Events

It's already 6:30 am on Kiritimati (Christmas) Island. I was going to have The Daily Parker automatically wish Kiritimatians a happy new year right at midnight, but I didn't think about it early enough, clearly. So: Happy new year, Kiribati, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Irkutsk, Singapore, and everywhere else whose time zone is east of UTC+7. Expect some silliness in today's Daily Parker time stamps, starting with this one (published 31 December 2015 10:32 CST).

I have actual work to do today, so I came into the office. Since the work involves finishing a bug fix and pushing it out to a server, I really could have done this from home. But hey, it's the last day the office is open this year, so... ...everyone else stayed home. I predict a short day.

After all the kvetching I did this morning, I'm pleased to report that I hit my step goal today (before 5pm), as I expect to do the remaining two days of the year. There will be stats and sunrises soon. Stay tuned.

I'm having my worst week ever since getting a Fitbit: only 65,000 steps from last Tuesday through yesterday. Christmas, traveling, and yesterday's horrible weather have really hobbled my step count. So far today I'm at 4,200 steps, and I have some errands to run this afternoon that will help. But wow, five days below 10,000? Scandal. Even Parker is bored.  

I'm working from home today because I had a cable guy here for two hours, and because winter has finally arrived. The rain and sleet is also a problem because my Fitbit numbers have been off for four straight days. I did get a lot of sleep this past weekend—but that also could be a factor today, according to new research into weekend lie-ins. (tl;dr: sleeping in on Sunday makes it harder to wake up on Monday.) I'll have more later today. Now I have to figure out how to get a custom Microsoft Dynamics...

It turns out, my Fitbit doesn't make me sad, but the numbers I get when traveling sometimes do. Despite a 3.5 km walk around Springfield yesterday, it was the second day in a row and the 4th in 10 days for which I missed my 10,000-step, 10 km goal. On the other hand, last night I got almost 9 hours of sleep (according to my Fitbit), through several trains and a thunderstorm. Yes, there was a thunderstorm in December in central Illinois. That's just weird. And in future, probably a lot more common.

It turns out, our neighbor to the west has a better-looking capitol building than we do. I mean, gilded roof? On a hill? We have none of these things. But we also don't have Steve King, which makes up for it and then some. That's from October 2004. I've tried to correct what the original camera did to it, but it only provided so much data.

Apparently we have two. The old one: And the new one: And as a bonus, here's a squirrel:

Combine a full moon, a really good camera, and a beautiful church on Christmas Eve: (The grain is from shooting a HDR photo at ISO-12800.) Did I mention the candlelight part? The final piece of the service is the entire congregation singing "Silent Night" holding candles. Even as an atheist, I found it moving. And the Winnetka Congregational Church, while still a Christian church, doesn't beat people over the head with religion. I'm certain I wasn't the only atheist in the congregation.