Since the beginning of Weather Now back in 1997, I have had total control over what users see on the home page. That changed today.
Now, once you have created a profile by logging into the app with your Microsoft account (O365, Live ID, Xbox, doesn't matter), you can change your home weather list. To add a station, simply go to any Current Weather page and click "Add to home page". This will take you to your Profile page, where you can see the entire list on the "Home page" tab.
Once there, you can remove any places you don't want. (The app populates your custom list with the default list the first time you add anything.)
Have fun with this! I know I will. I still have other features to write while my real job goes through a transition, so keep watching for more Weather Now updates.
Just a few more notes about last Saturday's 43-kilometer walk to Lake Bluff. First, some photos, including the obligatory BaháΚΌí Temple photo from about 14 km in:
And the Green Bay Trail in Glencoe, Ill., around 27 km:
The walk felt much easier than previous years, so I ran the numbers to find out why. For starters, this year I took longer (6:32:38) to get to 42.2 km than in 2020 (6:20:32) or 2021 (6:17:41)—but last year I took even longer (6:41:36), so that's only part of it. This year was the coolest, peaking at 22.8°C compared with last year's and 2020's 26.1°C and 2021's 24.4°C, which also helped.
But the most interesting data point turned out to be my heart rate. Here's the comparison of the four completions (remember, I didn't finish in 2022):
Zone |
2020 |
2021 |
2023 |
2024 |
Zone 2: warm-up |
8:44 |
0:00 |
8:29 |
1:33:15 |
Zone 3: aerobic |
4:00:41 |
1:40:19 |
4:09:15 |
3:40:19 |
Zone 4: threshold |
2:00:05 |
3:22:43 |
2:43:06 |
1:28:33 |
Huh. This year I spent the least time in the threshold zone, and over 20% of the time warming up, while in previous years I pushed myself a lot harder. I did that on purpose; I really didn't want to exhaust myself as I had in every previous year. I just wanted to enjoy the walk with my Brews & Choos buddy. Data: in all previous years I completely bottomed out my Garmin Body Battery score; this year I had 20 points left.
So, a couple of takeaways. First, most importantly, do the walk in October and not September. My birthday weekend almost always feels like summer even though it's officially autumn; mid-October, we've got cool weather. Second, if I manage my sleep, diet, and energy levels well enough, I can start next year's walk feeling great, and (third) if I manage my heart rate, I can end it feeling great, too.
But maybe it's OK to push a little harder. Could I have cut 15 minutes off my 42.2-km time by moving in the threshold zone earlier? Probably. Should I have left 20 points on the field? Probably not.
Before then, however, we're planning a Brews & Choos-ish like we did last November. Look for that in the coming weeks.
The most interesting news I have today comes from the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which voted 8-5 yesterday to lower the city's default speed limit from 30 mph (48 km/h) to 25 mph (40 km/h). Advocates have wanted this change for years. One influential group, People For Bikes, ranks Chicago 2,279th out of 2,579 cities in the US for bike friendliness almost entirely because of our speed limit. The change would instantly catapult Chicago to the top quintile of their rankings. Oh, and it would save a few dozen pedestrian lives each year.
Next up: an analysis by the New York Times showing that parking minimums dating back to the 1960s require that a new apartment building going up a block from a subway station in downtown Brooklyn has to have exactly 193 parking spaces, even though most of those spaces will likely never have cars in them. New York City has a mix of support and opposition to removing parking minimums, correlating almost exactly with the MTA subway map. This particular "transit-oriented" apartment block will have almost 200 unneeded parking spaces, though, because traffic engineering in the US hasn't progressed since 1961.
Finally, the Washington Post yesterday praised the simple townhouse, such as currently occupied by Inner Drive Technology's World Headquarters:
The new American Dream should be a townhouse — a two- or three-story home that shares walls with a neighbor. Townhouses are the Goldilocks option between single-family homes in the suburbs and high-rise condos in cities.
n the United States, [medium-density housing options] are scarce — they’ve been dubbed “the missing middle” because we need more homes of this size and spacing. And it’s here that we find townhouses.
The United States needs more homes — 3 million to 7 million, depending which expert you ask. In many parts of the world, the obvious solution would be to construct high-rises; however, financing and liability challenges for U.S. developers have meant almost no new condo construction since 2009.
I approve. Except for the four days of pounding, sanding, sawing, and yelling in Polish that I've experienced as my townhouse complex refinishes the stairs to the houses surrounding our courtyard, it's the perfect size and configuration for us. Yay townhouses!
Jim Fallows points out that XPOTUS backers and really horrible people Peter Thiel and Elon Musk surely know that the XPOTUS is losing it, so we need to think about what that means should JD Vance become VPOTUS:
Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention:
- Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago.
- Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to work for Thiel’s venture-capital firm in San Francisco and made his money there (before more money, from his book); and Thiel was the crucial donor in Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Senate. Recall that Vance’s success in Ohio two years ago was the rare big GOP victory in the purported “red wave” of that year. Vance is also an isolated success among the political proteges Thiel has funded, whose prominent failures include the right-wing extremist Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
- Musk, Thiel, and Vance himself are all savvy enough to recognize that Donald Trump is falling apart mentally, and perhaps physically, as the world watches. Should he and Vance be elected, the odds are overwhelming that Vance would sooner or later end up in control—through the 25th Amendment or by natural means.
About that last bit: the XPOTUS outdid himself the past couple of days, including uttering an obscenity at the Al Smith dinner (with the Catholic archbishop of New York sitting right there), and going on an extensive riff about the size of Arnold Palmer's penis before calling Vice President Harris "a shit vice president." And take a look at the transcript from his Univision town hall yesterday. Not to mention, of course, that he sounds a lot like our three favorite dictators from World War II. This is who half the country want as their leader.
While you ponder that, you can enjoy The New Republic's list of "the 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator." And then you can bloody well vote for Harris in 15 days.
Moving this annual 42 km walk to October really helped:
I'll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow. Right now...I'm a bit sore, but a lot less sore than I was last time.
The sun is just coming up over the trees east of my office, I'm having a bagel and coffee, and I'm checking the forecast for today's 42-kilometer walk:
Right now we've got 9°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, meaning a chilly start to the walk. But with the forecast high at our end point of 22°C with dewpoints under 6°C all day, and just a few clouds (bottom panel), I couldn't ask for better.
Here we go!
Cassie and I have gotten a full hour of walks today with the promise of more to come, as it's our third sunny day in a row, but today got above 19°C (though only up to 16.5°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ). I had two minor bugs to fix at Weather Now, but mainly I've had meetings today, so getting outside with the dog felt great. And tomorrow: a 42-kilometer walk.
Meanwhile, with 18 days left before the election:
Finally, the last Chuck E Cheese in Chicago has gotten rid of its animatronic band, opting for video screens instead. The youth of America weep.
Now if the crew repairing every single stair in my courtyard (which seems to involve hitting them all repeatedly with a hammer) would just go the f--- home, I could get some more work done.
I've just pushed Weather Now v5.0.9057, which has some of the coolest shit I've built into the app, ever. Introducing: maps and charts!
At my real job, I did an evaluation of charting tools for the app we're developing, and determined that Syncfusion had the best balance between ease and power. Boy, does it ever. I managed to get a community license for Inner Drive Technology and spent the last few days playing with it.
There are also a couple of bug fixes, and one change to cut down on all the screen-scrapers that have been hitting me (you have to register to get archival data).
I invite all Daily Parker readers to check out the new features, and please give me feedback. I think it may need some usability fixes, and I still have a lot of work to do on personalization—particularly around people selecting their preferred measurement systems.
Still, I'm jazzed at how quickly all the features came together, and how easy Syncfusion's tools are. I hope y'all enjoy the new toys.
As I've done a few times since 2020, I'm planning to walk a marathon distance this coming Saturday. Last year I got to 42.2 km in 6:41:36; this year I hope to break 6:30. The weather forecast looks incredible for Saturday, which makes me optimistic:
Starting nice and cool with the dewpoint staying below 9°C all day is perfect. Combine that with light winds out of the north (middle panel) and crystal-clear skies (bottom panel) and you've got perfect conditions for a long walk. Last year it got up to 26°C with a dewpoint of 15°C, which we did not enjoy all that much.
And that, of course, is why I moved the walk to October. The trees along the route are near peak foliage, the weather is cooler, the sun is lower in the sky and sets earlier—all things that should help our pace.
This should be fun!
A contractor punctured the iron casing around the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in New York City, but fortunately thousands of motorists escaped a horrible death:
Workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the tunnel, first noticed the curious downpour in the eastbound tube around 10 a.m. Leaks are not unheard of, and at first it appeared routine. An initial report indicated that officials suspected that the water was coming from a broken main on the Queens end of the tunnel.
But there was no evidence to support that guess. So, as the water continued to pour in, a tunnel worker performed a simple test using the most sensitive of instruments: his tongue.
The water, the worker discovered, was salty.
Immediately, it was clear that this was no burst pipe. City mains carry fresh water; salt water could only be rushing in from the river above.
[T]he cause of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s sudden failure was ... clear. Floating on the river, high above the tunnel, was a barge working on an entirely different infrastructure project, probing deep into the water with a large, red drilling rig.
When contractors punctured Chicago's Loop tunnel network in 1992, we got flooded basements. A QMT failure could have drowned thousands of people.