Events

Even though we have snow on the ground once again, the sun came out this morning, so my bus stop didn't look as grim as it did yesterday:

First, we get the worst cold and the most snow of any winter in the last 32 years. It even alienates many of its allies with its stubbornness in the face of popular (and meteorological) opposition, refusing to give up a fight it can't win. Finally, warm weather finally prevails, ending the snow's doomed effort to hold ground it will never be able to keep. This is Monday morning: Then, just when we were loosening our scarves, Arizona hit this morning: Winter, you're just making people despise you more....

I just did a dumb thing in Mercurial, but Mercurial saved me. Allow me to show, vividly, how using a DVCS can prevent disaster when you do something entirely too human. In the process of upgrading to a new database package in an old project, I realized that we still need to support the old database version. What I should have done involved me coming to this realization before making a bucket-load of changes. But never mind that for now. I figured I just need to create a branch for the old code. Before...

One of the funnier things I've seen recently:

Officially, at 1pm today, O'Hare reported no measurable snow on the ground. And at 2pm, the official Chicago temperature was 11°C, the warmest we've seen since December 4th. If only they weren't predicting more snow tomorrow...

In the hopeless war between spring-like warmth and the ice still covering Chicago, the heat has almost prevailed. Officially at 7am O'Hare had only 25 mm of snow left after an overnight temperature rise to 6°C. The end is near. Those last few millimeters have no chance of surviving the day, between nearly 12 hours of sunlight and a predicted high of 14°C. Still, today is the 71st consecutive snow-covered day here. No one under 30 has ever seen this in Chicago before. And it's unlikely anyone ever will...

It looks like we're going to go 71 days with snow on the ground before it all melts. But a couple of subtle yet telling things have happened since I last griped. First, the temperature has gone up since sunset, as forecast. It hasn't gone up a lot, but the influx of warm air from the Gulf of Mexico will continue through tomorrow, to the detriment of all the snowdrifts in Chicago. It's hard to get your mind around how much heat the atmosphere moves around. A human being can generate about 6-8 megajoules...

When we got a few centimeters of snow on December 29th, no one expected it would still be on the ground after we changed the clocks in March. Yet there it is, officially 50 mm for the last 24 hours. The 11am temperature at O'Hare was -0.6°C, and the forecast calls for the temperature to pop up to 7°C this afternoon and then stay above freezing until Tuesday night—possibly even getting up to 14°C tomorrow afternoon. If the little snow we've still got can survive that onslaught, then I will be impressed....

Someone forwarded me a year-old short story by Neil Gaiman the Guardian published last spring. It begins: The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion. It is...

Yesterday Chicago got warm enough to melt almost all the snow. We had just 50 mm on the ground at O'Hare (not including the waist-high drifts along all our major streets) when the cold front hit overnight. We woke up this morning to another "dusting" covering every surface of the city, just enough below freezing to make us ask "why?" The Weather Service promises 12°C on Monday, which should end our 10-week ordeal of boots and salty paws temporarily. But I won't believe we're through winter until we have...