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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.

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.

The Brews & Choos Project will celebrate its 6th anniversary on February 7th. When I started in 2020, I thought I would get most of it done that year. I managed to visit 25 breweries by March 7th (Lunar Brewing in Villa Park was 25th), before pausing in the pandemic panic until breweries with outdoor seating opened up again. It turns out, I only have 9 places to visit within the Chicago city limits, and another 13 in the Metra zone outside Chicago. Short of another pandemic or massive economic...

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...

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

I'm listening to the corporate annual update, which is neither corrupt nor stupid, though only about 20% of it applies to my job. So I'll just spend the other 80% lining up these articles about corruption and stupidity for lunchtime reading: Whether because of "you can't make me" or just doing the opposite of whatever President Biden's administration did, the latest toddler behavior in the administration comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who decided that Calibri is too DEI so State will go back...

I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here. Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the...

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee. So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly...

I'm a little delayed getting today's Morning Butters Report out for a couple of reasons. First, Butters and Cassie tag-teamed me starting just before 6:30 am. First Cassie poked me, then Butters poked me when Cassie kicked her off the dog bed in my room. Then Cassie came back when Butters used her engineering skills to ensure Cassie couldn't pull that crap again: Last night, though, Butters showed me how much she cares about me—or how much she wanted another Greenie, it's unclear: Meanwhile, all the...

I have mentioned how odd Butters can be. Part of her oddness seems to come from her being a little princess who craves comfort to the exclusion of propriety. Exhibit the first, this morning, less than a minute after I stripped my bed: I had to pick her up to get her to move. Exhibit the second, yesterday afternoon, rearranging the dog bed in my office for...reasons: Exhibit the third, last night, getting quite annoyed that Cassie has trouble respecting her personal space: The poor dear suffers so. 

I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face? This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do: The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow...

This was a lot of fun and a lot of work: This was my fifth full marathon walk: According to my watch, it was also the least draining, judging by my body battery score this morning: For comparison, here are the previous two years: This year, I rested a bit more, and more aggressively managed my heart rate. I also got a lot of good sleep earlier in the week. However, as this year was considerably warmer than last year, these mitigations meant it took a bit longer. Oddly, it was slightly cooler in 2023...

Almost exactly 3 months ago, I needed to get something out of a storage locker, and reminded myself why I hated getting something out of the storage locker: I found the thing I wanted. And as long as I was there, I said to myself, why not grab a couple of these boxes to see if I need to keep them? And so, from (I think) June 9th until just this past Saturday, I brought home over 60 boxes of stuff going all the way back to [redacted], threw out or shredded about 15 boxes worth, reorganized everything...

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

The temperature at Inner Drive World HQ bottomed out at 14.6°C at 6:35 this morning. It was last this cool on June 5th at 8:18 CDT, just under 81 days ago. I like summer, I really do. And I recognize that the overnight low at O'Hare this morning (12.8°C) was a bit below normal for August 25th (17.8°C). Still, I didn't sleep with the windows open for 22 days, which may be a (summer) record. That's too long. The next few days should remain unseasonably (but delightfully) cool before it gets warm again...

Just clearing my photo backlog. From the 23rd: And from yesterday: Today we're trooping out to Suburbistan for a walk with Cassie's old friend Kelsey. Updates as conditions warrant.

Cassie's stitches came out and her cone came off this afternoon: Tomorrow she goes back to day camp. This weekend, if the weather allows it, we'll go to the dog beach. We are both so freaking happy not to have the cone anymore. Also, her left ear doesn't look as out of place as I'd worried. We'll see how it looks when all her fur grows back in a couple of weeks.

I have to finish a feature today, and had a ton of meetings yesterday, which is why I missed posting yesterday. If I finish the feature before it gets dark I may even read a bunch of stuff that has piled up in my browser. Until then...

I'm glad to report that Cassie's face looks pretty much like it did before surgery. But for the next few days she's going to look like something out of Buffy. Here's the before, last night: And here's a few minutes ago: Her left ear is now a bit back of her right ear and slightly closer, but it does look like the surgeon did a great job taking out only the minimum. Right now she's napping on the couch. We'll try going for a walk before dinner, where we'll work on her not smacking me in the bum with the...

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump: The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats. Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet...

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain. Before I do any of that, however, I'm...

I got in a bit early this morning to beat the heat. Good thing, too, as my train line partially shut down upstream of my stop just as I got on the train. It's up to 34°C at O'Hare and 33°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ (feels like 42°C—107°F), with a forecast of 36°C and continued horrible heat indicies for this afternoon when I walk Cassie home from dog school. Chicago isn't the only place getting this awful weather. The record heat will affect over 200 million people this week with similar...

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past: A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is...

First, an update on Cassie: her spleen and lymph cytology came back clean, with no evidence of mast cell disease. That means the small tumor on her head is likely the only site of the disease, and they can pop it out surgically. We'll probably schedule that for the end of June. I have had an unusually full calendar this week, so this afternoon I blocked off three and a half hours with "No Meetings - Coding." Before I dive into finishing up the features for what I expect will be the 129th boring release...

On some days, I have more meetings than others. Today was a more extreme example, with meetings for 6 of the 8½ hours I put in. Somehow I also managed to read some documentation and get some other things accomplished. I also can't say that any of the meetings was a waste of time, either. Welcome back to management. Unfortunately, that meant I could only put these stories in a queue so I can read them now: William Finnegan wonders if he or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "Dead Puppies" Noem is...

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories: Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And...

Cassie and I walked 14 km yesterday, giving her almost 3 hours of walks and 8 hours continuously outside with friends (including Butters). The walk included a stop at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. (It's possible Cassie got a bit of pizza.) She's now on the couch, fast asleep. I would also like to be on the couch, fast asleep, but it is a work day. I also wish some of the people in today's stories were asleep on the couch instead of asleep at the switch: The Qatari government has offered the OAFPOTUS a naked bribe...

I thought I was done with last week's cold, but no, not entirely. So I'm spinning my wheels looking at code today. I want to be writing code today, however. My brain wants to be three meters west and three meters down from IDTWHQ (i.e., in my bed). I will note that Columbia Journalism professor Alexander Stille just came to the same realization Josh Marshall came to over nine years ago, that the OAFPOTUS resembles Benito Mussolini in all the ways that matter: The comparisons between Trump and...

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health...

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all: Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.) Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in...

Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction: Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever. I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train: It...

Business travel on Sunday evening brings some good, some not so good. For starters, I got from the curb through security to the terminal in 12 minutes, because there aren't a lot of business travelers. On the other hand, getting to the G Concourse lounge involved a lot of near-collisions as the leisure travelers shuffled around without looking where they were going. I'm impressed with what they've done to the lounge, though. I haven't been in G Concourse since August 2016, so I was pleasantly surprised....

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS: Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will...

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...

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th. I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there. Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would...

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this: The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy. As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from....

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...

Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here. I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years. And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025: The unelected winger specifically tasked with destroying our...

I just spent 15 minutes on TaxAct preparing and filing Punzun Ltd.'s 2024 taxes. It helps that it's an S-corporation and made almost no money last year, but still. Intuit still doesn't have the Schedule K-1S part of TurboTax ready, however, so I can't file my personal taxes yet. For those of you in countries with reasonable ways of doing things, I want to file my personal taxes because I overpaid all year, and the government owes me a non-trivial chunk of money. In order to do that I needed to file...

I had planned to go to Milwaukee for a quick day trip yesterday to further the Brews & Choos Project. Two friends were going to meet me at the Public Market, then go to two breweries and a distillery in the five hours between trains. Alas, after everyone had boarded the 1:05 Hiawatha, Amtrak got all of us off the train and cancelled it because of—no kidding—a flat wheel. We could have gone on the (now-overcrowded) 3:05, but we just decided to forget it and meet one of the friends up in Highwood. So I'll...

I've been on the fringes of something recently that I won't get into to protect the guilty, except to say it doesn't have anything to do with my day job. As this thing goes on and on and on, I keep going back to this bit of truth: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. And yet, the errors in this thing keep compounding, as only two or three people involved appear to have any sanity regarding the project. Naturally, the sane ones keep getting shouted down. If you look...

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime. Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these: Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS. On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS....

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday. Unrelated to the weather are these...

Also, kudos to the UK Home Office. I just applied for my UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, paid my £10 ($13.06), and almost immediately got approved. It helps that (a) I just entered the UK twice in September with the same passport, and until the UK decided Americans could use the EU passport lanes, I was in the UK Registered Traveller programme. So they've vetted me quite a few times already. When will I next go there? I hope January. I haven't said a lot about it, but I moved to a new practice at...

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic... I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy." Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully." Molly...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started: You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei. Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too: Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh...

I meant to post more photos from my trip earlier this month, but I do have a full-time job and other obligations. Plus it took me a couple of days longer than usual to recover, which I blame squarely on the shitty hotel room I had for my first night causing a sleep deficit that I never recovered from. I posted a couple of these already, but with crude, quick edits done on my phone. I think these treatments might be a little better. Sunrise at O'Hare on the 18th: The hills of Hampshire: Invasive...

I will spend most of today exploring the narrow streets and fromageries of Aix-en-Provence and visiting with an old friend up in the hills above the city. While I endure those horrors and privations, I will also be struggling with the realization that the TV series Lost premiered 20 years ago today. Remember, kids: don't let the smoke monster cast you out of purgatory until you've figured out the meaning of your life.E

I love actually experiencing the 21st Century. Right now I'm hurtling through the suburbs of Lyon at 265 km/h (down from 300 km/h earlier) on my way to Provence. The Eurostar from London started with an insane scrum at St Pancras—they really mean it when they advise you to arrive 75 minutes before departure—but it arrived at Paris Gare du Nord a minute early. The only impediment to getting onto this train came in the form of several consecutive people who couldn't figure out how to get RER tickets from...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week. I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things: Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina)...

I had planned a longer post this evening, but I had about 2 hours of chorus work to do and I didn't have any energy for half an hour after getting home. We may have our hottest night of the year tonight, with a forecast low of 26°C, before having our hottest day of the year tomorrow. (We had 36°C on June 17th; tomorrow could be 37°C.) So I'm going to drink another glass or two of ice water and pat Cassie for a bit, then gird myself for tomorrow's sticky walk to doggie day care.

I had painters in my house yesterday and today, and this morning I finally got chased out of my office for a bit. That meant I had more to do this afternoon, which meant I didn't get a chance to read much. Which is only to say, regular posting resumes tomorrow.

Yesterday, Cassie and I walked 16.4 km (just over 10 miles), including a 10 km walk that I'd planned only to be a bit less than 7 km. I wanted to stop by Ravinia Brewing's Logan Square taproom, but alas, when we got there, the patio was closed. So we went to Burning Bush instead. In all, we spent most of the day outside in the perfect weather. We'll do more of the same today, just not quite as much walking. Another brewery that didn't make the cut for the Brews & Choos Project—it's too far from the...

Thank you, Pfizer-BioNTech, for helping my body recognize and eliminate the SARS-Cov-2 virus in only five days: I've got 5 Brews & Choos stops planned over the long weekend. This helps immensely. And stay tuned: this summer I'm also planning to investigate some of the 12 breweries and distilleries in downtown Milwaukee. (It's only 80 minutes away by train!)

A cool front came through last night and I no longer want to take a shower every 45 minutes: The dewpoint also dropped, from a sticky 26°C yesterday afternoon to a comfortable 13°C right now. Cassie and I will take advantage of this delightful development in about half an hour. I'm hoping we get a good 10-12 km in over two hours or so. Speaking of weather, the WGN Weather Blog reminded me this morning of the twin derechos that tore through Northern Illinois 10 years ago today. And Facebook reminded me...

Cassie and I have gone on two walks today, the first for 3.2 km and the second for 4.25 km, despite the really uncomfortable 26°C dewpoint. I mean, it's really gross out there. Fortunately because of the way dogs get rid of excess heat, it didn't bother her as much as it bothered me—the air is only 28°C, after all. But we both felt a lot better when we got back to my air-conditioned house. (Fun fact: my thermostat is set for 25°C, but the dewpoint inside is closer to 15°C which makes all the...

Yesterday's productivity apparently included my nose producing a few billion coronaviruses: This comes almost exactly two years after my last bout with the disease (that I know of). That one took about 5 days to resolve, so I figure I'll be fine by Tuesday. I've had a couple of colds since June 2022 but tested negative for SARS-Cov-2, though before 2020 I rarely got colds of any kind. I'll get my next Covid booster in September when flu shots come out, but I think going forward, I'll get one every six...

I woke up at my usual time this morning, noticed how dark it was, checked radar, and got Cassie out the door less than 10 minutes later. Because by the time I had her to day camp and got myself to the Metra platform, it looked like this: Waiting for the train, I got this: But what luck, it let up just as the train arrived. The photo doesn't do it justice: those are horizontal rain bands, and I was standing behind a window. By the time I got down to Ogilvie, we had this: Again, just a bit of light rain...

Butters Poochface has gone home, Cassie and I have taken about an hour of walks so far, and the temperature hasn't yet cracked 25°C. I'm about to upend Cassie's life, though. It's bath time. Even one night boarding can create an awful smell. Wish me luck. Last time I bathed her, Cassie accepted her fate with grace and humility. The time before that she...didn't.

I had a dentist appointment up in Hubbard Woods this morning, so I took half a day off and had a relaxing walk through Winnetka. And as on Sunday, I encountered a lot of cicadas. I found one attached to my bag as I boarded the train back to the Loop: She* tried wandering off the bag in various directions, which prompted me to help her out from time to time. She could not get a grip, mentally or physically, on the outer surface of my bag, nor on the vinyl seats or metal frame of the train car. By the...

Cassie and I took two long walks yesterday. We drove up to the Skokie Lagoons before lunchtime and took a 7.25 km stroll along the north loop. The weather cooperated: I wanted to go up there in part because a 100-year-old forest had a higher probability of cicadas than anywhere near my house. We were not disappointed. Cassie and I both had passengers at various points in the walk: And wow, were they loud. I forgot how loud they got during the 2007 outbreak. Even at the points on the walk closest to the...

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside. In other news: David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection...

I first went to the Duke of Perth in June 1993, about four years after it opened. Today will be the pub's last day at their 35-year-old location on Clark St., after the property owner* doubled the rent. A bunch of us regulars and bartenders from the old days got together yesterday for one last whisky: The place really hasn't changed much since 1989, which is how it maintained its charm. That, and the patio, where I had more than a few first dates: When I lived in the neighborhood, I did so much...

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole. Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up: The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the...

Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first production deployment, which always terrifies the dev team and always reminds them of what they left out of the Runbook. The staging pipelines have already started churning, and if they uncover anything, the Dev pipelines might also run, so I've lined up a collection of stories from the last 24 hours to keep me...

Cassie and I got over 2 hours of walks yesterday, and spent most of the day outside. By the time we got to Spiteful, Cassie needed a nap: Her day ended pretty well, on the couch getting lots of scritches, but between our 10 km of walks, the dog park, and meeting new friends along the way, she got a bath. Instead of struggling and trying to escape, though, she mournfully stepped into the tub and awaited her fate. Such a good girl! Later today, the Apollo Chorus will conclude its season at St Michael...

We're once again basking in 21°C sun, prompting me to take Cassie on a 47-minute walk at lunchtime. Unfortunately, with a board meeting and rehearsal this evening, that leaves less time for doing my actual work, so I have to go back to that now. Like I said yesterday, the next couple of weeks will be a bit busy.

I'm heading off to a Euchre tournament in a bit. I haven't played cards with actual, live people in quite some time, so I just hope to end up in the middle of the pack. Or one perfect lay-down loner... A guy can dream. When I get home, I might have the time and attention span to read these: John Grinspan looks at the similarities and crucial differences between the upcoming election and the election of 1892. Andy Borowitz jokes about the latest of Robert F Kennedy's conspiracy theories: that his own...

I tried for a little more than 6 months to read a book of humorous essays by an author I really like, and just couldn't finish. It pains me. But I feel a tiny bit of relief at not seeing the book on my nightstand anymore. Since I started reading it, I read—no exaggeration—24 other books, which suggests I really didn't find it all that interesting. Sometimes you have to just move on, no matter how much you like someone's other work. Meanwhile, tonight is our annual fundraiser/cabaret, for which I need to...

My body thought this was around 8:30am, but no, it was 6:30: Also, it turns out that my three favorite people in Southern California live 60, 90, and 120 minutes away from here. Aw, snap.

Cassie and I adopted each other three years ago today. And yet, she remains one of my most frustrating photographic subjects: Regardless, I got really lucky when I found her at PAWS. I hope she feels the same way.

My flight from Munich landed at Charlotte about 40 minutes early, and I got through customs and back through TSA in 34 minutes. Sweet! And now I'm watching the plane that will take me to Chicago pull into my gate. Sweet! Really, I just want to hug my dog and get 10 hours of sleep tonight. I have a feeling one of those things will happen and the other won't.

Since I learned how to drive a car, I've wanted to pick up a BMW in Munich. The European Delivery program allowed Americans to buy a made-to-order car at their local dealer, pick it up in Munich, drive it around Europe for up to 6 months, drop it off at an Atlantic port (Antwerp, I think), and drive it home from your local dealer about 12 weeks after that. Because of tax incentives from the German government and other factors, the purchase price of the car and delivery to your local dealer cost almost...

The weather forecast for Munich doesn't look horrible, but doesn't look all that great either, at least until Saturday. So I'll probably do more indoorsy things Thursday and Friday, though I have tentatively decided to visit Dachau on Thursday, rain or not. You know, to start my trip in such a way that nothing else could possibly be worse. Meanwhile, I've added these to yesterday's crop of stories to read at the airport: Deciding to be "stabbed, to live to see another day," the Republican-controlled...

I'm still not 100% over this horrible bout of bronchitis that started more than two weeks ago, so I spent one more evening chilling on the couch drinking lots of water. But these two cuties seemed perfectly happy with that plan: They did get about an hour and 25 minutes of walkies yesterday, some at Cassie's speed, and some at Butters'. Beagles will keep up with the pack when goaded, but Butters prefers a more thorough investigation of all the smells in the immediate vicinity. It seems the bronchitis...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

The current work sprint ends tomorrow. Throughout, I've had several moments of "wow, I actually did that right three years ago" as I've extended or improved existing features for the next release. I've even added a couple of extra stories that didn't take me long to do. Meanwhile, I'm starting to get the sense of what it might be like when I'm 80, coughing so much that for the first time in years I'll actually miss rehearsal tonight. Which explains this post's headline: the cemetery is usually where the...

The computer I'm using to write this post turns 8 years old on April 6th. It has served me well, living through thousands of Daily Parker posts, two house moves, terabytes of photographs, and only one blown hard drive. So I have finally broken down and ordered a new one: a Dell Precision 3460 that will sit on my desk instead of under it, and will run Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 instead of warning me that it doesn't have the right hardware to get the latest OS. The new computer will have an 13th Gen Intel...

What do you get when you combine a 2°C air temperature, a 2°C dew point, frozen ground with snow patches, and nearly-calm winds? Visibility under 100 meters on my commute to the office: They say we may not see the sun until Wednesday. But they also say it'll be 7°C that day. March came early this year, it seems.

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret: Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him. I can't...

My five-and-a-half-hour-delayed flight got to Seattle in the usual amount of time, but the door-to-door duration—my house to my friend's house—set a new record for domestic travel: 15 hours and 20 minutes. That's the longest travel duration for any flying trip since I had a long connection going from Chicago to London two years ago and longer than any domestic trip I can recall. But at the end of the voyage, Hazel was very glad to see me: My friend has an all-day meeting that neither of us is...

Welp. My 10:00 flight has become a 3:00 flight: But at least when I get on board the plane, I'll have a good seat: Obviously if they had predicted the delay more accurately, I'd have slept longer, left later, and probably not dropped Cassie off with my friends until this morning. She seems to be settling in just fine, though: Hooray for air travel in January. My guess is that if the original crew had flown on to Seattle, they'd have timed out. So they probably moved my plane's crew to a shorter flight...

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November. That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day: Economic historian Guido Alfani examines the data on the richest people to live...

Some Daily Parker followers expressed interest in what books I read this year. So instead of just counting them in the annual statistical roundup, I've decided to list most of the media that I consumed last year in a separate post. Books In 2023 I started 39 and finished 37 books, not including the 6 reference books that I consulted at various points. It turns out, I read a lot more than in 2022 (27 started, 24 finished), and in fact more than in any year since 2010, when I read 51. Notable books I...

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...

Due to an odd combination of holidays, a use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday, and travel, I'm just about done with my first of four short work-weeks in a row. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course, since I would like to finish the coding problem I've been working on before I leave today, I'll have to read some of these later: Josh Marshall thinks it's hilarious and pathetic that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), realizing she can't win against a Democrat in her own district, said she'll run in...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

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...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

We have unusual wind and sunshine for mid-November today, with a bog-standard 10C temperature. It doesn't feel cold, though. Good weather for flying kites, if you have strong arms. Elsewhere in the world: The right wing of the US Supreme Court has finally found a firearms restriction that they can't wave away with their nonsense "originalism" doctrine. Speaking of the loony right-wing asses on the bench, the Post has a handy guide to all of the people and organizations Justice Clarence Thomas (R) and...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

My Garmin Venu 3 continues to impress me. First, its navigation accuracy averages  within less than 2 meters, meaning you can see on my activity tracks when I dip into an alley to drop off Cassie's latest offering.  Second, its battery life rocks. I'm charging it right now after it last got to 100% around noon last Friday. When I connected its charger 45 minutes ago it had dwindled to 7%. That equates to just over 15 percentage points per day, or a full discharge in 6½ days. My old Venu 2 could barely...

I got my Covid and flu boosters yesterday afternoon, which my body noticed around midnight. I spent a couple of hours overnight with a mild (<2°C) fever and feeling generally unpleasant. Last year's jabs worked, as far as I know. I hope this year's do as well. Right now, though, I could use a nap. And both my arms are sore.

Chicago just hit the magical 38.3°C (100°F) that we have avoided for over 11 years, and with the 25.6°C dewpoint it feels like 48.1°C (118.6°F): #Chicago-O'Hare has just hit 100°F. This is the first time since 7/6/2012 that Chicago has officially observed a 100°F temperature. This also ties Chicago's daily high temperature record for this date set in 1947. #ilwx — NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 24, 2023 Here at IDTWHQ it got 0.2°C warmer than yesterday but it seems to have peaked: Our little weather...

The National Weather Service reported earlier today that we did, in fact, have some historic weather: [11:34am CDT 8/23/2023] #Chicago-O'Hare is currently 93° with a dew point temperature of 80° for a heat index of 112°. The last time the heat index was higher than 112° in Chicago was on July 30, 1999, when the heat index reached as high as 114°. #ILwx (1/3) — NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 23, 2023 Here at IDTWHQ, things have cooled off in the last hour...but not by much: Fortunately the AQI is only...

This is why I won't get 10,000 steps today: I'm still at 84,000 steps over the past 7 days, though. Still, even though it's cool enough to have all the windows open, and none of the rain seems to be blowing in, I'd still rather have gotten all my steps today. Cassie, for her part, got over 4 hours of walks this past weekend, so she seems fine with it. She doesn't like the rain any more than I do. Maybe tomorrow.

The Martin Theater at Ravinia Park yesterday: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra sold out both of our Magic Flute performances in the Theater this weekend, but you can still get lawn tickets for 7:30pm tonight or 1pm Sunday. And if you take Metra, you can ride to and from the park for free.

I finished the main part of the feature I've been fighting since last week, only to discover that a sub-feature needs refactoring as well. Basically, before implementing this feature, the user would recalculate their model every time they changed its parameters. Calculation usually takes 5-10 seconds for most models, but (a) for some models it takes up to a minutes and (b) the calculation engine uses a first-in-first-out queue when calculating. But the calculation engine caches on a most-recently-used...

When I moved to my current house, I planned to hook up my ancient cassette player to a stereo system in my library. So I got my ancient cassettes out of storage and brought them to the new place. It took a couple of stages (ordering bookshelves, getting the bookshelves, waiting for them to fix the adjustable shelf in the center bookshelf) over a few months. In that last phase it looked like this: You're reading that right. I packed that box of cassettes on 3 January 2005, and put a sticker on it when I...

Because of yesterday's rain, poor Cassie only got 23 minutes of walkies yesterday—almost all of it in drenching rain. I went through two towels drying her off after each of her walks. And of course, because she was (a) being rained on and (b) couldn't smell anything, it took her way more time than I preferred to find where to do her job. For my part, I really got a close shave on my step count: Today we have blue skies, sun, and a forecast high of 23°C: perfection. (The AQI is down to 47, too.) I have...

I'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so. Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one...

More photos. The Czech countryside, approximately here: Hafnersteig, in Vienna's Innere Stadt: The Schloss Belvedere, with (I am told) an Apollo capsule:

We've got a cool snap going into its third day here, and despite the 16 hours of daylight, it feels like autumn. But this happens every June. We just forget every year. Coming on the heels of the studies saying I don't need 10,000 steps to stay healthy, I can honestly report I'll stay healthy today without getting 10,000 steps.

I took a quick trip to Berchtesgaden, Germany, this afternoon. I think it might be the most beautiful place I've seen in Europe: I didn't stay too long, but I did get in a 2½ km walk that included part of a river path: The whole area looks like Bavarian storybook hour: To get there, you take a train from Freilassing, a nondescript town just over the German border from Salzburg. The train meanders through Alpine meadows at a slow but steady pace, passing through this kind of scenery: I will pass through...

Thanks in part to Conservative Party mismanagement of the UK transport sector for the last 13 years, things have gotten a bit fraught in the Old Country. And now, I get to spend a bit of extra time getting from Gatwick to my hotel on Saturday: The Gatwick Express takes about 30 minutes from the airport to London Victoria Station. There is no other train option. Instead, it looks like I can take a cab straight to my hotel for about £90, or a bus to bloody Heathrow and the Elizabeth Line for about £25....

Cassie got about 4 hours of walks yesterday, plus about 9 additional hours of outdoor time. I got sunburned. So I didn't have any time to post, but I did have time to get side-eye from this girl: That's Butters, a beagle whose every look is side-eye. It's quite a talent. "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."—Lin Yutang

Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made: Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.

During the weeks around our Spring Concert, like during the first couple of weeks of December, I have almost no free time. The Beethoven performance also took away an entire day. Yesterday I had hoped to finish a bit of code linking my home weather station to Weather Now, but alas, I studied German instead. Plus, with the aforementioned Spring Concerts on Friday and today, I felt that Cassie needed some couch time. (We both sit on the couch while I read or watch TV and she gets non-stop pats. It's good...

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...

If you haven't got plans tonight, or you do but you're free Sunday afternoon, come to our Spring Concert: You can read these during the intermission: The National Association of Government Employees has sued President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—both of whom they support politically—to force the Administration to ignore the debt ceiling. Sci-fi author Ted Chiang, in a brutal essay, suggests a metaphor for AI: think of it "as a management consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey &...

The North Carolina supreme court reversed itself on a major Gerrymandering question for the simple reason that it flipped parties. Guess which way: Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act....

Life is skittles and life is beer! Seriously, just check out this forecast: Today Sunny, with a high near 7. East northeast wind 15 to 20 km/h. Tonight Mostly clear, with a low around 3. Northeast wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming southeast after midnight. Saturday Sunny, with a high near 12. South southeast wind 15 to 20 km/h becoming east northeast in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 km/h. Saturday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 4. East wind 10 to 15 km/h. Sunday Sunny, with a high near...

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago: Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow. Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.) While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories: The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so...

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday: Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night. I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning: London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park...

Unfortunately, though, I'm already at the airport, staring out at blue skies and sunny...airplanes. I'm looking forward to getting home, though, and to picking up Cassie tomorrow morning after her bath. (She was already overdue, but after 4 days with her pack, she'll need it even more.) I've got a couple of Brews & Choos from yesterday as well as a few photos from the weekend coming later this week. Stay tuned.

Apparently the rain has stopped! So I'm going to take a walk and get some tea. Lunch in Palo Alto; dinner possibly at The Stinking Rose, depending on how much I want to offend the people sitting next to me on the flight home tomorrow. What am I doing hanging round? I should be on that train and gone.

I can't remember ever taking an umbrella to California, but I'm packing one today. So instead of the sunny and cold weather I've usually experienced in San Francisco, the forecast calls for wet and cold weather every day I'm there, with the sun coming out right after I leave. Here in Chicago, we've had just 20% of possible sun this month, which WGN points out has completely obscured that we have 15 minutes more daylight than we had at the solstice. On the other hand, so far we've had the 4th-warmest...

In a form of enlightened laziness, I often go into my company's downtown Chicago office on Friday and the following Monday, avoiding the inconvenience of taking my laptop home. It helps also that Fridays and Mondays have become the quietest days of the week, with most return-to-office workers heading in Tuesdays through Thursdays. And after a productive morning, I have a few things to read at lunch: The Economist says a lot of nice things about Chicago, including that we have an almost inexhaustible...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days. Meanwhile: How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway? Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to...

We get one or two every year. The National Weather Service predicts that by Friday morning, Chicago will have heavy snowfall and gale-force winds, just what everyone wants two days before Christmas. By Saturday afternoon we'll have clear skies—and -15°C temperatures with 400 mm of snow on the ground. Whee! We get to share our misery with a sizeable portion of the country as the bomb cyclone develops over the next three days. At least, once its gone and we have a clear evening Saturday or Sunday, we can...

Both of our Messiah performances went well. We had too few rehearsals and too many new members this year to sing the 11 movements from memory that we have done in the past, which meant that all us veterans sang stuff we'd memorized with our scores open. So like many people in the chorus, I felt better about this year than I have since I started. We got a decent review, too. Also, we passed a milestone yesterday: 1,000 days since my company closed our Chicago office because of the pandemic, on 16 March...

Even though I'm president of a medium-sized non-profit organization who understands the importance of keeping in touch with constituents, I have run out of patience. For the last couple of weeks, I have mercilessly unsubscribed from every mailing list that sent me more than two emails a week. I might wind up missing a couple of them, but my dog, some of them just would not shut up. The worst offender was my undergraduate university. In the last week, until I finally unsubscribed from them just now...

Remember the stew I made Wednesday? It turned out one of my best: And I had a lot of leftovers: Remember Cassie getting a long walk to the big dog park Thursday? We did the same thing yesterday: And after dinner, I got this rare (inverted for your convenience) photo of Cassie getting a belly rub: Today, however, it's rainy and cold, so we will have less walking—but possibly more couch/belly-rub time.

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone...

I reported Saturday that Empirical Brewery, one of my favorite hang-outs just 400 meters from my new house, closed unexpectedly on Sunday. Block Club Chicago's Alex Hernandez found out why: Empirical Brewery was booted from its building and abruptly shut down over the weekend following a months-long legal battle in which the landlord said the company did not pay its rent for several months this year, according to court records. Hayes Properties, which owns the Foster Avenue building, served Empirical...

I believe I'm about halfway through the kitchen (the worst room to pack), and struggling not to go immediately to Empirical for my last pint there. It's sunny, breezy, and at this moment 24°C outside—perfect beer-on-a-patio weather. Alas, though, I have to pack...the dishes. And glassware. Maybe I can do this in two hours?

I have only two rooms left to pack before my move on Monday: the master bedroom (which will take me about 30 minutes and the movers about the same), and the kitchen (which will take me most of today). I also had to reserve some time later this afternoon to grab a pint with a friend at Empirical Brewery, because (a) the weather could not look better and (b) they close permanently tomorrow night. Let's move on from the demise of the second brewery three blocks from my new house in the period between me...

I went to bed Sunday thinking I would move next Wednesday. Then I had a productive day at my downtown office yesterday. Then, as I was walking to the train, I got a note that despite me saying repeatedly, for the last six weeks, "I cannot move on the 24th," my buyers want to close on the 24th, because their painters will be here the morning of the 25th. What a coincidence! My painters will be at my new place next Tuesday morning, and now they get the added fun of maneuvering around my furniture. Sigh....

As far as I know, I'm moving in 2½ weeks, though the exact timing of both real-estate closings remain unknown. Last time I moved it took me about 38 hours to pack and 15 to unpack. This time I expect it to go faster, in part because I'm not spending as much time going "oh, I love this book!" I'm taking a quick break and catching up on some reading: Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon (R-Fla.) continues to help the guy who appointed her in absurd ways large and small. David French explains why "strong"...

One of Inner Drive Technology's old laptops—actually, the most recently purchased—can be yours along with a few accessories for only $300: That's a Dell E6440 laptop with 12 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 2.4 GHz processor. It has a 97 W/h battery, and I'm including a docking station, 130 W power supply, and a DVI cable to connect the docking station with a monitor. It does not have a hard drive or software. (I originally had a 512 GB SSD. It'll take a standard 3½-inch laptop drive.) But hey, $300? I've...

We're performing with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra tonight, which means we need to get our butts to Peoria this morning. Which means I woke up way too early. Normal posting resumes tomorrow, assuming I recover by then.

I do love traveling Saturday mid-days, because it's the quietest time at O'Hare. There was no line at the Pre-Check security gate, and I only have a backpack, so it took less than 3 minutes to clear TSA. Wonderful. Unfortunately, every single economy parking space has a car in it. (I would have taken public transit but I had a meeting run until 12:30, with a 3pm flight. Couldn't risk the 90 minutes or so.) In any event, my plane is here, it appears to be on time, and the latest weather is VFR the whole...

Happy Monday: The XPOTUS uses the same pattern of lies every time he gets caught committing a crime. Jennifer Rubin says this was his dumbest crime yet. Usability experts at the Nielsen/Norman Group lay out everything you hate about phone trees, and how companies could fix them. My generation should be your boss now, but of course, we aren't. Within 30 years, Chicago could experience 52°C heat indexes. I would now like to take a nap, but alas...

Today, though, I've got a lot of debugging, and several chorus meetings on various topics, plus a condo association meeting that I really don't want to attend. Since I'm president of both the chorus and the condo association (one voluntary, one voluntold), I can't shirk either. Meanwhile, some of the grain silos that remind Beirut of the massive government incompetence that led to a massive aluminum nitrate explosion two years ago today collapsed, fortunately before the memorial began. And one of the...

We've got a (soft) product release tomorrow afternoon and I've got an opera rehearsal tonight, so a real post will have to wait. I did like Matt Ford's brief note that we've taken the gloves off in the Senate, which is about time. I might have to declare news bankruptcy tonight, though, and return to the world after we launch.

This is a bit of good news for my weekend getaway: Long-running weekend strikes on London's Night Tube have been suspended after the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union accepted a concession from London Underground about rotas. The bodies have agreed to have a minimum number of drivers who prefer to work overnight on each line. The RMT stressed the dispute was not resolved, and the situation would be reviewed in three months at the latest. Ongoing weekend strike action began in January and was...

Cassie got almost 2 hours of walkies before 9am with a return trip to the Montrose  Beach Dog Friendly Area: She also got a bath, because even though Lake Michigan supplies millions of people with fresh water, we don't drink it right out of the lake for very good reasons. Also, I did not take 540 photos like last time. Maybe tomorrow...? And if you're listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" on NPR this morning (and tomorrow morning in some markets), I was there Thursday night:

I'm spending today finishing a couple of books and season 3 of The Umbrella Academy on either side of hauling down to Bloomington, Ill., for a friend's birthday/housewarming. Tomorrow I intend to continue doing nothing creative, though the holiday may give me cause to contemplate the future of our nation. Regular posting should resume Tuesday.

I mentioned earlier today that my flight to Austin did not go smoothly. The plane actually took off on time and landed a few minutes ahead of schedule, and then...stopped. We wound up sitting on the apron for over two hours because of lightning near the airport. (Apparently the ground crew didn't want to get electrocuted. Seems legit.) Even after we got off the plane, our bags didn't for several hours. Just look at this fun excerpt from the FlightAware track log: But, as Cranky Flier reports, flying...

I've written often enough about wearing a fitness tracker, and I've been pretty happy with my Garmin Venu. The device has a feature called "body battery" which uses heart-rate variability and other measures to estimate how much energy you have. I've actually found it a reliable measure, in that when I check in on how I feel and then compare that to my body battery score, it seems right. For instance, I would say this chart is a pretty decent proxy of how I've felt for the past week: My symptoms hit...

A little more than four days after I first noticed Covid-19 symptoms, my body appears to have won the war, with my immune system putting down a few rear-guard actions in my lungs and sinuses quite handily. If I wake up tomorrow without residual coughing or sneezing, I'll be able to partially resume normal life, albeit masked. Good thing Cassie has a few weeks worth of food on hand. In sum, I should be perfectly healthy to deal with the two crises sure to blow up next week: the final Supreme Court...

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

Tonight our chorus has its (sold out!) fundraiser. This will be the first year since I joined the chorus that I won't be performing, and the second where I'm not running the event. I finally get to just enjoy the night. Except one of the co-chairs has Covid. And the reason I'm not performing is that one of the ensemble I put together also has Covid, and another got called up for his Army Reserve weekend unexpectedly. But, hey, it's going to be fun...and did I mention we sold out? We did find a couple...

NPR did a segment this morning on the 1978 movie Grease, which correspondent Dori Bell had never seen—since, you know, she's a late Millennial. As I listened to the movie, while slowly waking up and patting Cassie, the timeline of the movie and the play just made me feel...old. The play, which premiered in 1971, takes place in the fall of 1958. The movie came out in 1978. So try this out, with the dates changed a bit: The play premiered in 2015 and takes place in 2002. Oh, it gets better, Gen-Xers and...

At 7am Monday, it was 12°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. By 6pm the temperature had gone up to 26.5°C, then 29.8°C at 2pm Tuesday, then 29.1°C at 3:15pm yesterday, before a cold front finally ploughed through and got us down to lovely sleeping weather right before I turned in: The slow rise in my indoor temperature from 7am to 5pm was just my normal A/C program, as was the decline when the A/C turned on at 5. Then at 6, I discovered that the cold front had gone through, so I opened the...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

Thursday evening, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance: That's Bill Kurtis, Peter Sagal, Karen Chee, Alonzo Bodden, and Helen Hong at this week's "Wait Wait" taping. The "Not My Job" guest was actor Matt Walsh: Then yesterday, Cassie and I trundled up to Spiteful Brewing in the sun: Not a bad few days, in all.

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories: The Economist examines how Putin might be punished for war crimes in Ukraine. Max Boot wonders why Tucker Carlson still loves his old Uncle Vlad. The IPCC says we have eight years to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% or the planet will pass the 1.5°C warming threshold no matter what else we do. Welp. Via Bruce Schneier...

Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time. Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen. Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch: Berea College: One of the ranch's permanent residents: Down the road from the ranch: Cinnamon, who rather...

I've just switched the DNS entries for wx-now.com over to the v5 App, and I've turned off the v4 App and worker role. It'll take some time to transfer over the 360 GB of archival data, and to upload the 9 million rows of Gazetteer data, however. I've set up a virtual machine in my Azure subscription specifically to do that. This has been quite a lift. Check out the About... page for the whole history of the application. And watch this space over the next few months for more information about how the app...

The day started like this: Then it became this: And returned to this: But because of this: It is now this: As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way. Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out...

I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak. The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about...

Even as the East Coast gets bombed by an early-spring cyclone, we have sunny skies and bitter cold. But the -12°C at O'Hare at 6am will likely be the coldest temperature we get in Chicago until 2023. The forecast predicts temperatures above 10°C tomorrow and up to 16°C on Wednesday, with no more below-freezing temperatures predicted as far out as predictions can go. Meanwhile, I'm about to leave for our first of two Bach Jonannespassion performances this weekend. We still have tickets available for...

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Other than making a hearty beef stew, I have done almost nothing of value today. I mean, I did some administrative work, and some chorus work, and some condo board work. But I still haven't read a lick of the books I've got lined up, nor did I add the next feature to the Weather Now 5 app. I did read these, though: An Illinois state judge has enjoined the entire state from imposing mask mandates on schools, just as NBC reports that anti-vaxxer "influencers" are making bank off their anti-social...

After a lot of struggle trying to get Cassie to stop pulling on her leash, I finally gave up today and got her a prong collar. Dogs don't much like them, and neither do I, but no amount of treats or yanks on her harness worked with her. As soon as I switched the lead from her harness to her prong collar, Cassie suddenly knew exactly where to walk on a heel, and only pulled enough to make the prong contract before falling right back to my side. We walked about 4 blocks total, and she never pulled enough...

We almost made it to December 31st without measurable snowfall, which would have broken the record of 290 days. Alas, at day #288... I snapped that photo with the wind at my back and quarter-sized flakes melting on my coat. It was 1.7°C then, but by the time I sloshed home with the wind in my face and rain soaking through my coat, it was getting just enough warmer to really make the weather really suck dingo balls. At least I now have my Covid booster. Hurrah. And I now want to take a nap...

I've finally resumed progress on a major update to Weather Now. I finished everything except the user interface way back in April, but between summer, Cassie, and everything else, I paused. At least, until last week, when something clicked in my head, and I started writing again. As my dad would say, I broke the code's back. It turns out, the APIs really work well, and I'm getting used to .NET Blazor, so I'm actually getting things done. The only downside applies to Cassie, who will probably only get 90...

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

Just a quick observation: since I last visited London two years ago, almost every business I've encountered has gone cashless. Coffee shops, pubs, the Transport Museum, all cards-only. In 2019, most of the smaller places preferred cash. No real consequences, other than not needing to withdraw Sterling so far this trip. When I get home and sync up Quicken, I expect I'll have a little work, but again, not a biggie.

I completed a long-overdue project for my condo board today, made more tolerable by sitting in my relocated office with all the air and light it provides. Having completed that project, I will shortly take Cassie for another hour-long walk.

I once again walked from Uptown to Lake Bluff, as planned. And I broke all kinds of personal records. Unfortunately, I discovered a usability bug in Garmin's Venu software that led to me accidentally deleting the first 9.47 km of the walk. I re-started the trace after covering another 530 meters, so the official record starts at 10.0 km: Add 10 km and 1:27:02 to that data and you get 43.55 km in 6:30:08. My marathon time (42.2 km) was 6:16:55, a 2½-minute improvement over last year. But my...

Today is the 40th birthday of the IBM 5150—better known as the IBM PC: It wasn't that long before the August 1981 debut of the IBM PC that an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and 60 people to run and keep it loaded with instructions. The IBM PC changed all that. It was a very small machine that could not only process information faster than those ponderous mainframes of the 1960s but also hook up to the home TV set, process text and...

Cassie last got a bath (I think) sometime in April. So, wow, did she need one today. And she was a trooper. Before: After: She actually likes water, so she just let me spray her down, shampoo her up, and spray her down again. Once inside and toweled off, she got the zoomies but good. After two hours she's dry and doesn't smell like a wet dog. And she's so soft again, without the sheen of whatever she rolled in at day camp for the past few weeks.

I spent the day in Bristol, Wisconsin, eating a turkey leg and admiring the wandering bands of hordes. Regular posting returns tomorrow.

The New York Times throws cold water on a health fad: According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on step counts and health, the 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man. It also translated as “10,000-steps meter,”...

Yesterday I squashed six bugs (one of them incidentally to another) and today I've had a couple of good strategy meetings. But things seem to have picked up a bit, now that our customers and potential customers have returned to their offices as well. So I haven't had time to read all of these (a consistent theme on this blog): An early-summer heat dome has formed over a larger area than expected, pushing temperatures in the Southwest US as high as 53°C in places. Lenore Skenazy, who founded the...

I feel so proud of myself for getting this week's View From Your Window Contest (read the essay, then scroll down) in under 90 minutes: Yes, I know exactly what window the photographer took that photo from. I'll post Sullivan's confirmation of my geographic sleuthing ability next Friday. Of course, I may not have won the contest; I not only have answer correctly (or have the closest point to the correct answer), but I have to have the first correct answer. The last time I had the correct answer, I was...

I left Cassie all alone for 5½ hours yesterday, and came home to this baleful look: And yet, 20 minutes later, all was forgiven: (A 15-minute walk occurred between these two photos, which may have had something to do with the forgiveness.)

Cassie and I took on a stretch of the Ice Age Trail near La Grange, Wis., this afternoon: She is snoring peacefully on the couch now, and probably will continue doing so for many hours. Note to self: bring more water for the dog next hike.

I've been coding most of the day because it has rained since 1pm. I'm getting very close to a series of posts on what I've been working on the past few months, so stay tuned.

Getting my first Pfizer-Biontech SARS-COV-2 vaccine today comes on the heels of Chicago setting a new one-day record for vaccine administration: The 7-day daily average of administered vaccine doses is 112,680, with 154,201 doses given on Wednesday. Officials also say a total of 6,707,183 vaccines have now been administered. Illinois next week will make 150,000 first-dose appointments for coronavirus vaccinations available at 11 state-run mass vaccination sites in the Chicago suburbs and at area...

Back in May, which seems like ten years ago rather than ten months, I started going through all my CDs in the order that I acquired them. I don't listen every day, and some (like Bizet's Carmen) take a bit more time than others (like a 4-song mini CD of Buddy Holly songs). I've now arrived at about the middle of my collection, with a set of four CDs I bought on 19 September 1993. Holy Alternative, Batman. I had just started doing one shift a week at WLUW-Chicago, Loyola University's radio station...

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter: US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate. Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy. Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake...

Cassie has had an adventurous and full day: several rides in the car, visits to three—count them—three pet stores, and lots of walks. At our first pet shop of the day I picked up a cord to secure her while in the car, which did not stop her from winding up in the driver's seat when I got back from running into the grocery. Exhibit: And just look at that punim! She'll get another half-hour of walks today. I really would like her to learn how to heel, though. She wants to say hello to every dog in...

I've already done 8 km of walks this morning, and tomorrow I'm doing another 9. (Tomorrow's will end at Sketchbook Brewing, so I'll be even more motivated.) After being cooped up at home and forced to get my daily steps bundled up like the Michelin Man for a few weeks, I feel a bit liberated. The sidewalks are almost all clear (except for a few buildings whose owners suck, like the Cagan Management-run apartments near me), it's already 8°C outside, and the sky is crystal-clear. Tomorrow we might get a...

Happy new year! Or, as many of my friends have posted on social media, happy January, only 20 days until the new year! Of course what they mean has to do with this: President Donald Trump spent his first days in office pushing false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. He has spent the final weeks of his term blitzing the American people with falsehoods and far-fetched conspiracies as part of a failed attempt to overturn the election he lost — cementing his legacy as what fact checkers and...

My company gives us the usual American holidays off, and adds two "floating holidays" you can take whenever you want. I took my first one in January and just remembered last week that I hadn't taken the second one. So I took it today. Which gave me some time to read a bunch of things: The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wishes politicians in both parties understood how Covid-19 spreads. Paul Krugman wonders whether the president's efforts to kill Covid relief come from ignorance or cynicism. (I'd imagine...

...but the 2% doesn't really hurt it. I'm proud enough about my stew today, and full on three bowls of it, that I wanted to jot down the recipe. If you hate metric measurements, it hardly matters if the proportions are about right. Even then, it's a stew, not an angel food cake; it's resilient. Ingredients The rendered fat from the bacon I cooked for breakfast1 kg stew beef, cubed500 g small yellow and red potatoes, cubed400 g pre-chopped mirepoix from Trader Joe's250 g whole white mushrooms, rinsed100...

Parker has taken carprofen for about a year, 50 mg with each meal, to help with his arthritis and back pain. Starting yesterday I upped it to 100 mg at breakfast. More carprofen meant less pain almost immediately. His walking pace improved about 10% today and he has seemed more active and more confident of his footing. He seems like the dog he was a year ago. But at his body weight, 100 mg per day is the maximum safe dose. Carprofen, like NSAIDs in general, puts a lot of stress on the body, particularly...

My ex and I got Parker in part because every morning we could see a doggy play group right outside our bedroom window. Here's Parker, 14 years ago today, having a great time there: Today we went back to the same park. Parker initially wanted to go into the building where we lived back then, so I had to explain that someone else lives there now. Once in the park, though, he forgot all that and just strolled around with a happy look on his face: Today was a good day for him, except for the parts where he...

My company just sent out an email: "Given the current state of our COVID rates and timeline on an anticipated vaccine, as well as the upcoming flu season, we have made the decision to move our expected Return to Office (RTO) date to Tuesday, July 6th, 2021." Welp. At least I can go in once a week. But that means almost 15 months of an almost empty building. That can't be good for anyone, especially the building management and support teams.

First, a quick note: Joe and Jill Biden have tested negative for the virus. Many of my friends, who I consider reasonable people, have spent the morning freaking out on social media about the President's Covid-19 infection. I'm a little alarmed and a little sad. Alarmed, because an unhealthy proportion of my friends seem to believe that the President or the White House is lying about it, perhaps to get out of the debate in two weeks, or perhaps to set up a hero's narrative when the President gets...

As of Saturday, it looked like we might break the record for hottest summer ever (average daily temperature 24.7°C) in Chicago, set way back in 1955. If the today's forecast holds, however, we will merely tie the record. This is actually a good-news, bad-news thing. The good news is: (a) we came just a bit short of breaking the record (36.7°C) for August 26th, and (b) a cold front will push through tomorrow evening, dropping temperatures into the high 20s for the weekend. You know? I'm OK with not...

I just spent 90 minutes driving to and from two different Drivers Services facilities because I wanted to renew my drivers license with a Real ID version. At both places the lines stretched into the next time zone. Since I can renew online, and I have another Real ID available, I'm just not going to bother. I'm surprised—not very, but still—that Drivers Services still doesn't understand queuing theory. Or they just don't care. Illinois used to handle this much better, but after four years of Bruce...

A friend I met just last November died on Friday night at 32. She owned Heirloom Books in Chicago's Edgewater community, one of the last independent used-book shops in the neighborhood. (Always a "shop;" never a "store.") She'd only recently adopted a kitten, Pilar, who I met a few weeks ago. Her father posted on Facebook that she died "peacefully but unexpectedly...from complications arising from a long-standing illness which she fought valiantly against over many years, but which few people were aware...

I'm waiting for a build to finish so I can sign off work for the day, so I've queued up a few things to read later: The Atlantic's cover this month will be "How the Pandemic Defeated America" by Ed Yong. In a filing today, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr suggested his office is investigating the president for all kinds of bank fraud. Pass the popcorn. Charles Blow accuses the president of forecasting his own election fraud. Recreational weed sales in Illinois topped a record $61m last month...

A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man. And if you read the news today, oh boy, the weirdness is all over: Alex Shephard calls Chris Wallace "the only person who's figured out how to interview Trump." About the same interview, Peter Wehner concludes "Donald Trump is a broken man." In his last long-form essay for New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan...

I wore both my old Fitbit Ionic and new Garmin Venu for about 42 hours straight. Yesterday they overlapped for the entire day. And they came in with similar, but not quite the same, numbers. I thought that my Fitbit would record fewer steps overall, because it recorded about 450 (about 7%) fewer on my walk yesterday. For the whole day, though, the Fitbit counted 14,190 to the Garmin's 13,250—7% more. But I wore the Fitbit on my right (dominant) wrist, so it may have just had more activity in general. In...

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...

I have meant to post this for a while: a list of the media I regularly consume. This may help visitors to the Daily Parker more easily decide whether something I post is crap or (more likely) researched more than the typical Internet meme. (The title comes from an essay by Mark Twain.) The impetus to post this came from my Facebook feed, which contained a number of suspicious memes and posts from close friends today. In each case it took me about 30 seconds to fact-check them and gently remind people to...

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up: Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate. Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad." Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula...

Since January 2019, Chicago has had only two months with above-average sunshine, and in both cases we only got 10% more than average. This year we're ticking along about 9% below, with no month since July 2019 getting above 50% of possible sunshine. In other news: Former White House Butler Roosevelt Jerman, who served from 1957 to 2012, died of Covid-19 at age 91. One wonders, if the current White House had acted more propitiously, would Jerman have lived longer? Researchers suggest yes, if we'd locked...

Welcome to day 31 of the Illinois shelter-in-place regime, which also turns out to be day 36 of my own working-from-home regime (or day 43 if you ignore that I had to go into the office on March 16th). So what's new? Oy: Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says America "has been abused by this president." George Packer says "we are living in a failed state." Josh Marshall calls Covid-19 "an extinction-level event for news." The Trump International Hotel has asked its landlord, the...

The number of new Covid-19 cases per day may have peaked in Illinois, but that still means we have new cases every day. We have over 10,000 infected in the state, with the doubling period now at 12 days (from 2 days back mid-March). This coincides with unpleasant news from around the world: Covid-19 has become the second-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 12,400 deaths per week, just behind heart disease which kills about 12,600. More than 5 million people filed for unemployment...

We all know President Trump's pathologies pretty well by now. Between the malignant narcissism and his natural distrust for anyone who knows more than he does on a particular subject, plus his well-documented habit of believing things he wants to believe instead of the black-and-white reality right in front of him, it doesn't take an Oliver Sacks to guess how he has reacted to everyone telling him he can't simply restart the economy on May 1st. And, sadly, he does not disappoint: Over the weekend, the...

As we go into the fourth week of mandatory working from home, Chicago may have its warmest weather since October 1st, and I'm on course to finish a two-week sprint at work with a really boring deployment. So what's new and maddening in the world? The Trump Administration's chaotic response to the virus includes seizing states' protective equipment and giving it to private distributors, thus making states bid on stuff they've already obtained, sometimes for free. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics...

I suppose, given how long I've lived in the United States, the inability of my fellow Americans to understand anything not happening directly to them should no longer surprise me. And yet it does. Even as Illinois passes 10,000 known cases of Covid-19 (1,453 new ones just yesterday), with 300,000 cases nationwide, the president cares only about his TV ratings. People in rural areas are dying too, but not yet in the same proportions of population we're seeing in cities. I had a conversation yesterday...

I had plans to do the Blogging A-to-Z challenge this year as I've done the last two, but reality intervened. In theory I have more time to write than last year. In fact I didn't have the energy required to plan and start drafting entries mid-March, for obvious reasons. Things have stabilized since my office closed on the 17th, and I've gotten back into the swing of working from home every day. But I feel like a full 26-post series this month would not rise to my own standards of quality for permanent...

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago: The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates. In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he...

Today's news: President Trump claims he knew COVID-19 was a pandemic all along, even though he had a strangely ineffective way of showing it. COVID-19 has caused a food security crisis as entire industries lay off vulnerable workers. The University of Illinois has cancelled graduation, devastating thousands of seniors. The World Health Organisation recommends avoiding Ibuprofen to treat COVID-19 symptoms; use paracetamol instead. Bob Cesca in Slate asks, "Why do we keep electing Republicans? They're no...

I spent an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to track down a monitor to replace the one that sparked, popped, and went black on me this morning. That's going to set me back $150 for a replacement, which isn't so bad, considering. Less personally, the following also happened in the last 24 hours: Former Vice President Joe Biden thumped US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in most of the 6 primary-election states yesterday. Closer to home, the Illinois House district just south of me has become the center of...

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.

I'm visiting one of my oldest friends in Durham, N.C. She is fostering Lexi, who had nine puppies on the 5th: So, it turns out that puppies under two weeks old (a) smell horrendous, no matter how often you change their bedding, and (b) don't do a lot. But in the 18 hours I've been here most of them have opened their eyes for the first time. And they are really cute. This morning we took a short hike at the Museum of Life and Science, which encourages John Cleese to visit: It helps that while Chicago...

...that I finally passed my private pilot checkride and got my certificate. I finished all the requirements for the checkride except for two cross-country flights for practice on 18 July 1999. Unfortunately, the weather in New Jersey sucked on almost every weekend for the next six months. I finally took a day off from work in early December, took my checkride...and failed a landing. (I was too far off centerline to pass, but otherwise it was a perfectly safe landing.) It then took another six weeks to...

Armed with an InstantPot, a Cuisinart, and some basic understanding of cooking, I made this today: Starting here: Ingredients used (amounts where known): Hot Italian sausage, 300 g Salt Mild Italian sausage, 150 g Pepper Diced pancetta, 50 g Butter Tomato puree, 800 mL Juice of 1 lemon Tomato paste Juice of 1 lime Olive oil Basil Mirepoix (onion, carrot, celery) Sage Shallot Rosemary Garlic Thyme Romano Smoked chile powder Parmesan Chipotle powder Red pepper flakes Mushrooms Coriander Bay leaves I...

Chicago Classical Review attended our performance of Everest and Aleko this weekend: There are a myriad of reasons why an operatic adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air should not work. And yet it does. Composer [Joby] Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer have crafted a compelling 70-minute opera adapted form Krakauer’s nonfiction book about the disastrous 1996 Everest expedition in which eight people died. Scheer wisely narrows the scope to three mountaineers, alternating their increasingly desperate...

Twenty years ago today, I launched wx-now.com. It's now on version 4.5 with version 5 in the works (when I get the time). The earliest view on the Wayback Machine comes from late 2000, but the design looks similar enough to the first beta version on 11 November 1999. Hard to believe I've had two websites in continuous operation for over 20 years.

My 207-day streak of 10,000 steps per day ended, as I suspected it would, at midnight GMT tonight. Traveling from Chicago to London takes 6 hours out of the day, and it's hard to get enough steps before 7am to get to 10k by 6pm when most of that time is on an airplane. Anyway, I'm in the Ancestral Homeland, about to finish the book that inspired the opera I'm performing in next week. And then there's the other opera that requires I sing rapidly in Russian, without rushing. I brought the score for that...

Yesterday was my fifth anniversary using Fitbit products. Since 24 October 2014, I've walked 24,814,427 steps over 21,129.14 km and climbed 32,002 floors. In those 1,828 days I've hit 5,000 steps 1,825 times and 10,000 steps 1,631 times (and 193 days in a row as of yesterday). So, barring injury, I should hit 25 million steps in about 11 days. Cool.

My 5-year-old Microsoft Surface, which I use at work to keep personal and client concerns physically separated, has died. I thought it was the power supply, but it seems there is something even more wrong with it. Otherwise I would have posted earlier. This means I have to make an expensive field trip tonight. Regular posting should resume tomorrow.

If you haven't checked out the Apollo Chorus of Chicago's season this year, now's the time. Our first concert, on November 3rd at St Michael's Church in Old Town, is totally free and will showcase our entire season. Right now I'm entering all of our just-accepted new members into the official member database. Looks like we have some really good singers joining tomorrow.

On 1 September 2006, I adopted this guy: I can scarcely believe it's been 13 years. Here's the comparison: Here's to a couple 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....

Today the Blogging A-to-Z challenge comes to a close, and for the fourth time this year, I have to punt. Search all you want: music theory really doesn't have any important terms starting with Z. So today, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite vocal works: Brahms' opus 103, "Zigeunerlieder" (Gypsy Songs). I performed three songs from the cycle with the Illinois Music Educators Association All-State Honors Chorus in 1987, 100 years after Brahms wrote it. (Yes, back then I was one of the 256 best...

"It is no one's right to despise another. It is a hard-won privilege over long experience."—Isaac Asimov, "C-Chute" For the past three months, I've worked with a programming language called Scala. When I started with it, I thought it would present a challenge to learn, but ultimately it would be worth it. Scala is derived from Java, which in turn is a C-based language. C#, my primary language of the last 18 years, is also a C-based language.  So I analogized thus: C# : Java :: Spanish : Italian...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago's annual fundraiser has consumed my weekend and will continue to munch away at my week.  Tickets are still available. Come out and hear us! It's wicked fun. And somehow, I'll write the next six A-to-Z posts on time...

I told you the Chicago mayoral election would be difficult. I had no idea that my preferred candidate would come out in first place, setting up an April 2nd election that will elect Chicago's first African-American woman mayor: It’s only the second time Chicago has had a runoff campaign for mayor, which occurs when no candidate collects more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. Unofficial results showed Lightfoot with 17.5 percent of the vote, Preckwinkle with 16 percent and Bill Daley with...

I missed posting two days in a row because I've just been swamped. I'll have more details later. For now, here's my new office view: One of my smartass friends, who lives in Los Angeles, asked what that white stuff was. It's character, kid. It's character.

Yesterday was my [redacted] high school reunion. We started with a tour of the building, which has become a modern office park since we graduated: The glass atrium there is new, as of 2008. The structure back to the left is the Center for the Performing Arts, which featured proudly in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I didn't get a picture of the Michelin-starred student food court, but this, this I had to snap: So, at some point I'll post about Illinois school-funding policies and why one of the richest...

Yesterday around 7am, I made it from where I parked in the main O'Hare parking garage to the concourse past security in 7 minutes. Today, at Raleigh-Durham, I made it from my Lyft to the concourse past security in 4 minutes. If you have the option of traveling to or from a smaller airport on Saturday afternoon, do it. Also, it's gorgeous out, so I not only got a chance to walk around Durham for an hour after brunch, but I also got to play with this cutie in her yard: That's Hazel, my host's 6-month-old...

I'm just starting the process of moving, today, by signing a ton of papers in an office somewhere in Chicago. I get to do this two more times before the end of September. But mid-October, Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters will have a new home. Parker has no idea how disrupted his life is about to become.

Yesterday, the Cubs and Mets played to a 1-1 draw at Wrigley when the game got suspended in the 10th due to torrential rain. (They resume in about 20 minutes.) My department bought us rooftop tickets, so we got to see most of the game between the waves of thunderstorms that preceded and interrupted it: I got supremely lucky: the first wave of thunderstorms hit just as I was getting on the bus to go to the park, finished its deluge just as I got off the bus, and the second wave hit while I was on the bus...

It's 25°C and partly cloudy today, so I'm spending as much as possible outside. Regular posting will resume when I'm once again trapped inside by some unfortunate event, like work.

Since hearing about it on NPR almost 8 years ago, I have loved the book Hint Fiction. It's collection of short stories, none more than 25 words long. The other day I had an inspiration and wrote one of my own: Acquired, 1989 She left the office, reading the paper again. "This isn't possible," she thought. "Brad's not gay." These may pop up here from time to time.

I've finally gotten around to extending the historical weather feature in Weather Now. Now, you can get any archival report that the system has, back to 2013. (I have many more archival reports from before then but they're not online.) For example, here's the last time I arrived in London, or the time I took an amazing photo in Hermosa Beach, Calif. I don't know why it took me so long to code this feature. It only took about 4 hours, including testing. And it also led me to fix a bug that has been in...

In the 7 days through yesterday, I walked 169,083 steps, a new personal record (PR). That averages out to 24,154 per day. On the one hand, I can set a new PR of 25,000 per day, or 175,000 for 7 days, by walking 22,149 steps today. On the other hand, or if the shoe is on the other foot so to speak, my feet do not like this idea. Nor do my calves, quads, hams, or glutes. On the third hand, if I don't hit that PR today, I won't have another shot at it without either walking 25k consistently for a week, or...

My dentist is all the way up in Hubbard Woods, which turns out to be a 21.3 km walk from my house. I know that because I walked it this morning. In fairness, I did it in two roughly-equal parts with a stop in downtown Evanston for lunch. But my total time for the walk, 3:12:36, over what was almost exactly a half-marathon, implies a legal finishing time for the Chicago Marathon (6:30 allowed for the 42.2 km course). I'm in a step challenge with a co-worker who got 11,000 ahead of me yesterday. Let's see...

On Saturday I predicted hitting a new PR for total steps in a 7-day period on Thursday. I actually hit it yesterday: 151,791. I wound up getting over 18,000 yesterday, 65,500 for the weekend. And now, I am sore. But I have to give a shout-out to my new Keens, the best hiking shoes I've ever bought, and which I wore for the first time on Saturday's walk.

It's gloomy, foggy, rainy, and not all that warm today, so I'm doing very little of value. I'll probably do something of value tomorrow, though.

The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today. But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.

A Swedish psychologist has preliminary data that suggest sleeping in on the weekends can make up for some sleep loss during the week, maybe: Sleeping in on a day off feels marvelous, especially for those of us who don't get nearly enough rest during the workweek. But are the extra weekend winks worth it? It's a question that psychologist Torbjorn Akerstedt, director of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University, and his colleagues tried to answer in a study published Wednesday in the Journal...

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...

Yesterday Parker got fitted for a new E-collar after I discovered that his long nose and long tongue were just long enough to lick his sutures. Fortunately the incision doesn't seem irritated or infected, probably owing to the massive doses of antibiotics we've got him on. As for the primary injury, that seems to have healed remarkably well in the few days since his surgery. He's putting more weight on the leg, and has less trouble standing up. He still seems a little shaky in some postures...

Cone of shame, shaved leg, drugged out of his mind: that's my boy. But at least he's home: As I've been saying, the next few weeks will be rough. But he's going to get lots of attention, especially between now and Monday. And then there's this: He has physical pain, I have psychic pain. All because he ran up some stairs too fast. Again: ouch.

Welcome to day 4 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. After yesterday's more theoretical post on the CLR, today will have a practical example of how to connect to data sources from C# applications. Almost every application ever written needs to store data somewhere. If you're deploying a .NET website into Microsoft Azure (like this blog), you will probably connect it to an Azure SQL Database. Naturally, Visual Studio and C# make this pretty easy. Here's the code that opens up a database connection and...

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.

Man, I've needed this for a while. It's 11:15 on a Monday, after doing nothing of commercial or professional value for an entire weekend, and I'm finally at Inbox Zero for the first time in months. My to-do list currently has 30 items (plus 6 already finished) ranging in complexity or duration from "set up coffee with so-and-so" to "45,000 steps." Inbox Zero was not on the main list, but my inbox is itself a to-do list, so that counts too. In a few minutes I'll have finished with the physical items on...

In the last seven days, these things have happened: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the worst Secretary of State in modern history?) got kicked out in typical Trump Administration fashion (i.e., without notice and on Twitter). This may have had something to do with him stating firmly that... ...Russian operatives attempted to assassinate a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, resulting in... ...the UK government expelled 23 Russian diplomats after determining that the assassination attempt...

Yesterday I did, in fact, hit 25,000 steps. I ended the day with 28,828. I considered going for one more 15-minute walk to hit 30,000, but decided I'd had enough for the day, and went to bed—and got 7½ hours of sleep. This morning it was once again clear and crisp (but above freezing), so I walked to work, just over 6 km and one hour of walking, and about 7,000 steps. So at 11am, I've already got 9,200. With a forecast 11°C and an Apollo Chorus rehearsal 5 km away, I might hit 20,000 again today....

Finally! It's a clear, sunny, above-freezing day in Chicago with no snow left on the ground. So far I've gotten over 20,000 steps, and if I keep walking around various neighborhoods, I'll clear 25,000. (I've done that only 13 times since October 2014. I've hit 20,000 on 66 days, or about 5% of the time.) Of course, that means not a lot of blog posting this weekend. Sorry.

On Thursday I hit all my (admittedly non-taxing) goals for the day. And yesterday, on into this morning, I almost did again, except that making three of the goals interfered with making the fourth. Goal #1: See the Churchill War Rooms. Having recently seen "Darkest Hour," I wanted to see the rooms where it happened. I did, and they were really cool. Goal #2: Visit three more pubs. I had planned to check in again at 214 Bermondsey, then head up to Ye Olde Mitre before stopping again at The Ship Tavern. I...

Too much to read today, especially during an hours-long download from our trips over the past two weeks. So I'll come back to these: The CIA recently fired Lulu, a black Lab, because she didn't want to sniff for bombs after all. But more seriously: Josh Marshall calls out White House Chief of Staff for making the detestable argument that an attack on the President is an attack on the troops. Alex Shepard at New Republic just shakes his head sadly. London is running adverts aimed at cleaning up its air...

I'm in Northern Virginia for a project meeting tomorrow, so not much to post today except that I'm here. Tomorrow, though, should be very interesting. I hope to have photos. But it will soon become clear why I might not actually have any photos. Team meeting at 8am Eastern, and it's midnight, so off I go for now.

Today is my birthday, which makes this year's Beloit College Mindset List even harder to read: Students heading into their first year of college this year are mostly 18 and were born in 1999. 2. They are the last class to be born in the 1900s, the last of the Millennials --  enter next year, on cue, Generation Z! 11. The Panama Canal has always belonged to Panama and Macau has been part of China. 12. It is doubtful that they have ever used or heard the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem. 16. They are...

Articles I haven't got time to read until later: Tropical storm (and former hurricane) Harvey has dumped more rain on Houston than the city has ever seen, and it's still coming down. The Chicago Tribune recaps last night's Game of Throne finale. (I've already read the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.) Greg Sargent says President "Trump is dragging us towards a full-blown crisis" which leaves open the question what the ongoing crisis actually was already. On the same topic, James Fallows...

My office to my house is just over 7 km, so I try to walk home when I can. This week, I have walked home every day, which is not hurting my step count. I have no idea how much I'll be able to walk next week, so this will help.

I'm in New York for a friend's wedding this weekend, so light posting, depending on what blows up in Washington tonight. Josh Marshall is already in total freak-out mode. But President Trump tends not to do any work over the weekend, or in the evenings, or at all. Anyway, regular posting returns Monday.

Chicago temperatures stayed below 32°C for almost nine months: September 7th all the way until last Sunday, June 4th. Then we had absolutely gorgeous weather during the last work week, which all ended on Saturday when the temperature hit 32°C for the first of (so far) three times. Our forecast calls for continued hot and shitty weather through at least Thursday. Hey, it happens every year. And our cool weather was pretty good while it lasted. The bad part is that the temperature killed my Fitbit numbers...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago held its annual benefit on April 7th, with me as benefit chair. We raised more money than at any previous benefit, as far as we know. I've got some photos to post; here's the first, of soprano Meaghan Stainback and alto Molly Mikos:

As you can tell by the dearth of posts lately, I've been a little busy. Apollo After Hours was a raging success but took a lot of effort, particularly while I dealt with some unprecedented (for me, anyway) workplace insanity. According to my Fitbit, the last time I got more than 7 hours of sleep was the night of Sunday March 26th, more than two weeks ago. The night of After Hours I got 3:43; the weeks of March 27th and April 3rd I got averages of 6:35 and 6:01, respectively. Clearly this is not good....

The windows at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters are all open—yes, on February 17th—because it's 18°C outside. This is the normal high temperature for May 1st. Parker's having a bath, too, so the weather is great for him to walk home from the doggy daycare place.

I took a personal day yesterday to get my teeth cleaned (still no cavities, ever!) and to fork over a ton of cash to Parker's vet (five shots, three routine tests, heartworm pills, one biopsy, $843.49). That and other distractions made it a full personal day. So as I start another work day with the half-day of stuff I planned to do yesterday right in front of me, I'm queuing up some articles again: Then and Now, Armitage-Bissell Programming is Hard The Founding Fathers' Power Grab The Chicago Tribune...

Tonight I've gotten invited to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda speak at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and after that, a masquerade. Then tomorrow is Chicago Gourmet. Then Sunday I'll either plotz or walk 30 kilometers. (Though in truth I'll probably be fine as my cold, tapering though it is, makes me not want to indulge too much.) Meanwhile, here are some articles that I may read in the next few hours: This month has been really hot and rainy in Illinois. Bleah. One more thing Trump is wrong about: Stop and...

Here are some things that are occupying me while I figure out who delivers matzoh ball soup: Andrew Sullivan recounts his time being an Internet addict. The Daily WTF explains how not to do caching. Deeply Trivial talks about natural-language processing. CityLab bemoans Chicago's crime wave. The AP describes how Trump screwed Gary, Ind., in much the same way he would screw the entire country. I also have a book or 50 somewhere. And I need a nap.

What can I say? I have nerdy friends. Also the weather forecast for the Faire calls for sunny skies and 26°C—damn close to perfect. Only question is, should I bring my real camera?

Yesterday's walk had a number of consequences, including some discomfort that has persisted until today. But I also blew away my Fitbit personal records. Yesterday's results: Which makes my top 5 now look like this: 2016 Jun 16 40,748 2016 Jun 8 32,315 2015 Apr 26 30,496 2016 Mar 8 29,775 2015 Jun 15 28,455 Yesterday's weather worked out, too. It was almost completely overcast, until I hit the heavily-wooded sections of the trail up in Glencoe and Highland Park. And it was cool; I don't think it got...

I'm traveling to the Land of Uk (aka The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) next week, which got me wondering if I've actually seen the country in every month of the year. So I worked it out, and yes, as of 1 September 2013, I've seen the UK in every month of the year: January 2001, 2010, 2011 February 2001, 2010, 2015 March 2012, 2014 April 2011 May 2009, 2015 June 1992, 2014, 2015, 2016* July 1992 August 2009, 2013 September 2013, 2015 October 2002, 2009, 2012, 2014 November 2001...

After yesterday's epic walk (from which Parker recovered in just a couple of hours) I realized it wouldn't be that difficult to get another 10,000 steps. So I did: That's a new PR. It was also 27.08 km—another PR. So the top 5 (as I mentioned back in March) are now: 2016 Jun 8 32,315 2015 Apr 26 30,496 2016 Mar 8 29,775 2015 Jun 15 28,455 2015 May 2 26,054 I'm not moving as quickly today as I did yesterday, but I'm pretty happy about blowing past my previous PR. Now I have plans for some day in the next...

We had perfect weather this weekend, including for last night's performance of Mahler's 2nd, and it's still pretty epic, which is why I haven't posted a lot. Except for a brief interval to do a stupid task in my office, and after catching up on Game of Thrones, it's time to take a walk. Not sure when I'll be back. I haven't hit 25,000 steps since March 8th, and I've only hit 30,000 steps once. I don't think I'll hit either today, but if I do, I'll blog about it.

With two performances and two rehearsals over the weekend, I didn't have any time to post. I also didn't have as much time as I wanted to walk, though I did manage 20,249 steps for the weekend. (That was a little disappointing, especially because yesterday's weather was perfect for being outside.) Meanwhile, the chorus have finally put up videos of our April fundraiser. So, yeah, we did this: I'll leave finding videos of me holding a puppet as an exercise for the reader.

It's great that I spent 21 of 44 hours in Bend asleep. Yeah, that's just special. It's a beautiful day both in Oregon and in Chicago today, which is why I'm even happier to be inside the PDX terminal. Still, the extra-special-fun symptoms I've experienced over the last two days seem to have subsided. I may attempt to eat solid food in a few minutes, which I haven't done since 9am yesterday. Can I get a do-over, please?

Friday went long, so yesterday was pretty quiet. The Apollo Chorus had its annual fund-raiser on Friday. As one of the volunteers, I tagged along to the official after-party, which turned into two subsequent unofficial after-parties, and a completely lazy day yesterday. We should get preliminary results on the total fundraising take by tomorrow's rehearsal. We did get a pretty good haul at the door, and during our "Money Song," which included a challenge grant that got completely used. So, in all, great...

The final score from my FitBit challenge over the weekend was: friend, 33,800; me, 37,800. Yesterday I gave Parker 3 hours of walks and also walked home from dinner instead of taking public transit or a Divvy, which got me almost to 23,800 steps (and 17.7 km) for the day. There was a cost. My feet hurt, Parker was lethargic this morning, and I ate too much. And this week it's not likely I'll get 10,000 steps in every day this week because I've got an all-day meeting Wednesday. Which is probably a good...

Apparently, Chicago's Divvy is really popular with tourists—and tourists have trouble returning the bikes on time: Chicago's Divvy bicycle-sharing program took in up to $2.5 million during its first five months, a figure driven by tourists and others who bought daily passes and racked up the majority of overtime fees, according to a trove of preliminary customer data provided by city transportation officials. As much as $703,500 came from late charges, which kick in when bicycles aren't returned within...

The Atlantic Cities blog sounds the alarm about London's bike share program: While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme's major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes. None of this would matter much if...

This rocks: The so-called "Starpath" is a type of solar-enhanced liquid and aggregate made by Pro-Teq Surfacing, a company headquartered southwest of London near the awesomely titled town of Staines-upon-Thames. It's in the prototype phase, with a test path running 460 feet in a Cambridge park called Christ's Pieces. (The British and their delightful names!) The material works by absorbing UV rays during the day and later releasing them as topaz light. In a weird feature, it can somehow adjust its...

My experiment with Divvy—the ugliest form of transportation in Chicago—continues. Yesterday I took, I think, five Divvy rides of varying length, and ran into a problem that will always exist in their model. It wasn't weather. In fact, on reflection I believe that being able to park and forget the bikes means not caring at all about whether it's going to rain later. If it does, all one needs to do is take another way home. No, yesterday I encountered a supply problem at the remotest Divvy station on the...

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...

Someone appears to have slacked off from his exercise program:

Apparently there will be a series of bike races just outside my office window on July 22.

Even though I'm not riding my bike as much as I should (though this is about to change), I've finally got off my butt and put my Google Earth tracks from 2006 and this year.

Today is the Apple Cider Century, which I am not riding today because of the late unpleasantness. At this writing (noon in Three Oaks, Mich.), it's 15°C (59°F) with light West winds and nary a cloud to be found. Perfect riding weather. Sigh. Tomorrow and Tuesday are supposed to be beautiful as well. Tomorrow morning I meet with my surgeon for my post-op follow-up, and perhaps he'll declare me fit enought to ride again. If so, I'll at least get to spin a little on the last warm day of the year.

Note: These "site news" historical posts come from the original data sources in the proto-blog that debuted on the Q2 website in May 1997. Thursday 12 February 1998 Total eclipse approaches The only solar eclipse visible in the United States this year will begin at 9:50 EST on Feb. 26. The moon will completely obscure the sun over equatorial South America from 10:48 until 12:09 EST. Most parts of the U.S. should see a partial eclipse. Americans will not see either 1998’s second solar eclipse, on Aug....

Note: These "site news" historical posts come from the original data sources in the proto-blog that debuted on the Q2 website in May 1997. Thursday 1 January 1998 Dave gets pager (19:30 EST) Your web designer’s employer, Q2, has provided him with a pager for an indefinite period. If you don’t already have the number, call or email Dave to get it. Q2 gets yet another voicemail system (19:40 EST) Q2, your web designer’s employer, switched last week to a Bell Atlantic voicemail system that works. You will...