down (#2)
• James S.A. Corey, The Expanse series, books 6–9 and Memory's Legion
• Peter Kramer, Death of the Great Man
• Hugh Howey, the Silo series
• S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
• Nicholas Bloom, The Great American Transit Disaster
• Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted
• John Scalzi, Starter Villain
• And I just last night finished Iain Banks first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas.

I'll post the complete 2023 list in my statistics roundup on January 1st or 2nd.

Last weekend I made approximately 5 liters of chicken soup due to an unfortunate decision midway through the process to add more salt. Given the saltiness of the soup I put in mason jars, I recommend a 3:2 ratio of soup to water, meaning I effectively made 8 liters of soup. Most of it is in my freezer now, in convenient 250 mL jars, one serving apiece.

Suffice it to say I have had chicken soup for lunch 3 times this week. It is, however, very delicious. Except for over-salting it (which is easily corrected and preventable in future), I know what I'm doing.

Elsewhere in the world, things are not so delicious:

• Alex Shepard says the real reason House Republicans can't elect a speaker—Jim Jordan (R-OH) just failed for the third time in as many days—is because they don't have "any actual objectives beyond stymying the Biden administration and blocking liberal priorities."
• Andrew Sullivan throws up his hands at a party unfit for government.
• Dana Milbank chuckles at the Republicans wanting to "go to Gettysburg or something," which most people remember as the place the slave-owning South effectively lost their rebellion. "Washington isn’t broken," he writes. "The House of Representatives is broken — because you and your Republican colleagues broke it."
• Possibly related to the House GOP, Arthur Brooks outlines the "Dark Triad" type of malignant narcissist, and how to avoid them.
• Possibly related to that, Molly White continues her coverage of the SBF trial, today focusing on the confusing defense his lawyers have outlined.
• Speaking of malignant narcissists, which I guess would have to include all the preceding bullet points, Jeffrey Toobin (yes, that Jeffrey Toobin) warns that the XPOTUS is going to get someone killed. (Does Toobin not remember insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt?)
• Continuing with today's theme, Paul Krugman looks at Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a model of how an economic nexus dies.
• I don't usually go in for celebrity stuff, because things like the Post's review of Britney Spears' memoir remind me how horrible celebrity actually is.
• Moving off the narcissism theme: Sky News explains why workers have hung a bale of hay from London's Millennium Bridge.
• Chicago's Metropolitan Brewing has filed for bankruptcy, so the Brews & Choos Project will try to stop in for one last lager on Sunday.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of both the Sydney Opera House opening and Nixon's (and Bork's) Saturday Night Massacre. One of those things endures. The other does too, but not in a good way.

My friend's pittie mix Hazel does not always like other dogs. So my friend had some trepidation about letting Hazel stay over for a night. It looks like no one need have worried:

She and her driving partner are already passing through Rapid City, S.D. Hazel doesn't like being in the car that long, but she's doing fine with some Doggie's Little Helper from the vet.

An old friend stopped by today on her way from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest, and insisted we take our dogs to the dog beach. It's 14°C and sunny. What do you think I did?

Yeah:

Fortunately it's the middle of the sprint, and I have a metric shit ton (a shite tonne) of PTO hours, so this was my afternoon.

If you're my boss and reading this...I swear, this is not what I planned for the day.