Events

I just saved myself hours of pain by creating a unit test around a simple method that turned out to have a subtle bug. The method in question calculates the price difference between two subscriptions for a product. If you're using the product, and you use more of it, the cost goes up. Every day, the application looks to make sure you're only using your allotted amount. If you go over, you get automatically bumped to the next subscription level and charged the difference, pro-rated by how much of the...

Two popular Evanston restaurants, Pine Yard and Taco Diablo, burned to the ground this morning: Fire crews from several neighboring communities -- including Morton Grove, Wilmette and Skokie -- were called to the scene to assist Evanston firefighters in battling the blaze. The fire apparently broke out sometime before 3 a.m. and fire crews were still fully engaged in battling the blaze nearly three hours later. The bike shop next door suffered water and smoke damage. Twelve pets at the Bramer Animal...

I'm a few minutes from leaving my folks' house, looking at the weather forecast for Chicago. We may set a new record: The unseasonable late-season 10°C “warmth” which greets Chicagoans Saturday has swept into the area from southern Missouri over the past 24 hours. It’s stay is to be one of limited duration. A bitter southward plunge of frigid arctic air begins a downward temp spiral here Sunday which is to culminate in colder-than- -18°C Monday morning lows and single digits daytime highs—the coldest...

Another shot from Christmas afternoon, as promised:

Nephew #1 arrived yesterday evening while I sat a mile away talking with the manager of San Benito House and, apparently, challenging people to a Scrabble game later today. Nephew #1 is a much lighter sleeper than the rest of us, which causes him frustration, and when he gets frustrated he sets out to determine how much noise is required to make everyone exactly as light a sleeper as he. Fortunately, I'm on Chicago time, so getting up at 5am PST (7am CST) does not bother me. And it gives me some time to...

What is it about the right? I have difficulty imagining what it must be like to have such a constricted worldview that every provocation requires an escalation. The latest example of right-wing anti-diplomacy comes not from a state representative somewhere in the southern U.S., nor from a local Chinese official, nor from Marine le Pen. No, this time it's serial dick-swinger Shinzo Abe, who decided to help diffuse the tense diplomatic situation in the Sea of Japan by poking his finger in China's and...

Check these out: Calculated Risk posits the 10 most important questions about the U.S. economy in 2014. Chicago History maps out some fun bits of street trivia, including this: One street crosses under the same El line four times. Name the street and the El line. The Dictionary of American Regional English is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's fun. Not sure you want to go on that trip but want to lock in the airfare for up to a week? Buy a call option on the fare. McDonald's may have had a...

Not when they're 13 months old. And not when the weather looks like this. And not when someone needs a nap: Yes, these are the privations and suffering that my 13-month-old nephew must endure: A little earlier, he was chasing what my sister calls "California snow:" For those who care, it's a very un-Christmaslike 21°C here. I can see the appeal.

The intemperate, irascible judge's dissent in U.S. v. Windsor is the gift that keeps on giving: For the second time in a week, a federal judge embraced U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent from this summer's ruling overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a case challenging a state's ban on gay marriage. Scalia was adamant in his dissent that the logic of the DOMA decision would result in state bans being overturned. In his decision Monday declaring that Ohio must recognize...

Back in October, Chicago O'Hare International Airport opened its fourth east-west runway and promptly switched most operations to east-west from the diagonal pattern they'd used before. Chicago Tribune transportation writer Jon Hilkevich, a private pilot, explains the implications: Today taxi times to the gate are generally longer than they were several months ago because of a longer route that takes arrivals an extra mile or more around the airfield. The purpose is to have the planes taxi behind other...