Events

Anne is now a contributor to Jargon, a Chicago news and events site: So, what does a conscientious consumer wandering into Marsh - er, Macy's - need to watch out for? Fur and leather are just the beginning. Just as vegans are more restrictive in their food choices than most vegetarians, eschewing eggs, dairy and honey in addition to meat, so are they more discerning about their choice of fabric. All animal materials are off-limits, including wool, silk, cashmere, angora, shearling, mohair, down, and...

Today we had people working inside the house and on the roof, so I had to keep Parker occupied. I got almost no work done—bringing the book outside with me was wishful thinking—so I went back in and got my camera. Here are some of the results:

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the first day since March 17th with less day than night. Yes, Friday was the autumnal equinox, when the earth's axis was perpendicular to its orbital plane. But because the atmosphere refracts the sun's light about 0.85°, days are always just a little longer than nights on equinoxes. You can get sunrise and sunset information for your location at Weather Now.

Action shot. He often got the tennis ball away from Anne's friend Lisa, but he never quite understood that Lisa had some say in the matter.

Not content with being a contributor on The Daily Parker, Anne has created Parker a Dogster page. Competition for TDP? Woof.

The F-14 Tomcat has officially retired: The F-14, a big fighter with variable sweep wings, was deployed in 1972 to defend aircraft carrier groups against Russian bombers carrying cruise missiles. When that threat collapsed, it was converted to a ground support aircraft covering troops in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s and, as late as last year, in Iraq. It's been replaced by the F/A-18 Super Hornet. The F-14 was featured prominently in the 1986 movie Top Gun.

Sometimes his ears turn inside-out. He doesn't seem to mind.

Anne and I had company last night: my colleague Cameron Beatley, his wife Sarah, and their two-year-old son Jamie. Parker had never gotten the opportunity to play with a small person before. Cameron apparently got in the way:

Both of my blogs are now up: the Inner Drive Software blog, in which I will write about matters of professional interest (i.e., software, computers, security, and business); and The Daily Parker, in which I talk about nearly everything else. All of this required upgrading dasBlog on my servers, figuring out which theme to use, customizing the themes, and configuring the blogs. Despite my initial experience with dasBlog when I first started using it, I think the current version (1.9) is really quite...

I'm David Braverman, and this is my blog. This blog has actually been around for nearly a year, giving me time to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Initially, I called it "The WASP Blog," the acronym meaning "Weather, Anne, Software, and Politics." It turns out that I have more than four interests, and I post to the blog a lot, so those four categories got kind of large. I also got kind of tired of the old colors. And, today, I finally had the time to upgrade to das Blog 1.9, which came out just a...