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...

The American news and information radio network turns 50 today:

It's been a turbulent time, with a deadly pandemic and a chaotic — sometimes violent — political climate. In the midst of all this, NPR is marking a milestone; on May 3, 2021, the network turns 50 years old.

On the same day, in 1971, we started holding up our microphone to America. Just outside our doors, on the streets of Washington, DC, one of the biggest antiwar protests in American history was taking place. NPR's story is that of a ragtag network — born in the era of the Vietnam War and Watergate — one that came of age during the explosion of the 24/7 news cycle.

They've made their first-ever broadcast available for streaming, too.

On my horizontal monitor, I'm watching Apollo After Hours 2021, our chorus's annual benefit. Last year we deployed the 7pm video about now. This year we deployed it yesterday.

I've spent the last six years working very hard to spread the gospel of boring software deployments. I'm overjoyed that we had one this year with Apollo After Hours.

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:

Today is not only the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, it's also the 84th anniversary of the Nazi bombing of Guernica. Happy days, happy days.

In today's news, however:

• The European Union has announced it will allow fully-vaccinated travelers from the US to visit starting this summer.
• Chuck Geschke, who invented the portable document format (PDF) that we all know and love, died last week.
• The FAA revoked all of the certificates held by a 79-year-old flight instructor and aviation columnist after she (a) flew under a bridge and (b) allegedly turned off her transponder to hide this fact. Oopsi.
• Bruce Schneier starts his latest column with: "If you don’t have enough to worry about already, consider a world where AIs are hackers."
• Texas prosecutors dropped the felony embezzlement charge against a woman who had failed to return a VHS copy of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" to her local video store...in 1999.
• Chicago city attorneys have sued a northwest Indiana gun store for being the source of dozens of firearms used by criminals in Chicago.

I will now get lunch. And since it's 17°C right now (as opposed to yesterday's 5°C), I may eat it outside.

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth:

• The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet.
• Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100.
• Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA "the Met") to provide HPE Cray EX supercomputers capable of 60 petaflops and storing 4 exabytes of data.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has begun running brand-new, Chicago-built rail cars on the Blue Line, which runs from O'Hare Airport through the Loop and out to Oak Park.
• Guthries Tavern, a Chicago institution since the 1930s that closed because of the pandemic, will reopen under new ownership.
• Are you feeling blah in the late-stage pandemic? You could be languishing.
• Via Bruce Schneier, the New Yorker explains how North Korea has created an army of cyber thieves.

Finally, it looks like I'll have some really cool news to share about my own software in just a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

...and I still have another one to do, though I'm not sure if today's the day for it.

This year, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago annual benefit cabaret/fundraiser Apollo After Hours will once again go virtual, necessitating a lot more individual work and a lot less fun than doing it in person. I've just completed the easier of the two songs I need to record by yesterday. With rehearsing it, learning it, recording the audio, setting up the video, and uploading the audio and video files to Google Drive for our editor, it only took me...about two hours. The song runs 2:15; I sang only 21 bars out of 81, for about 40 seconds of singing; so the ratio of work to performance is about 50:1—including the 3 minutes where I videoed myself lip-synching to the accompaniment track and smiling benificently.

For comparison, we rehearse Händel's 2½-hour oratorio Messiah for about 12 hours total, for a 5:1 ratio.

And we have one more recording to do after After Hours, which I'll describe as we get closer to the "performance" date. Once that is in the can, I don't care if we have another pandemic, I'm never doing one of these again.

But hey, After Hours will be fun!

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.

Back in May, which seems like ten years ago rather than ten months, I started going through all my CDs in the order that I acquired them. I don't listen every day, and some (like Bizet's Carmen) take a bit more time than others (like a 4-song mini CD of Buddy Holly songs).

I've now arrived at about the middle of my collection, with a set of four CDs I bought on 19 September 1993. Holy Alternative, Batman. I had just started doing one shift a week at WLUW-Chicago, Loyola University's radio station, having made a deal to take the unpopular Saturday 8pm to midnight shift in exchange for doing whatever I wanted. They agreed, and I started the only Alternative show on what was then an all-dance station.

So the next four I've got cued up: the Charlatans UK Some Friendly, Eno & Cale Wrong Way Up, the Cure Disintegration, and U2 Zooropa.

These really take me back. Not that I'd experience my 20s again without knowing what I know now (or, at least, without the emotional maturity I've earned since then), but I did like the music.

We've spent 54 weeks in the looking-glass world of Covid-19. And while we may have so much more brain space than we had during the time a certain malignant personality invaded it every day, life has not entirely stopped. Things continue to improve, though:

• A local Evanston bookstore has joined a class-action suit against book publishers and Amazon for fixing prices.
• Natalie Shure criticizes the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, saying they have "dramatically exited one country's putrecsent ruling class...[and] officially leapt into another."
• Kathryn Schulz examines why animals don't seem to get lost, and what we can learn from them.
• Matthew Haag asks, what will Manhattan be like after the pandemic? (We could ask the same thing about downtown Chicago.)
• Local marijuana producer Green Thumb Industries has come under Federal scrutiny after allegations that it bribed politicians to secure retail licenses in Illinois.
• Brood X of America's 17-year cicadas will start re-emerging mainly in Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware at the end of May. Road trip! (Chicago's Brood XIII will re-emerge in 2024.)

Finally, today is the 40th anniversary of the day President Reagan got shot. I'm struggling a bit with the "40 years" bit.