Events

Item the first: S&P just cut Illinois' bond rating to one level above junk. Thanks, Governor Rauner. Item the second: According to Brian Beutler, at least, President Trump could be in serious trouble after James Comey testifies before Congress next week. Will Trump care? Will he even notice? Item the third: May was cold and dreary in Illinois. Today it's 24°C and sunny, which is neither cold nor dreary. Item the fourth: Cranky Flier believes that we absolutely should open up the U.S. to foreign...

The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came to America on 1 June 1967, and changed the world. As one might imagine, most news organizations have articles about it: Rolling Stone goes into the making of the album. CNN speculates on what the album cover might have looked like in 2017. The New York Times re-reviews the album, as does the Guardian, who also thinks the re-release could "re-unite Brexit Britain." (That's a change from their 2007 position that "Sgt. Pepper Must Die!") Here in...

(This is a cross-post with my employer's blog.) I'm the newest team member at DevMynd, and so far, the only one with a Windows PC. Since we do most of our work in Ruby on Rails, and since everyone else has Macs, this presents a challenge. If I wanted to do this the easy way, I'd simply run Rails on Windows natively. But I decided instead to do it the hard way and use Linux and BASH. First, I had a couple of free days to get up to speed last week giving me some time to experiment. Second, I figured that...

Via my company's Slack #general channel, San Francisco cartographer Justin O'Beirne has analyzed the changes Google has made to its Maps feature over the past year, while Apple Maps has stagnated: So it seems that Apple is updating its map more frequently than Google. But when we look closer, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. For instance, near the park’s southeast corner, there’s a group of three auto service-related businesses: Domport Auto Body Service, Fell Street Auto Service, and...

Pilot and author Patrick Smith points out that air travel is so much better than it was even 20 years ago, it's hard to see how far we've come: People often talk about a proverbial “golden age” of air travel, and if only we could return to it. That’s an easy sentiment to sympathize with. I’m old enough to recall when people actually looked forward to flying. I remember a trip to Florida in 1979, and my father putting on a coat and tie for the occasion. I remember cheesecake desserts on a 60-minute...

We have a child in the White House. And European leaders are saying they can no longer rely on the United States: Trump’s speech alone is likely a sufficient explanation. But I suspect there’s an additional element. Most of the major European and NATO leaders had already met Trump in Washington – Merkel, May, Gentiloni, Trudeau and others. But I suspect in meeting as a group, over a more extended period and in a context specifically focused on Europe and NATO there was a further realization that what...

Andrew Sullivan's note Friday analyzes the President's trip to the Vatican from a distinctly conservative and Catholic perspective: Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact...

Yesterday's step count did, in fact, reach top-5 numbers: 2016 Jun 16 40,748 2016 Oct 23 36,105 2017 May 27 33,241 2016 Sep 25 32,354 2016 Jun 8 32,315 Today's will not, if only because it looks like rain.

I took a short walk today, from Central Street in Evanston to my house. Totals: 16.37 km, 2:25:29, 8'53" per km, 18,357 steps. It's not as far as my epic 28 km walk last June, but I'll probably do another walk that distance sometime later this year. I mean, why not a 32 km walk? Right. Because my feet hurt. So far today I'm just shy of 30,000 steps. So I'm not quite in the top 5—but I will be if I walk another thousand steps, which seems pretty likely: 2016 Jun 16 40,748 2016 Oct 23 36,105 2016 Sep 25...

British Airways cancelled all of its flights out of its two biggest hubs in London today because of a power-supply failure: The airline hoped to be able to operate some long haul inbound flights on Saturday, landing in London on Sunday, Mr Cruz added. The GMB union has suggested the failure could have been avoided, had the airline not outsourced its IT work. BA refuted the claim, saying: "We would never compromise the integrity and security of our IT systems". All passengers affected by the failure -...