Events

No, not Thanksgiving; the time of day right now in Turkey. Even though I follow time zones pretty carefully, I really can't tell you what time it is right now in Ankara, and it seems no one else can, either: Following a decree originating from the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s government has officially delayed the start of daylight saving by two weeks. Like the rest of Europe, the country was supposed to turn back its clocks in the early hours of Sunday, October 25. Elections coming...

The Gateway Arch turned 50 today: And Bill Gates turned 60 today.  

My trivia team, "I'm Goin' Alone," has a 16-2 record. The trivia host, Brain Sportz Trivia, posts the night's topics every afternoon on Facebook. But something has changed. Initially, they posted the topics for all six rounds, including the Speed Round, which is key because a team can get 35 points (out of a possible 105) in that round. The members of I'm Goin' Alone dutifully studied the topics before each game, and routinely smashed the opposition, sometimes by 25 points. Brain Sportz seemed to figure...

St. Boniface Cemetery, Chicago:

So the masthead is blue now. Any thoughts? Parker and I managed to go for a one-hour, five-kilometer walk earlier today, as hoped. So my lazy Sunday hasn't been entirely lazy. But just on principle, I think the rest of the day will involve a nap and some time at a local bar with a book.

I forgot that I picked up my FitBit a year ago this week. So how am I doing since 24 October 2014? 4.76 million steps (13,000 per day) 4,081 km (11 km per day) 4,557 floors (12 per day) By FitBit's reckoning, that puts me somewhere around the 90th percentile of FitBit users worldwide. It also means I've walked the entire length of Japan and climbed enough stairs to reach the normal cruising altitude of a commercial jet. And Parker and I are about to get more steps in just a few minutes.

Politico has a long-form article describing Evanston's efforts to rid its downtown of cars: With stops for Chicago Transit Authority buses and its “L” rail line, Metra suburban rail’s Union Pacific North line and the Pace suburban bus, Evanston always had great transit bones. For much of its history it had also been a relatively prosperous North Shore city, its growth initially spurred by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as Chicagoans fled its chaotic density, and in the 20th century, its share of...

This post has a personal and a technical significance. Personally: exactly 10,000 days ago, I was graduated from high school, at about this time of day. Technically: The new blog engine let me pre-post this several days ahead, something the old blog engine thought it could do but never quite succeeded. That is all.

My new LG G4 phone has one hell of a camera: That's what came out of the phone, unedited (except for location tagging). The phone can save photos in raw .dng format, which Adobe Lightroom reads just fine. This enables full editing control and zero data loss, among other things. Pretty cool.

Hurricane Patricia, which will slam into the Mexican coastal villages of San Patricio and Barra de Navidad in just a few hours, is the strongest hurricane ever observed: Packing 200 mph winds, the U.S. National Hurricane Center described Patricia as the "strongest hurricane on record" in the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific Basins. At 8 a.m. ET, Patricia was about 230 km southwest of Manzanillo, and about 340 km south of Cabo Corrientes. Hurricane warnings stretched from San Blas to Punta San Telmo...