Events

Last week, Parker's daycare and boarding facility had a serious scare when two men stole one of their vans: The van was found abandoned near 21st and Wabash — dogs still inside — by a Good Samaritan who notified authorities. On Wednesday, two gunmen took the van, which was left running and unattended in the 800 block of West Superior, police said. Though the driver wasn’t in the van when it was taken, the robbers did point a gun at someone who tried to stop them, police said. Joseph Giannini, owner of...

A joint US-UK operation has obtained the master encryption keys to billions of mobile phones: The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence...

Yesterday was 17°C below normal in Chicago, the 8th consecutive day of frigid temperatures here, including a new record low maximum yesterday of -16°C. And while 19 states had record lows yesterday, western states are baking: "Winter seems to have completely forgotten about us out here," Kathie Dello, deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University, told the Associated Press. "If we could find a way of sending [the Northeast] snow out here, we'd really, really appreciate that."...

...and we had record cold this morning: Around daybreak, the temperature at O'Hare International Airport dropped to -22°C, beating the record of -21°C for this date set in 1936. Winds from the northwest at 15-25 km/h made it feel like -30 to -35°C, and a wind chill advisory remained in effect until noon. The coldest places this morning included -25°C in Aurora, Harvard and Island Lake, -24.4°C in DeKalb and -23.9°C in Mundelein, Union, Waukegan and West Chicago. Wind chills ranged from -33°C in Fox Lake...

Yesterday I found out that Weather Now, my demonstration app, got a mention on local TV in New Hampshire. Apparently it's now in newspapers as well. Are the mentions driving traffic? Hard to tell. According to Google Analytics, the site had 1,957 unique visitors on Monday against an average of around 400. Yesterday that number fell to 760. But for the three days ending yesterday, 18% of the site's visitors came from New Hampshire and another 23% from Massachusetts and New York. So it is getting picked...

Local Manchester, N.H., television station WMUR mentioned my weather application on the news last night: There was only one place in the world colder than Mount Washington this morning: the south pole. The weather website wx now.com says the summit's temperature of 35 degrees below zero early this morning was the second coldest reported temperature on the entire planet. I can't wait to see the Google analytics.

The Bode-Museum: Brandenburg Tor: And another view of the Reichstagsgebäude:

Oh, joy. Tomorrow night into next week, Chicago could set some cold-weather records for the month of February: Daytime highs Wednesday and Thursday are predicted to reach no higher than single digits [Fahrenheit] over much of the area–a rare development this late in a cold season. Just how rare?? There have been a grand total of 17 single digit daytime highs beyond Feb. 17 over the past 144 years which averages out to JUST ONE single digit high beyond Feb 17th per decade! The chill’s not going away...

I've finally pulled my photos off my real camera, but as I have actual work to do for my employer, it'll take a couple of days to publish some of them. This one, though, this one I'll publish today: This guy chased me around a park in Słubice. This may be a life-size image, too. Once I crouched down to take his photo, he got a little freaked out, and bounced around for a while before his owner called him back. That was the most hostile reaction I got from any living thing in Poland or Germany last week.

After nearly a week walking my ass off in reasonable early-spring weather, I arrived back in Chicago last night to -11°C, which dropped to -15°C for my commute this morning. It is strangely not comforting that it has been this cold this late on only 12 days since 1871. Or that it's going to be even colder Wednesday and Thursday. Will it warm up? Eventually. But the National Climate Prediction Center forecasts below-average temperatures for the next couple of weeks. It was really nice to be able to walk...