The Daily Parker

The Cubs will start the season in Philadelphia this afternoon, so at the moment they have a perfect record. That will likely change within the next 36 hours, so we're not to jazzed about it in Chicago.

When they open at Wrigley Field on Friday, it may be cold and drizzly according to the National Weather Service forecast this morning, but at least they'll finally have good beer:

After 25 years, Goose Island finally has a home field advantage at Wrigley Field.

Chicago’s longest-tenured beer maker will be abundant at Clark and Addison this season for the first time, with both 312 Urban Wheat Ale and the newly released 312 Urban Pale Ale to be sold by vendors throughout the stadium, according to the Cubs.

Goose’s Green Line (a pale ale available only in Chicago and on draft), Matilda (a Belgian-style pale ale) and Sofie (a saison) will also be available at Wrigley in 2014.

The reintroduction of Goose Island and departure of Old Style will come about because InBev now owns Goose Island. InBev also owns Budweiser. So Goose Island isn't by any stretch a craft brewer anymore, but they still make better beers than MillerCoors.

Still, it pains me to quote the end of the Tribune article: "U.S. Cellular Field will again be dominated by MillerCoors products (Miller Lite, Coors Light, Blue Moon and Redd’s Apple Ale), but will again feature a solid and varied lineup of craft beers that includes Bell’s Oberon, Revolution Anti-Hero, Rogue Dead Guy Ale, Lagunitas Daytime and Sierra Nevada Pale."

And there's Wrigley Field for you: Loser team, loser beers, sells out every home game. There is no god.

Gail Gygax, widow of Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax, is trying to get a statue to her late husband in Lake Geneva, Wis.:

Since 2009, Gail has been trying to make a Gary Gygax memorial happen in Lake Geneva.

And it should.

Or, at least, some form of a memorial to Gygax, whose influence on contemporary culture is vast and underrated, should happen. As David Ewalt, an editor at Forbes magazine and author of the 2013 history "Of Dice and Men," said, Dungeons & Dragons took the raw materials of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and revitalized the fantasy genre; it influenced the first generation of video game developers, introducing the now-familiar concept of game characters who could grow, improve, "level up"; Gygax's Gen Con, a role-playing game convention founded in 1968, helped popularize geek conventions (and continues to, decades later).

But most important, Ewalt said, "What Gary did was help give birth to a creative class: filmmakers, writers, TV showrunners. A generation now making art — from the 'Game of Thrones' guys to whomever — learned how to tell a story, and the power of narrative, from first being D&D players in the 1970s and '80s.

I hope they build the statue, and I'll leave a d20 in tribute. I actually played a game with Gygax as DM back in, oh, 1980, right in The Dragon in Lake Geneva. I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate the honor without going all fanboy on him. He seemed amused. And he signed my second-edition Players Handbook, which I still have somewhere.

I miss D&D...

I got home with no difficulty and bypassed the dead El train at O'Hare through the simple expedient of taking a taxi.

I'm catching up on work right now, so further comments will issue later. It also turns out, apparently, that a virus had made a beachhead in my nose, so I will have to fight that off before my wit and verve returns.

In totally unrelated news, today is the 30th anniversary of the fictional Breakfast Club.

All four are dead:

Quiznos, the Denver-based sandwich chain, said Friday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, the second quick-service restaurant chain in a week to do so.

Quizno's bankruptcy filing comes just days after Sbarro, the New York-based pizza chain, filed for court protection in Manhattan on Monday, the second time in three years. Hot Dog on a Stick, another purveyor of quick-service food, in February also filed for bankruptcy protection.

This is unfortunate especially for Chicago-area coyotes, as they are known to like Quiznos.

If I have time, I'll read these articles today:

• Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things, which is actually just his version of this kind of link round-up;
• Cranky Flier on American Airlines fare changes following the merger;
• The Daily WTF's CodeSOD of the Day;
• Now that Windows Azure SQL Database has launched page compression, a review of best practices around the technology; and
• Confirmation that the meterological winter ending last Friday was the third coldest and third snowiest in recroded history.

Now, to work.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in September 2011, more than 1,300 posts back, so it's time for a refresh.

The Daily Parker is about:

• Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 13 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
• Chicago (the greatest city in North America), and sometimes London, San Francisco, and the rest of the world.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until early 2011 when I finally got the first digital camera I've ever had whose photos were as good as film. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.

I also write a lot of software, and will occasionally post about technology as well. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got more than 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

It turned out that I had an actual task today. Two, in fact. Both were pure stupidity on my part. And both completely scotched my goal of doing nothing worthwhile for four days.

First, I had promised something to my team at work before I left, but didn't realize until I checked email this morning that, well, the task was not completed. (Notice the subtle use of passive voice there.) So I had that task, which took half an hour.

Second, mentioned forgetting a few vital items in my luggage, so I had to buy them. And I paid a stupidity tax. The cost of one hat, two pairs of shorts, one pair of sandals (which I didn't already own and therefore had planned to buy here anyway), and one bottle of sunscreen was two hundred bloody dollars. In other words, I paid a 100% tax on bad packing.

So to compensate for having to do things today, after accomplishing both tasks I put on my new shorts, sunscreen, and sandals, then walked the 800 meters from my hotel to the opposite side of Maho Beach and watched planes land for three hours. I need to point out that along the way, I walked through the Caribbean Sea. My new shorts got seawater on them. I think this is exactly what they're for. Especially since the seawater was about the same temperature as the air (27°C), and unlike walking through Lake Michigan on any day except that one day in the beginning of September when everything lines up perfectly, it felt really good. (My feet are, in fact, still wet.)

I also met a few good people, had a few good drinks, and learned that the best airplane landing of the week occurs tomorrow around lunchtime when KLM flight 785 lands. It's a 747-400, the largest plane that flies here. If I have to stand out in the rain, I'm going to see this thing land.

Of course, this means I now have a plan. Even though I came to this island with the explicit goal of not accomplishing or planning anything, except maybe reading a book or two, I just can't help myself. The Dude is onto something...I just can't get there yet...

My plan is:

• Tomorrow: sleep late, eat something, walk across Maho Beach, take photos of the 747 landing, walk back to my hotel, change my shoes, walk somewhere else (possibly Marigot or Phillipsburg), have some drinks.
• Saturday: sleep late, walk somewhere (maybe even take a bus and then walk), read something, walk somewhere else, read some more, have some drinks.
• Sunday: sleep late, shove things into my suitcase, walk somewhere, retrieve my suitcase, go to New York, have some drinks.

Understand that "have some drinks" is an ongoing activity. And the happy accident is that the room I got for cheap through Bookings.com includes free drinks.

Someday, and that day may never come, I will do nothing for an entire week. Meanwhile, this is the least I can do right now. Baby steps.

I'm sitting in the only spot in my hotel that has free WiFi, with a dozen or so other people doing the same thing. Plus, it's possible this is the slowest WiFi in the world (I'm getting 150 kbps). These things make it easy to get out of the building, into island air that's currently 27°C.

I know, I said to people I wouldn't use the internet, but I actually needed a map and some local info that the giant book of wristwatch advertisements guidebook didn't actually tell me.

Plus, I forgot three somewhat useful things, so I'm waiting for the shops to open. Which I think they are now. So I can get the shorts, sunscreen, and hat I need to go for a hike, as the shorts, sunscreen, and hats I have back in Chicago (current temperature: -17°C) are kind of useless here.

Since I intend to be useless here, but I don't want to overheat or get sunburned, and all 300 emails that came in overnight have finished downloading, off I go.

The huge furniture move is almost done. I finished moving the rooms around, so my office is now where my dining room used to be, etc. Here's where the office used to be:

Since the purpose of this exercise is to make my small apartment look a lot bigger, part of the plan requires moving a bunch of things to storage, including several nontrivial pieces of furniture. At that point the project will be complete. So I have to live with this mostly-finished living space for two weeks. That does not make me happy.

Nor does my primary WiFi connection. With the IDTWHQ in a completely different part of the space, it's not possible to have a wired connection to the primary DSL unless I move the laptop back to the other room. Which, I guess, is an appropriate thing to do with a laptop, so it's not such a hardship.

Wait, isn't there some kind of sports game on right now?

Now that the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC) has gone away, my apartment the IDT World Headquarters has a few more options. It's not a huge space, which has become a problem now that I'm trying to sell it.

Essentially, I'm rotating three rooms clockwise. That is, my office is moving to where my dining room is, which is moving into my living room, which is moving into my office.

That this is possible suggests the difficulties of having a server rack in the spot most people would ordinarily put a TV. I needed to put the rack next to an outlet I could isolate on a 30-amp circuit, right next to the main phone jack. That forced the TV, and therefore the living room, into the area most of my neighbors use for their dining rooms. So that forced the dining room into the are most of my neighbors put their desks.

I'll have the full "before" and "after" photos when I've moved all the furniture. (I may actually put some pieces in storage, because no amount of rearranging can reduce the volume of stuff in the place.)

Here's the "after," showing the true victim of all this disruption:

I looked through my old photos just now—yay indexing—and this is the closest analogue I could find:

(That's from March 2009, when I reinstalled windows at the office.)

The project should be complete in time for the game tonight.