Events

I'm all set to go to a warm little island this afternoon, except for this: Light snow continues to fall across the Chicago area with more moderate bands of snow close to and along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Moderate snowfall in the past hour has brought the Midway Airport total up to 148 mm. Winter Storm Warnings and Advisories across the Chicago area continue in effect until noon today. Snowfall is slowly diminishing here as the center of low pressure has already tracked up the Ohio River valley into...

While the eastern United States continue to freeze in between snowfalls, Alaska is experiencing an astounding heat wave: To give people an idea how freaky an event this was for the 49th State, NASA has put together a visualization of phenomenal temperatures from January 23 to the 30th. Based on satellite readings, the map shows warm-weather abnormalities spreading in red all across the region. Areas of white were about average, meanwhile, and blue spots show cooler-than-normal temps: One of the most...

If most of what Jason Harrington wrote in Politico last week is true, I'm disappointed to have my suspicions confirmed: Each day I had to look into the eyes of passengers in niqabs and thawbs undergoing full-body pat-downs, having been guilty of nothing besides holding passports from the wrong nations. As the son of a German-American mother and an African-American father who was born in the Jim Crow South, I can pass for Middle Eastern, so the glares directed at me felt particularly accusatory. The...

The huge furniture move is almost done. I finished moving the rooms around, so my office is now where my dining room used to be, etc. Here's where the office used to be: Since the purpose of this exercise is to make my small apartment look a lot bigger, part of the plan requires moving a bunch of things to storage, including several nontrivial pieces of furniture. At that point the project will be complete. So I have to live with this mostly-finished living space for two weeks. That does not make me...

Via the IANA Time Zone Database mailing list, through Randy Olson, comes this map showing the difference between local solar time and what wall clocks show throughout the world: At the time I’m writing, near the winter solstice, Madrid’s sunset is around 17:55, more than an hour later than the sunset in, for example, Naples, which is at a similar latitude. The same difference holds at the summer solstice and around the year. Just because it applies to most places I’ve been, a time like that in Naples...

Now that the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC) has gone away, my apartment the IDT World Headquarters has a few more options. It's not a huge space, which has become a problem now that I'm trying to sell it. Essentially, I'm rotating three rooms clockwise. That is, my office is moving to where my dining room is, which is moving into my living room, which is moving into my office. That this is possible suggests the difficulties of having a server rack in the spot most people would...

Today we got our 33rd day of measurable snowfall this winter, the day after we ended the third snowiest and third coldest January on record. (Did I mention I'm done with this winter?) At least someone likes the weather:

Three weeks back we had the coldest weather in 19 years. Forecasters predicted this week would be worse, but fortunately, they got it wrong: We had a very fast chill-down Sunday night, then a good two and a half days of miserably cold weather, but yesterday afternoon the temperature peeked its nose above freezing for a couple of hours. And wow, does "above freezing" feel good right now. For comparison, here's the week of January 6th: So it really could be worse.

I'm not going complain about how the 33 consecutive days of snow cover makes entering or leaving my house a complete pain in the ass (complete with Parker automatically flopping over when we get back inside so I can wipe off his paws*). No, I'm going to post today about chicken wings: [Bill Roenigk, chief economist at the National Chicken Council,] says the magical pairing of humongous athletes and itty-bitty chicken parts got its start with the rise of sports bars a few decades ago. Sports-watching...

Via my co-worker Matt Stratton, a frustrating example of how companies that should have known better allowed a social-engineering attack against a single-letter Twitter handle: I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up. It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that...