Events

My walk to the bus this morning, through a park path that I forgot they don't shovel: I could have taken a Divvy bike but...well, for some reason they're closed today: The good news is, it's stopped snowing for now. The bad news is, we're heading down to -17°C tonight. I texted some friends in Atlanta and Houston with the top photo. For some reason they don't want to visit Chicago just now.

Right before Christmas I removed all the long-dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center. Today I'd planned to shut off the last two live devices, my domain controller and my TeraStation network attached storage (NAS) appliance, replacing the first with nothing and the second with a new NAS. (The NAS is the little black box on the floor to the right; the domain controller is the thin rack-mounted server at the top.) It turns out, today was a good day to shut down the old NAS....

Welcome to your new year. Last year I totted up a bunch of numbers from 2012; here's the update. In 2013: I took only 9 trips, visiting 4½ countries (Canada, England, Scotland, South Korea, and North Korea—the last one for only 4 minutes) and 4 states (New York, California, Washington, and Texas). I probably visited Indiana and Wisconsin in there too, but only incidentally. I flew 77,610 km and drove only about 3,000 km. This is why I love living in a city. As I mentioned yesterday, I wrote 537 Daily...

My evening is kicking off soon. It will be relatively low-key: GMT New Year at O'Shaughnessey's (mostly because I'm curious about the neighborhood), back home for a quick bite, thence my remote office where all us regulars will talk quietly until about 12:30 when Eddie calls last orders. We might even notice when it's midnight. (We missed it in 2011 and 2013, and awkwardly made festive noises when someone called out, "Hey, it's 12:05 already!") This is the 537th Daily Parker post of 2013, the 3,907th...

WFM Lincoln Park Store Team Leader Rich Howley responded to my complaint right away: We are really sorry for the inconvenience in our garage this afternoon, we realized immediately that we were over-whelmed and brought in additional security, they unfortunately had not yet arrived. They are doing exactly what you had suggested. I walked the entire area around the store, and what exacerbated the situation was traffic on North Ave was bumper to bumper in both directions, and this gridlocked traffic trying...

I go to Whole Foods Market twice a week or more, almost always the Lincoln Park, Chicago store. Even when they have lots of customers, they have plenty of space and plenty of parking, so I didn't worry about ducking out of my house this afternoon to pick up lunch and dog food. Here's the result. Don't let the international units confuse you; that's an hour and 13 minutes to go about 4 miles: Here's the situation when I arrived, which looked remarkably like the situation when I left: Here's the store...

Here's the Tribune's weather infographic for today: The warmer-than-normal temperature formerly over Alaska has now swung around into the arctic, dragged by a persistent high pressure over the pole. That's pushing cold air down into the Prairie Provinces and the upper Midwest. Meanwhile, warmer-than-normal temperatures over the south-eastern U.S. and Caribbean is dragging moisture right over the lower Midwest. Consequence: it's -12°C here right now, and in 36 hours we'll have 250 mm of snow. We're...

Well, I mean, it's already 2014 in time zones east of UTC+8 (Singapore, Tokyo, Australia), but here in Chicago it's 10:30 in the morning. Which means, here in Chicago, many creative works created before 1 January 1924 are still protected by copyright. Many, like the last 10 stories about Sherlock Holmes: A US district court in Illinois found itself wading into the details of the fictional detective's imaginary life this week in a copyright ruling on a forthcoming collection of original short stories...

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...