The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Party time! Excellent!

I threw a party for a few friends last night. Cassie's friend Butters came by and ensconced herself on the couch for most of the night. Cassie, for her part, got oo-mox from one of the guests:

Cassie has spent most of today sleeping, as I would like to be doing. At some point I may even get the motivation to read. First I have to tweak a feature of Weather Now that will help re-import all the data I mentioned yesterday.

Not as much snow as we thought

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.

Brews & Choos Project: five years in

Five years ago this evening, I hopped a Milwaukee District North Line train after work for Glenview, and walked about 1.3 km to Macushla Brewing at Lake and Waukegan. The Brews & Choos Project had begun.

Since then, I've visited 118 breweries, distilleries, and meaderies in Chicago and another 10 while traveling. Sadly, 20 of the places I've visited have closed. (Let me revise that: sadly, 17 of them have closed, and happily, 3 others have closed.) I visited 25 places in the first month of the project, going all the way to the end of the Union Pacific West line on 7 March 2020. But then the pandemic halted the project for months, until everyone figured out that being outside in warm air was less risky than staying cooped up at home. By mid-2021, I'd resumed a steady pace and had taken at least one trip on every Metra line except the North Central Service, which had to wait until 25 August 2023.

In July 2023 I revised the criteria slightly to bring a few places outside Chicago into the project, primarily because Amtrak can get you to Milwaukee faster than the Union Pacific Northwest Line can get you to Woodstock.

I've used a simple rating system: would I go back? For 72 of the 118 Chicago-area places that are still open, I said yes; for 16, I said Maybe; and for just 10—including the second place I visited on 7 February 2020, Ten Ninety Brewing—I said No. I also started a Top 10 list in 2022.

I also have reported three other criteria that I hold dear: whether the place allows dogs (65), how easily one can avoid televisions (67), and whether the place has outdoor seating (92).

Starting today, I'm revising the rating system. In addition to the Yes-Maybe-No recommendation on each review, I'll be adding a star rating. As much as I liked the 81 places worldwide I rated "Would Go Back," there are differences. And not all of the "No" places are as bad as Crust Brewing in Rosemont. I know star ratings are boring, but with 184 places on the list and hundreds more within walking distance of trains throughout the world, it needs more precision.

So watch for a revised Brews List and Choos Map, and a concerted effort over the next six weeks to visit Bridgeport and Bronzeville, two areas of the city I've neglected.

Finally, I'm happy to report that that Macushla remains open, and continues to brew innovative beers like the HollaPeno Jalapeño IPA, which my Brews & Choos buddy would probably love.

Stay tuned for more Brews & Choos!

Only 1,460 days to go

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:

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

Time for the weekend

So much to read...tomorrow morning, when I wake up:

Finally, Block Club Chicago wonders why coyotes seem to be everywhere right now? I have two explanations: first, because it's mating season; and second, because of confirmation bias. We had two coyote sightings in strange places last week, and people are seeing more coyotes in general because they want to get laid. So that leads to more articles on coyotes. QED.

Diane, this looks to be my last message...

Writer and director David Lynch has died at 78:

The director of 10 feature films — or maybe 11, counting the 2017 revival of “Twin Peaks,” which he described as an 18-hour movie — Mr. Lynch received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2019. He also earned four Oscar nominations for directing “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and for directing and co-writing “The Elephant Man,” a 1980 historical drama about a hideously deformed but beautifully refined Englishman.

“Eraserhead,” his dystopian 1977 debut, featured giant spermatozoa and a singing woman who lives inside a radiator. “Blue Velvet,” a voyeuristic coming-of-age story, opened with a sequence that lingered uncomfortably on swarming ants. “Mulholland Drive,” a neo-noir drama, hinged on altered identities and dreamlike mysteries, including the appearance of an enigmatic blue box inside a character’s bag.

“If you look at TV drama since its inception, shows would tell the audience what they were going to see, show it to them and then tell them what they’ve seen. Nobody was ever puzzled by what was going on,” David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” told Time magazine in 2017. “With ‘Twin Peaks,’ Lynch and Frost show it to you and leave you thinking, ‘What did I just see?’ That was revolutionary, and it still is.”

During its first season, on ABC, the show drew as many as 20 million viewers and received 14 Emmy nominations, winning two, behind an ensemble cast that included Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean.

I have fond memories of sitting on a dorm bed watching Twin Peaks with my friend Renee on Thursday nights junior and senior years. I have mixed feelings about "The Return"—really, about everything he did (especially Dune)—and let's not talk about Fire Walk With Me, strangled in the crib by the suits at New Line. The first season of Twin Peaks, though. That really meant a lot to us in college.

He will be missed.

A good public-private partnership

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 Punzun Ltd.'s taxes to get the form declaring how much I made from Inner Drive Technology. In your country, I'd bet the government does all this for you, don't they?

Tallest building in Evanston proposed

Crain's reports this hour that the Evanston City Council has approved a 31-story, 447-unit apartment building right next to Inner Drive Technology World HQ v2.0:

Chicago-based Vermilion Development has submitted a zoning analysis application for a 447-unit, 330-foot-tall building at 605 Davis St., with ground-floor retail space, according to a report from the city manager.

If built, a tower of that height would eclipse Orrington Plaza, currently Evanston’s tallest building at 277 feet.

The suburban apartment market is virtually full, with the median net rent rising 3.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2024, according to data from Integra Realty Resources. Evanston is an especially popular residential market with a built-in renter base of Northwestern University students and staff.

The lot in question is this one, visible in this IDTWHQ Office Cam view from July 2005:

IDTWHQ moved there on 18 January 2005, 20 years ago next week. In a year or two, the only thing visible from that office will be a blank wall. (On 4 October 2005, I moved to IDTWHQ v3.0, across the hall from v2.0.)

Statistics: 2024 in Media

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 for the kakistocratic country we now live in. (Still reading this. It's not something one just breezes through.)
  • Iain Banks, Raw Spirit, his hilarious travelogue of Scottish distilleries, plus the Culture novels Excession, Inversions, Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata. I also finally read The Crow Road.
  • Christopher Buehlman, The Daughters' War. Prequel to his previous novel The Black-Tongued Thief.
  • Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, which I first read in 2001 and wanted to read again.
  • Cory Doctorow, The Lost Cause. Imagine what the world will look like when today's alt-right go to nursing homes and the yet-to-be-born generation has to take care of them.
  • David Farley, Modern Software Engineering. Decent recapitulation of stuff I've known for years, but updated.
  • Scott Farris, Almost President, short biographies of the men (it's from 2008) who lost presidential elections and still influenced politics for years after.
  • William Gibson, The Peripheral. Quite different than the TV series, but both were great.
  • Charles King, Every Valley. The history of Händel's Messiah. (Not finished yet.)
  • Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Absolutely essential reading if you want even to try understanding the horribly damaged generation born after 1995.
  • John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation and Agent to the Stars. I absolutely love Scalzi's writing.
  • John R. Schmidt, Authentic Chicago, a collection of historical vignettes from an authentic Chicago historian.
  • Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies. A quick read that helped me understand how my new boss looks at software team management.
  • Andrew Weir, The Martian. Another one that I have meant to read for a while.

Other Media

In 2024, I watched 24 films, a bit more TV than usual, two concerts, and one comedy show:

  • Films I would recommend: American Sniper (2014), The Beekeeper (2024), Constantine (2005), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), Dune Part 2 (2024), Furiosa (2024), The Gentlemen (2019), The Intern (2015), The Martian (2015), The Menu (2022), Sicario (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), and the entire John Wick series (2014 to present).
  • Films you can skip: The Good Shepherd (2006) and Maestro (2023).
  • TV shows: The 100 (first two episodes, 2014), The Bear season 1 (2022), The Boys season 4 (2024), The Decameron (2024), Designated Survivor (2016, first two episodes), Fallout (2024), Ghosts (first season of the UK version, first two episodes of the inferior US version), House of the Dragon (both seasons, 2023-2024), Justified season 1 (2010), KAOS (2024), Killing Eve season 1 (2018), Once Upon a Time season 1 (2011), The Peripheral (2023), Rome season 1 and some of season 2 (2005), Silo season 2 (2024), Slow Horses season 4 (2024), Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 (2024), Tales from the Apocalypse (2023), Three Body (2024), and The Umbrella Academy season 4 (2024).
  • I saw two live performances at Ravinia Festival: a live orchestra version of The Princess Bride (1987) and the CSO doing Holst's The Planets.
  • I also saw Liz Miele when she visited Chicago, and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! in December.

A lot of good things in there, and a couple of dogs. Actually, only one dog, who very much enjoyed all the time I spent on the couch with her.

Statistics: 2024

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 history this year.
  • Flights went up slightly, to 17 segments and 25,399 flight miles (up from 13 and 20,541), the most of either since 2018:
  • I visited 3 countries (Germany, the UK, and France) and 5 US states (Washington, North Carolina, Arizona, California, Texas). Total time traveling: 189 hours (up from 156).
  • Cassie got 369 hours of walks (down from 372) and at least that many hours of couch time.
  • Fitness numbers for 2024: 4,776,451 steps and 4,006 km (average: 13,050 per day), up from 4.62m steps and 3,948 km in 2023. Plus, I hit my step goal 343 times (341 in 2023). I also did my second-longest walk ever on October 19th, 43.23 km.
  • Driving went way down. My car logged only 3,812 km (down from 5,009) on 54 L of gasoline (down from 87), averaging 1.4 L/100 km (167 MPG). I last filled up April 8th, and I still have half a tank left. Can I make it a full year without refueling?
  • Total time at work: 1,807 hours at my real job (down from 1,905) and 43 hours on consulting and side projects, including 841 hours in the office (up from 640), plus 114 hours commuting (up from 91). For most of the summer we had 3-days-a-week office hours, but starting in November, that went back to 1 day a week.
  • The Apollo Chorus consumed 225 hours in 2024, with 138 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 247 hours in 2023).

In all, fairly consistent with previous years, though I do expect a few minor perturbations in 2025: less time in the office, less time on Apollo, and more time walking Cassie.