It's gloomy, foggy, rainy, and not all that warm today, so I'm doing very little of value. I'll probably do something of value tomorrow, though.
One of my Facebook friends just posted a photo of our high school graduation program—from 5th June 1988. Thirty years ago.
I am screaming in my head, not just because I missed the anniversary yesterday, but also because 30 YEARS.
Every so often I like to revisit old photos to see if I can improve them. Here's one of my favorites, which I took by the River Arun in Amberley, West Sussex, on 11 June 1992:
The photo above is one of the first direct-slide scans I have, which I originally published here in 2009, right after I took this photo at nearly the same location:
(I'm still kicking myself for not getting the angle right. I'll have to try again next time I'm in the UK.)
Those are the photos as they looked in 2009. Yesterday, during an extended internet outage at my house, I revisited them in Lightroom. Here's the 1992 shot, slightly edited:
And the 2009 shot, with slightly different treatment:
A side note: I did revisit Amberley in 2015, but I took the path up from Arundel instead of going around the northern path back into Amberley as in 2009, so I didn't re-shoot the bridge. Next time.
The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today.
But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.
A Swedish psychologist has preliminary data that suggest sleeping in on the weekends can make up for some sleep loss during the week, maybe:
Sleeping in on a day off feels marvelous, especially for those of us who don't get nearly enough rest during the workweek. But are the extra weekend winks worth it? It's a question that psychologist Torbjorn Akerstedt, director of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University, and his colleagues tried to answer in a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Akerstedt and his colleagues grouped the 38,000 Swedes by self-reports of sleep duration. Short sleepers slept for less than five hours per night. Medium sleepers slept the typical seven hours. Long sleepers, per the new study, snoozed for nine or more hours.
The researchers further divided the groups by pairing their weekday and weekend habits. Short-short sleepers got less than five hours a night all week long. They had increased mortality rates. Long-long sleepers slept nine or more hours every night. They too had increased mortality rates.
The short-medium sleepers, on the other hand, slept less than five hours on weeknights but seven or eight hours on days off. Their mortality rates were not different from the average.
Personally, getting 9 hours seems like a luxury. But I haven't been getting 7 enough lately. I have a dream that someday I will have a full week of 7+ hour nights again. I last had this happen in January.
On 13 May 1998, just past midnight New York time, I posted my first joke on my brand-new braverman.org website from my apartment in Brooklyn.
My first website of any kind was a page of links I maintained for myself starting in April 1997. Throughout 1997 and into 1998 I gradually experimented with Active Server Pages, the new hotness, and built out some rudimentary weather features. That site launched on 19 August 1997.
By early April 1998, I had a news feed, photos, and some other features. On April 2nd, I reserved the domain name braverman.org. Then on May 6th, I launched a redesign that filled out our giant 1024 x 768 CRT displays. Here's what it looked like; please don't vomit:
On May 13th, 20 years ago today, I added a Jokes section. That's when I started posting things for the general public, not just for myself, which made the site a proto-blog. That's the milestone this post is commemorating.
Shortly after that, I changed the name to "The Write Site," which lasted until early 2000.
In 1999, Katie Toner redesigned the site. The earliest Wayback Machine image shows how it looked after that. Except for the screenshot above, I have no records of how the site looked prior to Katie's redesign, and no easy way of recreating it from old source code.
I didn't call it a "blog" until November 2005. But on the original braverman.org site, I posted jokes, thoughts, news, my aviation log, and other bits of debris somewhat regularly. What else was it, really?
Today, The Daily Parker has 6,209 posts in dozens of categories. Will it go 20 more years? It might. Stick around.
No, this isn't one of the two Daily Parker milestones we'll see this month. It's trivial and personal.
On this day in 1988, 30 years ago, I bought my first CD. It was an almost-new technology—the first CDs were commercially available in 1981—and it sounded a lot better than scratchy old vinyl records.
Just looking back at what I posted 10 years ago confirms I haven't bought that many CDs lately. I don't have the number in front of me, but I believe I've now got 940 of them, meaning I've bought an average of 12 a year since 2008. That's slightly fewer than the 12 a month I bought in 1990.
For historical context, when I bought my first CD, Ronald Reagan was president, it looked like (but wasn't certain) that Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush would be the candidates to replace him, and our arch-rival for world domination was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A Toyota Corolla cost $10,000, a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk cost 96c, and you could buy a 3-bedroom house in my home town for $200,000. (The same house is now close to $750,000.)
It's entirely possible that I'll have more free time after today, at least for a week or two.
It's entirely possible that I have just looked at my calendar for this week and laughed at the previous sentence.
In advance of the largest expansion in the airport's history, the Tribune has a cool timeline of the airport's history.
Concerts tonight and Sunday; another, private performance tomorrow. And then I get a week off of choir.
This month will see two important Daily Parker milestones. This is the first one: the 6,000th post since braverman.org launched as a pure blog in November 2005. The 5,000th post was back in March 2016, and the 4,000th in March 2014, so I'm trucking along at just about 500 a year, as this chart shows:
Almost exactly four years ago I predicted the 6,000th post would go up in September. I'm glad the rate has picked up a bit. (New predictions: 7,000 in May 2020 and 10,000 in April 2026.)
Once again, thanks for reading. And keep your eyes peeled for another significant Daily Parker milestone in a little less than two weeks.