Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.
Crain's reports this hour that the Evanston City Council has approved a 31-story, 447-unit apartment building right next to Inner Drive Technology World HQ v2.0:
Chicago-based Vermilion Development has submitted a zoning analysis application for a 447-unit, 330-foot-tall building at 605 Davis St., with ground-floor retail space, according to a report from the city manager.
If built, a tower of that height would eclipse Orrington Plaza, currently Evanston’s tallest building at 277 feet.
The suburban apartment market is virtually full, with the median net rent rising 3.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2024, according to data from Integra Realty Resources. Evanston is an especially popular residential market with a built-in renter base of Northwestern University students and staff.
The lot in question is this one, visible in this IDTWHQ Office Cam view from July 2005:
IDTWHQ moved there on 18 January 2005, 20 years ago next week. In a year or two, the only thing visible from that office will be a blank wall. (On 4 October 2005, I moved to IDTWHQ v3.0, across the hall from v2.0.)
Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed regional trains. Only a few of these stories help:
I'm also spending some time looking over the Gazetteer that underpins Weather Now. In trying to solve one problem, I discovered another problem, which suggests I may need to re-import the whole thing. At the moment it has fewer than 100,000 rows, and the import code upserts (attempts to update before inserting) by default. More details as the situation warrants.
Item the first: Weather Now got an update today. Under the hood, it got its annual .NET version refresh (to .NET 9), and some code-quality improvements. But I also added a fun new feature called "Weather Score." This gives a 0-to-100 point value to each weather report, showing at a glance where the best and worst weather is. A perfect day (by my definition) is 22°C with a 10°C dewpoint, light winds, mostly-clear skies, and no precipitation. The weather at O'Hare right now is not, however, perfect, and only rates a score of 56.
Item the second: The Daily WTF has a really good, long summary of how the Y2K problem actually got solved. It's worth a read:
25 years on, it's really hard to capture the vibe at the close of the 90s. We'll focus on the US, because that's the only region I can speak to first hand. The decade had a "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," aspect to it. The economy was up, lifted in part by a tech bubble which had yet to pop. The AIDS epidemic was still raging (thanks, in part, to the disastrous policies of the Reagan administration). Crime was down. The Columbine Shooting was hitting the national consciousness, but was only a vague hint of the future of mass shootings (and the past, as mass shootings in the US have never actually been rare). The Soviet Union was at this point long dead and buried, and an eternal hegemony of the US seemed to be the "end of history". On the flip side, Eastern Europe was falling apart and there was war in Kosovo. Napster launches, and anti-globalization protests disrupt cities across the country.
When you add the Y2K bug into the mix, people lost their goddamn minds.
Enjoy both.
Despite getting back to a relative normal in 2023, 2024 seemed to revert back to how things went in 2020—just without the pandemic. Statistically, though, things remained steady, for the most part:
- I posted 480 times on The Daily Parker, 20 fewer than in 2023 and 17 below the long-term median. January and July had the most posts (48) and April and December the fewest (34). The mean of 40.0 was slightly lower than the long-term mean (41.34), with a standard deviation of 5.12, reflecting a mixed posting history this year.
- Flights went up slightly, to 17 segments and 25,399 flight miles (up from 13 and 20,541), the most of either since 2018:
- I visited 3 countries (Germany, the UK, and France) and 5 US states (Washington, North Carolina, Arizona, California, Texas). Total time traveling: 189 hours (up from 156).
- Cassie got 369 hours of walks (down from 372) and at least that many hours of couch time.
- Fitness numbers for 2024: 4,776,451 steps and 4,006 km (average: 13,050 per day), up from 4.62m steps and 3,948 km in 2023. Plus, I hit my step goal 343 times (341 in 2023). I also did my second-longest walk ever on October 19th, 43.23 km.
- Driving went way down. My car logged only 3,812 km (down from 5,009) on 54 L of gasoline (down from 87), averaging 1.4 L/100 km (167 MPG). I last filled up April 8th, and I still have half a tank left. Can I make it a full year without refueling?
- Total time at work: 1,807 hours at my real job (down from 1,905) and 43 hours on consulting and side projects, including 841 hours in the office (up from 640), plus 114 hours commuting (up from 91). For most of the summer we had 3-days-a-week office hours, but starting in November, that went back to 1 day a week.
- The Apollo Chorus consumed 225 hours in 2024, with 138 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 247 hours in 2023).
In all, fairly consistent with previous years, though I do expect a few minor perturbations in 2025: less time in the office, less time on Apollo, and more time walking Cassie.
Twenty five years ago this evening, I rang in New Year 2000 in the ops center at ING Barings in midtown Manhattan...and nothing happened.
Since then, people have largely bought into the myth that because nothing happened, the Y2K problem wasn't a real problem. I assure you, it was a real problem, thousands of programmers spent most of the late '90s fixing it.
Remember this when the Unix timestamp problem hits us on 19 January 2038. If my Social Security check that month gets delayed because everyone forgot how much work we did in 1999, I will be very cross. But, as that's only 13 years away, I'll probably be one of the people fixing it. Again.
Because Christmas came on a Wednesday*, and my entire UK-based team have buggered off until Monday in some cases and January 6th in others, I'm off for the long weekend. Tomorrow my Brews & Choos buddy and I will hit three places in Milwaukee, which turns out to be closer to downtown Chicago by train than a few stations on the Union Pacific North and Northwest lines.
Meanwhile, read some of these:
Enjoy the weekend. I'll have three Brews & Choos Reviews up before the end of the year, plus the 2025 sunrise chart for Chicago.
* That was also The Daily Parker's 9,500th post since the "modern" blog began in November 2005.
Once every seven years (on average), Christmas and New Year's Day fall on successive Wednesdays. Most other Christian holidays get around this problem by simply moving to the nearest Sunday. I guess the tradition of celebrating the church founder's birthday on a fixed day relates to birthdays taking place on fixed days. So we get Wednesday off from work this week because, well, that's the day tradition says he was born. This is, of course, despite a great deal of evidence in their own holy books that he was born in the fall, in a different year than tradition holds, and with only speculation about which calendar ancient Judeans used at that point.
All of that just makes this a weird work week followed by an annoying work week. Weird, because with most of my new team in the UK, tomorrow's 10 am CST stand-up meeting will have relatively poor attendance (it'll be 4 pm in the UK), and I've decided to bugger off on Thursday and Friday. Most of my developers—especially the UK guys—simply took the whole week off.
At least the ridiculously light work load gives me time to read these while I wait for confirmation that a build has made it into the wild:
Finally, a while ago a good friend gave me a random gift of an Author Clock, which sits right on my coffee table so I see it whenever I'm sitting on the couch. She just sent me a link to their next product: the Author Forecast. Oh no! They found me! Dammit, take my money! Bam: $10 deposit applied.
We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:
Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.
I just had a hilarious meeting with a vendor.
We (at my day job) use a JavaScript library for a small but useful feature in our application. We've used it for probably the app's entire 10 year lifespan and haven't given it a second thought. Recently, a security issue showed up on a routine scan, implicating the (obsolete) version we use. So we have to get the latest version, and company policy requires us to get a commercial license to protect our own IP.
So we got in touch with the vendor, which took some doing because this library has existed for such a long time and passed through so many owners.
First problem: the vendor's sales guy didn't have the first clue what our app does, even when explained three different ways. I feel like I spread a little knowledge into the world when I spelled "actuary" for him. I hope he reads at least the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
Second problem: after I guessed (inaccurately) how many actual customers use the app, he threw out a license fee of $12,000 per year. I had to choke back actual laughter. I said "well, that's not what we were expecting; are you sure that's the number you want me to take back to our head of engineering?"
In fact, our license costs would probably wind up around $2,000 per year. But given that an entire library of tools like Syncfusion offers would only cost $3,600 per year and would give us all kinds of bells and whistles, not to mention an actual support organization and frequent, predictable upgrades, even that seems high.
So, in conclusion, if you produce a tiny JavaScript library whose functionality can be found in a few dozen other libraries out there, you may want to reconsider requesting a license fee so high that the customer's only rational action would be to swap your library out for another one. If it takes one of our developers two entire days to put in a new library, it would still be cheaper than the requested license fee.
Remember: price is a function of supply and demand, not of wishful thinking.