Events

The Great Lakes have more ice cover than at any point in the last 20 years. Here's the view on the flight in last Monday morning: If you don't mind a 150 MB download, NASA took a photo of the Great Lakes (and, incidentially, me) at almost that exact moment. The ice today (also 150 MB) looks about the same.

I got gas today, which isn't that interesting in itself, except that it's only the third time I've gotten gas in the past four months. Like the last time, I decided to fill up in case it got cold (a full tank is better for your car in winter), so really I've only gotten about 2½ tanks of gas since the beginning of November. It's perfectly valid to wonder why I even own a car. I didn't for most of the time I lived in New York. Still, today I had about a half-dozen errands to run, and having a car made a...

Yesterday, Chicago Midway Airport recorded a high temperature of 1.1°C, the first time it has seen a temperature above freezing in 15 days. Unfortunately for our weather records, O'Hare is our official station, and it only got to 0°C yesterday. So officially we still have not had a day above freezing since January 30th, with a forecast for continued below-freezing weather through Monday at least. Plus, we've had measurable snow on the ground for 47 days now, and we're all frankly sick of it. That's why...

Today seemed like the right moment to recollect this short poem from Luis d'Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: Raseuse arrête, valet de Tsar bat loups, Joues gare et suite, et sot voyou. As van Rooten's commentary makes clear, the wolves were really at fault.

So how do people at Maho Beach know when planes are landing? They check the surfboard: And now my final Maho Beach photo for this trip, a US Airways A330 coming in from Charlotte: We now return to your regularly-scheduled winter, already in progress...

First, to give you a better sense of what it actually looks like, here's a Delta 737 approaching SXM normally: And here's a (gorgeous) Air France A340 landing normally: And here's an American 757 landing two meters above people's heads: Sorry about the image quality—I had a long lens on the camera, and it was set for a different kind of photo than this. We didn't realize how low he was until just a few seconds before this happened. The entire beach yelled "Whooooooaaaaa!" and then broke into applause. I...

My dad highlighted a Washington Post article from the weekend outlining why Accenture may have been a bad choice (as I pointed out at the time) to manage the healthcare.gov project: At the University of Michigan, students and faculty members are protesting the school’s use of Accenture to help cut costs, citing a report by a committee of alumni and graduate students that said the firm has “a disturbing pattern of problematic past performance.” In North Carolina, glitches in an Accenture-configured...

Wow. Getting off the plane in New York last night, then taking the bus into Manhattan during a gentle snowfall (during rush hour, on the Van Wyck and Grand Central Parkway), reminded me why I went to St. Maarten for the weekend. Getting home to this made me ask why I didn't stay longer: Today was the 20th day this winter that temperatures have dipped below -18°C at O’Hare. Tomorrow should be the 21st. That is triple the average of 7 days per winter. The record number of sub-zero days for a winter was 25...

I've figured out the hotel's WiFi. It's not the slowest Internet connection in the world; it's the slowest SSL in the world. In other words, they're not really throttling the Internet per se. But somewhere between here and the U.S., someone is only letting through a very few secure packets. The genius of this is that things like restaurant reviews (think: TripAdvisor.com) come up normally. But just try to get your email, check your airline reservations, or heaven forbid, get to your bank's website. It's...

When I last visited St. Martin five years ago, I struggled a bit to get through the heavily-defended border between the French and Dutch sides. I am happy to report that the two countries have made significant improvements to the border since then. For starters, they've put up a brand-new sign: Unfortunately, it appears that an aggressor nation has taken over part of the French side: All right, I'm wasting time writing a blog post when I could do it with something else. If only this Internet connection...