This won't actually show off my work or entice you to buy a magnificent image for your commercial advertising campaign at a surprisingly reasonable price. No, this merely shows a place Parker and I both enjoy for precisely the same reasons (sitting outside with popcorn and good beer). Four Farthings has their patio set up, and after I get back from a short bike ride, the dog and I are heading over:
I'm continuing to play with Adobe Lightroom, and it turns out I've been doing a lot wrong for five years (i.e., since I first started shooting with a digital SLR). It looks like I'm going to shoot a lot more raw photos, because they allow modern software (like Lightbox and Photoshop) a lot more control over the final image.
And, of course, I discovered this using Parker as a subject. The results don't completely suck:
50mm, 1/60 at f/2.0, ISO 3200.
50mm, 1/15 at f/1.8, ISO 3200.
There is no reason for this post beyond the obvious:
I'm wrapping up in Fairfield County, Conn., today, then I get five nights at home before popping off to Boston for an indefinite series of 4-day weeks there. At least it's Boston, a city I enjoy, and one with easy access to the airport. (I expect my commute will be two hours shorter than it is to Connecticut.) Parker won't like it, though: he'll likely board from Sunday night to Thursday afternoon every week for the duration of the project.
No word yet on Internet connectivity. The client with whom I'm wrapping up this morning trades good-sized portfolios, so they have strict security. The Boston client manages securities as well, so I may not have much contact with the outside world there, either.
I'll survive, and so will Parker, if for no other reason than the regular, magical increases in my bank account twice each month....
Last night around 3:30, Parker whined at me and nosed me. Given the hour, this meant something important. I found pants, shoes, a sweatshirt, a coat, then got my keys from their usual spot.
Parker took about 5 minutes to sniff out the best patch of mud on which to make his after-hours deposit. After cleaning it up, I took him back to my building, reached into my jacket, and pulled out the keys to my other apartment.
At this point I said a bad word. Then I calmly told Parker this was his fault. He licked my nose.
Maybe a New Yorker would have handled this differently, but I figured, there are a few early risers in the building, how long could I have to wait?
Two hours. I must have nodded off because it seemed like only 90 minutes. In the cold. On the floor.
At least I was inside.
I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 4½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page almost two years ago, so it's time for a quick update. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
The Daily Parker is about:
- Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
- Politics. I'm a moderate-leftie by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
- Software. I work for Avanade (a company that has no editorial control over this blog and which wants me to make it clear I'm not speaking for them), and I continue to own a micro-sized software company in Chicago. I have some experience writing software, which explains why Avanade continue to tolerate me. 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.
- The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten 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 the other ones I visit whenever I can.
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 (de rigeur in my opinion).
Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. They would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior assertions, and despite nearly three centuries of legal precedents. They want you to believe that, too.
Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it. All the photos I post are completely protected: send me an email if you want to republish one. I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. With apologies to King James and Yaishua ben Miriam, render to Facebook the things that are Facebook's; and to the original authors what is not.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.
Chicago weather conditions at 4pm: -6°C, winds northeast at 48 km/h gusting to 63 km/h, visibility 400 m in heavy, blowing snow.
Here's the corner of Belden and Clark in Lincoln Park around then:
And a little north of that, looking north:
One dog + snow – leash = one happy dog:
The last couple of days have reminded us we live in Chicago, severely limiting Parker's walk time. I don't want to keep him outside more than 15 minutes when it's below -15°C. He doesn't understand hypothermia, and he's got a double coat, so to him it seems like I'm being completely arbitrary. He probably doesn't remember the day it got down to -27°C and he fell over, whimpering, because his paws were too cold to walk after less than five minutes outside.
So he's at day camp today, and I'm working on an interesting coding problem.
I hope he comes home really, really tired.
At least the sun is out:
We had days last year close to -17°C, but it was last this cold on 5 February 2009. Parker is bored, but even he didn't seem to want to stay outside this morning.
As an aside, because of the radiator in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center that I can't turn off, I have two windows open right now and it's still 24°C—3°C above normal—over by the server rack.