Events

The huge furniture move is almost done. I finished moving the rooms around, so my office is now where my dining room used to be, etc. Here's where the office used to be: Since the purpose of this exercise is to make my small apartment look a lot bigger, part of the plan requires moving a bunch of things to storage, including several nontrivial pieces of furniture. At that point the project will be complete. So I have to live with this mostly-finished living space for two weeks. That does not make me...

Via the IANA Time Zone Database mailing list, through Randy Olson, comes this map showing the difference between local solar time and what wall clocks show throughout the world: At the time I’m writing, near the winter solstice, Madrid’s sunset is around 17:55, more than an hour later than the sunset in, for example, Naples, which is at a similar latitude. The same difference holds at the summer solstice and around the year. Just because it applies to most places I’ve been, a time like that in Naples...

Now that the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC) has gone away, my apartment the IDT World Headquarters has a few more options. It's not a huge space, which has become a problem now that I'm trying to sell it. Essentially, I'm rotating three rooms clockwise. That is, my office is moving to where my dining room is, which is moving into my living room, which is moving into my office. That this is possible suggests the difficulties of having a server rack in the spot most people would...

Today we got our 33rd day of measurable snowfall this winter, the day after we ended the third snowiest and third coldest January on record. (Did I mention I'm done with this winter?) At least someone likes the weather:

Three weeks back we had the coldest weather in 19 years. Forecasters predicted this week would be worse, but fortunately, they got it wrong: We had a very fast chill-down Sunday night, then a good two and a half days of miserably cold weather, but yesterday afternoon the temperature peeked its nose above freezing for a couple of hours. And wow, does "above freezing" feel good right now. For comparison, here's the week of January 6th: So it really could be worse.

I'm not going complain about how the 33 consecutive days of snow cover makes entering or leaving my house a complete pain in the ass (complete with Parker automatically flopping over when we get back inside so I can wipe off his paws*). No, I'm going to post today about chicken wings: [Bill Roenigk, chief economist at the National Chicken Council,] says the magical pairing of humongous athletes and itty-bitty chicken parts got its start with the rise of sports bars a few decades ago. Sports-watching...

Via my co-worker Matt Stratton, a frustrating example of how companies that should have known better allowed a social-engineering attack against a single-letter Twitter handle: I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up. It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that...

I just noticed that The Daily Parker is 3,000 days old today, counting from the modern era. (Counting from 13 May 1998, when I first posted something inane online, it's 5,741 days old.) Thank you for your continued reading.

Yesterday the world watched in horror as Atlanta shut down completely because of a little snow. Atlanta's politicians promptly blamed everyone else, even though they were elected to take responsibility for these kinds of things. Today, professional meteorologists fired back: "The mayor and the governor got on TV yesterday and said all this wasn't expected, and that's not true," [meteorologist Al] Roker said Wednesday on [NBC's] TODAY [Show]. Roker and other meteorologists pointed out that the weather...

Pity the South. They really can't deal with winter weather: In Atlanta, however, at 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning (well after the snowfall had stopped), [Mayor Kasim] Reed was talking about people still needing to get home. Many of these people wound up passing the night at a grocery store or a stranger's home because the alternative was spending it on the highway, stuck in traffic that was barely moving, if at all. And people who didn't leave work soon enough – or schools that may not have sent children...