The Daily Parker

First, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has gotten up to 10.5°C for the first time since 3:33 pm on Monday December 9th. If it goes up just 0.1°C more, that will make today the warmest day since Monday November 25th. Fingers crossed.

Second, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency returned to DNS this morning. Someone at the Department of Defense must have noticed that the government's maps had vanished and was able to get the DNS entries restored. In consequence, I have downloaded everything through Romania, imported everything through Comoros (except China; that's importing right now), and the automatic indexer has captured 274,194 new places for a total gazetteer size of 2,668,565 places. That will rise dramatically later today; there are 2.05 million records for China, of which the import tool has already saved 1 million.

Updates as conditions warrant.

Update: As of 2:29 pm the temperature hit 10.6°C for the first time since 1:49 pm on Monday November 25th. Today is officially the warmest day of the 2024-25 winter season!

Last night I released Weather Now v5.0.9183, with a few bug fixes including a patch to the Gazetteer that recognizes the UK's four constituent parts (example). I've spent a few evenings the past week and a half fixing everything I could think of in the Gazetteer code, plus integrating with Azure Maps to allow me to correct time zones and parent places.

Then, starting around 5pm yesterday, I re-imported the existing data from fresh sources, including the NCDC update Monday and the FAA update yesterday. And just now I've completed importing all 970,000 USGS names records for the 50 United States plus DC and Puerto Rico. The Gazetteer now has 1.6 million records, and there are still a lot of places to import from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

If you're curious, you can go to the About the Gazetteer page to see what all I've imported. I plan to start importing the NGIA country files this afternoon, once I've downloaded them.

The Azure Search indexer that populates the full-text search for the application runs every three hours, so most of the USGS records won't show up in the search feature until just after noon US Central time (a bit more than an hour for now).

Also, after lunch, I'll have a Butters update. Spoiler: she sleeps 21 hours a day.

The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a known Nazi sympathizer) in a speech in Munich just before meeting with actual Nazis.

("'I never thought leopards would eat my face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."—Adrian Bott)

Meanwhile, back home:

• The State Department has decided to cancel most of its news subscriptions, because why would our diplomats need to know what's going on in the world?
• Fortunately (for now), the OAFPOTUS violently dismantling the US government's bureaucracy has gotten in the way of him dismantling the regulations that he claims to hate, further showing (a) how fundamentally stupid he is and (b) how it has nothing to do with regulations.
• Apparently jealous of the OAFPOTUS's successful raiding of public funds for his own benefit, Argentine president Javier Milei and his friends appear to have raked in close to $100 million in what looks like a classic memecoin rug-pull.
• The Chicago City Council may vote today on a proposal to borrow $830 m in an issue that would not pay back principal until 2045, a structure that (a) would result in a constant cash-flow to the private investors of something like $80 m per year and (b) cost the city $2 bn once we finally pay it all back. It would be the dumbest thing the city's government has done since the parking-meter scam.
• Researchers have determined that both work-from-home and return-to-office have drawbacks and benefits, and that mandating all of one or the other isn't great for any company. (But we knew that, even if some CEOs didn't.)
• Beware anyone asking you to send a code that you see on the screen; this is a device-code authentication attack, which is increasing in popularity among your finer criminals.

Finally, one of my least-favorite Brews & Choos stops has threatened planned to open a new brewpub in Irving Park. Crust Brewing in Rosemont wants to bring the same hellish experience to the former Leader Bar at 3000 W Irving Park Rd. Yes, this is a B&C-qualifying location, but no, I won't review it until I run out of other things to review.

Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here.

I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years.

And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025:

• The unelected winger specifically tasked with destroying our soft-power Agency for International Development is, no surprised, a Christianist fundamentalist.
• One of the software blogs I read, The Daily WTF, took space out of its usual lineup today to castigate Elon Musk's disastrous technical implementations in service of destroying the US Government: "Musk's 'algorithm' really is...a 5-step plan of bumper-sticker business speak that ranges from fatuous to incompetent...."
• Ezra Klein talks about how the right thinks of most people as "NPCs"—non-player characters in the gaming world.

Finally, on this Presidents Day, let's return to Washington's farewell address for just a moment:

All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.

Can't say what made me go back to that source today...

I've added a couple of new features to Weather Now, including a view of the best weather in the world. More usefully, I've added a release notes page.

This weekend, I plan to to rebuild the Gazetteer, and import all of the USGS records—about 900,000 places. This will also mean rebuilding the search index in the Basic tier. The Free tier is great for testing, but it only lets me index 10,000 items at a time. Even if the Free tier could support 900,000 records, I don't want to hit "Rebuild" 90 times.

I'll also be setting up a Donate button, for obvious reasons.

Enjoy.

I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day:

• Pilot Project Brewing has announced plans for a second brewery/taproom in Wrigleyville, just 500 meters from the Addison Red Line station.
• Google Maps turned 20 four days ago, and The Guardian has a history of how it began.
• Microsoft will be retiring the (11-year-old) database APIs that this build of The Daily Parker uses, so watch this space for news about a brand new Daily Parker experience this fall!

I'm planning to wrap up a new release of Weather Now this evening, too. I'll post snow photos when I do.

The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account.

So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries:

• Yesterday, he pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the first Illinois governor so corrupt that the legislature actually removed him from office, and possibly the only politician with a lower approval rating in Chicago than the OAFPOTUS.
• His acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told the agency's employees to go home, probably in violation of several laws, and certainly to the delight of every corrupt financial institution in the United States. Former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra talked to NPR yesterday morning about the insanity of this order.
• He imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum, which will piss off our closest friends in the world while raising prices for all Americans, throwing Americans out of work, and raising no revenue worth discussing.

In other stupidity directly attributable to the OAFPOTUS:

• Google explained as patiently as possible that they have always followed the Board of Geographic Names database, but in the case of the asinine directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico in the database, they're going to show it three different ways depending on where you are in the world.
• Jordan's King Abdullah made it clear to the OAFPOTUS that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza he proposed would abrogate Israel's peace treaty with Jordan and force the two nations into a state of war.

But hey, he's really intelligent, isn't he? He's the Weave-Meister! The Weave-o-Matic! Weavy Wonder! And he really does inspire all the people with sub-100 IQs out there that, someday, they too could be president.

The damage he's done in the last three weeks to our standing in the world is a gift to Russia, China, and everyone else who wants to end Pax Americana. As Krugman said yesterday, "what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government."

It's also a testament to the Republican Party's 50-year endeavor to destroy public education. Makes me proud to be an American.

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement:

• The UK Home Office has demanded that Apple create a back door into its cloud storage system to allow the UK government to snoop on everyone's content worldwide, which, if I correctly understand Apple's ADP architecture, is technically impossible.
• ProPublica has compiled a list of the people Elon Musk has enlisted to capture the government of the United States. Paul Krugman calls Musk's efforts an "attempted autogolpe."
• Gen-Z writer Olivia Julianna doesn't think the OAFPOTUS is exceptional—he's what the entire generation has known all their lives.
• The NTSB has released its final report on the fatal CTA Yellow Line accident in November 2023, largely exonerating the train's driver and finding a CTA decision to disable automatic braking as one of the probable causes.
• Kate Wagner takes a look at Neuschwanstein Castle and sees an 1870s version of the McMansions she's crusaded against for years.

Finally, Chicago has only gotten 251 mm of snowfall this season, just 3 mm more than the record-lowest 1920-21 season and only 26% of our normal 975 mm. Granted, we still have three more weeks of winter, but nothing in the forecast suggests we'll get a significant snowfall before March 1st. We may get 10 mm or so Saturday night, depending on when the temperature falls below freezing, but the 10-day forecast doesn't have a lot of precipitation in it. I hope we get some good rainfall this spring, though.

Chicago got a few millimeters of ice last night, which made my 15-minute walk from my house to Cassie's day camp into a 24-minute walk. The poor girl could not understand my difficulty, but she also can't count all four of her paws, so we work with what we have. Fortunately the temperature has gotten above freezing and promises to stay there at least until late tonight.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Josh Marshall proposes a taxonomy of the Administration's forces of destruction.
• Part of that destruction: erasing from DOJ websites any information about the January 6th terrorists who stormed the Capitol.
• Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien describes Elon Musk's efforts as "state capture."
• Karen Tumulty says we're watching a constitutional collapse.
• Jeff Maurer jokes that Musk closing a $0.04-trillion agency will certainly put a dent in the $1.8-trillion budget gap.

In other news, I deployed an update to Weather Now last night that corrected a couple of bugs, and I also imported a few thousand places from the US Census Bureau and the US Geological Survey. By the end of February I should have the entire USGS gazetteer imported, plus a vastly expanded search service that will speed up finding places in the world to see their weather. I also hope to (finally!) allow registered users to choose measurement systems and to see where the best and the worst weather in the world is currently reported. Fun!

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn.

But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

• Jonathan Last argues that maybe the OAFPOTUS just doesn't like Americans.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone to remain vigilant that the OAFPOTUS's mangling of the English language has consequences.
• Jeff Maurer is flabbergasted that the fanatical left wing has left behind "free speech, color-blindness, and meritocracy" on the playing field so that the right could pick it up at their leisure.
• Connor Echols worries that the US has developed a "total security" problem, with the impossible goal of making everywhere safe for Americans.
• In an unusual nontechnical post, The Daily WTF points out that "everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
• Bruce Schneier worries that we don't have the tools to deal with the kinds of mistakes AI LLMs will make.
• The 606 Trail, which runs along an abandoned railway right-of-way through several Chicago north side neighborhoods, won't get its promised eastern extension until at least 2027.
• Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who illustrated one of my favorite childhood books, The Phantom Tollbooth, died age 95.

Finally, while Chicago has almost no snow on the ground, which probably helped prevent the overnight temperature from going below -20°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, the same weather system has already dumped more snow on the Gulf Coast cities of Mobile and Pensacola than they have ever recorded. Right now at Pensacola International, they have snow and -4°C temperatures. Climate change science didn't predict this specific event, but it did predict the weakening of the circumpolar jet stream that made this possible. This is not normal (temperatures in Fahrenheit):