Events

I'm a Certified Scrum Master. W00t! (Certificate here.)

Some articles to read: Trump, the single best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect since Dunning and Kruger identified it, thinks he can end Chicago's crime wave in a week. Right. Also, there is no retail voter fraud. Trump's call for vigilantes to police polling places is nothing more than Jim Crow tactics. Josh Marshall wonders just what Trump's immigration policies really are. (Hint: he doesn't have any.) Scott Hanselman has advice for how to reduce your psychic weight. David Dayin in New Republic...

On our trip to Ravinia Park Sunday afternoon, we brought along a cookie White House "because it's a project," according to the person who purchased it. A team worked diligently through the pre-concert picnic and constructed this: The concert included Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," which is notable because the War of 1812 was not the best time for the Executive Mansion. (Of course, that's not the war Tchaikovsky was writing about.) So the trip home actually didn't go so poorly, but the South Portico...

Posting has been slow because I've been in a place that looks like this: Tomorrow I've got some photos of my recent trip to Minneapolis and an unexpected project that some friends completed at Ravinia Park.

A University of Texas at Austin student found a pointed protest against concealed-carry on campus: As she recalls, the pundits on the radio were talking about how there is no conceivable solution to gun violence, that mass shootings are just something that we’re going to have to learn to live with in America. “I felt like, you know, what a bunch of dildos,” [student Jessica] Jin says. “They were taking the safe route and not wanting to say anything that would piss anybody off or be too divisive. They...

Ravinia Park on Sunday, work and other things on Saturday...no time to blog. There will be photos and more description soon.

Day two of Certified Scrum Master training starts in just a few minutes (more on that later), so I've queued up a bunch of articles to read this weekend: The climate prediction center forecasts a warm, dry fall for Illinois followed by a normal winter. Reactions to Trump dumping Russian stooge Paul Manfort in favor of right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon are pretty consistent: here's Fallows and Bloomberg, for starters, plus analysis from the Times and Marshall on how Trump's support is declining even among...

The Justice Department announced today that it's ending private prisons because, it turns out, they suck: In making the decision, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates cited new findings by the Justice Department's inspector general, who concluded earlier this month that a pool of 14 privately contracted prisons reported more incidents of inmate contraband, higher rates of assaults and more uses of force than facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "They simply do not provide the same level of...

Courtesy of Scott Hanselman. I actually learned a few things.