The Daily Parker

The Inner Drive Technology World HQ weather station actually comprises four Netatmo components: an indoor base station, and outdoor station, a rain gauge, and an anemometer. The outdoor station lives in a white birdhouse in a shaded area on the east side of my house, the rain gauge is in a vertically-unobstructed corner of my west-side deck, and the indoor station is between the two so they're both comfortably within range. At the moment, the anemometer is on the floor of the west deck and doesn't get a lot of wind.

I have been waiting for a friend to stop by and hold a ladder so I could attach the anemometer to my standpipe on the roof. The roof comes down to about 2 m above a section of my upstairs walkway, so getting on the roof looked like it wouldn't be an issue.

Today, the friend stopped by, held the ladder while Cassie supervised, and watched as I easily got onto the roof. I quickly scampered on all fours up to the crest of the roof and saw that the zip ties I had in my backpack would be perfectly adequate for fixing the anemometer mount to the standpipe.

As I shifted my weight to stand up, I learned that my shoes did not provide nearly as much friction against the roof shingles as I had hoped—or, for that matter, as I needed.

Don't worry, I made it back to the ladder, but by sliding slowly down the roof the way I came up. I now have minor abrasions on both forearms, my right thigh, and the part of my belly that my shirt helpfully slid up to present to the asphalt-and-gravel tiles.

So if anyone in Chicago knows a handyman with appropriate footware, please send him my way. For now, WHQ will continue report really light and variable winds.

I just got back from a 30-minute walk with Cassie in 22°C early-autumn sun. We suffered. And now I'm back in my home office and she's back on the couch. She will spend the next several hours napping in a cool, breezy spot downstairs, and I will...work.

I will also read a bit, which is a skill that I'm glad Cassie does not have after encountering the day's news:

• It's official! The June jobs report showed a decline in US employment for the first time since December 2020, making President Biden the only president in history to have 48 consecutive months of job growth during his term.
• Dan Rather adds his voice to the chorus advising Senate Democrats to actually bring a knife to the knife fight they're about to have over a looming government shutdown on October 1st.
• Meanwhile, the OAFPOTUS continues driving the United States into a Perónist-style economic collapse for no reason other than his own incompetence. Paul Krugman worries that the OAFPOTUS's cratering popularity might not be enough to stop this.
• Matt Ford castigates Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts (R) for doing exactly what he tells other judges not to do: defying Court precedents. Jen Rubin rounds up reports of lower-court Federal judges saying similar things: "This intra-judicial fight is just the latest installment in the MAGA justices’ record of misbehavior and overreach."
• Pro Publica spent 15 hours with Leland Dudek, who oversaw the looting of the Social Security Administration after being illegally installed as part of the DOGE team by the Clown Prince of X.
• Jeff Maurer wishes people had known that RFK Jr is completely mental: "if only there had been signs that he’s an unqualified loon with out-of-the-mainstream views."
• Bruce Schneier questions the benefits of "AI in government," at least in the US.
• Because of Earth's axial procession, the Zodiac has shifted almost a full sign to the right in the last 2,000 years, making me a Leo and not a Virgo! (It's almost as if star signs are nonsense.)

Finally, the Chicago Dept of Transportation has published plans to designate Wellington Avenue a bike greenway from Leavitt Ave in North Center to the lakefront path. The project will include protected counterflow bike lanes on one-way segments of Wellington, traffic calming, signage, and a number of other features to protect bicyclists. The greenway will allow bikes to avoid Belmont and Diversey, two busy streets that aren't fun to ride on. CDOT expects to finish the project this fall.

Oh, and today is the 50th anniversary of Welcome Back, Kotter premiering on ABC. Let me tell you I'm Gen X without actually saying the words, right?

This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies.

I might have time to read all of these things as well:

• Jeff Maurer, who watched (some of) this week's televised cabinet meeting so we didn't have to, really hates this season of The Apprentice.
• Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (D) thinks the OAFPOTUS's "fascist capitalism" will ultimately bring down his regime.
• Jennifer Rubin asks, why is the OAFPOTUS administration trying to kill everyone?
• Paul Krugman likens our current economic situation to Wile E. Coyote not noticing he's run off the cliff.
• The Chicago Sun-Times has a map of all the lead pipes in the city. (I'm happy to learn that all of the water lines leading to my house are lead-free.)
• Rachel Janfaza wants to change the conversation around how the kids today use AI. Kyla Scanlon also dug into attitudes towards AI in the workplace.

Meanwhile, my birthday ribs order got delayed. One of the assistant butchers backed into a meat grinder, so they got behind in their work. He was the biggest ass in the shop until he recently got unseated, so I don't feel too bad for making him the butt of my jokes.

G'nite.

I finally broke down and tried Chat GPT 5, wasting no time to waste half an hour. The first thing I asked it for was to write a bit of code for me. I wrote similar code about 4 years ago, so I wanted to see if the LLM could at least match what I did. I was pleasantly surprised that, after two refining prompts, it came up with a better solution.

And then I had it do this:

(Image generated by Chat GPT v5 from original work by the author.)

For comparison, here's the original:

The Super Cassie image is the second attempt. I asked it to restore her fur color and texture and it wasn't able to. Also, I discovered that 3 images pretty much uses up the Free tier's compute limit, and it appears to have a 4-hour reset window.

At the moment, the subject of both images is sitting next to me, well within my personal space, poking me with her nose. She may need to go outside. So my time-wasting will have to continue later.

By the best count I have available, this is the 10,000th post on the Daily Parker, going back to the very first news item posted on my very first website in July 1997.

I am not entirely sure this is really the 10,000th post, however, for a number of reasons. First, BlogEngine.NET doesn't actually count posts; I've had to use some arithmetic. Second, I removed a small number (3 or 4) of posts over the years for various reasons. Third, at some point I merged some of the posts from the separate Inner Drive Technology blog that ran from 2006 to 2008. Finally, I count 13 November 2005 as the first post of the "modern" era, when the blog became an intentional blog instead of a blog in all but name, if that makes sense. I've only posted 9,795 times since then, as the previous 205 were just a scrolling list of jokes, notes, news, and...a blog that got maybe 1 post a month instead of 41 posts a month.

As I've mentioned in passing, however, I'm writing my own blog engine from scratch, which I plan to finish before the end of the year. At that point I will know exactly how many posts the blog has because the new software will keep better statistics than BlogEngine.NET does. I also plan to write an intelligent importer that merges duplicate content from the existing history while adding certain kinds of notes and other content as full blog posts.

So this is one of those times where we just call it #10,000 officially, and revise the number when we have better data.

But still, 10,000 posts and just over 28 years of blogging. I'd wager there are fewer than 1,000 of us in the world who have done that.

I don't scrutinize hobby project deployments as much as work projects for a lot of reasons, one of them being that I don't have a QA staff. So as much as I believe I do pretty cool things with Weather Now, I also know that sometimes things slip through.

Which is why I haven't gone out to play yet, though I will right after I hit "publish" on this post, which will happen moments after the second production deployment of the afternoon finishes. Oh, the first one was boring enough, and everything worked. I just think anonymous users probably shouldn't see naked user IDs on the Weather Lists page.

So, really cool release today, with that one pesky bit that affected...me. (Fortunately no one else created a public weather list in the 3 minutes between the first deployment and me discovering the oversight.)

OK. Cassie and I are heading to the dog park now. Have a great weekend.

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes.

When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
• Not only is the State Department's HR director a "RIF-happy, Christian evangelizing MAGA warrior with an axe to grind," he's also apparently kind of creepy.
• Former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper "set the record straight on Russian and 2016."
• James Fallows once again calls on everyone to help protect our institutions.
• Yascha Mounk sees the rise of AI as akin to the Industrial Revolution.
• After more than a century of slow traffic through Wrigleyville, the CTA finally straightened out a section of the Red Line to cut travel times for everyone, which unfortunately means more noise.
• The impending merger between the Southern Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads will have a huge impact on Chicago rail traffic—but no one yet knows whether it will be up or down.
• Molly White suggests using RSS readers instead of email lists to reduce the enshittification of news publications.
• Jeff Maurer, who spent several years writing for John Oliver as you may recall, wants to have a serious autopsy of late night television that includes all the uncomfortable topics.

By the way, the new Weather Now build allows users to create their own weather lists and share them with the world or keep them private. I've wanted to build this feature for a long time, finally starting work on it two weekends ago. Try it out and let me know what you think!

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again.

It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler:

[I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last year, why did Trump impose huge tariffs and leave many of them in place even after the so-called deal? Because he felt like it. You won’t get anywhere in understanding the trade war if you insist on believing that Trump’s tariffs are a response to any legitimate grievances. And he failed to gain any significant concessions, mainly because Europe was already behaving well and had nothing to concede.

So was the US-EU trade deal basically a nothingburger? No, it was a bad thing, but mainly for political reasons.

Two less discouraging aspects of what just happened: First, Trump appears to have backed down on the idea of treating European value-added taxes as an unfair barrier to U.S. exports (which they aren’t, but facts don’t matter here.) So that’s one potentially awful confrontation avoided, at least for now.

Second, if this trade deal was in part an attempt to drive Epstein from the top of the news, my sense of the news flow is that it has been a complete flop.

Still, if I were a European I’d be very angry at anything that even looks like Trump appeasement. The EU is an economic superpower, especially if it allies itself with the UK. It needs to start acting like it.

Oh, it will, I reckon. But for now, all the OAFPOTUS has done is to impose a 15% tariff on the United States in Europe and Japan.

Meanwhile:

• Dan Rather calls out the OAFPOTUS for (once more) enriching himself at taxpayer expense, and not just for spending $63 million on golf trips.
• Explaining to the Republican Party that we'll put down our guns when they put theirs down, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) warns that several large Blue states can also go full-Gerrymander, so maybe Texas should leave well enough alone.
• Crime has fallen dramatically in Chicago and other big cities across the US since 2020, and no one really knows why.
• Pro-Ukrainian hackers crippled Russian civil airline Aeroflot over the past weekend.
• Auto and traffic-safety writer Josh Max suggests that upping training and safety standards could reduce the 38,000 annual US traffic deaths, while ignoring the roles that road and city design play.
• The continued destruction of our environment under Republican administrations has led to the reddest districts in some places playing host to huge, noisy, climate-destroying AI data centers.
• On-premises Microsoft SharePoint Server installations suffered a catastrophic data breach in a zero-day attack starting Friday, which researchers say means any network with an on-site SPS instance exposed to the Internet must consider their user credentials compromised.

Finally, the New York Times has a look at Sesame Street's set design and how it has reflected changes in urban life over the last 56 years. "The show’s designers intentionally made the original set appear grungy, with garbage on the street, the brownstone spotted with soot and the color scheme appearing dull and muted. ... During a major redesign in the ’90s, the set introduced a new hotel and apartment building. The brownstone remained, and one of the show’s designers said it 'was meant to look like a survivor of gentrification.' After the show struck a deal to stream on HBO in 2015, the set appeared even shinier, newer and brighter." There's even a recycling bin next to Oscar's trash can. Sic transit, et cetera.

As promised, I just pushed new bits for Weather Now. Release 5.0.9340 corrects a couple of regression issues I introduced with the previous release, which happens more often than not after an architecture refactoring. End users will probably not notice any differences, except that for the last 10 days no one other than system admins have been able to edit their own home page weather lists. Now they can.

I have one more release of Weather Now planned for this summer, which will allow users to create multiple weather lists (which was the whole point of this round of refactoring) and view the site in French. All of the measurements and weather reports have been available in French and 8 other languages since 2007, but the version 5 release only had US English and Mexican Spanish. I have plans to restore all the other languages, I just don't have a lot of time or a lot of registered users from outside North America.

For the past few weeks I've been going through things I've got in storage, some of them my mom's from before I was born. It's a lot of stuff, but has yielded some interesting finds. For example, in 1983 or 1984 I bought What's Where in the Apple, a comprehensive look at the Apple ][ and //e architecture. Stuffed inside it I found notes and some source code I wrote to explore the inner workings of the Apple, and a Beagle Bros. "Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers" poster from 1983.

I also found the Glenbrook Loyalty Song, which I spent 15 minutes transcribing in MuseScore this morning for your enjoyment. So, nu? Enjoy.

This project has also produced 3 full bankers boxes of material to shred, at least one full lawn-and-leaf bag of trash, and minor lower-back pain despite being careful to lift with my legs. And the storage locker still has an overwhelming number of boxes in it, most buried under other boxes.

Anyone want a bread maker? How about a small Ikea-like work desk?