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I just released v1.0.9531 which corrected the caching issue that prevented anonymous visitors from commenting.

I figured out why comments broke for anonymous users: caching is hard. I spent some time yesterday after work digging into the caching code and realized that I was an idiot. I also found where my bad decision about what to cache caused unrelated things to work, which they wouldn't have done had I done caching correctly. I'll fix that tonight.

I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

I've just discovered comments aren't working for anonymous users. They appear to work, and the logs say they worked, but they're not saving to the comment index.

I just pushed a minor update to the Daily Parker's blog engine, the thing that you're looking at right now. I fixed a couple of performance bottlenecks, so I hope the experience is a bit faster. (You can always check out the release notes for a summary of what I've done.)

Now that the Calendar feature works, I spent an hour today writing a utility to count all the public blog posts by month, and to give me a cumulative count. It turns out, most of my posts exhorting big milestones, like the 5,000th or, more recently, the 9,000th, were off by a few weeks.

In my last post on how the Daily Parker blog engine works, I talked about the fundamental abstractions that I built it around. Today I'm going to talk about the code some more, but more concretely, by explaining how the application decides who can see or do what. I'm a little proud of this design, to be honest.

I just released a new production version of the Inner Drive Journal (the software the Daily Parker runs on) with 7 bug fixes, 9 new stories, and a technical task. Most of these Jira cases took me less than 15 minutes. Yesterday, though, I wound up spending 5 hours on a new system configuration management tool because (a) it's complex and (b) I changed my mind about the interface after I ran it a couple of times.

The first problem of developing a new software application is to determine what it does. The second problem is to decide the fundamental abstractions that will govern the system. If you don't figure this out early, you'll either write a hideous pile of rotting spaghetti that no one will want to maintain, or you'll do that and change careers entirely.

In Friday's explainer, I gave a 10,000-meter view of the application and its basic components. Today I'm going to show you the software's basic features; I'll go deeper on some of them in later posts.

In my last post about the Daily Parker's new blog engine, I explained why I built this and what it's for. This post will give you an overview of the app's basic structure; that is, the physical building blocks that make the blog happen.

This is the first in a series of posts I've planned to explain what the Daily Parker blog engine actually is, how it works, and what's coming. I'll start with the most basic question: what the heck is a blog engine and why did I write one from scratch?

Even though I wrote this thing, the new editor interface is so radically different from the old one that it will take getting used to. Also, the new blog engine uses Markdown instead of HTML, which makes writing quicker with a lot less formatting.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Cassie is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in March 2021. Quite a lot has changed since then, most notably I wrote a whole new blog engine. (More on that in a moment.)

I feel a little chagrined today as I expect to release the new version of The Daily Parker this evening, and yesterday I failed to write even a cursory post. I blame meetings and a very long dentist appointment (I'm fine; still no cavities; but the new dentist patient intake took a while). I also didn't have any time to read these: Brian Beutler outlines a workable plan for getting rid of the Schutzstaffel Immigration and Customs Enforcement permanently. Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's threats...

(After Dave and Bob got so excited about yesterday's post, I just had to give them more of what they came for. You're welcome.) It turns out, several people use RSS to keep up with The Daily Parker. I hadn't planned to write an RSS feed component before launch, but as I don't want to cut them off, I've reprioritized the feature. Plus, I have a couple more things to do before I can cut over to the new production environment: Implement Real Simple Syndication (RSS); Fix a bug caused by the interaction...

As I type this, Azure DevOps is banging away at the new blog engine's dev-test pipeline so that I can confirm the last few bits of it are correctly configured. The production environment is up and working, except for icons and RECAPTCHA, which explains the rebuild. Google: your dashboards are really confusing. Creating the production environment took 57 minutes this morning, and creating the production release pipeline (which included setting all the Azure roles properly on things like the database and...

I had planned to develop the full-text search feature for the new blog engine before starting to deploy anything to production, but I hit a snag. Microsoft Azure only allows you to have one free search service per subscription. Since my dev/test subscription already uses one (for the Weather Now dev environment), I'll have to create a free search instance in my production environment. And because I don't want to deal with cross-subscription security and all that shiznit, that means I'll have to create...

The events in Venezuela earlier today are a bit more important than the soft launch of a beta blog engine's dev-test environment. Still, if you're curious what I've been working on for (checks Git log) more than five years, here is the Daily Parker's next iteration. A big caveat: It's still in development. I've gotten to the minimal feature set where I feel comfortable letting people play with it, but it still has a ways to go before I can move this blog off BlogEngine.NET. I still need to add search...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

I remember 2025 like it was yesterday...and in that long-forgotten year: I posted 459 times on The Daily Parker, down 21 from 2024 and 41 from 2023. But the blog had it's 10,000th post sometime in August, which is something. I flew less in 2025 than in the previous three years, with only 7 flight segments totaling 8,371 flight miles. I didn't leave the US in 2025, about which I am sad. And I only visited five states: Tennessee,  Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and California. Strangely, I didn't even make...

Because I've spent almost all my computer time on my real job and on getting the next version of The Daily Parker ready for its Beta launch, I haven't had many of these link roundups for the last couple of weeks. Another reason: all the end-of-year retrospectives, floofy non-news stories, and all those damned "send us money" emails. I promise you, I will never send you an email begging for money. Of course, if you enjoy either this blog or Weather Now, or find them vaguely useful, please consider...

I've basically finished everything I'd planned for Weather Now this year, and I've made significant progress on the new blog engine. For the former, I just need to make one more small bug fix, so I expect to release the new version tomorrow afternoon. For the latter, I expect to finish the comments feature set Thursday; then I'll publish the link to the dev/test site. Today, though, I have a few other things to do before making more progress on either. But don't change that dial!

I've posted the Chicago Sunrises 2026 page a few days before the end of the year in part because I'm still thinking about the way the new blog engine will handle static pages. The fundamental abstraction in the new blog engine is an Event, which is a thing that occurs in time; static pages are, well, static. The solution I'm experimenting with is to have "favorite" or "pinned" posts, which will show up second on the main landing page. First, I have to finish comments, which has led me to re-evaluate...

So far today, in addition to my usual activities, I've nearly completed the Tags features for the new blog engine. It looks more and more like I'll have something to show the world before the end of the year. Stay tuned!

Cassie and I went out right at sunrise (7:14—two more weeks before the latest one of the winter on January 3rd) just as the temperature bottomed out at -10.5°C (13.1°F) after yesterday's cold front. Tomorrow will be above freezing, Sunday will be a bit below, and then Monday through the end of the year looks like it'll be above. And the forecast for Christmas Day is 11°C (52°F). Meanwhile, as I sip my second cup of tea, these stories made me want to go back to bed: As much as we want to ignore the...

A weak La Niña has already started affecting the weather in the United States, as this week's cold snap demonstrates. Weak La Niña events typically cause cooler, wetter winters in Chicago. Last night's temperature got down to -12.8°C (9°F), just a few degrees above the coldest December 5th on record. Normal for today would be 4.3°C (39.8°F); this godawful cold is 5°C below the normal low for the coldest day of the year, January 24th. Fortunately the forecast this weekend calls for more seasonable...

By the best count I have available, this is the 10,000th post on the Daily Parker, going back to the very first news item posted on my very first website in July 1997. I am not entirely sure this is really the 10,000th post, however, for a number of reasons. First, BlogEngine.NET doesn't actually count posts; I've had to use some arithmetic. Second, I removed a small number (3 or 4) of posts over the years for various reasons. Third, at some point I merged some of the posts from the separate Inner Drive...

I've spent a lot of my day cleaning my house and doing some housekeeping on the Daily Parker. In the latter case, I finished adding the ancient Site News entries that ran from July 1997 to March 1998, bringing the total active posts up to 9,984 (though the blog engine thinks there are 9,988). That means that the 10,000th Post will happen in about two weeks at my present rate of posting. I also uploaded a few more Fitbit tracks into my Garmin account, including a 14.5 kilometer walk with Parker in June...

I've added a bunch of small but useful features to Weather Now: Users can now set their preferred measurement system (metric, Imperial, default) and time/date formats. On Nearby Weather and Nearby Places, users can double-click the map to re-center and load new info. Moved the Weather Score column on lists to increase usability. Tweaked the Weather Score formula. Several other bug fixes and feature tweaks. So if you set up a profile, which you can do simply by logging in with any Microsoft ID, you can...

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery. Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my...

As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more. The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer...

A longtime Daily Parker reader asked this about yesterday's post: "The Daily Parker costs $4.87 per day" -- I'm really hoping that's a misprint, because that's almost $150 a month, which is ten times what I pay for my web hosting package which comes with unlimited domains, a full email service (IMAP+SMTP over TLS), click-to-install WordPress and MySQL database creation, SSH access to the back-end Linux machine, and excellent customer support. Also -- and I *really* hate to say this to a fellow IT...

Late Tuesday night, Weather Now finished importing and indexing 15,430,045 places from around the world, ending with Mutirikwi Dam, Masvingo, Zimbabwe at 9:29 pm CST. (I need to re-import about 11,000 records for places that don't belong to any particular country, but that's low-priority.) When I first built the Weather Now Gazetteer in July 2002, I only imported populated places, because database space was a lot more expensive then. So from 2002 until the v5 upgrade launched 3 years ago, the Gazetteer...

I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day: Pilot Project Brewing has announced plans for a second brewery/taproom in Wrigleyville, just 500 meters from the Addison Red Line station. Google Maps turned 20 four days ago, and The Guardian has a history of how it began. Microsoft will be retiring the (11-year-old) database APIs that this build of The Daily Parker uses, so watch this space for news about a brand new Daily Parker experience this fall! I'm planning to wrap up a new release of...

Despite getting back to a relative normal in 2023, 2024 seemed to revert back to how things went in 2020—just without the pandemic. Statistically, though, things remained steady, for the most part: I posted 480 times on The Daily Parker, 20 fewer than in 2023 and 17 below the long-term median. January and July had the most posts (48) and April and December the fewest (34). The mean of 40.0 was slightly lower than the long-term mean (41.34), with a standard deviation of 5.12, reflecting a mixed posting...

Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022. I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent...

I just realized that my short complaint about the cold front that came through Saturday was The Daily Parker's 9,000th post since it re-launched as a modern, continuous blog on 13 November 2005. (I still maintain that it was a blog from its inception on 13 May 1998, but the term "blog" hadn't been coined yet.) In the "modern" era, I've written a mean 495 and a median 505 posts per year, with a standard deviation of 66.3 (1.36, 1.4, and 0.27 per day, respectively). For the 12 months ending November 30th...

Remember how it snowed six days ago? Today it didn't: Unrelated, I'm monitoring some frustrating slowness with the Daily Parker. I'm not sure what's going on. Doubling the VM memory didn't seem to help. I've been thinking of writing my own blog engine again (as I have for about 15 years), so maybe this will give me the push I need.

A person who reads The Daily Parker regularly asked me if I read any fiction, since many of my posts highlight news and opinion (non-fiction) articles I've read in the past day or two. And my annual statistics round-up have only mentioned the number of books I've read, not their names and authors. So for the reader's benefit, and my own in posterity, here are some of the books I've read recently, in no particular order: James Fell, Sh!t Went Down (#2) James S.A. Corey, The Expanse series, books 6–9 and...

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, now a United States Senator grâce a the wisdom and good sense of the fine people of Alabama, continues to degrade the United States military by preventing the US Senate from confirming 301 (and counting) general and flag officers from formally taking the jobs they're already doing. Earlier this month, the commanders of the Naval Air Forces and Naval Sea Systems Command retired, passing their responsibilities—but, crucially, not their policy-setting...

Every time I perform a major work like a Mozart opera, I'm tired and uncreative for about two days afterward. I often forget this. So yesterday and today are more for recharging than creating, which is fortunate as the story I'm working on at my day job just requires changing a label to a text box and adding a Save button. (I should have all that done in a couple of hours.) I expect regular posting will resume tomorrow.

I forgot at the time that my post yesterday afternoon was the 9,000th since The Daily Parker began in May 1998. I generally care more about the "modern era" since I began posting in a true blog format in November 2005. This is the 8,806th post since then. At the current rate, you should see the 10,000th post in early August 2025 (all-time) or at the end of December 2025 (modern era), depending on how you count.

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

We've now got two full years between us and 2020, and it does look like 2022 got mostly back to normal. The Daily Parker got 487 posts in 2022, 51 fewer than in 2021 and 25 below median. As usual, I posted the most in January (46) and fewest in November (37), creating a very tight statistical distribution with a standard deviation of 3.45. In other words: posting was pretty consistent month to month, but down overall from previous years. I flew 10 segments and 16,138 flight miles in 2022, low for...

I realize posting has slipped a little in the past couple of weeks. It should resume its normal frequency tomorrow, as I actually have five consecutive weeks of a routine schedule coming up. That routine includes rehearsals on Mondays, though, so nothing new today.

The Tech Forum goes on. Tomorrow, though, I don't need my work laptop, and so will bring my personal one, enabling me to post a little more. I've also thought about finally writing my own blog engine. Or, at least, forking an existing one (maybe even this one?) and going to town on it. During some downtime today I purged a lot of crap from my Microsoft Azure subscriptions, but I still have old applications (like this blog) running in old workloads. Tonight: the Fun Dinner. Oh, boy.

After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures: In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five segments came in 3rd lowest, ahead of only 2020 and 1999. I only visited one other country (the UK) and two other states (Wisconsin and California) during 2021. What a change from 2014. In 2020, I posted a record 609 times on The Daily Parker; 2021's 537 posts came in about average for the modern era....

The Daily Parker has, as of yesterday, 8,000 posts since 13 May 1998. We should hit 10,000 in February 2025. Keep reading and find out!

I had planned to note Bruce Schneier's latest essay, "The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security," along with a report that Microsoft has noticed an uptick in SolarWinds attacks against its own services. But twice in two weeks I've received bogus DMCA takedown notices that tried to trick me into downloading files from a Google site, and I'm impressed by the effort that went into these phishing attacks. In both cases, the attacks came through the blog's Contact page, meaning someone had to copy and...

What a bizarre year. Just looking at last year's numbers, it almost doesn't make sense to compare, but what the hell: Last year I flew the fewest air-miles in 20 years; this year, I flew the fewest since the first time I got on a commercial airplane, which was during the Nixon Administration. In January I flew to Raleigh-Durham and back, and didn't even go to the airport for the rest of the year. That's 1,292 air miles, fewer than the very first flight I took (Chicago to Los Angeles, 1,745 air miles). I...

Just a housekeeping note: this is my 7,500th post since re-launching braverman.org as a pure blog in November 2005. On average, I've posted 41.2 times per month, though this year that has gone up somewhat: For whatever reason, the average (so far) in 2020 is 50.5 times per month. I'll know the exact stats and have more to say about this on Friday.

Welp, it's July now, so we've completed half of 2020. (You can insert your own adverb there; I'll go with "only.") A couple of things magically changed or got recorded at midnight, though. Among them: The Lake Michigan-Huron system finished its 6th consecutive month of record high water levels, with June 2020 levels a full meter over the long-term average. Illinois' minimum wage went up to $10 per hour, and Chicago's to $14. Both minima will increase by $1 per year until they reach $15. China has...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 14-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2019, and the world has changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 20 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many...

Just a housekeeping note: my post on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the 7,000th since this blog relaunched in 2005. (It was the 7,196th since the proto-blog began in 1998.) Thanks for reading.

This is The Daily Parker's 7,000th post since 13 May 1998 (but only #6,804 since the "modern era" began in November 2005). When I started posting jokes on braverman.org back in 1998, none of the predictions I could make about the world on the verge of the 2020s would have been correct. The Cubs winning the World Series? A powerful computer in every pocket? Donald Trump being anywhere near the nuclear codes? And here we are. A thousand posts since December 2017, two thousand since October 2015...that's a...

I've been a little busy lately, so I missed posting that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of my first quasi-blog post. Yes. You read that right. The Daily Parker, which used to be just Braverman.Org, is 20 years old. I'm betting on 20 more.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

It may appear that blogging will slow down a little bit going into the last week of March. That's because Blogging A-to-Z entries take a little more time to write. This year might be a little ambitious, also, because I plan to provide musical snippets to go along with the text (otherwise what's the point?). My goal today: get through a chunk of the first week of April. And figure out when I can write the rest for that week. I've also written an entry for an historical anniversary mid-April. Stay tuned.

Once again, the Daily Parker will participate in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, this year on the theme: "Basic Music Theory."  For the A-to-Z challenge, I'll post 26 entries on this topic, usually by 7am Chicago time (noon UTC) on every day except Sunday. I'll also continue my normal posting routine, though given the time and effort required to write A-to-Z posts, I many not write as much about other things. This should be fun for you and for me. Music theory explains how and why music works. Knowing...

On 13 May 1998, just past midnight New York time, I posted my first joke on my brand-new braverman.org website from my apartment in Brooklyn. My first website of any kind was a page of links I maintained for myself starting in April 1997. Throughout 1997 and into 1998 I gradually experimented with Active Server Pages, the new hotness, and built out some rudimentary weather features. That site launched on 19 August 1997. By early April 1998, I had a news feed, photos, and some other features. On April...

This month will see two important Daily Parker milestones. This is the first one: the 6,000th post since braverman.org launched as a pure blog in November 2005. The 5,000th post was back in March 2016, and the 4,000th in March 2014, so I'm trucking along at just about 500 a year, as this chart shows: Almost exactly four years ago I predicted the 6,000th post would go up in September. I'm glad the rate has picked up a bit. (New predictions: 7,000 in May 2020 and 10,000 in April 2026.) Once again, thanks...

Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#": A is for Assembly (April 1) B is for BASIC (April 2) C is for Common Language Runtime (April 3) D is for Database (April 4) E is for Encapsulation (April 5) F is for F# (April 6) G is for Generics (April 7) H is for Human Factors (April 9) I is for Interface (April 10) J is for JetBrains (April 11) K is for Key-Value Pairs (April 12) L is for LINQ (April 13) M is for Method (April...

For day 2 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going to talk about the first computer language I learned, which is still alive and kicking in the .NET universe decades after it first appeared on a MS-DOS 1.0 system disk: BASIC. BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." The original specification came from John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. Today it's one of the core .NET languages included with Visual Studio as "VB.NET" (for "Visual BASIC," Microsoft's...

The A-to-Z Challenge starts tomorrow, and I'm all set to go with a list of 26 topics on programming with Microsoft .NET. Now I just need to write the actual posts. It's interesting to me how vacations don't actually lend themselves to much productivity, even when that's the explicit purpose of the vacation. Anyway, if I do my job today, the first post will hit at noon UTC tomorrow. If I don't do my job today, it'll hit sometime later than that.

Over the past few weeks I've gotten several emails from someone purporting to be "Jess Miller" in New Zealand, mentioning she'd noticed a post I did on the Maldives in 2012. That post reported on the violent coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected government of the island nation just southwest of the Indian subcontinent. And just a few weeks ago, the military dissolved Parliament and threw the country into more unrest. The U.S. State Department has issued a level-2 caution. Understandably...

I've narrowed my list down to four potential topics for the Blogging A-to-Z challenge: U.S. Civics Programming (with .NET) Music Places I've visited I've got 26 topics lined up for each. I think they'll all be fun and relatively easy to do (though I'll have to start writing them at least a week ahead). But like a true INTP, I can't decide which to start with. Sign-up is at 00:01 GMT tonight, or 6:01 pm Chicago time.

This year, The Daily Parker will participate in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Since I've posted an average 1.31 times per day since the modern era* of this blog began in November 2005, and an average of 39.6 times every April, posting at least 26 entries this coming April isn't the challenge. (Also, given trends, it's possible my 6,000th modern-era post will be one of them.) No, the challenge will be coming up with 26 entries on one specific topic, and making them worth reading. Keep reading to see (a)...

The first proto-blog post on braverman.org hit the Internet on 13 May 1998. (And it was a joke. Literally.) This is the 6,000th since then. And every single one of them is here. (The count of actual blog posts is now 5,804, starting from this site becoming an actual blog on 9 November 2005.)

Today, by the way, is the 12th anniversary of the modern incarnation of this blog. (I had a proto-blog on braverman.org from 13 May 1998 until this app took over.) This is the 5,766th post on The Daily Parker. I hope you've enjoyed at least 577 of them.

There's a lot going on at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so I haven't had a lot of time or energy to post this weekend. Regular posting should resume tomorrow.

A year ago today I posted that the previous month, July 2016, was my worst blogging month in 5 years. Well, July 2017 was my best blogging month in 3½ years. The last month I posted 47 posts was January 2014 before I slowed down to the point where this past February I only posted 20 times for a rate of 0.74/day, a number not seen since November 2010. I have some hypotheses why this happened, and why posting has rebounded. For now, though, I'll just say I've had three consecutive months of beating both...

April seems to have gone quickly this year, but that could just be my advancing age. I'm hoping to have a little more inspiration this month to return to 40+ blog entries a month—i.e., the running average since November 2005. For the 12 months ending yesterday, my average (mean) has been 34.4 with a median of 35, just barely holding above 1.0 entries per day. Of course, the total number of entries doesn't really matter if they're good. Deeply Trivial took part in last month's A-to-Z blogging challenge...

It looks like I'm slowing down Daily Parker posts over the past year. Including this post, I've published 477 items in the past 12 calendar months, for an average of 39.75 per month or 1.3 per day. The long-term average is 40.2 per month or 1.33 per day. This means October 2016 is the first month since July 2011 in which the moving 12-month average dipped below the all-time average. Here's the chart: I'm not sure why the count has dropped off, or why this month was especially slow, but there are some...

With a new job, summer weather, and lots of things going on, July 2016 turned out to be the worst month for the Daily Parker since November 2010. Back then I was finishing my MBA and traveling for work four days a week. This past month I only had 37 entries (the all-time mean is 40), averaging 1.19 per day (cf. mean 1.33). Ah, well. I'll try to be more conscientious this month.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 10-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in April 2016, and a couple have things have changed (not least of which, all the internal links changed when the blog moved to BlogEngine 3 last October). So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've...

I didn't participate in the challenge this year, but one of my favorite bloggers, Deeply Trivial, did: I think the biggest indicator of success, for me, is that I didn't miss a scheduled blog post. There were days when the post came really late, and on those days, I seriously considered just waiting until tomorrow and writing two posts, or just moving a post to a Sunday. But I made myself do it, and it worked. I guess I should apply that same perseverance to other things in my life. Some lessons learned...

The Ph.D. psychologist at Deeply Trivial is participating in the A-Z Blog Challenge this month. She's six posts into a great primer on social psychology, starting with last Friday's Attribution through today's Festinger. The Daily Parker is not doing the A-Z challenge this year because I'm not nearly as disciplined as Deeply Trivial. That, and I'm not clear on a topic that would interest anyone else. Maybe next year.

Wow, I missed a yuge milestone a couple weeks ago. It turns out that a stupid post on March 7th was the 5,000th Daily Parker post since the blog launched as a pure blog in November 2005. I don't usually miss those things. I must be distracted...

Wow, a Saturday post. Rare this year, yes? Tomorrow I'll have photos from New York and Indianapolis, including the latter's monument to stupidity. Check back. 

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday: The blue line is average posts per...

I just upgraded my system to the Azure SDK 2.8.1, released earlier today, and also merged the latest code from the BlogEngine.NET master repo into my custom codebase. Do you see where I'm heading? Once I "solved" the version issue with msshrtmi.dll (a perennial bête noir [not to be confused with this bête noir]), then published the changes, and promptly killed the blog for an hour. It looks better now, but I'm still having trouble debugging it locally. Tomorrow, after I finish fixing a bug for work...

I missed an important anniversary last Friday, probably because I was traveling and got distracted. The Daily Parker is now ten years (and six days) old. I launched it officially on 13 November 2005, from Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters in Evanston, Ill. In the 10 years ending last Thursday night, I posted 4,842 entries, averaging 40 per month, or one every 32 hours or so. Not a bad record. Any odds the blog will be around another 10 years?

So the masthead is blue now. Any thoughts? Parker and I managed to go for a one-hour, five-kilometer walk earlier today, as hoped. So my lazy Sunday hasn't been entirely lazy. But just on principle, I think the rest of the day will involve a nap and some time at a local bar with a book.

This post has a personal and a technical significance. Personally: exactly 10,000 days ago, I was graduated from high school, at about this time of day. Technically: The new blog engine let me pre-post this several days ahead, something the old blog engine thought it could do but never quite succeeded. That is all.

You may not have known that the "Contact Us" page failed in almost all cases to send messages, but it's fixed now. Please don't make me enable Captchas.

We have a crystal-clear, crisp October morning, perfect for spending three hours in a rehearsal for the Apollo Chorus...sigh. It's also a good morning to test the new blog engine and posting from my friend's car.

The Daily Parker v3.1 is here. We have officially launched on BlogEngine.NET. And this is the 5,000th post since May 1998 (but only the 4,804th since November 2005, when the blog launched independently of braverman.org.) I've maintained a pretty consistent posting rate since finishing my MBA in December 2010. Posting nearly every day is how you get to 5,000 entries: There are still a number of bugs, but nothing really horrible except for the Production instance not being able to properly respond to old...

It's finally here: the Daily Parker running on BlogEngine.NET 3.1. This is, in fact, the first native post on the new platform, visible (for the time being) only to the select few who know the temporary URL. So why did it take me eight weeks to get the new engine up and running? A few reasons: BlogEngine.NET 3.1 is still in development, with the main open source team making changes almost daily. I've made some serious customizations (outlined below) on my own private fork of the source code. I have a...

The (new) Daily Parker is code-complete for the first launch. There are a few steps to go, like launching the production site and migrating nearly 5,000 blog entries. But maybe, just maybe, it'll launch tomorrow. (Note that the beta site only has the last six weeks of entries, and doesn't include any since yesterday, because I didn't re-run the migration for the last bits of testing.)

Yesterday I successfully ran a complete import of the entire Daily Parker, all the way back to May 1998, and promptly discovered a couple of problems. First, a recent change broke the app's ability to add or edit blog posts; and second, because BlogEngine.NET reads the entire blog into memory when it starts up, it took nearly five minutes for the home page to load on my debugging machine. That means the beta site will only have a few dozen entries up at any point, so I can actually fix the Javascript...

I'm continuing to test the new blog engine. This evening's tests, which I'm setting up with this post, will involve some of the trickier tasks in the migration: Relative links to posts within the blog itself Links to arbitrary files using absolute paths Links to files with relative paths Links to images (like the one below) with relative paths If you're reading this on the new blog engine, and all the links above work and the image below shows up, then the migration tool is complete. Deploying the new...

I've got a development instance of the new blog engine running on Azure: http://dailyparker-dev.azurewebsites.net/. Go ahead, take a peek. It's important to note that I'm testing the import engine right now, so the collection of entries on the development site will probably change during debugging. Also, since it's a development site, it may disappear altogether from time to time. Plus, the master source code (from which I'm merging into my custom code base from time to time) keeps changing. And merges...

Two things this weekend kept me from blogging. First, the amazing weather. It was warm and sunny both days, so I spent time picking apples and sitting outside with a book. The other thing is that the time I did spend at my computer involved working on the replacement for this blog engine. Regular blogging will continue this week.

I noted earlier that this code base I'm working with assumes all file stores look like a disk-based file system. This has forced me to do something totally ugly. All requests for files get pre-pended with a hard-coded string somewhere in the base classes—i.e., the crap I didn't write. So when I want to use the Azure storage container "myfiles", some (but not all) requests for files will use ~/App_Data/files/myfiles (or whatever is configured) as the container name. Therefore, the Azure provider has to...

I've been playing around with BlogEngine.NET, and I've hit a snag making it work with Microsoft Azure. BlogEngine.NET was built to store files inside the application's own file system. So if you install the engine in, say, c:\inetpub\wwwroot\blogEngine, by default the files will be in ~/App_Data/files, which maps to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\blogEngine\App_Data\files. All of the file-handling code, even the abstractions, assume that your files will have some kind of file name that looks like that. You must...

I just Googled a problem I'm having setting up a continuous-integration build, because I've had this problem before and wanted to review how I solved it before. Google took me to my own blog on the second hit. (The first hit was the entry I cross-posted on my old employer's blog.) Why even bother with my own memory?

After struggling for almost two weeks to learn AngularJS and other technologies, I've gotten BlogEngine.NET (which will replace DasBlog as the Daily Parker's platform) to do geography and time zones the way I want them. (Notice the time stamp and globe icon at the bottom of this post.) Specifically, last night I got the clickable Google Map on the Edit Post page to work. Sometimes I like learning new technology. This was a lot less painful than some I've taken up, with only a couple of blind alleys and...

I'm still doing some R&D with BlogEngine.NET, and I keep finding strange behaviors. This is, of course, part of the fun of open-source software: with many contributors, you get many coding styles. You also don't get a lot of consistency without a single over-mind at the top. My latest head scratch was about how labels work. I won't go into too many details, except to say, re-saving a code file with no changes in it shouldn't change the behavior of the code file. I'm still puzzling that out. In any...

Since development of DasBlog petered out in 2012, and since I have an entire (size A1) Azure VM dedicated solely to hosting The Daily Parker, I've been looking for a new blog engine for this blog. The requirements are pretty broad: Written in .NET Open source or source code available for download Can use SQL Server as a data source (instead of the local file system, like DasBlog) Can deploy to an Azure Web App (to get it off the VM) Still in active development Modern appearance and user experience See?...

My friend Sara, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote in her blog today about dreaming's influence on inspiration, and incidentally why psychoanalysis isn't science: REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this...

I've had a lot going on over the past couple of weeks so posting has been a little slow. I spent yesterday at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, following Saturday night's Pentatonix (and, right, Kelly Clarkson) performance, following running around during the day Saturday trying to get everything done ahead of both those events. I'm a little fried. I'm also apparently slowing my average posting rate, having failed two months in a row to post 40 times. Before June 2015, the last time I failed to post 40...

Not a lot of time to write today because I'm spending most of the day as CTO and the rest of the day as Lead Developer. The context switches are horrible. Tomorrow should be a little easier.

And the Daily Parker suffers. This is my 38th post this month, making June 2015 the slowest month on the blog since November 2010, the last month of my MBA. Let's see if I can do better in July.

...and also preparing for a fundraiser at which I'm performing tomorrow: Microsoft has moved Azure Premium Storage to general availability... ...and also improved SQL backup and export services. Coincidentally, my favorite performance analysis tool just added a feature I need this week. Color me happy. The United Center, where the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks play, is getting beer robots. British photographer Marcus Lyon does not like sprawl. And his photos are kind of cool. There's also a...

Six and half hours at Rockefeller Chapel, a Euchre tournament (my first—middle of the pack), a dinner party, and yet more rehearsals for an April performance all left my weekend kind of full. Somehow I managed to walk Parker enough times and to do laundry. So, good weekend, full weekend, not exactly the Daily Parker's finest hour. Regular posting will resume presently.

NPR takes a look at how the Internet never forgets and what that means to people who find themselves going viral: Some unwitting meme celebrities embrace their fame. Earlier this year the Washington Post profiled Kyle Craven, more popularly known as "Bad Luck Brian," a meme about a boy with hilariously and often very dark bad luck. Craven, who was always a class clown, capitalized on his fame. The Post reports that between licensing deals and T-shirts, he has made between $15,000 and $20,000 in the past...

After 15 years and hundreds of thousands of posts, Sullivan posted the last Dish entry this afternoon: I hope that this fifteen-year catalog of insights and errors, new truths and old lies, prejudices and loves, jokes and intimacy, prescience and forgetfulness, will not be taken for anything more than it was, or ever could be. I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we...

There have been interesting developments in two stories I've mentioned recently: Exploding Kittens continues to, ah, explode. They have 122,900 backers and have raised over $4.8 million—with 20 days to go. They're going to be rich in about three weeks. Nicely done, guys. Fallows has video from ABC News from the SR-22 ditching off Hawaii that happened last week. The Atlantic has a note about Andrew Sullivan, who announced he's quitting his blog soon. Otherwise, it's just work work work. But fun work.

Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite bloggers, announced this afternoon he's moving on from blogging: Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash...

Pomplamoose front-man and Patreon CEO Jack Conte published a blog post last week discussing the economics of touring musicians. I commented here, both as a fan of Conte's and as a supporter of Pomplamoose (including through Patreon). Within a few days, music critic Bob Lefsetz accused Conte of fabricating his figures, and also of concealing his role with Patreon. Master click-bater Mark Teo piled on, Conte responded, and it's now a standard Internet catfight. I don't see the ethical problem here. I do...

The modern Daily Parker started in November 2005. Since then I've posted 4,376 entries, averaging 1.32 per day—though, for the past 48 straight months, I've averaged more than 1.32 per day, with pretty high consistency: The green line is the 12-month moving average, which I have (alas) brought down most of this year. The red line is the raw mean, which, because of mathematics, has gone up every month since December 2010. Is there a point to all this? Nope. Not at all. It's just a testament to a habit of...

Only a little, it turns out. I'm in the second of three weeks without travel, but I'm back on the road for the first two weeks in December. I even have to miss a concert, which is a bad thing, but it's because I'll be doing a technical diligence in freakin' Paris, which est pas mal. I'm also going to see about taking a quick side-trip to London, which, given the agenda for the diligence and flight schedules back to the U.S., might not make a difference as far as my work schedule goes. I've also noticed...

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman provides a list: "Knowing computers" today is more than just knowing Office, or knowing how to attach a file. Today's connected world is way more complex than any of us realize. If you're a techie, you're very likely forgetting how far you've come! The #1 thing you can do when working with a non-techie is to be empathetic. Put yourself in their shoes. Give them the tools and the base of knowledge they need. Backup everything. Is your entire company on your 10 year old...

For more than four years, I have not failed to post an above-average number of entries each day. Since its official launch in November 2005, I've averaged about 1.28 entries per day. As of the last entry, the 39th for September, the average was 1.25. This makes it 1.33. It's a simple target, really: 40 or 41 per month, depending on the number of days in the month. Since one of the stated purposes of the blog is to encourage daily public writing, meeting this target is almost a requirement. Someday...

Nah, I've just been super-busy the past few days. Regular posting should resume shortly—depending on how this week in Cleveland goes.

For the last couple of days, I've had trouble getting to Microsoft's Azure blog. From my office in downtown Chicago, clicking the link gives me an error message: The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. However, going to the same URL from a virtual machine on Azure takes me to the blog. So what's going on here? It took a little detective work, but I think Microsoft has a configuration error one of a set of geographically-distributed Azure...

As mentioned earlier, today is the first day of my new job. That means orientation, setting up a computer, navigating paperwork, etc. Then tonight the Cubs play Cincinnati at Wrigley (weather permitting), so I'll probably go straight from work to the field. So I'll probably be a little slow posting things this week.

The Daily Currant's business model, explained: [I]n The New Republic, Luke O'Neil argued that such stories "could do actual damage to political discourse and the media in general... Juicing an already true-enough premise with more unbelievability simply adds to the informational noise pollution—without even the expected payoff of a laugh."  All legitimate gripes, but perhaps that's overthinking it for a site that's the product of under-thinking. The Daily Currant is trying to maximize clicks and shares...

I may come back to these again: Sullivan on America's dynasties, and how they're bad for us. One of the better blog comments I've read: Codethulu. (The article commented on is also a good read.) Gulliver wonders whether a new sensing technology could end the ban on liquids aboard airplanes. Elsewhere at the Economist, a writer speculates on the reductio ad absurdam of Putin's language doctrine. Publishing the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ to NuGet is still coming up...just not this weekend.

Yesterday I migrated this blog and four other ASP.NET websites from a Windows 2008 Microsoft Azure virtual machine (VM) to a brand-new Windows 2012 R2 VM. I did this because Microsoft has announced the end-of-life for Windows 2008 VMs on June 1st, so I thought I'd get a jump on it. VMs usually mean never having to say "reinstall." Unfortunately, since this involved upgrading three steps at once, I decided it would be simpler just to launch a new VM and migrate the applications using FTP. Seven hours and...

You can't actually see it, but I've upgraded the Microsoft Azure VM that this blog runs on to a brand-spanking-new Windows Server 2012 box. In fact, it's so transparent, the only purpose of this blog entry is to make sure I can make blog entries. Seriously, this means absolutely nothing to anyone else. Except that, since Microsoft was going to kill the old VM automatically sometime in June, this is a good thing.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in September 2011, more than 1,300 posts back, so it's time for a refresh. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 13 years. That site deals with raw data and objective...

This is the Daily Parker's 4,000th post of the modern era. Since 13 November 2005 (3,030 days ago), I've posted 4,000 bits of flotsam, jetsam, and other things considered debris in some circles. Four thousand entries ago: George W. Bush was almost a year into his second term and Barack Obama was the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois; Molly Ivins was still alive and kicking; Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had stagnated; Facebook was less than two years old but more than a year from general...

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.

It happens in every form of art ever invented. First the tinkerers discover the art form, aided by a new techology. Then come the dilettantes, people who figure out the rules and structures of the medium. Next the amateurs refine the techniques, pushing a fad into a form that has commercial possibilities. Finally, the professionals—people who make the art for a living—push everyone else out. Eventually you wind up with nothing but the last two groups—and the amateurs that remain do it because they love...

The Illinois Supreme Court recently overturned the "Amazon tax" that caused the online retailer to drop all of their Illinois affiliates (like me) a couple years ago. Well, they brought the program back to Illinois, so The Daily Parker is once again an Amazon Associate. All that means is, when I link to books or content—like, for example, the Deadwood Blu-Ray box set—the link will include an ID that lets me take a piece of your purchase. This is the only way that I monetize the blog. Note, for example...

This is my 4,000th blog post. Of course, that's counting from the first braverman.org entry from May 1998, which disappeared entirely for ten years and predated the concept of a "blog" by an interval. The first Daily Parker post was on 8 November 2005. Which points out, the total doesn't include two non-public entries. The first public entry was 13 November 2005. So, really, this is only the 3,803rd Daily Parker posting—but only the 3,801st visible one. Yeah, this wasn't the highlight of your day...

I have a new post up on the 10th Magnitude developers' blog.

I'm pulling the public repository for Orchard again, because I made a mistake with Git that I can't seem to undo. I've set up my environment to have a copy of the public repository, and then a working repository cloned from it. This allows me to try things out on my own machine, in private branches, while still pulling the public bits without the need to merge them into my working copy. Orchard, which will soon (I hope) replace dasBlog as this blog's platform, recently switched from Mercurial to Git, to...

I've started playing around with Orchard, an open-source content-management system, as a replacement for this blog's infrastructure (and as a replacement for other things, like inner-drive.com. It hasn't been all skittles and beer: Orchard has serious issues running on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, though it runs fine on Azure Web sites. It turns out, my employer is moving to Umbraco, a different open-source CMS. So it makes sense to try that out, too, as I'll have to support Umbraco at work...

The journalist and blogger's beagle Daisy died today at the age of 15. I'm getting sniffly just posting this: This was not like waiting for someone to die; it was a positive act to end a life – out of mercy and kindness, to be sure – but nonetheless a positive act to end a life so intensely dear to me for a decade and a half. That’s still sinking in. The power of it. But as we laid her on the table for the final injection, she appeared as serene as she has ever been. I crouched down to look in her...

This past week, my company put me in charge of operations. The job includes responsibility for our tools and technologies: bug tracking, client request tracking, code repositories, internal knowledge sharing, and Agile process management. Right now we use a collection of tools that we've used for three years: Beanstalk, Sifter, Zendesk, Yammer, and a home-grown Agile tool called Storyboard. Well, Storyboard runs on the Azure SDK 1.4, which Microsoft will stop supporting at the end of November....

It's good reconnecting with stuff that has been lost for years. Like the Jewish Samurai, for example. And the quiz proving executives do not have much in common with pre-schoolers. And let's not forget the four Jewish sons. Somewhere in the mists of time I have notes about why I released so many jokes in batches. As I move to a new blog/content platform this fall, I'll post what I find.

Earlier I surmised that automating the process of extracting my old jokes from the ancient braverman.org site would take less time than hand-copying them. Well, duh. It only took two hours to write the script, lint the very few entries that needed it, and push the lot up to The Daily Parker. So, for those of you who have missed all the jokes—there are just under 200 of them, all published from May 1998 to November 2004—start here, then skip to here, and then keep clicking the calendar control. I'll call...

Observer columnist John Naughton explains how the practices Edward Snowden revealed have hurt us: [H]ere are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far. The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided...

...braverman.org published six proto-blog entries. This brings the total ancient blog entries restored to 63, leaving around 140 still to be dug out. It takes about 5 minutes per entry to convert right now, so I may automate the process. Since writing some automation will probably take less than 11 hours, I may just do that over the next couple of days.

After a short experiment yesterday at lunch, in which I put up three original braverman.org posts from 1998, I've added all the content from May 1998. A couple of things came up during this process: 1. dasBlog, whose open-source project has ceased active development, won't display any of the entries for a particular day if any one of them has any errors in its HTML. That is really annoying. 2. In frustration, I started looking for other blog engines, and came upon Orchard. I'm intrigued. The extension...

My first website, braverman.org, debuted in New York on 16 August 1997. We didn't have things called "blogs" back then, but over the course of about four years I posted jokes, stories, and poetry—almost all of it submitted by other people—two or three times per week. It was kind of blog-like, except I had to add actual Classic ASP pages to the site until I figured out a way to automate it in May 1998. I'm going to start re-posting the archives, with their original time stamps... Here are the first ones...

Not only does my time evaporate into multiple projects these days, but the number of context switches I've experienced over the past few days hurts. Here's today's timesheet: Yeah, but I shoot with this hand. I worked from home Wednesday so that I could jam on some documentation. How'd that work out? Blogging, by the way, helps me switch contexts. I think.

After four years or so, I've changed the Daily Parker's skin. Looking back at my other, dead blog enticed me to play with the theme control for a few minutes. And then I decided, you know, Mads Simple looks really clean and elegant, but I'm kind of tired of it. So? Blue enough for you?

Years ago, I had two blogs: one for work, and one for everything else. Eventually I stopped having two blogs because...well, laziness? The old blog is back. I discovered I had dead links, and it was simple enough to drag the old blog out of archives and throw it onto my general-purpose VM. Actually, I cheated. I only threw the content up there. I used The Daily Parker's blog engine with all its customization and just copied the old content up to the VM. It's kind of interesting, looking back on the...

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read: The Atlantic Cities blog has an analysis of class in Chicago by census tract. Seth Godin doesn't like airports, because they're organizationally horrible. Best bit: "There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones." Liz Keogh advocates Behavior-Driven Development as a new way of looking at Test-Driven Development. I will get to them...soon...

I have a new post up at my employer's developers blog. Hard-core Daily Parker enthusiasts may have seen it already. Still, click through to XM. We like blog visitors!

I had meant to make a note of my 3,000th blog posting, but I completely forgot it was coming. So, after 2,353 days (and 24 minutes), three house moves, a few significant personal events, and Parker's entire life, The Daily Parker is still going strong. At the historical posting rate for the blog (1.28 per day), I'll hit 6,000 entries in September 2018 and 10,000 entries by April 2027. (For the last two years, though, I've posted about 1.5 per day, so you could see 10,000 as early as April 2025.) Stick...

Swamped with client work, getting ready for Xmas, traveling hither and yon—tomorrow, at least, will be quieter.

If you don't know Hyperbole and a Half, set aside an hour and read every one of Allie Brosh's posts. Since it's December, though, start with this one: By the time I was done reinventing her, Mary carried a cane, walked with an exaggerated limp and was completely covered in BandAids. She was also blind. I started reading the blog last night when I got home for dinner and finally stopped 90 minutes later because my face hurt from laughing.

Just now, going into hour 32 of the (technically) longest day of my life, I noticed that the blog's comment view feature isn't working. This is Case #2869 in FogBugz, and will be fixed as soon as possible. Not tonight, though. Just like Saturday, my goal is only to make it to 9pm. If I can do that, I will defeat jet lag in one stroke. I must not fail. Sleep deprivation leads to pointless blog entries, and we can't have that, can we?

The new feature I mentioned this morning is done. Now, in addition to the "where was this posted" button on the footer, you will notice the entry's time zone. Each entry can have its own time zone—in addition to the site-wide default. I still have to fix a couple of things related to this change, like the fact that the date headers ("Thursday 24 November 2011," just above this entry) are on UTC rather than local time. But going forward (and going backward if I ever get supremely bored), you can now see...

I'm rushing to get a major change to the resurrected dasBlog code done before I leave tomorrow (because I don't want to push code from anywhere I can't recover). Meanwhile, here's a timely NSFW comic for your holiday.

A week ago Sunday I mentioned that I'd forked this blog engine so I could add features. I've added the first one, and everything seems to be working just fine. The Daily Parker has used GeoRSS for a long time. All of the entries since March 2010 are geo-coded, which you would only know by looking at the RSS feed. Well, now you can see the geographic information on the blog entries themselves. See the little globe icon next to the time and date at the bottom of the entry? Go ahead, click on it. For more...

The blog engine running The Daily Parker, dasBlog, last got updated in March 2009. It appears moribund; no one's updating it anymore. This happens in software development all the time. As a user of the software, however, I'd like some new features and some defect corrections. For example, I complained last month that I couldn't switch from GUID permalinks to more user-friendly ones. I also found a bug in the module that lists the months, off to the side. And I want to show the posting time in the local...

Many people reading this blog actually see the posts a day or so later when they show up on my Facebook page. For years, Facebook has imported The Daily Parker through the blog's RSS feed. Today, Facebook announced it will discontinue the practice before Thanksgiving: You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share...

"Leading e-commerce development and acquisition group" KASA Capital sent me this email over the weekend: I'd like to contribute an article to your site, thedailyparker.com - I can select a topic that matches the tone and theme of your site, or if you prefer, I can write about something of your choosing. The article will be unique and interesting to read. In return, I ask that I be able to subtly include a link to my site ____ within the article. If you are able to put a permanent link to the article in...

I'm at a client site today and tomorrow, jamming on database optimization. Expect regular posts to resume Friday.

The Daily Parker uses the mostly-open-source dasBlog engine. The software has always offered two choices for how it creates permanent links (permalinks): titles and GUIDs. As you can see, we use GUIDs, so permalinks look like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/PermaLink,guid,05976d99-b3cb-4391-9052-509832cbf5cf.aspx instead of like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/About-This-Blog. I've been thinking that GUIDs, while always unique, are kind of ugly. This morning I tried changing the blog's...

Apparently a lot of people are interested in time zones. Here's The Daily Parker's traffic this week: Sat 2011-10-014,239 Sun 2011-10-02 3,727 Mon 2011-10-03 4,206 Tue 2011-10-04 5,497 Wed 2011-10-05 4,049 Thu 2011-10-0677,558 Fri 2011-10-07127,023 Fortunately my server seems to be keeping up. I expect that my ISP is unhappy with me, though.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's...

For the last three years running—including, it seems this one—my ability to find passably-interesting topics to write about plummets in September and picks up again mid-October. Any hypotheses about why? I haven't got any, except maybe that the shortening days do something. Which is all just a longer way of saying, chirp...chirp...chirp...

From the New Yorker: UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out. COMMENTS (24) Beta version was better. I thought the Adam-Steve dynamic was much more compelling than the Adam-Eve work-around You finally settled on. Adam was obviously created somewhere else and then just put here. So, until I see some paperwork proving otherwise...

The UK Independent's Jon Rantoul won't be using clichés any time soon: Normally, though, politicians are the worst offenders. It is not clear how much they themselves are to blame, or how much they are simply overwhelmed by the substandard drafting of civil servants and speech writers. Perhaps they lack the time to put a pen through it and rewrite it themselves. It is a national scandal that the Civil Service provides such ghastly drafting of official documents, full of turgid abstractions that are...

I'm wrapping up in Fairfield County, Conn., today, then I get five nights at home before popping off to Boston for an indefinite series of 4-day weeks there. At least it's Boston, a city I enjoy, and one with easy access to the airport. (I expect my commute will be two hours shorter than it is to Connecticut.) Parker won't like it, though: he'll likely board from Sunday night to Thursday afternoon every week for the duration of the project. No word yet on Internet connectivity. The client with whom I'm...

Because of a barrage of comment spam, I've temporarily killed the comment feature of The Daily Parker. These things usually pass in a couple of days. Management apologizes for the inconvenience.

I keep getting asked about my Facebook notes: why did I leave out the punchline? Where's the rest of the post? Why do you post three at once at odd hours? The simple explanation: I post on my blog, The Daily Parker, throughout the day; Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed at 8-hour intervals; and the RSS Feed only has the article blurb. Facebook also rearranges embedded links and photos, so sometimes pictures attached to blog entries just seem to vanish. Fascinating, no?

After a lot of procrastination, I've finally upgraded The Daily Parker to dasBlog 2.3. Nothing outwardly has changed, but apparently the developer community has fixed a ton of bugs and, more helpfully, upgraded to .NET 2.0. I don't have time at the moment to go through the entire feature list, but I'm sure there are a couple in there I'll use. Mainly I was tired of having an item on my to-do list since October 2008. (I said "a lot of procrastination.")

Actually, there will be a Cubs game, in about 10 minutes, but I won't be there, for the following reasons: It's cold out, it's raining, and I have a financial accounting exam in about a week for which I am slightly more prepared than I am to swim the English Channel. Instead of rainy Cubs photos, then, here is a great post about ghostwriting: I recognize the paradox [of ghostwriting celebrity memoirs]: the bookstores are already happy to sell this kind of fraud, so why can't online authors engage in the...

Via Tom Hollander comes Strange Maps, a blog I will have to read through when I get a free moment next year. The blog supports Frank Jacobs' forthcoming book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. The blog starts with "Lunatic Asylum Districts in Pennsylvania," moving through "The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World" and "Heineken's 'Eurotopia'" on its random walk through maps. Very cool blog. Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a...

Sunny and 13°C in Chicago today. Result: Parker got almost two hours of walks. Other result: Pithy, pointless blog entry. Everyone wins!

Last Thursday, The Daily Parker turned three. Actually, yesterday, the dog turned 2 years, 5 months; but the blog is three years old. And in honor of this august day in November, I hit "Post" three times before correcting all the typos.

And I'm not dead. I am, however, very busy, and I was travelling all weekend. Regular postings will resume soon.

Yes, this is my 1,000th post since this blog started in November 2005. I had hoped to write a long, introspective essay on blogging in general and this blog in specific over the years, but it turns out I have work to do today, so that will have to wait until the 2,000th post or so. (Many of you are fighting back tears, I know; though I suspect they're tears of joy.) No, today I'm just going to mention the two most immediately relevant things that confronted me on my way to work this morning. First, in...

I've just spent a few minutes putting together a little countdown clock for my blog. (Credit goes to Kris van der Mast for the code sample.) What does it do? Well, it's driving the Dubya Clock and Other Countdown tools on the nav bar to the right.

Via Paul Krugman, I've been reading the Calculated Risk blog for a while. They write about finance and economics, from the perspective of a retired senior public-company executive. Very good stuff, and very frightening.

The Daily Parker is two years old. That is all.

Happy dog with tennis ball: I'm starting a new project on Monday that will consume tons o' time. The good news is that Parker will be with me in the office probably four days a week. The bad news is that "Today's Daily Parker" will become "The Daily Parker Roundup" starting next week. In other words, The Daily Parker may not have daily Parker for a while. Somehow, I think we'll all survive.

Parker has gone on vacation for a week while I'm at a professional conference. When I dropped him off with the dog sitter I felt pretty sad: Today's DP will return April 2nd, but I'll be checking in all week (and probably cross-posting to my professional blog). So if you're only interested in puppy photos, enjoy spring break, and think of Parker spending every day with all his play-group friends (since many of them are in day care).

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 8-month-old mutt. Here are the main topics on the Daily Parker: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on September 1st. Biking. I ride my bikes a lot. Last year I prepared for two Century rides but, alas, my gallbladder decided to explode a week before the first one. I might not have a lot to say until later in the spring, but I have big plans in 2007. Jokes. All right, I admit: when I'm strapped for ideas, sometimes I just post a dumb joke. Politics. I'm...

We're back, with the ParkerCam. I didn't intend to go five days without posting anything, but the office DSL modem—a crappy 2Wire model—has sporadically dropped the internal network connection. So while the DSL worked just fine, the modem stopped communicating with the rest of the office. No blogs, no email, no weather: quelle horreur. More later.

Last Monday was the first anniversary of this blog. I completely forgot. As penance, I will now post this photo Anne took ten minutes ago (she and Parker are at home; I'm still at World Headquarters):

The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why; here's the "before:" And the "after:" (The new camera is so good, if you open the bottom image in its own window you can read half my programming library.) Alas, the new camera and I had a disagreement initially. It's a Logitech QuickCam Orbit that I'm running through Sascha...

Parker has discovered birds: Also, a definition. I've arbitrarily defined "Daily" to mean "once per weekday," and also (because I'm a total geography nerd) defining "day" as starting at midnight Universal Coordinated Time (which is 7pm Central Daylight Time). Today, being Saturday, is a bonus TDP, you lucky dog. Parker is going to the office later today, too, so there may be yet another bonus TDP if you check back later.

Last one from Meramec: (By the way, most of the photos on the site are displayed at one-quarter size; you can open them in a new browser window, or save them to disk, to see them at larger sizes.)

The WBEZ-Chicago Website has just published my Dusty Baker photo. Cool!

The Daily Parker is now, officially, http://www.thedailyparker.com/. The old address (http://www.thedailyparker.com/) will continue to work indefinitely, but the new address is cooler.

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

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...