Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and would happily stay outside until she passed out from hypothermia.
So, bottom line, I'm in no hurry to take her for her lunchtime walk.
Besides, I've got a lot of interesting stories to read:
- Former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff explains why he's a liberal, and why you should be, too.
- Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman have some ideas about how to fix the United States' "two-party problem:" proportional representation.
- Block Club Chicago lists 10 of its investigations into the Chicago Transit Authority's mismanagement under its outgoing boss, Dorval Carter.
- Chuck Marohn explains why building tons of new housing in old, dense cities like San Francisco and NYC doesn't work as well as people hope.
- Two Illinois state representatives introduced a bill in the state House to decriminalize sex work, which would dramatically increase their safety and security.
- British computer scientist Peter Kirstein died five years ago, and left behind a delightful essay on the beginnings of the Internet—and the Internet's first-ever password.
- James Poniewozik has a fun history of TV show opening titles that will waste a few minutes of your afternoon (in a good way).
Finally, yet another coyote found his way into a store, this time an Aldi in Humboldt Park. Almost 17 years ago one of his ancestors tried to hide in a Quiznos sandwich shop in the Loop. The result was the same for both: removal and relocation. Block Club says yesterday's incident involved "rescuing" the coyote from the Aldi, but that seems pretty harsh. Like, was the coyote trying to go to Whole Foods instead? They're usually not that bougie.
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 Punzun Ltd.'s taxes to get the form declaring how much I made from Inner Drive Technology. In your country, I'd bet the government does all this for you, don't they?
I keep thinking of this clip from Remains of the Day:
The "gentleman diplomacy" conducted by British nobility in the 1930s exemplifies the maxim "any sufficiently-advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Once every seven years (on average), Christmas and New Year's Day fall on successive Wednesdays. Most other Christian holidays get around this problem by simply moving to the nearest Sunday. I guess the tradition of celebrating the church founder's birthday on a fixed day relates to birthdays taking place on fixed days. So we get Wednesday off from work this week because, well, that's the day tradition says he was born. This is, of course, despite a great deal of evidence in their own holy books that he was born in the fall, in a different year than tradition holds, and with only speculation about which calendar ancient Judeans used at that point.
All of that just makes this a weird work week followed by an annoying work week. Weird, because with most of my new team in the UK, tomorrow's 10 am CST stand-up meeting will have relatively poor attendance (it'll be 4 pm in the UK), and I've decided to bugger off on Thursday and Friday. Most of my developers—especially the UK guys—simply took the whole week off.
At least the ridiculously light work load gives me time to read these while I wait for confirmation that a build has made it into the wild:
Finally, a while ago a good friend gave me a random gift of an Author Clock, which sits right on my coffee table so I see it whenever I'm sitting on the couch. She just sent me a link to their next product: the Author Forecast. Oh no! They found me! Dammit, take my money! Bam: $10 deposit applied.
We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:
Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.
Stunning developments in the last 48 hours as Syrian rebels have taken Damascus and dictator Bashar al-Assad appears to have fled the country:
Mr. al-Assad’s departure after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat him for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. al-Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that had used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been rived with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
The biggest factors in the dramatic shift in power appear to be both Russia and Iran over-extending their own forces and pulling out of Syria:
Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese movement long backed by Iran in their shared fight against Israel, miscalculated in coming to Hamas’s aid in the war in Gaza by opening a front on the UN-demarcated blue line that separates the Lebanese from their Israeli neighbours.
After almost a year of tit-for-tat cross-border attacks that displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, Israel stepped up its campaign in September. It managed to wipe out much of Hezbollah’s command structure in airstrikes, including its longtime secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, and drove the group’s fighters away from the demarcation zone in a ground offensive.
Assad’s fall effectively severs the weapons, materiel and personnel route from Tehran to Hezbollah, particularly if Syrian Kurdish forces, which have expanded their control of the desert border between Syria and Iraq, remain in position with US backing. Hezbollah, already isolated, will be further weakened, making it more vulnerable to Israeli attack or infiltration.
The rebels promise to have free and fair elections as soon as possible. That would be the best outcome, however unlikely.
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:
Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...
I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.
Meanwhile:
Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.
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:
Finally, 35 years ago today I called my college roommate into our dorm room to watch live as Berliners took sledgehammers to the Wall. We didn't know what it meant other than we'd won the Cold War. Too bad we were still decades away from Aaron Sorkin's prescient words, "we'll see."
* "It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
You've heard the expression "crossing the Rubicon," but you may not know the history.
In the Roman Republic, the Rubicon marked the border of Italy (read: the Home Counties/Eastern Seaboard), where it was illegal to garrison troops. In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar ran out of lawful ways to—wait for it—avoid prosecution for corruption stemming from his first term as Consul, and the Senate denied him the governorship of Cisalpine Gallus (read: the Midlands/the Midwest) which would have also granted him immunity. So he and his XIII Legion crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome to force the Senate to make him Dictator of Rome. It worked out for Caesar, but not for the Republic.
The ensuing civil war killed a good fraction of the Roman population and conclusively ended the Republic. Then just days before the end of that conflagration, Caesar had his unfortunate accident in the Senate. This led to Caesar's great-nephew Octavian becoming Emperor shortly thereafter, starting a 400-year slow-motion disintegration of Roman civilization. And the distraction of all this prepared the ground in Judea for a fundamentalist sect to break off from Judaism and go on to bury the 1500-year-old Greco-Roman religion in the archaeological dust.
The relevance of this history to current events is left as an exercise for the reader.