The Daily Parker

Over the weekend, I stooped down to give Cassie some pats while she slept on her bed in my office, and realized I had a cache of turn-of-the-century computer games on a lower shelf. Among them I found SimCity 4, from 2003.

It turns out that SimCity 4, like many games from that era, relies on a thing called "SecuROM" which turned out to have sufficient security problems of its own that Microsoft decided not to support it in Windows 10. I didn't know this until I started researching why the game just...didn't work. When you find a support article that says "96 people have reported this problem" you at least know you're not alone.

So, following the advice in the support article, I opened a support case with Electronic Arts. We are now on a 24-hour cycle of them asking me to send back auto-generated codes to prove I'm an actual person with an actual copy of the SimCity 4 CD. This, after it took three rounds with their automated systems to set up a support account. The merry-go-round with their automated systems was irritating, but the 24-hour cycle time between emails just makes me laugh. I haven't actually taken the time 

After all that, I may actually play SimCity for the first time in 17 years at some point this month. I can't wait to see how a game designed for Pentium 4 processors and 256 MB of RAM performs on a Xeon 6C with 40 GB available...

Hello, CDC? I'd like to report some side-effects of my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. To wit: All I wanted to do on Friday was sleep. When I finally slept, my left arm was sore enough to wake me up a couple of times. But hey, I planned to sleep in yesterday anyway, so no biggie.

Cassie had other ideas. She poked her nose in my ear at 6:30. I shooed her away. At 6:45, she decided that the squirrel or bird or whateverthefuck outside had to die, and that was the end of my slumber for good.

According to my Garmin watch, the day I adopted Cassie I had averaged 7:48 of sleep a night for the preceding 30 days. My 7-day moving average hung out around the same value. As of today, my 30-day average has fallen to 7:17, and my 7-day moving average is 7:08 this morning. Most of this is Cassie. I have to go to bed at 10 to get a full night's sleep because the sun wakes her up at 6 and she wakes me up a few minutes later.

Now she's conked out on my office floor, and I desperately want a nap.

Sunday evening we had 4°C gloominess with gusty winds. Today we've got 28°C sunniness with gusty winds. We've also got a bunch of news stories to glance through while a build completes:

• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidance about the relative safety of various activities given vaccines and masks (see chart below).
• On this day 500 years ago, Ferdinand Magellan died when he got involved in an internecine dispute in the Philippines.
• Climate change will increase flood risks in places you might not expect, including (*ulp*) my own house.
• Ten Chicago restaurants made this year's Bib Gourmand list for the first time.

Cassie has plotzed on the sofa, probably from the heat and from spending all day yesterday at doggy day care.

And here's the CDC's latest chart:

The United Winthrop Tower Cooperative started life in the early 1970s as a public housing development. In response to rising crime and costs on the order of $1m a year, the residents bought the building from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993 and turned it into the affordable-housing co-op it remains today.

We had a really cool sunset Tuesday evening, so I snapped this on my walk with Cassie.

Everyone: D'awwwww!

Boy, did we get a clown car full of them today. Let's start with Joel Greenberg, the dingus whose bad behavior got US Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) caught up in a sex-trafficking investigation:

Records and interviews detailed a litany of accusations: Mr. Greenberg strutted into work with a pistol on his hip in a state that does not allow guns to be openly carried. He spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to create no-show jobs for a relative and some of his groomsmen. He tried to talk his way out of a traffic ticket, asking a police officer for “professional courtesy.” He played police officer himself, putting a flashing light on his car to pull over a woman and accuse her of speeding. He published an anti-Muslim Facebook post. He solicited help to hack critics on the county commission.

Stalking a rival candidate got him arrested. Federal agents looking into the matter found at least five fake IDs in his wallet and backpack, and kept digging.

Their inquiry culminated in 33 federal charges against Mr. Greenberg, 36, including sex trafficking of a minor, bribery, fraud and stalking — and led to a mushrooming political scandal that burst into national news in recent days and ensnared Mr. Gaetz, who is a close ally of President Donald J. Trump, and other influential Florida Republicans, with the investigation continuing.

I mean, of course they live in Florida.

Moving on, local restaurant Tank Noodle must pay back a $150,000 pandemic grant to the state because of previous bad behavior:

Tank Noodle will have to return the $150,000 business interruption grant it received from the state of Illinois last year. The popular Vietnamese restaurant at 4953 N. Broadway violated the terms of the state grant program by running afoul of federal labor laws, said Lauren Huffman, spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO).

The mandate to return the grant money comes weeks after Tank Noodle also was forced to pay almost $700,000 in back wages to employees it didn’t adequately compensate, federal investigators found as part of a two-year investigation.

Tank Noodle withheld pay and used illegal employment practices for 60 of its employees, a labor department investigation concluded. In addition to making servers work for tips, a violation of federal work laws, the investigation also found Tank Noddle shorted servers when the business pooled tips and divided the money among all staff, including management.

The restaurant drew ire from customers after its owners attended a Jan. 6 rally in support of former President Donald Trump that ended in the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Former customers, I should say. The stretch of Argyle Street they anchor has about 15 Vietnamese restaurants that not only serve better food than Tank Noodle, but also don't steal from their employees.

Finally, the Brennan Center has taken notice of 361 proposals in 47 states designed to limit voting participation:

These measures have begun to be enacted. Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law. In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).

During the same timeframe, pro-voter legislators, often in the very same state houses, are pushing back, seeking to make permanent the changes that led to the biggest voter turnout in over a century. In a different set of 47 states, 843 bills with expansive provisions have been introduced in a different set of 47 states (up from 704 bills as of February 19, 2021). Of these, nine expansive bills have been signed into law. In addition, at least 112 bills with expansive provisions are moving in 31 states: 9 have passed both chambers and are awaiting signature (including a bill to restore voting rights in Washington), 41 have passed one chamber, and 62 have had some sort of committee action.

I'll comb through some of those later. Now, I have a meeting, following which Cassie has to go to the dog park. Really, she has to, or I'll lose my mind with her nudging me.

Bit of a frustrating day, today. I spent 2½ hours trying to deploy an Azure function using the Az package in PowerShell, before giving up and going back to the AzureCLI. All of this to confirm a massive performance issue that I suspected but needed to see in a setting that eliminated network throughput as a possible factor. Yep: running everything completely within Azure sped it up by 11%, meaning an architecture choice I made a long time ago is definitely the problem. I factored the code well enough that I can replace the offending structure with a faster one in a couple of hours, but it's a springtime Sunday, so I don't really feel totally motivated right now to do so.

Lest you worry I have neglected other responsibilities, Cassie already got over an hour of walks and dog park time today, bringing her up to 10½ hours for the week. I plan to take her on another 45-minute walk in an hour or so. Last week she got almost 14 hours of walks, however. I blame the mid-week rain we got.

I also have a 30-minute task that will involve 15 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of tear-down, and 5 minutes of video recording. I will be so relieved next fall when all of our chorus work happens in person again.

Before I do that, however, I'm going to go hug my dog.

I got my first Pfizer Biontech jab this morning, and will get the second one in three weeks. So far, no side-effects. And Cassie seemed to enjoy being with me for the portions of the morning involving the car, though she didn't seem all that pleased with the car itself.

In related news, I've booked a flight for mid-May.

I feel better already.

You read that right. The UK has so few dogs available for adoption that organized crime has stepped in:

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the field for 35 years,” said Wayne May, police liaison with Dog Lost, Britain’s largest lost-and-found dog service.

May said thefts reported to his organization have increased 250 percent, year-on-year.

“That’s over 400 cases, just in England, just reported to us,” he said. “This isn’t a dog that’s run off. This is a reported case of theft.”

Investigators talk about the emergence of a new “puppy mafia.” They say some of the same traffickers who usually deal in prostitution, drugs and gun sales have turned to Labradoodles, unscrupulously exploiting the exploding demand.

“No papers, no shots record, nothing, and they pay £3,000 in a parking lot for a sick puppy,” said [Jacob] Lloyd, [senior investigator for] Animal Protection Services.

The report may be a little sensational, but I can't imagine losing Cassie to a dog thief. Violence might be justified.

It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon.

So, posting may be light this weekend.