The Inner Drive Technology Journal v1.0.9708 is here, with a dozen or so significant security and performance tweaks that came out of the Claude Fable 5 review I undertook a couple of weeks ago. Just opening the Edit page to create this post showed me how much faster and cleaner the application is, so I'm glad I spent the time (34 hours, give or take) and several hundred thousand Claude tokens getting this done.

In fact, given how extensive some of the changes were, I'm flabbergasted that it only took 34 hours. In the past I would have estimated probably a solid month (180 hours) to do them if I worked full-time, maybe longer if there were a team of devs working on each of the fixes in parallel. (Merging is still a thing, even with modern multi-developer techniques.)

And let me just say, this kind of work is exactly why I wrote my own blog software. It wasn't just that I developed the Journal application for modern database technology, speed, reliability, and a slicker look. Oh, no: the main impetus was just to fix bugs faster, because the predecessor blog engine was really difficult to change.

"It does what you want and it's easy to change" is the definition of good software. I'm pretty happy with this app, especially after this latest round of performance fixes. Now let the bugs show themselves...I know they're in there...

• About this Blog (v5.0)  (2 hours) Updated
• Brews and Choos project  (3 weeks)
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  (7 months)
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  (2 years)
• Logical fallacies  (6 years)
• Other people's writing  (6 years)
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  (5 years)
• Style sheet  (1 year)
• The 30-Park Geas  (20 hours) Updated
• Where I get my corn-pone  (5 months)

Glen Hansard, the musician and actor best known for The Commitments and Once, died early yesterday outside Dublin, Ireland, after crashing his motorcycle. He was 56. Gardaí (the Irish national police) will conduct a routine inquest to determine exactly what happened.

In other news:

• The OAFPOTUS has completely flipped world opinion on the US and China, as we're less popular than they are now.
• Between the OAFPOTUS's deranged dementia and the natural proclivites of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's natural proclivities, ICE is using a program to reunite migrant children with relatives as a shortcut to deporting the relatives. Becaues the cruelty is the point.
• A former deputy prime minister of Canada rolls her eyes at the OAFPOTUS blaming Canada for just about everything.
• Jennifer Rubin cracks her knuckles as Republicans rightfully panic about the midterms.
• Paul Krugman jokes that "reality is a Communist plot" in the wake of US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)'s "unhinged obsession" with former CDC director Anthony Fauci.
• Jamelle Bouie asks, "why do we tolerate Elon Musk's racist commentary?"
• Bruce Schneier presents a simple way to decide if you should use AI for a task.

Finally, it looks like summer heat will return to Chicago after a three-day respite. Oh, joy.

I think I've hit a good balance today between working and not. Cassie and I have walked 9½ km so far today, spending 1¾ hours outside, and I've squished three bugs that were in the way of releasing a new version of the Inner Drive Journal (aka the software you're looking at right now). About 90 minutes ago I set Claude Sonnet to analyzing a pretty vexing bug that sometimes causes the index of posts to fail in a very specific way, and then while Sonnet did its thing, Cassie and I walked down to Belmont Harbor. I came back, read the analysis, looked at the fix plan, and told Claude to go ahead and fix it.

Unfortunately, about the time Cassie and I were passing Addison heading south, Claude.AI horked. Since 2:49 pm CDT, just about everything Anthropic offers has been down, so no bug fix yet. Pity, it's really the last one I need to fix before deploying everything I've worked on for the past 10 days.

Fortunately, I have several other things to do that don't require Claude, including taking a shower. It's nice out but I still walked for about 75 minutes. I really do not want Claude's help for that.

I missed all the fun yesterday:

Rounds of powerful storms flooded basements, downed trees and caused widespread power outages Monday.

As many as 3 inches of rain and 74 mph winds were recorded at Midway Airport and about 2 inches fell at O’Hare Airport as of 4:30 p.m. Monday, said Eric Lenning, a National Weather Service meteorologist. That was before another round of storms barreled through the area.

ComEd reported more than 530,000 customers experienced power outages across northern Illinois, with service restored to about 300,000 as of Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS's mind-bendingly stupid war with Iran has pushed our munitions supplies to dangerously low levels.
• Jeff Maurer tut-tuts the "anti-corporate crusaders...using Big Tobacco's logic" against...Waymos?
• While the Democratic leadership politely asks for US Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to show a sign of life, Adam Kinzinger would like to remind you that McConnell himeslf would "never be this nice." However, what Kinzinger misses is that Kentucky governor Andy Beshear (D) does not want a Republican incumbent in that seat come November, so as long as McConnell doesn't die or resign before August 3rd, there won't be.
• Cranky Flier has a cool visualization of how the major US air carriers have updated their technology. I was surprised to find, using his methodology, that American is the laggard, only getting an infusion of the newest planes when US Airways merged with it in 2015.

Finally, what is the "Gen Alpha melody?" I don't really know; I'm Gen X. But it sounds a bit modal to me, fa-mi-re-ti, do-re, mi-re-do-la, on infinite repeat. Which would be consistent with V/V, V7, vi, IV, yes? Am I hearing that right? My piano is in storage else I'd work this one out more thoroughly. OK, here's the full explanation.

Just sharing a couple of photos from the weekend. I didn't actually take that many, mainly because I was too busy having a good weekend. My friend and I spent way too long at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, for starters:

And I got terribly distracted by their dog, a deaf Jack Russel terrier mix named Ollie:

Even late at night, he still proved he was a dog by staring ever-hopefully at the fridge:

(In fairness, I had just put the charcuterie tray back in it, after "accidentally" dropping a little coppa on the floor.)

Today, as one might imagine, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Once again, TSA's Touchless ID program sped me right through the security checkpoint, getting me from the BART station to the other side of security in just 19 minutes. That included waiting for the airport tram. Some aspects of this timeline really are fun.

Less fun is the inbound flow control at O'Hare which may or may not delay me even more than I'm already delayed. At the moment, FlightAware predicts I'll get to O'Hare just an hour late. Fortunately, I have 300 pages left of my novel and about 250 pages left of a more challenging book, so I should be OK. In any event, I'll be in the lounge staring across at the International Terminal for at least another 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Remember the "rational-actor" theory of foreign affairs? Uh, have you met the OAFPOTUS?
• The OAFPOTUS really doesn't understand much, and really doesn't have the psychological makeup necessary to host the White House Correspondents Dinner.
• Jennifer Rubin marvels at how much he keeps losing. Which, unfortunately, just makes him act worse.
• Check out Molly White's atlas of the OAFPOTUS's crypto corruption!
• Meanwhile, my Party's leadership just can't get their act together to fight the Republicans effectively, suggesting perhaps we need new leadership.
• The captain of the Hemisphere, a €38.5m catamaran sailboat, has to find a new home once the yacht's owner sells it. (The new owners could retain him, of course.)

OK, the inbound plane is only half an hour from gate arrival, so at least one necessary part of getting home is nearly accomplished. I am really looking forward to (a) seeing Cassie and (b) sleeping in my own bed.

Oh, and I almost forgot to add this story. Forget me own head if it weren't attached!

As longtime readers know, when I travel on short trips, I typically stay on Chicago time. This is a lot easier to do in California than in Europe, of course. But it does mean I get out of the house pretty early. Both today and Saturday I walked up the hill and back down right at dawn to get steps and, importantly, caffeine. And yesterday, after returning to Millbrae from my adventures in Santa Cruz County, I walked to the adorable little library they have here. (Thanks, Proposition 13!)

As will surprise no one familiar with modern civil aviation, my flight out has a bit of a delay. They had to swap planes at O'Hare this morning so the plane I'm taking back to Chicago was 90 minutes late getting off the ground. That only translates into half an hour late leaving SFO, barring any weather-related inbound flight delays Air Traffic Control might start adding as thunderstorms pop up around the Chicago area this afternoon. I still expect to get home and pick up Cassie well in time to get a good night's sleep.

I was right about yesterday. I haven't decided what I'm doing for the next three hours, but for the moment I'm back at my hotel in Millbrae briefly. I am debating heading into San Francisco proper as I still need 4300 steps, but I'm also tempted to explore Millbrae more. It's possible that I have already explored Millbrae thoroughly, thus the indecision. All I know is, this little town has a plethora¹ of Chinese restaurants, so I will be having Chinese food tonight.

Really, I just want to read the book I started yesterday and take a nap. Because I want to stay on Chicago time, however, only one of those things is a good idea.

I'm back home tomorrow, and I'll have really cute dog photos on Tuesday.

I'm in the Bay Area seeing family and friends, which means lots of time on Caltrain up and down the peninsula but not a lot of time in the city.

Other than that, the most interesting thing I came across this morning is that today is the 70th anniversary of the Stockholm colliding with the Andrea Doria. The entirely-preventable colission resulted in only 46 deaths out of over 2,500 passengers and crew on both ships. The Doria sank in 80 meters of water off Nantucket, but the Stockholm limped back to New York missing several meters of its bow. I first read about the accident years ago in the book Saved! by William Hoffer. (I think I have a copy somewhere...)

This may be a new record: I got from the CTA Blue Line platform to the Admirals Club in 11 minutes. I'm quite pleased. And I have the TSA to thank, by enrolling me in Touchless ID program the last time I flew. I just walked up to the camera, the agent pressed a button, and then she said "Have a nice flight."

And before you get all weird about me giving up my privacy and all, keep in mind that I've had a security clearance in the past. The US Government knows who I kissed at Prom in 1986, and they've had my photo on file since 1993. After the probing they gave me the last time I filled out an SF-86, I'll take the airport perk.

On the way to the airport, I read a few Substack articles, including one by doctors Katrine Wallace and Katie Sharkey: "Ending clock changes. But which direction should we reset the clock?":

When we spring forward, we lose critical morning light. ... The fall transition doesn’t seem to be as harmful to our health and safety: evening crashes rise, but morning crashes drop, and the week nets out flat. “Falling back” is also easier on the body: because our internal clock runs slightly longer than 24 hours, shifting later (what we do in fall) comes more naturally than shifting earlier (what we do in spring)—the same reason flying west is easier than flying east.

With permanent DST, more than 200 million Americans would receive morning light an hour later by the clock, with winter sunrises after 8:15 a.m. in cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Denver, San Francisco, and Tampa.

Circadian biology, laboratory research, epidemiologic studies, and natural experiments indicate that permanent standard time is more closely aligned with human biology

Amen. But as I've said for years, the current system is only bad until you pick a permanent ST/DST condition. North of the 30th parallel, it's best to keep changing twice a year.

OK, off to California. Next report when conditions warrant (and possibly from the plane).

I'm getting ready to travel, so all you're getting this morning is a photo of Butters from Sunday:

If I have time, I'll post from O'Hare. If I don't, I'll post from Millbrae.

As promised, Cassie got lots of walks yesterday: 10.4 km in three walks over two hours. Plus she got lots of outdoor time between the walks. The weather stayed comfortable all day and into this morning. After lunch today she'll get another 4-5 km. It's also a perfect day for Ravinia, so a bunch of us will be sitting on the lawn listening to Mahler's 6th this evening.

Elswhere in the world:

• The government of Mexico has filed criminal complaints in Illinois and other states demanding accountability for Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings of its citizens, which Mexico (and many others) allege were unlawful murders.
• Cranky Flier wonders if the LAX People Mover will ever, you know, move people. It's already 3 yeasrs and millions of dollars over plan.
• The Chicago El used to have garden beauty contests, the first of which was on this day in 1910.
• James Beard Award winners Beverly Kim and Johny Clark have gotten approval to open a new restaurant in Evanston specializing in brunch and dinner with seasonal ingredients.

Finally, I've been beavering away on a fairly substantial collection of bug fixes as I mentioned a few days ago. So far I've fixed 20 since I had Claude Fable dig into everything. That said, I'm traveling this weekend, and I really don't like pushing new bits to prodcution right before leaving Inner Drive Technology World HQ. So look for performance and security improvements in The Daily Parker sometime next Tuesday or Wednesday, followed later in the week by what I hope will be significant improvements to Weather Now. Stay tuned.

A cold front pushed through yesterday around 7pm:

This morning, the temperature and dewpoint had dropped to late September levels and the AQI cleared up to 14, giving us a dramatic sky with unlimited visibility:

Less dramatic but no less clear to the west:

I've got my windows open and the A/C off for the first time in over a week. Cassie will get lots of walks today.

Time for a link round-up:

• David Graham reminds us that the OAFPOTUS can hoodwink his MAGA minions but not so much the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
• He's also trying to put 50% tariffs on Canada again, this time for not preventing forest fires within their 526 millon hectares of unmanaged wilderness.
• Brian Beutler is one of the only pundits on the left giving real thought to beating the billionaires.
• New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) announced that their motor-voter registration software registered 6,600 non-citizens to vote, which the state blames on the software vendor. And I have to say, given that all 6,600 ticked the "not a citizen" box but still somehow got voter registration cards, I would also blame them.
• Remember when Google was the way you could find anything on the Internet without bullshit intermediation? Yeah...
• Crain's laments how airport lounges have enshittified, which so far does not apply to American Airlines or British Airways, in my experience.
• But American Airlines has made changes to its basic economy fare class that really piss me off. (They're still better than Delta.)

Finally, let's all give a nice, slow golf clap to 33-year-old Thomas Matteson of Clarendon, Vt., whose balls and brains are approximately the same size:

A Clarendon man is charged with leading city police on a chase riding a souped-up lawnmower.

The Rutland City Police said Ofc. Timothy Rice was on patrol at around 7 p.m. Sunday when he saw Matteson riding the mower on Pine Street. Rice wrote that he was going significantly faster than a normal lawnmower and estimated his speed at around 20 mph.

After Matteson ran the stop sign turning from Pine Street onto Forest Street, Rice said he activated his lights, signaling Matteson to pull over. Matteson ran another stop sign, according to affidavits, and turned around and gave Rice “the finger.”

Matteson led Rice on a chase at speeds from 10 mph to 25 mph to Rover Street, Dorr Drive and Creek Road, police said, running another stop sign and failing to yield to a vehicle in the process.

The chase did not end until a second police cruiser got in front of Matteson, blocking the road along with an oncoming vehicle, according to affidavits. Matteson veered off the road and into the brush, police said, where he got stuck and was taken into custody. Police said they were more than two miles from where the six-minute chase began.

The article also delves into the nuances of what qualifies as a "farm tractor" under Vermont law. This is something the Vermont Supreme Court has ruled on, so it's kind of a big deal in the Green Mountain State. And hey, if you're riding a 24-horsepower lawnmower down a Vermont street, please stop at stop signs and don't flip off the cops.

This is definitely an improvement over last week:

Cassie and I had a lovely 4 km walk this morning when the AQI was a "healthy" 43 and the temperature was a comfortable 24°C (though with a dewpoint of 20°C). Tomorrow's AQI and weather forecasts suggest I might not want to spend a lot of time inside.

Meanwhile, I've smooshed more bugs than expected this morning, so I may actually get the next Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ release out this evening instead of tomorrow afternoon. Keep your eyes on NuGet!

I just released a new Daily Parker build with new editing features and some really helpful performance improvements.

Over the weekend, I took advantage of the Claude Fable 5 promotional pricing to run deep architectural, performance, and security reviews of this application, Weather Now, the Weather Now Gazetteer that manages Weather Now's geographical data, and the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ (the IDEA™), which underpins all of the foregoing.

Fable really dug into all four products and produced hugely useful reports with about a dozen recommendations in each. I also prompted Fable to re-run the report on this application after finishing the one on the IDEA, to produce a prioritized, ordered list of fixes. I had already completed six features and made two other bug fixes for this release. So today, I had Claude Sonnet implement the three recommended fixes that were independent of the IDEA fixes, and that seemed like a very good stopping point for this release.

Tomorrow I'll work on the IDEA recommendations. There are 10 altogether. Since I instructed Fable to write implementation hints specifically for Sonnet to use, it took 20 minutes for the first fix today and 50 minutes for each of the other two. Assuming similar efficiency on the IDEA fixes, I could plausibly finish Wednesday. I've got 9 more bug cards after that on this application, so I could possibly have another Journal/Daily Parker release Friday.

That might be wildly optimistic. Wednesday will be 24°C with a dewpoint of 12°C, so if the AQI can get below 100 then Cassie will get lots of walks and the Daily Parker performance updates will have to wait until late next week. Stay tuned.

Everyone who isn't a highly-paid executive at a health-insurance company believes that health care costs way too much in the US in part because health insurance companies take about 30 cents of every dollar we spend on it. Even people who support Republican politicians know this is true. We have to change how it works here.

The 22 million or so people who work in healthcare and the 167 million people who have private health insurance through their employers have some legitimate concerns about changing the system suddenly. So when they hear "Medicare for All," they worry about their great health plans and their jobs. I think those are fair concerns.

Here's my proposal: starting on an arbitrary date—let's say 1 January 2030—we extend Medicare eligibility by one day for every two days of birthdates. So people born on January 1st and 2nd 1965 get Medicare on 1 January 2030. People born January 3rd and 4th get in on 2 January 2030. And so on. The result looks like this:

The second part of the plan: everyone born on or after the effective date of the legislation is covered immediately. If that seems unfair to babies born in 2029, I agree, but in order for this compormise to work, we have to draw the line somewhere. We could also extend child eligibility backwards at the same rate, which means Medicare for All arrives in 16¼ years (i.e., April 2046) instead of 32½ years (July 2062). That would still give the industry a long time to adjust. And nothing about this plan prevents people from buying private insurance, or takes health insurance off the menu for tax-free benefits to employees.

It looks like this:

As of 1 April 2046, everyone has Medicare, the system doesn't collapse, millions aren't suddenly unemployed, and highly-paid executives can retire.

We could also make people born in or after 2012 wait until the descending dates catch up with them in 2046, but as people in the "gap years" of 1997 to 2012 watch everyone else get it, knowing they'll be last, that might not be as popular.

Where's the flaw?

Sir Keir Starmer MP (Lab.-Holborn & St Pancras) met with King Charles at 11:30 BST this morning and formally tendered his resignation as Prime Minister. A few minutes later, the King asked Andy Burnham (Lab.-Makerfield) to form a new government in his name.

Burnham, I should note, is the 4th Gen X to hold this office, while we have yet to elect the first person born after 1962 to the White House. More relevantly to UK politics, Burnham is the 7th prime minister in the last 10 years, a feat of political ineptitude by the British ruling class that may even surpass the chaotic eras in Italy and France after WWII. Burnham has until 4 July 2029 to sort things out before he has to call a general election. I wish him well.

In other news, Spain won the World Cup yesterday, being the first team in World Cup history to give up only one goal through the entire tournament. As the OAFPOTUS shuffled out to greet the victorious Spanish, the official FIFA feed had to cut out the crowd's booing. Then the demented alte cacker couldn't figure out how to leave the stage in his peak-sundowning state, making it challenging for the team publicist to edit him out of the official photos of the trophy lift.

England beat France for 3rd place, 6-4. As one online wag put it, this weekend's World Cup matches brought back the politics of the Napoleonic Era, when England and Spain last got together against France.

The smoke that went away yesterday has returned:

During the 7pm-11pm swath you see there, I was at Millennium Park listening to a really good performance of Fauré's Requiem, followed by watching the Navy Pier fireworks. We noticed the smoke, and I'm sure the Grant Park Chorus did too.

That said, this also happened:

Walking Cassie this morning was mostly pleasant, despite the smoke. The rest of the week might be cooler, too. So I'll take a bit more smoke for a day if we also get rid of the heat.

She doesn't look like a middle-aged lady, does she?

I also liked this shot, though I'm not sure she did:

The air quality in Chicago has cleared up to near-normal levels—or, at least, levels that would have been normal in the 1980s:

The smoke might come back tomorrow night when I'll be at the Pritzker Pavilion listening to Fauré. Criminy.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS rambled for 25 minutes about the 2020 election last night, in a kind of pathetic attempt to call elections in general into question.
• The OAFPOTUS's nominees for attorney general, Director of National Intelligence, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director debased themselves in their Senate committee hearings this week.
• Thomas Edsall pleads with the Democratic Party to shift on three key issues if we at all want to win in 2026 and 2028.
• That epidemic of explosive diarrhea sweeping the nation? Yep. Taco Bell.
• A bi-partisan group of US Senators is trying to tighten the screws on Russia as Lindsey Graham tried to do.
• MP Andy Burnham (Lab.-Makersfield) is the new Labour Party leader, and will become Prime Minister on Monday.
• People don't like data centers, which seems a bit irrational if you look at the numbers.

Finally, a sad note: stick shifts are nearly extinct. I learned to drive on a stick shift, and every car I owned until the Prius had one. Manufacturers make so few of them that only 0.6% of new cars have them. Even in Europe, stick shifts have gone from 91% of new car registrations in 2001 to just 29% in 2024. Even BMW, who make the most fun cars to drive, has only three models with stick shifts.

As I get older, I find more and more of my skills no longer matter. "How to use a clutch" is now one of them.

The AQI has dropped to 204 at Mayfair, Chicago reporting station, just barely in the "very unhealthy" category and almost down to "unhealthy." For the first time in two days, I can see the beach 1,300 meters away:

One can only hope that the smoke blows away to the east soon. Of course, it's still 33 damn degrees outside, with a heat index now at 41.5°C, into which I must now take Cassie so she can pee. So it's not all puppies and rainbows in Chicago today.

Meanwhile, I loved XKCD's response to the House bill for year-round daylight saving time:

Sadly, the people who most need to understand the joke will not understand the joke. So goes the 119th Congress.

It looks like the Canadian Smoke Monster will move off to the east in a couple of hours:

Indeed, the AirNow map shows that AQIs are merely "very unhealthy" just south and west of Inner Drive Technology WHQ, though the closest stations report AQIs of 334 and 318:

Of course, that's when the heat and thunderstorms will start, so it promises to be a lovely day all around.

The miserable air quality I mentioned earlier has somehow gotten worse. At 3pm, the AQI hit 817 in the northern suburb of Northbrook, Ill.:

I love that the tongue of "hazardous" 300+ PM2.5 AQI seems to be poking the lakefront and city while just a few kilometers away, Joliet is "moderate" bordering on "unhealthy for sensitve groups." Officially at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the AQI is 477 (reported at Mayfair, Chicago), and the dog is extremely bored. I took her for a slow, 25-minute walk after lunch, allowing her to sniff whatever she wanted, but wouldn't you know it, smart dogs want more than that.

The local Fox affilliate's meterologist says this is the "worst air quality on record" in the city, while conceding that records only go back three years.

Tomorrow's forecast shows particulate matter dropping throughout the day while ozone rises, which is always fun. By Saturday, though, the smoke is expected to move east and out of the area. Meanwhile, everything smells and tastes like rancid smoke, and I can't see the harbor. At least GOES-East is back up, showing us clearly that there isn't a cloud in the sky over the city of Chicago at the moment: