Ah, how lovely to be at the beach in Chicago tonight. Just look at it:
Oh, just kidding. That's actually Miami Beach at sunrise in January 2007. This is what Lake Michigan looked like this evening:
The video's resolution isn't high enough to show the snowflakes proceeding in a generally horizontal fashion to the south. Nor does it show my dog, who couldn't decide whether all that snow and water was freaky or fun. (He ultimately decided the water was freaky, the snow was fun, and getting toweled off feels great.)
In Chicago, we get about 10 days a year like this against about 20 leave-work-early-it's-too-gorgeous-out days:
Current conditions at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters: 1°C, winds from the north at 46 km/h gusting to
57 km/h, with snow. Oh, it gets better, according to the National Weather Service:
Today: Snow and areas of blowing snow. Temperature falling to around -4°C by 5pm. Very windy, with a north wind between 45 and 65 km/h, with gusts as high as 90 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total daytime snow accumulation of 4 to 8 cm possible.
Tonight: Snow and areas of blowing snow before midnight, then areas of blowing snow and a slight chance of snow after midnight. Low around -12°C. Wind chill values as low as -22°C. Very windy, with a north northwest wind between 50 and 65 km/h, with gusts as high as 80 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of less than one centimeter possible.
Again, though, I have to remind my fellow Chicagoans: for every day we get like this, we get two or three where you don't want to go back inside.
Sullivan included my note to him about The Duke of Perth in his thread on America's corner pubs. The whole thread is worth reading, as most Americans don't seem to know that such thing as a corner pub exists—except those of us who live in actual cities:
I'm sitting in a great pub in Chicago right now: the Duke of Perth. It's walking distance from my apartment, has wonderful Shepherd's Pie (though they assure me it contains no shepherds), Theakston's Twisted Thistle IPA on draught, and 90 varieties of single-malt Scotch. It also has no TVs, free WiFi, and two active fireplaces. Bonus: it's owned by a guy who immigrated from Scotland.
Sullivan's blog has hundreds of thousands of page views per day.
Lincoln Park, Chicago, this morning:
Parker hasn't gotten to play in this yet because I had an 8am class, but as soon as that's over we'll hit the park. Welcome to winter:
Remember that bit about our unusually warm autumn? Meteorological winter began yesterday, leaving no doubt of its arrival:
Chicagoans shivered through the coldest December open in 27 years Wednesday. The day's biting 48 to 56 km/h gusts generated wind chills which ranged from single digits to the mid teens [Fahrenheit] as bursts of snowfall dusted the ground and produced the city's first measurable (3 mm) accumulations at Midway and O'Hare. The snowfall generated patches of black ice which led to a number of traffic accidents on I-65 while wrecks forced state police to close of sections of I-69 north of Indianapolis for a time.
Wednesday's -3°C high was not only the coldest to occur this fall, it was 7°C below normal and nearly 16°C colder than the month's 13°C open a year ago. Not since the -4°C high Dec. 1, 1983 has a December opened any colder here. It's interesting to note that the month which followed produced a -32°C Christmas Eve low temperature.
Over at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, we'll get to experience the cold weather in an extra-special way when guys come to replace half of our windows. They were scheduled to do it back in October, but, wouldn't you know, they were waiting on their suppliers...
The Chicago Tribune reported this morning that average Chicago temperatures have remained above normal month by month for the past nine in a row:
The temperature trend to date may be among the most remarkable on record for the period here. November 2010 is to become the ninth consecutive month to close with a temperature which has averaged warmer than normal. That's a nearly unprecedented accomplishment. It means meteorological spring (March through May), meteorological summer (June through August) and meteorological autumn (September through November) have each finished above normal. An in-house analysis of Chicago's seasonal temperatures indicates there have only been two instances since Midway Airport observations began in 1928--the years 1998 and 1999--in which spring, summer and autumn have ALL been above normal--including each of their constituent months!
The report also mentions we've had the sunniest autumn in 11 years.
Of course, it's almost December, which means relative warmth can still mean absolute misery. Alaska has sent us a storm which should arrive Saturday morning, bringing the first significant snowfall of the year.
This month has set the record, and it's only the 22nd:
Chicagoans have been soaking up sunshine at a record rate this month in what has been the sunniest October to date. So far this month the city has recorded 86 percent of its possible sunshine, surpassing the previous Oct. 1-21 record of 84 percent established in 1958. Another mostly sunny day is on tap for Friday before a weekend storm promises to bring extensive cloudiness along with the city's first significant rainfall since October's opening three days....
And then there's the new sunshine provided by Wikileaks:
The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.
But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.
Endless war.
(Apologies to Bill Cosby.)
The Chicago Tribune reported today that Chicago needs more software engineers:
With a national unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, many people assume employers have their pick of applicants for any job, McCombs said. Not so. Within every down job market exist bright spots, which in Chicago means tech jobs, particularly for software engineers.
The continued growth of the Internet and mobile technology is fueling the increased demand for IT professionals, McCombs said. Computer application software engineers will be the fastest growing job category over the next eight years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects a 32 percent increase in the number of computer software engineers between 2008 and 2018. The total work force is expected to grow 8 percent during the same period.
...
"I feel we're at 100 percent employment" for highly qualified software engineers in Chicago, said Zach Kaplan, chief executive at Chicago-based Inventables, an online marketplace for materials and technology. The company gets flooded with applications when it posts nontechnical jobs, but it struggles to find software engineers.
So, what about a software engineer with 17 years of experience and (soon to be) two graduate degrees? Would that be worth something to you?
Sometimes you can't make these things up:
Chicago election officials say crews will work overtime to reprogram thousands of electronic voting machines that mistakenly list a gubernatorial candidate's name as "Rich Whitey" instead of Rich Whitney.
Chicago elections board chairman Langdon Neal said 530 machines being used for early voting and an additional 4,200 destined for the Nov. 2 election will be reprogrammed and retested.
The mistake in the Green Party candidate's name appears on a review screen that allows voters to double-check their selections and not on the screen where the vote is registered. It also is not on paper ballots, Neal said.
Heavens, where does one go with this...