Items by Tag

I have a list of 6 or 7 short plumbing tasks that I hope will take less than an hour, which is 1/8th the time window the plumbing service provided for the plumber's arrival. We all know how that goes. And at my real job, I'm coordinating a bunch of processes for a biweekly release that, so far, is pretty boring—just how we like it.

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'm a bit under the weather but still have to get to rehearsal tonight, so just briefly: Michael Tomasky observes that the general public have developed antibodies to the nonstop lies coming from the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger takes on the big piggy in the Oval Office as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) resignation late last week. Chris Dalla Riva explains how the US copyright system bears some of the responsibility for the enshitiffication of music and movies. Tim Wu thinks the federal judge...

Almost always, during the last few days before a performance, a huge chunk of my working memory contains the music I'm about to perform. I have two concerts this weekend, so right now, my brain has a lot of Bruckner in it. I feel completely prepared, in fact. Unfortunately, I still have a day job, and I need a large chunk of my brain to work on re-architecting a section of our app. Instead of loading data from Microsoft Excel files, which the app needs to read entirely into memory because of the way...

May your solstice be more luminous than these stories would have it: Chicago politician Ed Burke, who ruled the city's Finance Committee from his 14th-Ward office for 50 years, got convicted of bribery and corruption this afternoon. This has to do with all the bribes he accepted and the corruption he embodied from 1969 through May of this year. New Republic's Tori Otten agrees with me that US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest schmuck in the Senate. (She didn't use the word "schmuck," but it...

We've got a big demo at 8am that we've just put to bed, which means I get to go to bed. While the pipelines ran I came across Cory Doctorow's latest post on how DRM ruins everything: [In 2002,] we warned that giving manufacturers the power to restrict how you configured your own digital products would lead them to abuse that power – not to prevent copyright infringement, but to shift value from you to them. The temptation would be too great to resist, especially if the companies knew they could use the...

I mean... Josh Marshall takes another look at the astonishing bribe Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler paid to Jared Kushner and concludes it's not just a one-off favor; it's an ongoing relationship. Joan Williams argues that Democrats need to look at the class and economic aspects of the Right's economic populism, and maybe perhaps argue (correctly) that blaming people of color just takes the spotlight off the super-rich who are stealing from the middle? US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) makes essentially...

All works published before 1 January 1926 have now entered the public domain: 1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley ... and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from...

First, four publishers have sued the Internet Archive for "mass copyright infringement" following IA temporarily suspending waiting lists on borrowing e-books: The plaintiffs — John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five U.S. publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House — are trying to block the nonprofit group's operations and recover damages for scores of allegedly infringed works. "Its goal of creating digital copies of books and providing them to whomever wants to download...

On March 4th, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases that change how copyright infringement cases work in the U.S. In Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation v. Wall-Street.com, the Court held that a copyright owner must wait for the Copyright Office to accept or reject a registration application before the owner can sue for infringement: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who had not attended the oral argument because she was home recovering from surgery) delivered the court’s opinion. She analogized the...

McMansionHell.com suffered a really bad week that had an awesomely good outcome thanks to the EFF. It's worth reading about. But last week, she published a great essay on the architectural styles (or lacks thereof) of the modern wealthy and how we should look at middle-class architecture as well (emphasis hers): Architecture as a field has always been captivated by the houses of the elite - those who can hire architects, build large and high quality homes, and set trends for the next generations. While...

As the work week slowly grinds down, I've lined these articles up for consumption tomorrow morning: Paul Krugman has thoughts about Fitbits. Chicago is going ahead with a $1bn plan to finish the O'Hare Modernization Project. Elsewhere in our fair city, a Meetup group walks the entire length of a Chicago street once a month. I might join. Monkeys can't own copyrights in the U.S., even for their own selfies. And now it's off to the barber shop. And then the pub.