Events

Cassie and I headed up to Tyranena Brewing in Lake Mills, Wis., yesterday to hang out with family. Today, other than a trip to the grocery and adjacent pet store where Cassie picked out an "indestructible" toy that now lies in tatters on the couch, we've had a pretty relaxing Sunday. I thought I'd take a break from Hard Times to queue up some stuff to read tomorrow at lunch: Joni Mitchell and friends discuss her album Blue, which came out 50 years ago this week. National Geographic investigated a...

President Biden's 13-year-old German shepherd died earlier this week: Champ Biden, one of two German shepherds belonging to President Biden and his family has died, the president and first lady Jill Biden announced late Saturday morning. He was 13 years old. "Our hearts are heavy today," Biden and first lady Jill Biden wrote in a statement, adding that the dog had died at their home. Champ was a puppy during Biden's tenure as vice president under the Obama administration. The same statement commemorated...

The Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has fallen for 12 straight months. But not a lot: So even though water levels have fallen 50 cm or so, they're still 40 cm higher than the long-term average. With much of the lake basin in serious drought, the water should keep draining out the Detroit River for a while longer.

Yesterday I squashed six bugs (one of them incidentally to another) and today I've had a couple of good strategy meetings. But things seem to have picked up a bit, now that our customers and potential customers have returned to their offices as well. So I haven't had time to read all of these (a consistent theme on this blog): An early-summer heat dome has formed over a larger area than expected, pushing temperatures in the Southwest US as high as 53°C in places. Lenore Skenazy, who founded the...

After taking Cassie on a 45-minute walk before the heat hits us, I've spent the morning debugging, watching these news stories pile up for lunchtime reading: The US Supreme Court once again upheld Obamacare, with only Alito and Gorsuch dissenting. The Illinois legislature passed a common-sense gun control law, supported by the State Police, that largely brings us back in line with the rules we had in the 1990s. Illinois Deputy Governor Dan Hynes has resigned (ahem) ahead of the 2022 election. The BBC...

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one. Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues: Ukrainian police arrested members of the Cl0p ransomware gang, seizing money and cars along with the...

Parker would have turned 15 today. I'm of course very glad to have Cassie, but I do miss my bête noir quite a bit.

I spent nearly three days debugging a configuration issue that I resolved by simply deleting the wonky Azure App Service and rebuilding it from the CI pipeline. It's hard to find a real-world analogy. The total time required to simply start over (given the automation we've spent two years building) was less than an hour, meaning had I done that Thursday morning, instead of trying to fix the unfixable problem, I'd have saved myself a net 22 hours of grief. Blarg.

A nearly-comical coalition of political parties in Israel successfully achieved the only thing they agreed on by removing Benjamin Netanyahu from power yesterday: The long and divisive reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the dominant Israeli politician of the past generation, officially ended on Sunday night, at least for the time being, as the country’s Parliament gave its vote of confidence to a precarious coalition government stitched together by widely disparate anti-Netanyahu forces. Naftali Bennett, a...

So far today, Cassie and I have taken 2½ hours of walks, and she's taken about twice that in naps while I read in the sunroom with a nice breeze blowing over me. In other words, nothing to blog about today.