The first snow of the season has begun in Chicago. Yippee.
For those of you keeping score at home, it was last this cold in Chicago (-7°C) on March 8th.
It builds character, doesn't it?
Another one from Ninth Street, Durham:
This was, of course, from Wednesday, not today. Wednesday it was warm; this morning it was below freezing. Apparently it does get cold in Durham, though "cold" here isn't "cold" back home.
Jamie mentioned several times that the weather in Durham is much preferable to the weather in Chicago, because apparently she has forgotten last August. I guess it depends whether you prefer warm or cold weather.
Tomorrow we're heading back to Chicago. Straight through. Twelve hours. Whee.
Parker yawns lazily on the sidewalk by Bean Traders Coffee in Durham, N.C., where the temperature is 22°C*:
* For comparison, back home in Chicago it's 6°C, windy, and raining.
Update, 1pm EST: It's now 24°C here and 6°C (and still windy and gross) in Chicago.
Useless fact: Today was the first time since April 6th that my walk to work was below freezing.
Not useless fact: the Inner Drive Webcam was temporarily off-line overnight, as I'm making some infrastructure changes and the computer it's attached to is being decommissioned. (It's back up now.) Apparently people noticed:
I don't do business with you because I don't need to, however, I do look at your live camera every day to see the weather and get a look at Evanston, the town in which I was born and raised. My grandfather lived in the North Shore Hotel in the '50s and I visited there often. Your bottom line may not get any bigger if you continue with the camera but there may be people like myself that will miss getting a glimpse of a portion of the city. I hope that you will not let your new infrastructure cancel out the continuation of the camera.
—John in Craddockville, Va.
And:
Greetings:
I look out at Chicago Ave almost every morning that I am not home in Evanston—just to 'check in'. I think it is the only Webcam in the town. Please keep it up! I love it!
—Bernard, writing from Los Angeles
I had no idea.
The technical issue is simple. Right now the camera runs on an ancient (6-year-old) server running Windows 2000. It's essentially Inner Drive's backup server, sort of the Prince Charles of the office. All it does with its 200 watts is run the Webcam and wait for another server to die.
Here's a photo. The Webcam is hooked into the server on the bottom. (One wag called it "Paul McServer" and called the other one "Server Wonder," but in the office we call them McHenry and Bulle. Bulle is so old it reflects the obsolete naming scheme we haven't used in years.)
Well, server prices having fallen, and efficiencies having risen, and rack-mounting being generally preferable to floor-mounting, we're replacing it with a Dell 860. But the new server will have a Xeon processor, which means we'll be running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, which means (finally) our Webcam software won't run on the new server.
When we get the new server running (probably the first week of December), I may take an old, decrepit laptop and hook that into the Webcam. In any event, given the outpouring of support for it, I'll do what I can to keep it running.
I've been walking around the last few days noticing the fall colors in Chicago and thinking, "how odd, it's November, the trees should be bare." Turns out I was right:
Intense heat in late summer and early fall delayed the changing of the leaves in the area, with peak colors not arriving until last week, about two weeks later than normal.
I can't remember the last time Chicago got all the way through October without a freezing day. This year, even by November 2nd, we still haven't officially had a freeze.
Also, tomorrow has Chicago's latest sunrise: 7:25 am. For those 33 years old and under, it's the latest sunrise ever. (During the 1973 energy crisis, Chicago didn't return to Standard Time in the fall.)
Delayed edit, 11:05pm: Moments after posting this, O'Hare recorded its first freezing temperature since April 16th.
With record temperatures in Chicago today (now at 29°C), organizers have halted the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon:
Reports of inadequate supplies of water were frequent along the route, and many of the 36,000 runners competing stopped early.
The men's race appeared more like a track finish than the usually tactical marathon finish, with Kenyan Patrick Ivuti winning the closest race in the 30 years of the Chicago Marathon. In a photo-finish, Ivuti edged out Moroccan Jaouad Gharib by 5/100th of a second.
Both were clocked at 2 hours 11 minutes 11 seconds and appeared to break the tape at the same time. Ivuti is the fifth consecutive Kenyan to win the Chicago Marathon.
Ethiopian Berhane Adere recorded one of the greatest race comebacks, repeating as champion in 2:33:49. Adere fell behind by about 25 seconds late in the race, but managed to sprint to the finish and overtake unsuspecting Romanian Adriana Pirtea.
The Cubs, meanwhile, spent the day cooling their heels.
We're looking forward to another lovely day in Chicago: 25°C, sunny, light breeze, crystal-clear skies. What more perfect day to wake up with the news that, not only are the Cubs still hanging on to first place, but also Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has finally resigned, no doubt to spend some quality time with his defense lawyers:
Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not announced immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.
The official who disclosed the resignation today said that the decision was Mr. Gonzales’s and that the president accepted it grudgingly. At the same time, the official acknowledged that the turmoil over Mr. Gonzales had made his continuing as attorney general difficult.
The turmoil has made the job difficult? Kind of like someone shooting his parents and then bemoaning his lot as an orphan, isn't it?
Well, with 512 days and 3 hours (or less) remaining in the worst administration in history, the President can still do enormous harm to the country, but with Gonzales back in Houston he'll now have none of his original cronies to help.
Update, 10:25 CDT: Does anyone else find some irony in his last day being September 17th?
Yesterday storms tore through the Chicago area, generating high winds and more rain than we need. On our walk to work this morning Parker and I found our path blocked by one of the results:
The tree missed all the houses, cars, and power lines it aimed for. Very fortunate.