The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Problems with air pressure

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 200 meters from my house.

Updates as conditions warrant.

Purging old data

I mentioned yesterday that I purged a lot of utterly useless archival data from Weather Now. It sometimes takes a while for the Azure Portal to update its statistics, so I didn't know until this afternoon exactly how much I dumped: 325 GB.

Version 5 already has a bi-monthly function to move archival data to cool storage after 14 days and purge it after 3 months. I'm going to extend that to purging year-old logs as well. It may only reduce my Azure bill by $20 a month, but hey, that's a couple of beers.

As for Weather Now 5, if all goes well, I'll start downloading weather in the Production environment today, and possibly deploy the app over the weekend. Stay tuned...

Gotcha!

A year ago today, Cassie and I adopted each other, which was obvious even on the drive home from PAWS:

Right now she's sulking on the couch because she didn't get breakfast this morning. That's because in about 15 minutes she's going to the vet to get her teeth cleaned. Pobre perrita.

Not quite back to normal yet

We had two incredible performances of Bach's Johannespassion this weekend. (Update: we got a great review!) It's a notoriously difficult work that Bach wrote for his small, amateur church chorus in Leipzig the year he started working there. I can only imagine what rehearsals were like in 1724. I'm also grateful that we didn't include the traditional 90-minute sermon between the 39-minute first part and the 70-minute second part, and that we didn't conclude the work with the equally-traditional pogrom against the Jews of Leipzig.

It's still a magnificent work of music.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

Finally, Rachel Feltman lists five myths about Daylight Saving Time. Our annual tradition of questioning it without changing anything will continue, of course.

And it's about 16°C outside, so it's time to take Cassie on her third half-hour walk of the day.

High pressure, low temperatures

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 tomorrow's, so come on down!

Quick update from Ukraine

My friend Тетяна is still posting on social media and texting, and still at her home in central Kyiv. She reports:

Kyiv is more or less ok, except a few attacks - 2 residential buildings, Holocaust memorial instead of TV tower, children’s hospital... failing to target lots of things, the other day another Iskander got shot down targeting the famous Motherland statue... those idiots apparently thought that the museum of military vehicles is a military convoy

North-west suburbs - pure massacre (((( with air strikes, tanks etc. My friend is fighting in that area, and his house nearby was destroyed by a cluster bomb yesterday

She posted this photo from a street near her house, showing that there are worse things in the world than Chicago potholes:

Updates when possible.

Weather Now 5 close to launch

Last night, I finished the last major feature in the Weather Now upgrade that I started in earnest back in October 2020. That means the development app can do most of what the version 4 can do, except better in most cases. By extension, that means I just have a few things to do in order to replace version 4 in production. But "a few things" includes setting up all the production assets for the new version, including the DevOps pipelines. That's not a small job.

That last bit may take a while. I'll have more extensive release notes closer to launch. The Search feature will have the most limitations immediately post-launch as it requires replacing the current 7.5-million-row gazetteer from the external sources, rather than simply porting the data. A few other things (full internationalization, configuring your language and measurement systems, and historical data) will also take time. Modernizing the deployment pipeline makes adding these features back in a lot easier, though.

For now, the development app has weather archives back to last May and much simpler methods of accessing data than v4. I encourage you to try it out.

The short lives of Cassie's toys

Yesterday evening, Cassie and I went to the store to buy dog food, and I got her a toy I thought seemed durable enough even for her:

Not so much, as you can see in this photo from 55 minutes later:

Yes, that pile of white fluff by her belly came out of the stuffed rabbit.

So I have a question for the hive mind: what should I do with all of the toy corpses? Cassie still plays with them, sometimes. I mean, I know the gray one with orange highlights in the center is a duck, but no one else does. And the red Kong to its left turned out to be destructable, regardless of its labeling:

Of course, it doesn't take a lot to make this dog happy:

Will she really miss the half-eaten rubber ball?

Productive first day of spring

I finished a sprint at my day job while finding time to take Cassie to the dog park and make a stir-fry for lunch. While the unit tests continue to spin on my work computer, I have some time to read about all the things that went wrong in the world today:

I'm heading out tonight to watch President Biden's first State of the Union Address with friends. Robert Reich will also tune in.

Busy day

Two weeks from today, the Apollo Chorus will join with the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra for their performance of Bach's St John Passion. Our performance is the next day in Lakeview, Chicago. Today we had a 2½-hour special rehearsal, after which I needed to do some shopping, then give Cassie a bit of exercise.

I will now nap. Tomorrow will be easier.