Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.)
Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era:
Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...
We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday.
Unrelated to the weather are these two things I liked from the past week. Yesterday I went over to a friend's house to help her set up a new computer and back up her old one. It turned out she was fostering this little guy, Hayes:
She texted me last night to say thanks and also that she's going to fork over the $495 adoption fee for him. Because of course she will. He's a sweet Lab-something mix whose pregnant mom got rescued from the side of the road in Arkansas. He'll have a much better (and longer) life with my friend than he would have otherwise.
I also liked the way the sun played around with the Civic Opera Building and 110 North Wacker (the mirrored building behind the Civic Opera) on Tuesday afternoon:
My new office is farther west than my old one, but still facing north, so it won't get any direct sunlight, ever. That said, on Tuesday I discovered that the mirrored windows at 110 North Wacker will give me pretty intense reflected sunlight, which is almost as bright. I'm still only going in once a week, but it's a nice perk.
Also, kudos to the UK Home Office. I just applied for my UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, paid my £10 ($13.06), and almost immediately got approved. It helps that (a) I just entered the UK twice in September with the same passport, and until the UK decided Americans could use the EU passport lanes, I was in the UK Registered Traveller programme. So they've vetted me quite a few times already.
When will I next go there? I hope January. I haven't said a lot about it, but I moved to a new practice at Milliman on November 1st, and half my team—not to mention, my boss—are in England. I really need to meet them in person before too long. The other half of my team are in Seattle, where I also need to go soon, when I can work it out with my friend who brought Hazel through my house when they moved out there.
So, I'm aiming for Southampton in January and Seattle in February, because who doesn't love passing north of the 48th parallel in the winter?
This morning's stand-up meeting begins in a moment, at the only time of day that works for my Seattle-Chicago-UK team (8am/10am/4pm respectively). After, I have these queued up:
Finally, a new paper found something I've long suspected: small amounts of alcohol actually do help you speak a foreign language better. (Large amounts do not.)
* The X in "Xitter" is pronounced "sh," as in Xi Jinping.
Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96:
Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them.
“We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. “Completely nutty idea.”
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command — “RUN” — into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.
I don't have the earliest programs I wrote because nothing survives from the TRS-80 era, when we saved everything to cassette tape (!), nor from the Apple ][+ era because I never converted those files to PC format. But here is a little thing I wrote in October 1987 in the BASICA (Advanced BASIC) language that shipped with MS DOS 3:
5 DEFDBL A-Z
6 PRINT
7 PRINT
10 INPUT "Number to test = ",N#
15 U$="##########"
16 IF N#<10000000# THEN U$="#######"
17 IF N#<1000000! THEN U$="######"
18 IF N#<100000! THEN U$="#####"
19 IF N#<10000 THEN U$="####"
20 N#=INT(N#)
30 TEST#=1
33 WHILE TEST#<=SQR(N#)
36 TEST#=TEST#+1
40 IF N#/TEST# = INT (N#/TEST#) THEN GOSUB 100
50 WEND
55 PRINT
60 PRINT "I found";FACTORS;"factor(s)."
70 IF FACTORS=0 THEN PRINT "The number"N"is prime."
80 PRINT
81 INPUT "Test another (y/n)";A$
82 IF INSTR(A$,"Y") OR INSTR(A$,"y") THEN RUN
90 END
100 FACTORS=FACTORS+1
120 PRINT USING U$;TEST#;
130 PRINT " * ";
140 PRINT USING U$;N#/TEST#
150 RETURN
If you can find a DOS emulator with BASICA, knock yourself out.
I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:
Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:
The domain name wx-now.com went live on 11 November 1999, 25 years ago today. The earliest known Wayback Machine capture of the old Active Server Pages site was in September 2000; this screen shot from January 2001 looks a bit closer to what it looked like when it went live:
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In 2008, Katie Zoellner gave it a facelift that lasted pretty much until March 2022, when I completely overhauled the app, writing an entirely new UI and refactoring about 50% of the internal code.
I still have all the old source code. It's trippy to look at how I wrote 25 years ago. Even trippier that I've had an application running in the wild continuously for that long.
When voting, consider that under a dictatorship, courts have no independence and have to issue nonsensical rulings like the one a Russian court just issued in order to remain in favor of the dictator:
U.S. tech giant Google has closed up shop in Russia, but that hasn’t stopped a court there from leveling it with a fine greater than all the wealth in the world — a figure that is growing every day.
The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.
Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters Thursday that the figure was symbolic and should be a reason for Google to pay attention to the Moscow Arbitration Court’s order to restore access to the YouTube channels.
The sum grew so large because the fine increases with time in noncompliance, with no upper limit. The order was made after 17 blocked channels joined a lawsuit against Google’s American, Irish and Russia-based companies, according to RBC. The lawsuit predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was initiated in 2020 by a channel that YouTube blocked to comply with U.S. sanctions.
The Post drolly notes in the article that "Google did not respond to a request for comment."
In all seriousness, if the XPOTUS returns to office, it's only a matter of weeks before Judges Aileen Cannon (R-FL) or Matthew Kacsmaryk (Bigly R-TX) come up with something similar.
Absolutely slammed today, though only about 2 hours of it actually mattered in the scheme of things. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.
Since the beginning of Weather Now back in 1997, I have had total control over what users see on the home page. That changed today.
Now, once you have created a profile by logging into the app with your Microsoft account (O365, Live ID, Xbox, doesn't matter), you can change your home weather list. To add a station, simply go to any Current Weather page and click "Add to home page". This will take you to your Profile page, where you can see the entire list on the "Home page" tab.
Once there, you can remove any places you don't want. (The app populates your custom list with the default list the first time you add anything.)
Have fun with this! I know I will. I still have other features to write while my real job goes through a transition, so keep watching for more Weather Now updates.