Events

Via Bruce Schneier, a true horror.

...died last night, aged 82: William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

The UK humor site Daily Mash has a different take than, say, the Chicago Tribune: THE price of a bushel of wheat rose yet again in the markets of Flanders yesterday presaging a monstrous tribulation and a grave rise in the price of mead, the Lord High Guardian of the King's Purse has warned. ... The noble lord forewarned that a time of privation would surely be visited on the kingdom, when the peasant would find himself cast from his wretched midden and the knight dispossessed of his estates by the...

Via Calculated Risk, in Sunday's Chicago Tribune: The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police. Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson...

I don't know how to introduce this comic, except to say that another developer sent it to me.

For those of you who missed it last night, we had a total lunar eclipse, which the cold, clear weather in Chicago let us see perfectly:

Forgetting for a moment the enormous expense of moving, I now have approximately 75% of my possessions in boxes in my living room. My new place is not only slightly smaller than my old place, but I've absorbed the entire Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters and International Data Center. (The IDTIDC takes up about one square meter of floor space, but five servers make a certain amount of noise.) Photos later. For now, I'm back at work, trying not to think about the disaster area that is my new...

Eight and a half hours later, I have single-handedly done the following: Moved four 23 kg rack-mount servers (sans rack); Moved four 23 kg uninterruptible power sources; Moved uncounted connectors, network cables, power cords, etc.; Updated all the DNS entries for the 33 domain names that point to said servers; Talked to three lovely people at my ISP's tech-support line to figure out why I couldn't connect to my new IP range (it was a PEBCAK issue on my end); Confirmed that my mail server can receive...

Via Evanston Now: The pension fund TIAA-CREF has closed on its purchase of the 10-year-old Park Evanston rental apartment tower at 1630 Chicago Ave. from the John Buck Company. The sale price of the 24-story structure—$101,125,000—is reportedly the highest price ever paid for a suburban apartment building. The transaction late last month brings an immediate real estate transfer tax benefit to the city of $505,625 in what has otherwise been a slowing market for property sales. This interests me because...

I mean, other than the process of moving, which isn't at all fun, is that I'm giving up access to a yard. The guy painting my new apartment pointed out to me that there are 46 steps from the alley to the third floor, and said this made getting the tarps and things into the place that much less fun. I pointed out to him that I will have to traverse all 46 steps, in every weather, in every state of health, every day, three times a day, because I can't train my dog to use a toilet. As far as Parker will...