The Daily Parker - Software|Blogs

Upgrade

David Braverman — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:16:44 GMT

After a lot of procrastination, I've finally upgraded The Daily Parker to dasBlog 2.3.

Nothing outwardly has changed, but apparently the developer community has fixed a ton of bugs and, more helpfully, upgraded to .NET 2.0. I don't have time at the moment to go through the entire feature list, but I'm sure there are a couple in there I'll use.

Mainly I was tired of having an item on my to-do list since October 2008. (I said "a lot of procrastination.")

No Cubs game tonight

David Braverman — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:58:39 GMT

Actually, there will be a Cubs game, in about 10 minutes, but I won't be there, for the following reasons: It's cold out, it's raining, and I have a financial accounting exam in about a week for which I am slightly more prepared than I am to swim the English Channel.

Instead of rainy Cubs photos, then, here is a great post about ghostwriting:

I recognize the paradox [of ghostwriting celebrity memoirs]: the bookstores are already happy to sell this kind of fraud, so why can't online authors engage in the same sort of duplicity? The answer is that online authors need to err on the side of honesty and integrity in order to support not only their own work, but the internet as both a medium and distribution platform.
... Speaking of frauds, do you remember Milli Vanilli? They’re a Grammy-winning singing duo who had to give their Grammy back when it was revealed that the people singing the Grammy-winning song weren't the stage-act duo who accepted the award. C+C Music Factory got into the same kind of hot water when they replaced a full-figured singer on one of their hit songs with a shapely non-singer for that song's music video.

As for the Cubs, well, they were eliminated mid-May, so oh well. Pitchers and catchers come back in five months.

Strange maps, including good beer

David Braverman — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:02:27 GMT

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

Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a handy refiguring of the results by population:

The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:

Colorado – 64.4

Oregon – 42.5

Wisconsin – 38.6

Washington – 16.2

Missouri – 15

Pennsylvania – 13.5

Massachusetts – 12.6

California – 12.8

Texas – 5.6

New York – 5.1

Also from Hollander, a report that Samoa changed sides:

As sirens and church bells wailed across Samoa just before 6am on Monday, drivers obediently stopped their cars. Then, after instructions issued over the radio by the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, they shifted to the other side of the road and ushered in history.

"After this announcement you will all be permitted to move to the other side of the road, to begin this new era in our history," Mr Tuilaepa told his people, warning: "Don't drive if you are sleepy, drunk or just had a fight with your wife."

Good advice, that.

It's really Spring after all!

David Braverman — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:48:11 GMT

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

Missed my own anniversary!

David Braverman — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:32:33 GMT

Last Thursday, The Daily Parker turned three.

Actually, yesterday, the dog turned 2 years, 5 months; but the blog is three years old.

And in honor of this august day in November, I hit "Post" three times before correcting all the typos.

I'm still here

David Braverman — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:10:58 GMT

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

Daily Parker post #1000

David Braverman — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:02:27 GMT

Yes, this is my 1,000th post since this blog started in November 2005.

I had hoped to write a long, introspective essay on blogging in general and this blog in specific over the years, but it turns out I have work to do today, so that will have to wait until the 2,000th post or so. (Many of you are fighting back tears, I know; though I suspect they're tears of joy.)

No, today I'm just going to mention the two most immediately relevant things that confronted me on my way to work today.

Cool little tool

David Braverman — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:03:18 GMT

I've just spent a few minutes putting together a little countdown clock for my blog. (Credit goes to Kris van der Mast for the code sample.)

What does it do? Well, it's driving the Dubya Clock and Other Countdown tools on the nav bar to the right.

Scary blog to read

David Braverman — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:44:09 GMT

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

Bolgiversary

David Braverman — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:36:17 GMT

The Daily Parker is two years old.

That is all.

Today's Daily Parker

David Braverman — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:24:33 GMT

Happy dog with tennis ball:

Today's Daily Parker

David Braverman — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:07:26 GMT

Parker has gone on vacation for a week while I'm at a professional conference. When I dropped him off with the dog sitter I felt pretty sad:

About this Blog

David Braverman — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:23:06 GMT

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 8-month-old mutt.

Long weekend

David Braverman — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:54:58 GMT

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

More later.

Holy missed anniversary, Batman!

David Braverman — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:10:58 GMT

Last Monday was the first anniversary of this blog. I completely forgot.

As pennance, I will now post this photo Anne took ten minutes ago (she and Parker are at home; I'm still at World Headquarters):

New ParkerCam

David Braverman — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:45:34 GMT

The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why.

Today's Daily Parker

David Braverman — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:43:29 GMT

Parker has discovered birds:

Today's Daily Parker

David Braverman — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:04:48 GMT

Last one from Meramec:

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

Chicago Public Radio publishes photo

David Braverman — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:06:25 GMT

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

Change your web links

David Braverman — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:18:52 GMT

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

Dogster?

David Braverman — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:41:29 GMT

Not content with being a contributor on The Daily Parker, Anne has created Parker a Dogster page.

Competition for TDP? Woof.

Fall cleaning

David Braverman — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:34:39 GMT

Both of my blogs are now up: the Inner Drive Software blog, in which I will write about matters of professional interest (i.e., software, computers, security, and business); and The Daily Parker, in which I talk about nearly everything else.

All of this required upgrading dasBlog on my servers, figuring out which theme to use, customizing the themes, and configuring the blogs. Despite my initial experience with dasBlog when I first started using it, I think the current version (1.9) is really quite slick and usable. Good work, Newtelligence AG.

I shall now do something completely different, like play with the dog.

Something has changed

David Braverman — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:37:44 GMT

I'm David Braverman, and this is my blog.

This blog has actually been around for nearly a year, giving me time to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Initially, I called it "The WASP Blog," the acronym meaning "Weather, Anne, Software, and Politics." It turns out that I have more than four interests, and I post to the blog a lot, so those four categories got kind of large.