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I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

Now that the Calendar feature works, I spent an hour today writing a utility to count all the public blog posts by month, and to give me a cumulative count. It turns out, most of my posts exhorting big milestones, like the 5,000th or, more recently, the 9,000th, were off by a few weeks.

Here are the books and other media I consumed in 2025. (Here's 2024 for comparison.) Books Spending less time traveling meant less time reading, unfortunately. That said, I managed to read 29 books and finish 25, including: Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Totally different than the TV series (see below) but just as fun. Iain Banks, The Algebraist. Very fun novel that's worth its 900 pages. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, his...

I remember 2025 like it was yesterday...and in that long-forgotten year: I posted 459 times on The Daily Parker, down 21 from 2024 and 41 from 2023. But the blog had it's 10,000th post sometime in August, which is something. I flew less in 2025 than in the previous three years, with only 7 flight segments totaling 8,371 flight miles. I didn't leave the US in 2025, about which I am sad. And I only visited five states: Tennessee,  Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and California. Strangely, I didn't even make...

My morning commute today had mild temperatures, clear skies, and a nearly-empty platform: My office is nearly empty, too. And I'm leaving early-ish, though my laptop will stay here until Monday. And I have no meetings, so I can fix a lingering bug without anyone interrupting me. So far, today doesn't suck. I shall endeavor to enjoy it.

Just so I can keep track, my month so far: Mon Dec 1, Messiah dress rehearsal, Millar Chapel, EvanstonTue Dec 2, chorus fundraiser planning committeeMon Dec 8, Messiah rehearsalThu Dec 11, Messiah tutti rehearsal, Holy Name Cathedral, ChicagoSat Dec 13, Messiah performance, Holy Name CathedralSun Dec 14, Messiah performance, Millar ChapelTue Dec 16, Messiah sing-a-long, EvanstonWed Dec 17, Christmas Eve rehearsal, EvanstonSun Dec 21 (morning), 4th Sunday of Advent service, EvanstonSun Dec 21...

Cassie and I went out right at sunrise (7:14—two more weeks before the latest one of the winter on January 3rd) just as the temperature bottomed out at -10.5°C (13.1°F) after yesterday's cold front. Tomorrow will be above freezing, Sunday will be a bit below, and then Monday through the end of the year looks like it'll be above. And the forecast for Christmas Day is 11°C (52°F). Meanwhile, as I sip my second cup of tea, these stories made me want to go back to bed: As much as we want to ignore the...

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

I'm listening to the corporate annual update, which is neither corrupt nor stupid, though only about 20% of it applies to my job. So I'll just spend the other 80% lining up these articles about corruption and stupidity for lunchtime reading: Whether because of "you can't make me" or just doing the opposite of whatever President Biden's administration did, the latest toddler behavior in the administration comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who decided that Calibri is too DEI so State will go back...

A weak La Niña has already started affecting the weather in the United States, as this week's cold snap demonstrates. Weak La Niña events typically cause cooler, wetter winters in Chicago. Last night's temperature got down to -12.8°C (9°F), just a few degrees above the coldest December 5th on record. Normal for today would be 4.3°C (39.8°F); this godawful cold is 5°C below the normal low for the coldest day of the year, January 24th. Fortunately the forecast this weekend calls for more seasonable...

We got 220 mm (8.6 in) of snow at O'Hare by 6am today, which means the storm dumped more on us than on any November day in history (earlier reported as the worst in almost 10 years): As of 6 p.m., 6.9 inches (175 mm) of snow had fallen at O’Hare and 5.5 (140 mm) at Midway, making it the heaviest single-day snowfall since Nov. 21 2015, when 7 inches fell at O’Hare, according to the National Weather Service. O’Hare had been predicting its busiest Thanksgiving week ever, despite the FAA recently lifting...

It's nice when you can plan for severe weather. It's snowed nearly all day, lightly at first but turning a lot worse after noon. Since the temperature has stayed right around -1°C it wasn't a problem to give Cassie some off-leash time at the local park: She even made new friends: And you'd think after 9 hours of snowfall, my rain gauge might have registered some precipitation. I wonder what the trouble could be? As of noon we had 76 mm of snow officially at O'Hare. I expect it'll be more than double...

Cassie and I hauled out to Far Suburbistan and met friends (one dog, one human) for a 4.7-km walk around the St James Farm Forest Preserve: Because I wanted to get groceries ahead of tomorrow's snowfall, poor Cassie had to suffer in the car for about 3 hours. Don't feel bad: my friend had tons of leftovers from yesterday, so Cassie got enough turkey to last her until dinner next Thursday. She's now plotzed on the couch. She doesn't know it yet, but we're about to go for another walk. My 77-day streak of...

I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later: What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa? After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year. The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor...

I don't enjoy taking 6 am flights, of course, but they do have advantages. I left my hotel at 6:11 am and was through SFO security by 6:25. That's even faster than last year! I'm a little less enthused about this, however: URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Chicago IL 224 AM CST Sun Nov 9 2025 Northern Cook-Central Cook-Southern Cook-Eastern Will- Including the cities of Chicago, Peotone, Northbrook, Crete, Evanston, Lemont, Park Forest, Schaumburg, Cicero, Oak Park, La Grange, Des...

I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here. Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the...

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee. So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly...

My old Surface decided it didn't trust its own drive this morning when I booted up in my downtown office. Instead of getting a new laptop, I had stumped for the $30 fee to buy another year of security patches for Windows 10. Well, the latest one changed the Bitlocker settings, requiring me to enter the recovery key...which I couldn't get to from my downtown office. Fortunately I had the key at home and entered it manually without a problem, so the Surface has sprung back to life. I will have to replace...

I'm a little delayed getting today's Morning Butters Report out for a couple of reasons. First, Butters and Cassie tag-teamed me starting just before 6:30 am. First Cassie poked me, then Butters poked me when Cassie kicked her off the dog bed in my room. Then Cassie came back when Butters used her engineering skills to ensure Cassie couldn't pull that crap again: Last night, though, Butters showed me how much she cares about me—or how much she wanted another Greenie, it's unclear: Meanwhile, all the...

I have mentioned how odd Butters can be. Part of her oddness seems to come from her being a little princess who craves comfort to the exclusion of propriety. Exhibit the first, this morning, less than a minute after I stripped my bed: I had to pick her up to get her to move. Exhibit the second, yesterday afternoon, rearranging the dog bed in my office for...reasons: Exhibit the third, last night, getting quite annoyed that Cassie has trouble respecting her personal space: The poor dear suffers so. 

I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face? This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do: The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow...

Butters has stayed at Château Punzun many times. And yet, I swear she's getting stranger, starting with this burrowing behavior: And her engineering: Why the dog bed needs folding over and rearranging, I have no idea. I keep flattening it after Butters leaves, and she keeps doing this. Of course, Cassie has opinions about me giving Butters attention: And Butters is definitely not a morning dog. After showering and getting dressed, with Cassie checking on my progress several times, it took two hands and...

I'll be in tonight's Ear Taxi Festival performance at Harris Theater in Millennium Park, singing Damien Geter's African American Requiem. I'm really enjoying the piece. Even though our call time (1:30pm) makes it impossible to participate in the No Kings demonstration happening just 400 meters away from the concert venue, I think the chorus are doing their parts as Geter's message is relevant to the day. If you're in Chicago, come for the demonstration and stay for the concert! If you're not in Chicago...

I spent about 6 hours today making dozens of performance and stability updates to the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture and the Inner Drive Gazetteer (which provides geographical services for Weather Now). Cassie spent about that much time outside, including Riding In The Car!, which she also loves. Tomorrow I should have some more interesting things to say about how I did about 40 separate refactorings in just a few hours. Hint: Chat GPT 5 and 5-mini. Sometimes they were laughably wrong, but about...

I attended an event last night at Chicago's Old Post Office. It was a lovely night in (and on top of) a lovely building: That's all, just some pretty photos.

(Update: I've chased down some of Layne's sources and I am not convinced that they entirely support her conclusions about what has caused the degradation of Americans' reading skills. The Daily Parker is ever-evolving.) ProPublica reported this morning that the OAFPOTUS has stocked the Department of Education with Christian nationalists who want to end public schooling and redirect our taxes to private interests. OK, maybe they're not all Christian nationalists; maybe some of them are just grifters...

This was a lot of fun and a lot of work: This was my fifth full marathon walk: According to my watch, it was also the least draining, judging by my body battery score this morning: For comparison, here are the previous two years: This year, I rested a bit more, and more aggressively managed my heart rate. I also got a lot of good sleep earlier in the week. However, as this year was considerably warmer than last year, these mitigations meant it took a bit longer. Oddly, it was slightly cooler in 2023...

Almost exactly 3 months ago, I needed to get something out of a storage locker, and reminded myself why I hated getting something out of the storage locker: I found the thing I wanted. And as long as I was there, I said to myself, why not grab a couple of these boxes to see if I need to keep them? And so, from (I think) June 9th until just this past Saturday, I brought home over 60 boxes of stuff going all the way back to [redacted], threw out or shredded about 15 boxes worth, reorganized everything...

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

After a lovely weekend that included not one but two long walks with Cassie, not to mention the only baseball game I've attended this season and what is likely to be the last of 10 consecutive days and nights with the A/C off and the windows open, work has returned. I'm mulling a number of different topics to attack this month, but first I have to finish the massive storage locker reorganization I began June 15th. I'm happy to say it looks like I'll have reduced the volume of my own and my mom's things...

The temperature at Inner Drive World HQ bottomed out at 14.6°C at 6:35 this morning. It was last this cool on June 5th at 8:18 CDT, just under 81 days ago. I like summer, I really do. And I recognize that the overnight low at O'Hare this morning (12.8°C) was a bit below normal for August 25th (17.8°C). Still, I didn't sleep with the windows open for 22 days, which may be a (summer) record. That's too long. The next few days should remain unseasonably (but delightfully) cool before it gets warm again...

I have to finish a feature today, and had a ton of meetings yesterday, which is why I missed posting yesterday. If I finish the feature before it gets dark I may even read a bunch of stuff that has piled up in my browser. Until then...

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump: The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats. Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet...

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain. Before I do any of that, however, I'm...

I got in a bit early this morning to beat the heat. Good thing, too, as my train line partially shut down upstream of my stop just as I got on the train. It's up to 34°C at O'Hare and 33°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ (feels like 42°C—107°F), with a forecast of 36°C and continued horrible heat indicies for this afternoon when I walk Cassie home from dog school. Chicago isn't the only place getting this awful weather. The record heat will affect over 200 million people this week with similar...

Barret Hansen, better known as Dr Demento, has announced his retirement: “It’s been a blast,” he wrote in a message to fans, “but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon.” Throughout the course of his long career, Demento introduced several fantastically silly songs into the public consciousness, including “Fish Heads” by the comedy duo Barnes and Barns, and “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell. But his greatest achievement took place in 1976 when he dug out a cassette mailed into...

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it. Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist: Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of...

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

On some days, I have more meetings than others. Today was a more extreme example, with meetings for 6 of the 8½ hours I put in. Somehow I also managed to read some documentation and get some other things accomplished. I also can't say that any of the meetings was a waste of time, either. Welcome back to management. Unfortunately, that meant I could only put these stories in a queue so I can read them now: William Finnegan wonders if he or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "Dead Puppies" Noem is...

Before we even set out yesterday, I discovered evidence of a cardinal nest in my back patio. The evidence was this guy and his mate dive-bombing me when I went out to check the Inner Drive Technology weather station: Later, we took the most direct route to the Horner Park Dog Park, where I met up with a friend and Cassie met a bunch of new friends: Altogether, Cassie got 3 hours of exercise, and we stayed outside for about 6½ hours total. We won't get anywhere near that today, unfortunately, but...

Taking 90 minutes to finish a novel this afternoon doesn't seem to have lessened my fatigue from the last couple of days. And now I'm off to a "friend-raiser" for an organization I've supported in the past. As I'm also dogsitting Butters again, there's a good possibility that I'll have cute beagle photos tomorrow. For the next few hours, though, I need to smile and shake hands. I hope the passed apps are good...

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all: Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.) Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in...

Business travel on Sunday evening brings some good, some not so good. For starters, I got from the curb through security to the terminal in 12 minutes, because there aren't a lot of business travelers. On the other hand, getting to the G Concourse lounge involved a lot of near-collisions as the leisure travelers shuffled around without looking where they were going. I'm impressed with what they've done to the lounge, though. I haven't been in G Concourse since August 2016, so I was pleasantly surprised....

As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more. The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer...

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th. I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there. Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would...

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this: The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy. As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from....

A longtime Daily Parker reader asked this about yesterday's post: "The Daily Parker costs $4.87 per day" -- I'm really hoping that's a misprint, because that's almost $150 a month, which is ten times what I pay for my web hosting package which comes with unlimited domains, a full email service (IMAP+SMTP over TLS), click-to-install WordPress and MySQL database creation, SSH access to the back-end Linux machine, and excellent customer support. Also -- and I *really* hate to say this to a fellow IT...

My friends have gone to a tropical beach for the week, which means I get a second dog for a few days. She has been here many times before (most recently on Saturday), so she knows the drill. Still, five minutes after her people left, Butters seemed resigned to never seeing them again: By the time I woke up this morning, however, she seemed to have settled in just fine: Walking the two of them together in this cold doesn't actually work, however. Butters hates cold weather; Cassie loves it. So Cassie...

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...

I promised snow photos. So far, it looks like we've gotten only about 25 mm of snow, though it continues to fall and will probably keep falling until the early morning. Cassie and I went out around 1pm, and I gave her a bit of off-leash time in the courtyard: That is a happy dog. And we're about to go out again, because she insists on metabolizing food and water. Tomorrow she gets to go to day camp and I get to go to my downtown office. One of us will have a lot more fun than the other.

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...

I just spent 15 minutes on TaxAct preparing and filing Punzun Ltd.'s 2024 taxes. It helps that it's an S-corporation and made almost no money last year, but still. Intuit still doesn't have the Schedule K-1S part of TurboTax ready, however, so I can't file my personal taxes yet. For those of you in countries with reasonable ways of doing things, I want to file my personal taxes because I overpaid all year, and the government owes me a non-trivial chunk of money. In order to do that I needed to file...

After my general statistics for 2024, here are the books and media I consumed since 2023. Books I didn't read as many books in 2024 as in 2023, mainly because they were longer. Any one of the Culture novels is the equivalent of 3 or 4 times The Outsiders, for example. The 30 books I started (and 26 I finished) included: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. An excellent handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I hope this does not become a handbook...

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...

I've been on the fringes of something recently that I won't get into to protect the guilty, except to say it doesn't have anything to do with my day job. As this thing goes on and on and on, I keep going back to this bit of truth: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. And yet, the errors in this thing keep compounding, as only two or three people involved appear to have any sanity regarding the project. Naturally, the sane ones keep getting shouted down. If you look...

Earlier this year the Illinois State Treasurer's newsletter mentioned the state database of unclaimed property. It took two quick searches to discover that the state had about $200 of my money, and would happily hand it back to me if I filled out a form. (The state also has about $40 of my mother's money, but the effort to gather all the documentation—including her will and trust documents—does not make this a worthwhile effort. Maybe the state will use it to improve public transit? But I jest.) This...

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: The German government collapsed today after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag. People think the OAFPOTUS transition team are doing a great job for the simple reason that most people don't follow this kind of thing. Josh Marshall points out that it...

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime. Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these: Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS. On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS....

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday. Unrelated to the weather are these...

Also, kudos to the UK Home Office. I just applied for my UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, paid my £10 ($13.06), and almost immediately got approved. It helps that (a) I just entered the UK twice in September with the same passport, and until the UK decided Americans could use the EU passport lanes, I was in the UK Registered Traveller programme. So they've vetted me quite a few times already. When will I next go there? I hope January. I haven't said a lot about it, but I moved to a new practice at...

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic... I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy." Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully." Molly...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started: You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei. Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too: Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh...

I meant to post more photos from my trip earlier this month, but I do have a full-time job and other obligations. Plus it took me a couple of days longer than usual to recover, which I blame squarely on the shitty hotel room I had for my first night causing a sleep deficit that I never recovered from. I posted a couple of these already, but with crude, quick edits done on my phone. I think these treatments might be a little better. Sunrise at O'Hare on the 18th: The hills of Hampshire: Invasive...

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T. I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may...

I will spend most of today exploring the narrow streets and fromageries of Aix-en-Provence and visiting with an old friend up in the hills above the city. While I endure those horrors and privations, I will also be struggling with the realization that the TV series Lost premiered 20 years ago today. Remember, kids: don't let the smoke monster cast you out of purgatory until you've figured out the meaning of your life.E

I love actually experiencing the 21st Century. Right now I'm hurtling through the suburbs of Lyon at 265 km/h (down from 300 km/h earlier) on my way to Provence. The Eurostar from London started with an insane scrum at St Pancras—they really mean it when they advise you to arrive 75 minutes before departure—but it arrived at Paris Gare du Nord a minute early. The only impediment to getting onto this train came in the form of several consecutive people who couldn't figure out how to get RER tickets from...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week. I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things: Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina)...

I just finished a 75-minute open-level French test as part of a QA study that Duolingo invited me to participate in. What an eye-opener. And quelle épuisement! The test started well enough but got a lot harder as it went on, for two principal reasons. First, the order of sections went precisely in the order of my abilities: reading, writing, listening, speaking. Turns out I read French a lot better than I write it, write it better than I understand it, and speak it like a reject from a Pink Panther...

I had planned a longer post this evening, but I had about 2 hours of chorus work to do and I didn't have any energy for half an hour after getting home. We may have our hottest night of the year tonight, with a forecast low of 26°C, before having our hottest day of the year tomorrow. (We had 36°C on June 17th; tomorrow could be 37°C.) So I'm going to drink another glass or two of ice water and pat Cassie for a bit, then gird myself for tomorrow's sticky walk to doggie day care.

I had painters in my house yesterday and today, and this morning I finally got chased out of my office for a bit. That meant I had more to do this afternoon, which meant I didn't get a chance to read much. Which is only to say, regular posting resumes tomorrow.

Yesterday, Cassie and I walked 16.4 km (just over 10 miles), including a 10 km walk that I'd planned only to be a bit less than 7 km. I wanted to stop by Ravinia Brewing's Logan Square taproom, but alas, when we got there, the patio was closed. So we went to Burning Bush instead. In all, we spent most of the day outside in the perfect weather. We'll do more of the same today, just not quite as much walking. Another brewery that didn't make the cut for the Brews & Choos Project—it's too far from the...

The Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 day temperature outlook has generally good news for the upper Midwest, including Chicago: I wouldn't want to be in New Orleans next week, but that's true most weeks of the year even without this forecast. While we weather the summer, the news just keeps coming: The XPOTUS lied about what caused the one-hour delay before he took the stage at Wednesday's National Association of Black Journalists conference, as one would guess, because the truth was he didn't want to be...

Cassie and I have gone on two walks today, the first for 3.2 km and the second for 4.25 km, despite the really uncomfortable 26°C dewpoint. I mean, it's really gross out there. Fortunately because of the way dogs get rid of excess heat, it didn't bother her as much as it bothered me—the air is only 28°C, after all. But we both felt a lot better when we got back to my air-conditioned house. (Fun fact: my thermostat is set for 25°C, but the dewpoint inside is closer to 15°C which makes all the...

I woke up at my usual time this morning, noticed how dark it was, checked radar, and got Cassie out the door less than 10 minutes later. Because by the time I had her to day camp and got myself to the Metra platform, it looked like this: Waiting for the train, I got this: But what luck, it let up just as the train arrived. The photo doesn't do it justice: those are horizontal rain bands, and I was standing behind a window. By the time I got down to Ogilvie, we had this: Again, just a bit of light rain...

I've got a performance this evening that requires being on-site at the venue for most of the day. So in a few minutes I'll take two dogs to boarding (the houseguest is another performer's dog), get packed, an start heading to a hockey rink in another city. Fun! If I'm supremely lucky, I'll get back home before the storm. Since I also have to travel to the venue, I'll have time to read a few of these: Jamelle Bouie warns that the convicted-felon XPOTUS has even less preparation for a possible second term...

I had a dentist appointment up in Hubbard Woods this morning, so I took half a day off and had a relaxing walk through Winnetka. And as on Sunday, I encountered a lot of cicadas. I found one attached to my bag as I boarded the train back to the Loop: She* tried wandering off the bag in various directions, which prompted me to help her out from time to time. She could not get a grip, mentally or physically, on the outer surface of my bag, nor on the vinyl seats or metal frame of the train car. By the...

Cassie and I took two long walks yesterday. We drove up to the Skokie Lagoons before lunchtime and took a 7.25 km stroll along the north loop. The weather cooperated: I wanted to go up there in part because a 100-year-old forest had a higher probability of cicadas than anywhere near my house. We were not disappointed. Cassie and I both had passengers at various points in the walk: And wow, were they loud. I forgot how loud they got during the 2007 outbreak. Even at the points on the walk closest to the...

My home office has an unobstructed eastern view, and it sits in a loft above my bedroom. That means my bedroom gets indirect eastern light. The blinds in my office don't block all that light, however, so for three months of the year my bedroom gets awfully bright before 6am. Today, for whatever reason, I didn't sleep through it. Fortunately the sun rises before 6am only from late April to mid August, so I will get to sleep later eventually. And I do like that the sun sets after 7:30pm from early April...

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside. In other news: David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection...

I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off... This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning: For the first time in his life, the XPOTUS finds himself waiting for a jury to decide whether he's a felon. In closing arguments yesterday, his attorney nearly got himself sanctioned on the spot for a...

I first went to the Duke of Perth in June 1993, about four years after it opened. Today will be the pub's last day at their 35-year-old location on Clark St., after the property owner* doubled the rent. A bunch of us regulars and bartenders from the old days got together yesterday for one last whisky: The place really hasn't changed much since 1989, which is how it maintained its charm. That, and the patio, where I had more than a few first dates: When I lived in the neighborhood, I did so much...

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole. Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up: The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the...

Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first production deployment, which always terrifies the dev team and always reminds them of what they left out of the Runbook. The staging pipelines have already started churning, and if they uncover anything, the Dev pipelines might also run, so I've lined up a collection of stories from the last 24 hours to keep me...

After a week of rehearsals capped by two performances of some really challenging works by French and Swiss composers, I finally got a full 8½ hours of sleep last night. What a difference. Not just the needed rest, but also having a much smaller inbox (just one task for the chorus left until next week) and less to worry about. Until I open a newspaper, of course: The head of the political arm of Hamas, the terrorist group and de jure governing party in Gaza which has called for the annihilation of all...

Cassie and I got over 2 hours of walks yesterday, and spent most of the day outside. By the time we got to Spiteful, Cassie needed a nap: Her day ended pretty well, on the couch getting lots of scritches, but between our 10 km of walks, the dog park, and meeting new friends along the way, she got a bath. Instead of struggling and trying to escape, though, she mournfully stepped into the tub and awaited her fate. Such a good girl! Later today, the Apollo Chorus will conclude its season at St Michael...

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight. I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories: The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of...

We're once again basking in 21°C sun, prompting me to take Cassie on a 47-minute walk at lunchtime. Unfortunately, with a board meeting and rehearsal this evening, that leaves less time for doing my actual work, so I have to go back to that now. Like I said yesterday, the next couple of weeks will be a bit busy.

I'm heading off to a Euchre tournament in a bit. I haven't played cards with actual, live people in quite some time, so I just hope to end up in the middle of the pack. Or one perfect lay-down loner... A guy can dream. When I get home, I might have the time and attention span to read these: John Grinspan looks at the similarities and crucial differences between the upcoming election and the election of 1892. Andy Borowitz jokes about the latest of Robert F Kennedy's conspiracy theories: that his own...

I tried for a little more than 6 months to read a book of humorous essays by an author I really like, and just couldn't finish. It pains me. But I feel a tiny bit of relief at not seeing the book on my nightstand anymore. Since I started reading it, I read—no exaggeration—24 other books, which suggests I really didn't find it all that interesting. Sometimes you have to just move on, no matter how much you like someone's other work. Meanwhile, tonight is our annual fundraiser/cabaret, for which I need to...

Through next weekend I'm going to have a lot to do, so much that I've scheduled "nothing" for the back half of next week going into our annual fundraiser on April 6th. I might even get enough sleep. I hope I have time to read some of these, too: Eileen O'Neill Burke has won the Democratic Party primary for Cook County States Attorney (called a District Attorney just about everywhere else), and is therefore the presumptive successor to outgoing CCSA Kim Foxx. Andrew Sullivan sees the XPOTUS hawking $59...

My body thought this was around 8:30am, but no, it was 6:30: Also, it turns out that my three favorite people in Southern California live 60, 90, and 120 minutes away from here. Aw, snap.

Cassie and I adopted each other three years ago today. And yet, she remains one of my most frustrating photographic subjects: Regardless, I got really lucky when I found her at PAWS. I hope she feels the same way.

Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT. I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the...

We always take a week off after our Choral Classics concert, which saves everyone's sanity. I in fact do have a chorus obligation today, but it's easy and relatively fun: I'm walking through the space where we'll have our annual Benefit Cabaret, Apollo After Hours, and presumably having dinner with the benefit committee. I'll be home early enough to have couch time with Cassie and get a full night's sleep. Meanwhile: Former presidential speechwriter James Fallows annotates President Biden's State of the...

Chicago Classical Review reporter Tim Sawyier liked what he heard last night: The number of American performing ensembles that can date their lineage to the Romantic era is small and dwindling. Yet it is striking to consider that Anton Bruckner was still in his forties when Chicago’s Apollo Chorus was founded in 1872, in the wake of the Great Fire; the group was entering its second decade when the composer completed his Te Deum in 1884. The Chorus also offered three smaller, a cappella Bruckner...

Almost always, during the last few days before a performance, a huge chunk of my working memory contains the music I'm about to perform. I have two concerts this weekend, so right now, my brain has a lot of Bruckner in it. I feel completely prepared, in fact. Unfortunately, I still have a day job, and I need a large chunk of my brain to work on re-architecting a section of our app. Instead of loading data from Microsoft Excel files, which the app needs to read entirely into memory because of the way...

I went through the photos I took on my trip to Germany last week and put a couple of them through Lightroom. Getting coffee in Viktualienmarkt: A very practical car for city life in post-war Germany, the 1955 BMW Isetta: The Trödelmarktinsel, Nürnberg: A better edit of my earlier photo of the main gate at Dachau: And finally, I had a really great view of the New York metro area on the flight home:

As fun as my trip last week was, having this last night was awesome: I've also got my windows open, because we just set a new record high temperature for February 26th of 19.4°C. Of course, it may snow tomorrow night, because it's still winter until Friday. OK, back to work...

The sky looks different this morning: I'm about to head to Nuremberg, depending on the price of train tickets. They seem to vary quite a bit every time I check online. But on a day like this, I'm sure I can find something fun to do nearby.

Since I learned how to drive a car, I've wanted to pick up a BMW in Munich. The European Delivery program allowed Americans to buy a made-to-order car at their local dealer, pick it up in Munich, drive it around Europe for up to 6 months, drop it off at an Atlantic port (Antwerp, I think), and drive it home from your local dealer about 12 weeks after that. Because of tax incentives from the German government and other factors, the purchase price of the car and delivery to your local dealer cost almost...

I'll have more and better-finished photos when I return to Chicago. Here are three quick phone edits from today. The Neue Rathaus in Marienplatz, near my hotel: The main gate to the prisoner camp at Dachau: The main road in the Dachau prison camp: That was not a fun visit, but it was necessary.

I forgot that one of the perks of flying in international first class—even if it's a miles ticket—is access to American's Flagship Lounge. I have to say, I see the appeal. But like so much in the United States, the top-tier lounge in Chicago has roughly the same amenities and food as the regular lounges in Europe and Asia. I'm heading to Munich, as mentioned earlier, in part to enjoy modern technology, now that my own country has drifted to the back of the pack amongst its peer countries. It's very...

The weather forecast for Munich doesn't look horrible, but doesn't look all that great either, at least until Saturday. So I'll probably do more indoorsy things Thursday and Friday, though I have tentatively decided to visit Dachau on Thursday, rain or not. You know, to start my trip in such a way that nothing else could possibly be worse. Meanwhile, I've added these to yesterday's crop of stories to read at the airport: Deciding to be "stabbed, to live to see another day," the Republican-controlled...

My local park around 7am: For work reasons, I have to get up progressively earlier every day this week. I'm comforting myself with the knowledge that my 6am meeting Wednesday would actually be a 1pm meeting if I were already on Munich time. Sadly, I won't be on Munich time until about 19 hours later. But I'm a lot more likely to sleep on the flight if I keep waking up before sunrise this week.

Butters Poochface has decided that her humans have abandoned her, so she's keeping me close. Despite the warm sun on the downstairs porch, where Cassie has sprawled, Butters has camped in my office where she can watch me literally bang my head on my desk trying to work out a thorny design problem: Earlier today, the famously stubborn hound discovered that Cassie alone can tow her reluctant butt down the sidewalk even without human intervention. After a few seconds of this Butters decided (realized?)...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

The current work sprint ends tomorrow. Throughout, I've had several moments of "wow, I actually did that right three years ago" as I've extended or improved existing features for the next release. I've even added a couple of extra stories that didn't take me long to do. Meanwhile, I'm starting to get the sense of what it might be like when I'm 80, coughing so much that for the first time in years I'll actually miss rehearsal tonight. Which explains this post's headline: the cemetery is usually where the...

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. When I first visited London in 1992, a bobby at Victoria Station explained that they didn't have bins there because "they tend to explode." I supported President Clinton in brokering the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and I was in a pub in Killarney in July 2005 watching the telly with the silent crowd there as Sinn Féin put down their guns for good. So while today's news would have shocked me in 1992, I'm merely surprised in 2024: Northern Ireland’s devolved government...

Inner Drive Technology's new computer arrived two days early, so there was a flurry of activity around lunchtime that postponed Cassie's mid-day walk. We just got back from that...but now I've got to do my real job while the new computer installs tons of software. As someone who paid $200 for four 1-megabyte SIMMs back in the day, I'm absolutely astounded at the tiny 4-terabyte SSD that I snapped into the new machine, and which cost $260. OK, back to work. Friday I'll have a retrospective on Inner Drive...

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal. Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app...

The computer I'm using to write this post turns 8 years old on April 6th. It has served me well, living through thousands of Daily Parker posts, two house moves, terabytes of photographs, and only one blown hard drive. So I have finally broken down and ordered a new one: a Dell Precision 3460 that will sit on my desk instead of under it, and will run Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 instead of warning me that it doesn't have the right hardware to get the latest OS. The new computer will have an 13th Gen Intel...

What do you get when you combine a 2°C air temperature, a 2°C dew point, frozen ground with snow patches, and nearly-calm winds? Visibility under 100 meters on my commute to the office: They say we may not see the sun until Wednesday. But they also say it'll be 7°C that day. March came early this year, it seems.

Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and street in Chicago. She seemed very concerned about my ability to walk, and very disappointed that we didn't take our usual detour to the bagel place to get me some coffee and her a fresh dog treat. The "wintry mix" has stopped and the temperature has risen all the way to 1.5°C at Inner Drive Technology...

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret: Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him. I can't...

My five-and-a-half-hour-delayed flight got to Seattle in the usual amount of time, but the door-to-door duration—my house to my friend's house—set a new record for domestic travel: 15 hours and 20 minutes. That's the longest travel duration for any flying trip since I had a long connection going from Chicago to London two years ago and longer than any domestic trip I can recall. But at the end of the voyage, Hazel was very glad to see me: My friend has an all-day meeting that neither of us is...

Welp. My 10:00 flight has become a 3:00 flight: But at least when I get on board the plane, I'll have a good seat: Obviously if they had predicted the delay more accurately, I'd have slept longer, left later, and probably not dropped Cassie off with my friends until this morning. She seems to be settling in just fine, though: Hooray for air travel in January. My guess is that if the original crew had flown on to Seattle, they'd have timed out. So they probably moved my plane's crew to a shorter flight...

I have enough travel experience to know that a winter storm doesn't totally shut down O'Hare. I mean, isn't it pretty? It does, however, cause some disruptions: But knowing that my flight has a 2+ hour delay means I can take a leisurely bus trip for $3.25 (including transfer), which is way better than a $60 Lyft that would take almost as long. The bus got up to 20 km/h at one point! Look at us zoom through Lincoln Square: And along the route, a little bit of good news from the airline! So only two hours...

We knew this was coming eventually: URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Chicago IL 243 PM CST Thu Jan 11 2024 ILZ006-103-104-120445- /O.CON.KLOT.WS.W.0002.240112T0900Z-240113T1800Z/ Lake IL-Northern Cook-Central Cook- Including the cities of Waukegan, Buffalo Grove, Mundelein, Gurnee, Evanston, Des Plaines, Schaumburg, Palatine, Northbrook, Chicago, Cicero, Oak Lawn, Oak Park, and La Grange 243 PM CST Thu Jan 11 2024 ...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 3 AM FRIDAY TO NOON CST...

We got about 50 mm of snow overnight, even though the temperature barely got below freezing at O'Hare and never got below freezing at IDTWHQ. I expect most of it will melt today, but this morning it looked pretty: On the other hand, most of the models predict a huge winter storm next weekend. If I get supremely lucky, the worst of it will hit while I'm away. If my luck runs as usual, I'll spend a lot more time at O'Hare than I'd prefer. At least sunrises have finally started to get earlier. 

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November. That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day: Economic historian Guido Alfani examines the data on the richest people to live...

Some Daily Parker followers expressed interest in what books I read this year. So instead of just counting them in the annual statistical roundup, I've decided to list most of the media that I consumed last year in a separate post. Books In 2023 I started 39 and finished 37 books, not including the 6 reference books that I consulted at various points. It turns out, I read a lot more than in 2022 (27 started, 24 finished), and in fact more than in any year since 2010, when I read 51. Notable books I...

Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022. I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent...

Due to an odd combination of holidays, a use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday, and travel, I'm just about done with my first of four short work-weeks in a row. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course, since I would like to finish the coding problem I've been working on before I leave today, I'll have to read some of these later: Josh Marshall thinks it's hilarious and pathetic that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), realizing she can't win against a Democrat in her own district, said she'll run in...

One of my friends got this little clock for me: It's an Author Clock. Instead of just the time, it shows a literary quote containing the time. They have well over 1,440 quotes in there (they claim 13,000), and they update frequently, so you may never see the same quote twice. I had it in my home office for about an hour and got no work done. Because it's that cool.

Cassie and I walked down to Christkindlmarket by Wrigley Field yesterday to meet up with some friends. I understand that the lakefront was completely fogged in, but a kilometer or so inland it just looked creepy: And on the walk home: Right now at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, the sun has started peeking out, though the temperature-dewpoint spread hasn't gotten that much wider from this morning: 10.9°C with a dewpoint of 10.6°C. O'Hare still reports mist with increasing horizontal...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

I just realized that my short complaint about the cold front that came through Saturday was The Daily Parker's 9,000th post since it re-launched as a modern, continuous blog on 13 November 2005. (I still maintain that it was a blog from its inception on 13 May 1998, but the term "blog" hadn't been coined yet.) In the "modern" era, I've written a mean 495 and a median 505 posts per year, with a standard deviation of 66.3 (1.36, 1.4, and 0.27 per day, respectively). For the 12 months ending November 30th...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

I guess not all of the stories I read at lunchtime depressed me, but...well, you decide: Writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma weaves together the threads of white backlash to civil rights laws, the Democratic Party's cultural elitism, and a series of global crises, to explain why the US uniquely among its peer nations has made such a hash of the post-1970s economy. Georgetown public policy professor George P. Moynihan, who studies government bureaucracies, lays out how the XPOTUS intends to destroy the...

I closed a 3-point story and if the build that's running right now passes, another bug and a 1-point story. So I'm pretty comfortable with my progress through this sprint. But I haven't had time to read any of these, though I may try to sneak them in before rehearsal: The XPOTUS has started using specific terminology to describe his political opponents that we last heard from a head of government in 1945. (Guess which one.) Says Tomasky: "[Republicans] are telling us in broad daylight that they want to...

I've had a few things on my plate this week, including a wonderful event with the Choeur de la Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris at Old St Patrick's Church in Chicago. We had a big dinner, they sang for us, we sang for them, and then some of us hosted some of them in our homes. Tonight I'm hearing their real performance at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston. Sunday night I saw comedian Liz Miele at the Den Theater. I'm totally crushing on her and highly recommend you catch her on this tour: And naturally I...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

My Garmin Venu 3 continues to impress me. First, its navigation accuracy averages  within less than 2 meters, meaning you can see on my activity tracks when I dip into an alley to drop off Cassie's latest offering.  Second, its battery life rocks. I'm charging it right now after it last got to 100% around noon last Friday. When I connected its charger 45 minutes ago it had dwindled to 7%. That equates to just over 15 percentage points per day, or a full discharge in 6½ days. My old Venu 2 could barely...

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, now a United States Senator grâce a the wisdom and good sense of the fine people of Alabama, continues to degrade the United States military by preventing the US Senate from confirming 301 (and counting) general and flag officers from formally taking the jobs they're already doing. Earlier this month, the commanders of the Naval Air Forces and Naval Sea Systems Command retired, passing their responsibilities—but, crucially, not their policy-setting...

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie. First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can...

Meteorological autumn begins at midnight local time, even though today's autumn-like temperatures will give way to summer heat for a few days starting Saturday. Tomorrow I will once again attempt the 42-kilometer walk from Cassie's daycare to Lake Bluff. Will I go 3-for-4 or .500? Tune in Saturday morning to find out. Meanwhile: Quinta Jurecic foresees some problems with the overlapping XPOTUS criminal trials next year, not least of which is looking for a judicial solution to a political problem. Even...

Chicago just hit the magical 38.3°C (100°F) that we have avoided for over 11 years, and with the 25.6°C dewpoint it feels like 48.1°C (118.6°F): #Chicago-O'Hare has just hit 100°F. This is the first time since 7/6/2012 that Chicago has officially observed a 100°F temperature. This also ties Chicago's daily high temperature record for this date set in 1947. #ilwx — NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 24, 2023 Here at IDTWHQ it got 0.2°C warmer than yesterday but it seems to have peaked: Our little weather...

The National Weather Service reported earlier today that we did, in fact, have some historic weather: [11:34am CDT 8/23/2023] #Chicago-O'Hare is currently 93° with a dew point temperature of 80° for a heat index of 112°. The last time the heat index was higher than 112° in Chicago was on July 30, 1999, when the heat index reached as high as 114°. #ILwx (1/3) — NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 23, 2023 Here at IDTWHQ, things have cooled off in the last hour...but not by much: Fortunately the AQI is only...

This is why I won't get 10,000 steps today: I'm still at 84,000 steps over the past 7 days, though. Still, even though it's cool enough to have all the windows open, and none of the rain seems to be blowing in, I'd still rather have gotten all my steps today. Cassie, for her part, got over 4 hours of walks this past weekend, so she seems fine with it. She doesn't like the rain any more than I do. Maybe tomorrow.

The Martin Theater at Ravinia Park yesterday: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra sold out both of our Magic Flute performances in the Theater this weekend, but you can still get lawn tickets for 7:30pm tonight or 1pm Sunday. And if you take Metra, you can ride to and from the park for free.

Just a couple this morning as I have another long day of Die Zauberflöte rehearsals today: Ronald Brownstein warns that the closest parallel to the XPOTUS and his supporters assaulting the Constitution is "the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War." David Brooks wonders out loud whether the old guard Republican Party (like himself) created their own monster by aggressively promoting a meritocracy that depends on people having the right parents, among other things. Matt...

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read: The US Senate has the second-highest average age in its 234-year history, with 34 members over 70. The House is the third-oldest, with 72 members over 70. Josh Marshall (and The Daily Parker) don't extend that worry to the presidency, however: we're just fine with four more years of President Biden being the oldest president ever. The Chicago Transit Authority has cut over the CTA Red and...

I finished the main part of the feature I've been fighting since last week, only to discover that a sub-feature needs refactoring as well. Basically, before implementing this feature, the user would recalculate their model every time they changed its parameters. Calculation usually takes 5-10 seconds for most models, but (a) for some models it takes up to a minutes and (b) the calculation engine uses a first-in-first-out queue when calculating. But the calculation engine caches on a most-recently-used...

I'm just over a week from performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, so as I try to finish a feature that turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought, I'm hearing opera choruses in my head. Between rehearsals and actual work, I might never get to read any of these items: Jesse Wegman describes how to tell a political prosecution from a real one, which would be great except the people doing the political ones don't read the Times. Meaghan O'Rourke points to...

The Irish Times reported this morning that the controversial singer and author of a hunk of my university-days soundtrack died unexpectedly yesterday: In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” Ms O’Connor is survived by her three children. Her son, Shane, died last year aged 17. Ms O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her...

On my way downtown to hear Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem with some friends, I saw this notice, hung with a tragicomic level of incompetence, at the Ravenswood Metra station's 12-year-old "temporary" inbound platform: What? We get our "new" platform that has been almost completed for the past 24 months on August 1st? There’s only one brief note on the station info page, but otherwise…nothing. No ribbon cutting, no acknowledgement that the platform is opening 6 years late, no recognition that former...

When I moved to my current house, I planned to hook up my ancient cassette player to a stereo system in my library. So I got my ancient cassettes out of storage and brought them to the new place. It took a couple of stages (ordering bookshelves, getting the bookshelves, waiting for them to fix the adjustable shelf in the center bookshelf) over a few months. In that last phase it looked like this: You're reading that right. I packed that box of cassettes on 3 January 2005, and put a sticker on it when I...

As predicted, the weather is great and I'm working from home with the windows open. And I'm doing an open-ended research project that is leaving me with more questions than answers, which is always good. I haven't spent a lot of time online today, except for the research. But I would like to point out yesterday's Strong Towns post, which hit home almost literally. In most parts of the US, the suburban city plan (aka sprawl) gets a pretty heavy subsidy from urban property-tax payers: A couple of years...

Because of yesterday's rain, poor Cassie only got 23 minutes of walkies yesterday—almost all of it in drenching rain. I went through two towels drying her off after each of her walks. And of course, because she was (a) being rained on and (b) couldn't smell anything, it took her way more time than I preferred to find where to do her job. For my part, I really got a close shave on my step count: Today we have blue skies, sun, and a forecast high of 23°C: perfection. (The AQI is down to 47, too.) I have...

I'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so. Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one...

More photos. The Czech countryside, approximately here: Hafnersteig, in Vienna's Innere Stadt: The Schloss Belvedere, with (I am told) an Apollo capsule:

We've got a cool snap going into its third day here, and despite the 16 hours of daylight, it feels like autumn. But this happens every June. We just forget every year. Coming on the heels of the studies saying I don't need 10,000 steps to stay healthy, I can honestly report I'll stay healthy today without getting 10,000 steps.

I'm finally at Heathrow about 10 minutes from boarding. Whew. I've got loads of photos to go through, and hours of sleep to catch up on. I am ready to be home. Tonight I'm going to spend as much time as possible on the couch with Cassie. I've got a lot of pats for her.

I took a quick trip to Berchtesgaden, Germany, this afternoon. I think it might be the most beautiful place I've seen in Europe: I didn't stay too long, but I did get in a 2½ km walk that included part of a river path: The whole area looks like Bavarian storybook hour: To get there, you take a train from Freilassing, a nondescript town just over the German border from Salzburg. The train meanders through Alpine meadows at a slow but steady pace, passing through this kind of scenery: I will pass through...

Between check-out and my departure for Vienna I have about 2 hours to kill. I've had my caffeine for the day already, so I'm not hanging out in Wenceslas Square occupying space at a cafe. Instead, I decamped to the park across the street from the train station: This might actually be the best thing I've done all week. And whether because either Prague has lax leash laws or no one cares about them, several random dogs have said hi today. I'll be back here soon.

I took a short (5.5 km) walk and ended with a Czech open-faced egg sandwich: For the record, I didn't stop in the Sex Machines Museum, tempting as that sounded. Stopping ever few meters to take photos didn't help my time. Neither did the perfect weather. I did stroll around the Czech Senate grounds, which felt a lot different than our Capitol Hill: It almost felt as if our Senate sits in a building designed to dominate the city around it, while Czechia's sits in a walled garden. There's some profound...

Boarding pass from Chicago to Heathrow in app? Check. Boarding pass from Heathrow to Prague in app? Check. Packed? Uh...sure, once this laundry is done...

Cassie got about 4 hours of walks yesterday, plus about 9 additional hours of outdoor time. I got sunburned. So I didn't have any time to post, but I did have time to get side-eye from this girl: That's Butters, a beagle whose every look is side-eye. It's quite a talent. "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."—Lin Yutang

Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made: Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.

For 10 hours today I had banging and pounding right above my head. Once the roofers left, I took advantage of the light winds and decent light to take some aerial photos. Here's the roof on Thursday, before they ripped it off this morning: Here's 20 minutes ago: Fortunately I won't be home tomorrow during the day, else I'd probably start yelling at them. And hey, since I had the drone up, here's a Chicago skyline photo, free of charge:

During the weeks around our Spring Concert, like during the first couple of weeks of December, I have almost no free time. The Beethoven performance also took away an entire day. Yesterday I had hoped to finish a bit of code linking my home weather station to Weather Now, but alas, I studied German instead. Plus, with the aforementioned Spring Concerts on Friday and today, I felt that Cassie needed some couch time. (We both sit on the couch while I read or watch TV and she gets non-stop pats. It's good...

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

If you haven't got plans tonight, or you do but you're free Sunday afternoon, come to our Spring Concert: You can read these during the intermission: The National Association of Government Employees has sued President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—both of whom they support politically—to force the Administration to ignore the debt ceiling. Sci-fi author Ted Chiang, in a brutal essay, suggests a metaphor for AI: think of it "as a management consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey &...

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading: Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift...

The North Carolina supreme court reversed itself on a major Gerrymandering question for the simple reason that it flipped parties. Guess which way: Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act....

A plethora: Google has updated its satellite photos of Mariupol, clearly showing the destruction from Russia's invasion and subsequent siege. Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowsky (R-AK) have introduced legislation to force the Supreme Court—read: Justices Thomas (R$) and Gorsuch (R)—to adopt a binding code of ethics. Presumably a Democratic bill that would actually let Congress set the Court's ethical standards will come soon. On Monday, the city will cut down a bur oak they estimate has lived...

On this day in 1998, I registered braverman.org, and just a few weeks later built the first draft of what became this blog. When I registered it, only about a million domain names existed, though 1998 turned out to be the year the Internet exploded worldwide. Just seven years earlier, only 100 .org names existed, so braverman.org may be one of the oldest .orgs out there. (For comparison, there are just about 350 million registered domain names today.) Of course, the 25th anniversary of braverman.org...

Life is skittles and life is beer! Seriously, just check out this forecast: Today Sunny, with a high near 7. East northeast wind 15 to 20 km/h. Tonight Mostly clear, with a low around 3. Northeast wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming southeast after midnight. Saturday Sunny, with a high near 12. South southeast wind 15 to 20 km/h becoming east northeast in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 km/h. Saturday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 4. East wind 10 to 15 km/h. Sunday Sunny, with a high near...

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago: Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow. Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories: James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well. Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things. Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League...

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.) While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories: The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so...

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday: Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night. I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning: London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park...

I enjoyed my lunch in the Loop today, but not the walk back to the office: Sigh. At least the sun sets at 5pm for the first time since November 5th.

Unfortunately, though, I'm already at the airport, staring out at blue skies and sunny...airplanes. I'm looking forward to getting home, though, and to picking up Cassie tomorrow morning after her bath. (She was already overdue, but after 4 days with her pack, she'll need it even more.) I've got a couple of Brews & Choos from yesterday as well as a few photos from the weekend coming later this week. Stay tuned.

Apparently the rain has stopped! So I'm going to take a walk and get some tea. Lunch in Palo Alto; dinner possibly at The Stinking Rose, depending on how much I want to offend the people sitting next to me on the flight home tomorrow. What am I doing hanging round? I should be on that train and gone.

Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, Jr., blamed "extremely higher-than-normal call-offs" (i.e., a blue flu) for the New Year's Eve failures that left The Daily Parker waiting on a platform 35 minutes for the El: It’s not unusual for CTA workers to “call off” on holidays, but the CTA has in the past been ready to replace them. But this year, with a shortage of train operators in the ranks, the CTA couldn’t deliver the number of free trains it promised. The CTA promoted increased service on...

Staring out a window at the Terminal A parking garage at DFW Airport, I pause to check my email. Top of the pile I see this lovely report from MSNBC: Californians should brace for flooding and possible landslides as “heavy to excessive rainfall” is expected over the weekend and into next week, forecasters warned early Saturday.  With recovery efforts continuing in parts of the state which was battered by storms earlier this week, the National Weather Service said in a bulletin that a couple of Pacific...

I can't remember ever taking an umbrella to California, but I'm packing one today. So instead of the sunny and cold weather I've usually experienced in San Francisco, the forecast calls for wet and cold weather every day I'm there, with the sun coming out right after I leave. Here in Chicago, we've had just 20% of possible sun this month, which WGN points out has completely obscured that we have 15 minutes more daylight than we had at the solstice. On the other hand, so far we've had the 4th-warmest...

In a form of enlightened laziness, I often go into my company's downtown Chicago office on Friday and the following Monday, avoiding the inconvenience of taking my laptop home. It helps also that Fridays and Mondays have become the quietest days of the week, with most return-to-office workers heading in Tuesdays through Thursdays. And after a productive morning, I have a few things to read at lunch: The Economist says a lot of nice things about Chicago, including that we have an almost inexhaustible...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days. Meanwhile: How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway? Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to...

We get one or two every year. The National Weather Service predicts that by Friday morning, Chicago will have heavy snowfall and gale-force winds, just what everyone wants two days before Christmas. By Saturday afternoon we'll have clear skies—and -15°C temperatures with 400 mm of snow on the ground. Whee! We get to share our misery with a sizeable portion of the country as the bomb cyclone develops over the next three days. At least, once its gone and we have a clear evening Saturday or Sunday, we can...

What a delight to wake up for the second day in a row and see the sun. After 13 consecutive days of blah, even the -11°C cold that encouraged Cassie and me to get her to day care at a trot didn't bother me too much. Unfortunately, the weather forecast says a blizzard will (probably) hit us next weekend, so I guess I'll have time to read all of these stories sitting on the couch with my dog: The House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection referred the XPOTUS to the Justice Department on four...

Before you freak out, I need to remind you that this made the news because this sort of thing happens so rarely. Still, two armed robberies followed by the getaway car bursting into flames just a few blocks away did get my attention: A driver fleeing police crashed and their car burst into flames Monday morning on a residential block in Lincoln Square, according to police and the local aldermen. About 10:45 a.m., several people in a stolen silver Hyundai robbed someone in the 1900 block of West Berteau...

Both of our Messiah performances went well. We had too few rehearsals and too many new members this year to sing the 11 movements from memory that we have done in the past, which meant that all us veterans sang stuff we'd memorized with our scores open. So like many people in the chorus, I felt better about this year than I have since I started. We got a decent review, too. Also, we passed a milestone yesterday: 1,000 days since my company closed our Chicago office because of the pandemic, on 16 March...

My drivers license expired in 2020, when all the Secretary of State's offices (what we in Illinois call the DMV) were closed, so I just renewed it online. I had hoped to upgrade to a Real ID, but it turned out the 2021 deadline for getting one got pushed back to 2023. Since I moved in October, I actually have to go to the SOS office as they won't accept address changes online. But I still don't need a Real ID, it turns out: Americans will have two more years to obtain a Real ID driver’s license or...

Meteorological winter begins in the Northern Hemisphere today. In Chicago right now we have sunny skies and a normal-for-December 2°C. And any day above freezing between December 1st and March 1st works for me. Meanwhile: Eric Levitz explains why four railroad unions might go on strike next week. Hint: greedy private equity investors. Adam Conover explains why so many major retail chains have gone bankrupt in the past few years. Hint: greedy private equity investors. The pilot who crashed his Mooney...

Even though I'm president of a medium-sized non-profit organization who understands the importance of keeping in touch with constituents, I have run out of patience. For the last couple of weeks, I have mercilessly unsubscribed from every mailing list that sent me more than two emails a week. I might wind up missing a couple of them, but my dog, some of them just would not shut up. The worst offender was my undergraduate university. In the last week, until I finally unsubscribed from them just now...

Remember the stew I made Wednesday? It turned out one of my best: And I had a lot of leftovers: Remember Cassie getting a long walk to the big dog park Thursday? We did the same thing yesterday: And after dinner, I got this rare (inverted for your convenience) photo of Cassie getting a belly rub: Today, however, it's rainy and cold, so we will have less walking—but possibly more couch/belly-rub time.

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone...

Can you tell when I moved from a first-floor walkup apartment into a 3½–story townhouse? I figure, Cassie has about 7 years of climbing stairs in her. We're both going to have much stronger legs (though only one of us needs them).

I'm starting to adapt my habits and patterns to the new place. I haven't figured out where to put everything yet, especially in my kitchen, but I'll live with the first draft for a few weeks before moving things around. I'm also back at work in my new office loft, which is measurably quieter than the previous location—except when the Metra comes by, but that just takes a couple of seconds. I actually have the mental space to resume my normal diet of reading. If only I had the time. Nevertheless: Texas...

I reported Saturday that Empirical Brewery, one of my favorite hang-outs just 400 meters from my new house, closed unexpectedly on Sunday. Block Club Chicago's Alex Hernandez found out why: Empirical Brewery was booted from its building and abruptly shut down over the weekend following a months-long legal battle in which the landlord said the company did not pay its rent for several months this year, according to court records. Hayes Properties, which owns the Foster Avenue building, served Empirical...

I'm not quite done with my kitchen, master bedroom, or master bathroom, but I have absolutely no energy left: The big spikes around 3pm were the concert I performed in this afternoon. So, I'm going to do a couple of low-stress tasks (swapping out the thermostat, disconnecting the A/V equipment) and then I'm going to sit on the couch with Cassie and try not to doze off before 10.

I believe I'm about halfway through the kitchen (the worst room to pack), and struggling not to go immediately to Empirical for my last pint there. It's sunny, breezy, and at this moment 24°C outside—perfect beer-on-a-patio weather. Alas, though, I have to pack...the dishes. And glassware. Maybe I can do this in two hours?

I have only two rooms left to pack before my move on Monday: the master bedroom (which will take me about 30 minutes and the movers about the same), and the kitchen (which will take me most of today). I also had to reserve some time later this afternoon to grab a pint with a friend at Empirical Brewery, because (a) the weather could not look better and (b) they close permanently tomorrow night. Let's move on from the demise of the second brewery three blocks from my new house in the period between me...

I went to bed Sunday thinking I would move next Wednesday. Then I had a productive day at my downtown office yesterday. Then, as I was walking to the train, I got a note that despite me saying repeatedly, for the last six weeks, "I cannot move on the 24th," my buyers want to close on the 24th, because their painters will be here the morning of the 25th. What a coincidence! My painters will be at my new place next Tuesday morning, and now they get the added fun of maneuvering around my furniture. Sigh....

Just finishing up a sprint at work, lost track of time, have to go in 10 minutes, no time even to list the stories I queued up for later reading. So: happy Monday!

As far as I know, I'm moving in 2½ weeks, though the exact timing of both real-estate closings remain unknown. Last time I moved it took me about 38 hours to pack and 15 to unpack. This time I expect it to go faster, in part because I'm not spending as much time going "oh, I love this book!" I'm taking a quick break and catching up on some reading: Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon (R-Fla.) continues to help the guy who appointed her in absurd ways large and small. David French explains why "strong"...

One of Inner Drive Technology's old laptops—actually, the most recently purchased—can be yours along with a few accessories for only $300: That's a Dell E6440 laptop with 12 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 2.4 GHz processor. It has a 97 W/h battery, and I'm including a docking station, 130 W power supply, and a DVI cable to connect the docking station with a monitor. It does not have a hard drive or software. (I originally had a 512 GB SSD. It'll take a standard 3½-inch laptop drive.) But hey, $300? I've...

The temperature outside has hit 19°C, so I've just opened 26 of the 30 windows in my house (the other four are behind furniture and hard to reach). Because I'm moving in about three weeks, and because the forecast says a cold front will come through mid-day tomorrow, I expect that when I close most of the windows tonight they'll stay closed as long as I live here. Still, with all that sun and warm air on the other side of those open windows, it's time to take Cassie out.

Wow, yesterday went on a bit. From getting on the bus to Peoria to getting off the bus back in Chicago, I spent 18 hours and 20 minutes doing something connected with the Peoria Symphony's performance of Beethoven's 9th yesterday. I think it went quite well, and I expect they'll ask us back the next time they do a huge symphonic choral work. Right now, Cassie has plotzed completely after two nights in boarding, and I need to figure out what I'm eating this week. So I'll post something more interesting...

We're performing with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra tonight, which means we need to get our butts to Peoria this morning. Which means I woke up way too early. Normal posting resumes tomorrow, assuming I recover by then.

I've had two parallel tasks today, one of them involving feeding 72 people on Saturday. The other one involved finishing a major feature for work. Both seem successful right now but need testing with real users. Meanwhile, outside my little world: The XPOTUS seems to have backed himself into a corner by lying about "declassifying" things psychically, after the Special Master that he asked for called bullshit. Greg Sargent has thoughts. Pro Publica reported on Colorado's halfway-house system that sends...

I do love traveling Saturday mid-days, because it's the quietest time at O'Hare. There was no line at the Pre-Check security gate, and I only have a backpack, so it took less than 3 minutes to clear TSA. Wonderful. Unfortunately, every single economy parking space has a car in it. (I would have taken public transit but I had a meeting run until 12:30, with a 3pm flight. Couldn't risk the 90 minutes or so.) In any event, my plane is here, it appears to be on time, and the latest weather is VFR the whole...

A line of thunderstorms just blew past my office about 3 hours ahead of schedule, which means I might get home at a reasonable hour without drowning. Of course, we might get more storms: Scott Lincoln, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The first storms are expected to hit Chicago as early as 1 p.m., but that could vary — and more storms will be possible throughout the afternoon, he said. Some parts of the city could get 1-2 inches of rain or more if they’re hit by strong storms, while other...

Happy Monday: The XPOTUS uses the same pattern of lies every time he gets caught committing a crime. Jennifer Rubin says this was his dumbest crime yet. Usability experts at the Nielsen/Norman Group lay out everything you hate about phone trees, and how companies could fix them. My generation should be your boss now, but of course, we aren't. Within 30 years, Chicago could experience 52°C heat indexes. I would now like to take a nap, but alas...

This was such an amazing experience! Exhausting, but amazing. Backstage at intermission; Maestro James Conlon is front and center: And we, the chorus of Roman Citizens, after our curtain call: I should fully recover by...maybe Thursday?

After Tuesday's half-day of rehearsals (which would have been a full day except for a scheduling conflict I couldn't move), and yesterday's all-day rehearsals, my intellectual capabilities and creativity seem a bit diminished this week. We open tonight with Don Giovanni and close Sunday afternoon with La Clemenza di Tito. I'm meant to work on our product roadmap for the next 5-10 sprints (i.e., through years' end) while also delivering at least one more feature for the current sprint that ends Tuesday....

Today, though, I've got a lot of debugging, and several chorus meetings on various topics, plus a condo association meeting that I really don't want to attend. Since I'm president of both the chorus and the condo association (one voluntary, one voluntold), I can't shirk either. Meanwhile, some of the grain silos that remind Beirut of the massive government incompetence that led to a massive aluminum nitrate explosion two years ago today collapsed, fortunately before the memorial began. And one of the...

We've got a (soft) product release tomorrow afternoon and I've got an opera rehearsal tonight, so a real post will have to wait. I did like Matt Ford's brief note that we've taken the gloves off in the Senate, which is about time. I might have to declare news bankruptcy tonight, though, and return to the world after we launch.

This is a bit of good news for my weekend getaway: Long-running weekend strikes on London's Night Tube have been suspended after the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union accepted a concession from London Underground about rotas. The bodies have agreed to have a minimum number of drivers who prefer to work overnight on each line. The RMT stressed the dispute was not resolved, and the situation would be reviewed in three months at the latest. Ongoing weekend strike action began in January and was...

In just a few minutes I will take Cassie to boarding, then head up to Northwestern for a rehearsal (I'm in the chorus at Ravinia's upcoming performances of La Clemenza di Tito.) I'll then have to pack when I get home from rehearsal, then head to a hotel by O'Hare. Ah, how much fun is an 8:30 international flight! As I'll have some time at the airport in the morning, and no time now, I want to queue these up for myself: Jonathan Chait says Senator Joe Manchin (D?-WV) didn't kill President Biden's agenda...

Cassie got almost 2 hours of walkies before 9am with a return trip to the Montrose  Beach Dog Friendly Area: She also got a bath, because even though Lake Michigan supplies millions of people with fresh water, we don't drink it right out of the lake for very good reasons. Also, I did not take 540 photos like last time. Maybe tomorrow...? And if you're listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" on NPR this morning (and tomorrow morning in some markets), I was there Thursday night:

Many people, particularly in the US, have suffered recently because of their choices to live in places without meaningful alternatives to driving, their neighbors' choices not to fund meaningful alternatives to driving, and a war in Eastern Europe that has directly and indirectly raised worldwide oil prices to real values not seen since 1973. I feel a bit of smugness coming on. See, my house has a Walk Score of 95 and a transit score of 81. I live within 1500 meters (about a mile*) of two rapid-transit...

I'm spending today finishing a couple of books and season 3 of The Umbrella Academy on either side of hauling down to Bloomington, Ill., for a friend's birthday/housewarming. Tomorrow I intend to continue doing nothing creative, though the holiday may give me cause to contemplate the future of our nation. Regular posting should resume Tuesday.

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

It's not too late to get one of the remaining tickets to Terra Nostra:

Tonight our chorus has its (sold out!) fundraiser. This will be the first year since I joined the chorus that I won't be performing, and the second where I'm not running the event. I finally get to just enjoy the night. Except one of the co-chairs has Covid. And the reason I'm not performing is that one of the ensemble I put together also has Covid, and another got called up for his Army Reserve weekend unexpectedly. But, hey, it's going to be fun...and did I mention we sold out? We did find a couple...

NPR did a segment this morning on the 1978 movie Grease, which correspondent Dori Bell had never seen—since, you know, she's a late Millennial. As I listened to the movie, while slowly waking up and patting Cassie, the timeline of the movie and the play just made me feel...old. The play, which premiered in 1971, takes place in the fall of 1958. The movie came out in 1978. So try this out, with the dates changed a bit: The play premiered in 2015 and takes place in 2002. Oh, it gets better, Gen-Xers and...

At 7am Monday, it was 12°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. By 6pm the temperature had gone up to 26.5°C, then 29.8°C at 2pm Tuesday, then 29.1°C at 3:15pm yesterday, before a cold front finally ploughed through and got us down to lovely sleeping weather right before I turned in: The slow rise in my indoor temperature from 7am to 5pm was just my normal A/C program, as was the decline when the A/C turned on at 5. Then at 6, I discovered that the cold front had gone through, so I opened the...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

Thursday evening, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance: That's Bill Kurtis, Peter Sagal, Karen Chee, Alonzo Bodden, and Helen Hong at this week's "Wait Wait" taping. The "Not My Job" guest was actor Matt Walsh: Then yesterday, Cassie and I trundled up to Spiteful Brewing in the sun: Not a bad few days, in all.

Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time. Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen. Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch: Berea College: One of the ranch's permanent residents: Down the road from the ranch: Cinnamon, who rather...

I've just switched the DNS entries for wx-now.com over to the v5 App, and I've turned off the v4 App and worker role. It'll take some time to transfer over the 360 GB of archival data, and to upload the 9 million rows of Gazetteer data, however. I've set up a virtual machine in my Azure subscription specifically to do that. This has been quite a lift. Check out the About... page for the whole history of the application. And watch this space over the next few months for more information about how the app...

We're about to get back on the road for our 700 km drive back to Chicago. Before leaving, I just wanted to highlight Ravinia Festival's upcoming 2022 season. In particular, note who they're partnering with for these performances of La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni. Oh, yes, I will be there.

The day started like this: Then it became this: And returned to this: But because of this: It is now this: As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way. Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out...

I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak. The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about...

Even as the East Coast gets bombed by an early-spring cyclone, we have sunny skies and bitter cold. But the -12°C at O'Hare at 6am will likely be the coldest temperature we get in Chicago until 2023. The forecast predicts temperatures above 10°C tomorrow and up to 16°C on Wednesday, with no more below-freezing temperatures predicted as far out as predictions can go. Meanwhile, I'm about to leave for our first of two Bach Jonannespassion performances this weekend. We still have tickets available for...

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Other than making a hearty beef stew, I have done almost nothing of value today. I mean, I did some administrative work, and some chorus work, and some condo board work. But I still haven't read a lick of the books I've got lined up, nor did I add the next feature to the Weather Now 5 app. I did read these, though: An Illinois state judge has enjoined the entire state from imposing mask mandates on schools, just as NBC reports that anti-vaxxer "influencers" are making bank off their anti-social...

On the walk home from the Empirical Taproom last night, Cassie managed to lose all four of her boots, at roughly 500-meter intervals. It got to the point where I started compulsively checking her paws to see if any remaining boot(s) remained attached, and still, they just vanished. Well, winter is almost over, I suppose...

The XPOTUS promised yet another thing that would hurt the people he claims to want to help, in part because he (and obviously they) deeply misunderstand how the laws work in this country: Former president Donald Trump suggested Saturday night he will pardon the rioters charged in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol if he is elected president in 2024. Trump, who has teased but not confirmed another run for president, has repeatedly criticized the prosecution of individuals who...

Former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner (R, of course) famously stopped almost all discretionary spending in the state during his term in office by continually vetoing state budgets passed by the Democratically-controlled legislature. His term overlapped with a project to rebuild 11 railroad bridges on the North Side of Chicago, and which included a companion project, partially necessitated by the track reconfigurations required to replace the bridges, to rebuild the Ravenswood Metra station serving...

I managed to acquire a few bruises last night walking Cassie. I'm fine; she's fine; but my left hand and elbow are a bit sore. Yesterday continued our really strange week as the repeating 96-hour cycle of cold and thaw continued: Starting around 4pm, the warm front pushed just enough moisture ahead of itself to give Chicago a fine mist that instantly coated everything. Even though the air got above freezing later on, the sidewalks did not. Result: most of them got a perfectly smooth, nearly invisible...

After a lot of struggle trying to get Cassie to stop pulling on her leash, I finally gave up today and got her a prong collar. Dogs don't much like them, and neither do I, but no amount of treats or yanks on her harness worked with her. As soon as I switched the lead from her harness to her prong collar, Cassie suddenly knew exactly where to walk on a heel, and only pulled enough to make the prong contract before falling right back to my side. We walked about 4 blocks total, and she never pulled enough...

We almost made it to December 31st without measurable snowfall, which would have broken the record of 290 days. Alas, at day #288... I snapped that photo with the wind at my back and quarter-sized flakes melting on my coat. It was 1.7°C then, but by the time I sloshed home with the wind in my face and rain soaking through my coat, it was getting just enough warmer to really make the weather really suck dingo balls. At least I now have my Covid booster. Hurrah. And I now want to take a nap...

When I got home from our Messiah performance yesterday, my car ended up here: If you don't have International System conversion factors ready to hand, just know that one statute mile is 1,609.344 meters. So right before I got to my garage last night, my car hit 10,000 miles exactly. And how about that average fuel economy? For the luddites, 2.2 L/100 km is about 105 MPG. If you recall, I bought the car just shy of 3 years ago. So in three years, I've driven about 10,000 miles and filled up the car 12...

My outdoor thermometer has alerted me to an unusual temperature swing: Yes, that's a 4°C rise in one hour. At least it's stopped raining. But there is a tornado warning about 100 km from here, so there's a lot of energy in the air right now. Meanwhile, indoors, my fireplace caused a spike in CO2: Don't worry, 2,000 ppm won't hurt me. But I did get an alert about it.

I've finally resumed progress on a major update to Weather Now. I finished everything except the user interface way back in April, but between summer, Cassie, and everything else, I paused. At least, until last week, when something clicked in my head, and I started writing again. As my dad would say, I broke the code's back. It turns out, the APIs really work well, and I'm getting used to .NET Blazor, so I'm actually getting things done. The only downside applies to Cassie, who will probably only get 90...

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

It's hard to believe Parker has been gone a whole year. I miss you, buddy.

My lunch spot, the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich: Lincoln's Inn Fields, by the Sir John Soane Museum: Lincoln's Inn Fields gazebo: Today: Hampshire and Gospel Oak.

Just a quick observation: since I last visited London two years ago, almost every business I've encountered has gone cashless. Coffee shops, pubs, the Transport Museum, all cards-only. In 2019, most of the smaller places preferred cash. No real consequences, other than not needing to withdraw Sterling so far this trip. When I get home and sync up Quicken, I expect I'll have a little work, but again, not a biggie.

I'm leaving the country today, for the first time in almost exactly two years, and I couldn't be happier. I miss my Ancestral Homeland. And the list of Covid-related travel requirements, while annoying, make sense to me. In fact, because I return Sunday, I timed my (£39 FFS!) UK 2-day test to double as my US 3-day test. Before I take off, and consign poor Cassie to 103 hours of desperate loneliness (albeit with her entire daycare pack), I want to comment on two news stories. First, the Chicago...

671 days. The Apollo Chorus of Chicago last performed in public on 15 December 2019, 671 days ago. This morning we performed at the Chicago History Museum, outside, without masks, to an audience of about 100 people. It is absolutely wonderful to be performing again. The cool, sunny weather helped, too. And the decision not to wear tuxedos.

Tonight the Apollo Chorus of Chicago has its first in-person rehearsal since 12 March 2020, almost exactly 18 months ago. We're in a new rehearsal space with lots of new people and new challenges (like mandatory mask-wearing while singing). Poor Cassie won't see me for several more hours. Tomorrow I expect a little more breathing room. Today, though...yikes.

I completed a long-overdue project for my condo board today, made more tolerable by sitting in my relocated office with all the air and light it provides. Having completed that project, I will shortly take Cassie for another hour-long walk.

I once again walked from Uptown to Lake Bluff, as planned. And I broke all kinds of personal records. Unfortunately, I discovered a usability bug in Garmin's Venu software that led to me accidentally deleting the first 9.47 km of the walk. I re-started the trace after covering another 530 meters, so the official record starts at 10.0 km: Add 10 km and 1:27:02 to that data and you get 43.55 km in 6:30:08. My marathon time (42.2 km) was 6:16:55, a 2½-minute improvement over last year. But my...

The first day of autumn has brought us lovely cool weather with even lovelier cool dewpoints. We expect similar weather through the weekend. I hope so; Friday I plan another marathon walk, and Saturday I'm throwing a small party. Meanwhile, we have a major deliverable tomorrow at my real job, and Cassie has a routine vet check-up this afternoon. But with this weather, I'm extra happy that I moved my office to the sunroom.

I've just spent the last 45 minutes transferring all my auto-pay accounts to a new credit card after my bank notified me that someone in Berlin tried to use my old card to buy something on a French website. Since this happened just a couple of days after T-Mobile once again lost control of millions of customer records, I assume that's how my card number wound up with a European criminal. Or maybe it came from one of the companies whose accounts I just had to update? According to C-Net, "T-Mobile says...

Today is the 40th birthday of the IBM 5150—better known as the IBM PC: It wasn't that long before the August 1981 debut of the IBM PC that an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and 60 people to run and keep it loaded with instructions. The IBM PC changed all that. It was a very small machine that could not only process information faster than those ponderous mainframes of the 1960s but also hook up to the home TV set, process text and...

If all goes as planned, in about half an hour a Comcast technician will make a change to my service here at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters that will, in turn, result in Cassie experiencing some anxiety. I don't want to cause doggy angina, but if Comcast moves my primary cable connection from the room it's in now to the room I want it in, then I'm going to spend the subsequent two or three hours moving furniture. Updates and art as conditions warrant.

Cassie last got a bath (I think) sometime in April. So, wow, did she need one today. And she was a trooper. Before: After: She actually likes water, so she just let me spray her down, shampoo her up, and spray her down again. Once inside and toweled off, she got the zoomies but good. After two hours she's dry and doesn't smell like a wet dog. And she's so soft again, without the sheen of whatever she rolled in at day camp for the past few weeks.

I spent the day in Bristol, Wisconsin, eating a turkey leg and admiring the wandering bands of hordes. Regular posting returns tomorrow.

The New York Times throws cold water on a health fad: According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on step counts and health, the 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man. It also translated as “10,000-steps meter,”...

Parker would have turned 15 today. I'm of course very glad to have Cassie, but I do miss my bête noir quite a bit.

I feel so proud of myself for getting this week's View From Your Window Contest (read the essay, then scroll down) in under 90 minutes: Yes, I know exactly what window the photographer took that photo from. I'll post Sullivan's confirmation of my geographic sleuthing ability next Friday. Of course, I may not have won the contest; I not only have answer correctly (or have the closest point to the correct answer), but I have to have the first correct answer. The last time I had the correct answer, I was...

I left Cassie all alone for 5½ hours yesterday, and came home to this baleful look: And yet, 20 minutes later, all was forgiven: (A 15-minute walk occurred between these two photos, which may have had something to do with the forgiveness.)

Cassie and I took on a stretch of the Ice Age Trail near La Grange, Wis., this afternoon: She is snoring peacefully on the couch now, and probably will continue doing so for many hours. Note to self: bring more water for the dog next hike.

Not having an adolescent dog who wants her breakfast at 6am to contend with this morning meant I actually got to sleep in. (Yes, 7:15 is "sleeping in" when I'm in California, because that's 9:15 back home.) The friends looking after Cassie reported last night: "Cassie's a bit confused...she said something about not signing up for the overnight package." This morning: "Very barky at noises. But she settled down. We're heading to the dog park after Meet the Press!" (Cassie will not be on the news program...

Almost 16 months since I last flew anywhere, I have returned to O'Hare: Despite traveling on Saturday afternoon, which historically has meant few delays and a quiet airport, the traffic coming up here was so bad my car's adaptive cruise control gave up. But she got a treat once we got to economy parking: I don't think I have ever parked that close to the elevators in 48 years of flying. Good thing, too, because the closest non-LEV space was in the next county. Once I got into the terminal, it took less...