Events

I had a meeting this morning to bring a new developer onto a maintenance-mode project. In doing so I went over some code I wrote 4 years ago. Yikes. We're doing a deep-dive on Monday...

After the criminal gang known as ISIS held the Mosul Dam in Iraq last year, it did not follow the campsite rule when it fled the Iraqi government's counter-attack. Consequently, engineers say the dam is in danger of imminent collapse: [P]ressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut. The Iraqi...

Both United and American want approval for non-stop flights from Chicago to Havana: Initially, the customer pool for Chicago-to-Havana trips would be limited, given the ongoing trade embargo. The Department of the Treasury only permits travelers to fly to Cuba for a dozen reasons, including family visits, official governmental trips and humanitarian missions. But carriers are eager to establish a beachhead in the island nation, which might eventually prove a robust destination for leisure and business...

The GOP made their own bed:

From two years ago, and still relevant (and still NSFW funny):

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday: The blue line is average posts per...

When I read this, I couldn't help thinking of this: The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,When Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise." In other burials of Caesar, former University of Chicago law students have had some unkind things to say about how Scalia treated minorities: Ben Streeter, now an...

Corporations that have lost major cases at the Circuit Court level are settling rather than try their luck with a post-Scalia Supreme Court: Last week, Dow Chemical made headlines by opting for a $835 million settlement in a class action lawsuit rather than risk having the case heard by a Scalia-less Supreme Court. A lower court had already ruled against the company for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for industrial chemicals, and prior to the settlement, Dow had appealed to the Supreme Court to...

Technical debt occurs when you make a short-term coding decision to get something done, but in the process introduce an error or code smell you'll have to correct later. Josh Marshall thinks the Republican Party did exactly that over the years, and Donald Trump is the refactoring: This is a fairly good description of what the media is now wrongly defining as the GOP's 'Trump problem', only in this case the problem isn't programming debt. It's a build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense...

Why posting is slow today: