After a several-week absence, the ParkerCam is back up.

Via Bruce Schneier, a true horror.

...died last night, aged 82:

William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

The UK humor site Daily Mash has a different take than, say, the Chicago Tribune:

THE price of a bushel of wheat rose yet again in the markets of Flanders yesterday presaging a monstrous tribulation and a grave rise in the price of mead, the Lord High Guardian of the King's Purse has warned.

...

The noble lord forewarned that a time of privation would surely be visited on the kingdom, when the peasant would find himself cast from his wretched midden and the knight dispossessed of his estates by the grubby moneychangers of old Lombard Street.

Via Calculated Risk, in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:

The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police.

Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson, a middle-age man who lived alone in the North Kenwood house.

...

Left holding the bag is Countrywide Home Loans, the nation's largest mortgage lender and a company whose practices are being scrutinized by the Illinois attorney general's office. Countrywide made mortgages of $450,000 on the property. Now it is likely to lose it all because it financed the sale of a home whose rightful owner was in no condition to sell.

Lovely.

I don't know how to introduce this comic, except to say that another developer sent it to me.

For those of you who missed it last night, we had a total lunar eclipse, which the cold, clear weather in Chicago let us see perfectly:

Forgetting for a moment the enormous expense of moving, I now have approximately 75% of my possessions in boxes in my living room. My new place is not only slightly smaller than my old place, but I've absorbed the entire Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters and International Data Center. (The IDTIDC takes up about one square meter of floor space, but five servers make a certain amount of noise.)

Photos later. For now, I'm back at work, trying not to think about the disaster area that is my new apartment...

Eight and a half hours later, I have single-handedly done the following:

• Moved four 23 kg rack-mount servers (sans rack);
• Moved four 23 kg uninterruptible power sources;
• Moved uncounted connectors, network cables, power cords, etc.;
• Updated all the DNS entries for the 33 domain names that point to said servers;
• Talked to three lovely people at my ISP's tech-support line to figure out why I couldn't connect to my new IP range (it was a PEBCAK issue on my end);
• Confirmed that my mail server can receive mail from everywhere; and
• Dropped my overall stress level by about 30%.

So now all I have to do is move a not-insignificant quantity of my mother's stuff, empty my current office, and empty my current apartment, then move the lot into my new place. Fortunately I have all day Monday to do that.

(Did I mention the three flights of stairs on the receiving end?)

Via Evanston Now:

The pension fund TIAA-CREF has closed on its purchase of the 10-year-old Park Evanston rental apartment tower at 1630 Chicago Ave. from the John Buck Company.

I mean, other than the process of moving, which isn't at all fun, is that I'm giving up access to a yard. The guy painting my new apartment pointed out to me that there are 46 steps from the alley to the third floor, and said this made getting the tarps and things into the place that much less fun. I pointed out to him that I will have to traverse all 46 steps, in every weather, in every state of health, every day, three times a day, because I can't train my dog to use a toilet. As far as Parker will notice, I'll walk him a lot more than I do now, which for him is good.

I will miss the yard, even if Parker won't care.

For the time being, I'm working on the top floor of the tallest building in Evanston, Ill. The view isn't too bad:

This morning I dropped Parker off at his new day camp, Urban Outsitters. Everyone was wagging when I left, though Parker seemed a little overwhelmed by the onrush of dogs. I was a little apprehensive, but I think he'll be fine. Do parents feel this way after dropping their kids off at a new school?

Yes, today I had my sixth consecutive flight cancellation. The sky is clear, visibility is 80 km, but the -19°C temperatures and 60 km/h wind gusts are just too much for the ancient Piper Warrior I rent.

Stay tuned.

The City of Evanston, my birthplace, bastion of good government, where I have lived for just over three years, has run out of road salt:

[Evanston Public Works chief] David Jennings says that on Wednesday "our salt supplier notified us that they could not honor the balance of our current order, about 1,100 tons, due to difficulties in getting their supply of salt to the distribution point that serves us."

Jennings says city crews have stopped salting residential streets, but are continuing to plow. "This means that most of these streets will develop 'snowpack' which is smooth in some areas, but tends to rut and develop a washboard surface as traffic packs it down."

I can attest to the 'washboard' surface as driving Parker to day camp the last two days was like driving over two miles of railroad tracks. Oh well, snow does melt eventually, and we should have above-freezing temperatures in a month or two.

I think Talking Points Memo is sounding just about the right note of alarm:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey...so far [has] dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration's warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it's not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it's not. ... It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical.

Can we make it 347 more days without Congress selling the farm?

Via Bruce Schneier, a fourth undersea cable providing Internet connectivity to much of the Middle East has been cut in as many weeks:

The first three have been blamed on ships' anchors, but there is some dispute about that. And that's two in the Mediterranean and two in the Persian Gulf. There have been no official reports of malice to me, but it's an awfully big coincidence. The fact that Iran has lost Internet connectivity only makes this weirder.

This may not be more important than tonight's primary elections, but it may be important.

I have to thank Mike Huckabee for comic relief just now, too.

Maria Shriver has endorsed Obama, just a couple of days after her husband, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, endorsed McCain. Interesting.