Some asshole with a gun and an arrest warrant has blocked the entire length of North Lake Shore Drive as every cop in Illinois tries to prise him from his car:
A car chase through the South Side and downtown involving a man wanted in connection with a murder in Georgia ended with a standoff between the man and police after the vehicle crashed on Lake Shore Drive on the Near North Side, officials and witnesses said.
According to Harvey Police Department spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado, the man in the vehicle police were pursuing is wanted in connection with a murder in Hampton, Ga. Alvarado said that at 12:24 p.m. today, Harvey police had been contacted by the Henry Country Sheriff's Office asking for help in locating a homicide suspect. Harvey police were given a description of the vehicle, its registration, GPS location and arrest warrant information on the suspect, who was wanted in connection with a March homicide. Alvarado did not name the suspect.
Harvey police located the vehicle, which fled from officers about 12:27 p.m., beginning a chase on highways and interstates in the south suburbs and on the South Side of Chicago. Eventually the vehicle ended up on South Lake Shore Drive, and then North Lake Shore, where it crashed about 1:10 p.m. near Fullerton Parkway. The dark-colored vehicle came to rest in the grass just to the east of the northbound lanes there and police were seen surrounding it with guns drawn, pointing at the vehicle.
This seems like an overreaction, but I'm not a cop. I will say that it took me nearly 90 minutes to get from Wilmette to home this afternoon, which happens when the 40,000 cars that would ordinarily go down Lake Shore Drive during that period instead go down Broadway, Clark, Halsted, and Ashland.
The incident is still going on about 800 meters from my apartment. I'll know it's over when the news helicopters bugger off.
As predicted last week in private Kremlin memoranda, today's referendum in Crimea has determined that more people on the peninsula support union with Russia than actually live on the peninsula. As someone once said more eloquently than I:
But here's the BBC:
Some 95.5% of voters in Crimea have supported joining Russia, officials say. after half the votes have been counted in a disputed referendum.
Crimea's leader says he will apply to join Russia on Monday. Russia's Vladimir Putin has said he will respect the Crimean people's wishes.
Some review, I think, is in order.
First, Crimea doesn't have a leader that can apply for union with Russia any more than Long Island has a leader that can apply for union with Bermuda.
Second, Putin's respect for the Crimean people's wishes notwithstanding, I can't decide if we're back in 1980, 1939, 1914, or 1836; regardless, it's nice to have the USSR back in town as we're all sick of terrorists.
Third, is there anyone who thinks about these things seriously and believes that this action shows anything other than Russian weakness? Authoritarian leaders always make this mistake, and they wind up destroying their countries. You can't conquer your way to security. Just ask, well, us.
The news recently and Krugman this morning have brought Tennyson to mind:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Heroism has its place, but not when it takes everyone else through hell.
I've just picked up Bob Martin's The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
.
I'm just a couple chapters in, and I find myself agreeing with him vehemently. So far, he's reinforcing the professional aspects of the profession. Next chapters will TDD, testing, estimation, and a bunch of other parts of the profession that are more difficult than the actual coding part.
More later.
All four are dead:
Quiznos, the Denver-based sandwich chain, said Friday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, the second quick-service restaurant chain in a week to do so.
Quizno's bankruptcy filing comes just days after Sbarro, the New York-based pizza chain, filed for court protection in Manhattan on Monday, the second time in three years. Hot Dog on a Stick, another purveyor of quick-service food, in February also filed for bankruptcy protection.
This is unfortunate especially for Chicago-area coyotes, as they are known to like Quiznos.
Calumet Photo, one of the last real photography stores, has closed abruptly:
Calumet Photographic, a Chicago-based camera supply and photo services provider that first opened 1939, has abruptly closed its doors and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.
Calumet said on its Facebook page that it was closing its stores in the United States, but that its European stores would remain.
In its Chapter 7 filing, in which a company prepares to liquidate, it listed between $50 million and $100 million in assets and $10 million to $50 million in liabilities.
I rented lenses from them for my trips to Korea and Sint Maarten recently, and I found them truly helpful on other photographic issues. This is a big blow to photography.
Even though we have snow on the ground once again, the sun came out this morning, so my bus stop didn't look as grim as it did yesterday:
First, we get the worst cold and the most snow of any winter in the last 32 years. It even alienates many of its allies with its stubbornness in the face of popular (and meteorological) opposition, refusing to give up a fight it can't win. Finally, warm weather finally prevails, ending the snow's doomed effort to hold ground it will never be able to keep. This is Monday morning:
Then, just when we were loosening our scarves, Arizona hit this morning:
Winter, you're just making people despise you more. It's the middle of March already. Not only will you be gone and forgotten in two months, but an ENSO event is forming in the Pacific right now, so you won't even be back next season.
Go away, winter. You're obsolete, losing even your friends, and damaging the country.
I just did a dumb thing in Mercurial, but Mercurial saved me. Allow me to show, vividly, how using a DVCS can prevent disaster when you do something entirely too human.
In the process of upgrading to a new database package in an old project, I realized that we still need to support the old database version. What I should have done involved me coming to this realization before making a bucket-load of changes. But never mind that for now.
I figured I just need to create a branch for the old code. Before taking this action, my repository looked a like this:
Thinking I was doing the right thing, I right-clicked the last commit and added a branch:
Oops:
Well, now I have a problem. I wanted the uncommitted changes on the default branch, and the old code on the 1.0 branch. Now I have the opposite condition.
Fortunately this is Mercurial, so nothing has left my own computer yet. So here's what I did to fix it:
- Committed the changes to the 1.0 branch of this repository. The commit is in the wrong branch, but it's atomic and stable.
- Created a patch from the commit.
- Cloned the remote (which, remember, doesn't have the changes) back to my local computer.
- Created the branch on the new clone.
- Committed the new branch.
- Switched branches on the new clone back to default.
- Applied the patch containing the 2.0 changes.
- Deleted the old, broken repository.
Now it looks like this:
Now all is good in the world, and no one in my company needs to know that I screwed up, because the screw-up only affected my local copy of the team's repository.
It's a legitimate question why I didn't create a 2.0 branch instead. In this case, the likelihood of an application depending on the 1.0 version is small enough that the 1.0 branch is simply insurance against not being able to support old code. By creating a branch for the old code, we can continue advancing the default branch, and basically forget the 1.0 branch is there unless calamity (or a zombie application) strikes.
One of the funnier things I've seen recently: