Events

Welcome to stop #61 on the Brews and Choos project. Distillery: Chicago Distilling Co., 2359 N. Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, California Time from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 300 m It's dangerous to have such a great distillery two doors down from a great brewpub. It's also convenient, when you're out with friends and want to have a cocktail after having a pile of pub food. Chicago Distilling makes really good spirits, full stop. And they've recently launched a line of...

The kids today don't know how good they have it. When I lived in New York more than 20 years ago, I would have gotten on a bike and ridden this trail: Last December, the Empire State Trail — a sprawling, 750-mile cyclist and pedestrian route that connects Buffalo to Albany and New York City to the Canadian border, forming what looks like a sideways T — opened to the public. Considering the pandemic bike boom, the timing was perfect. About 400 miles of greenways, repurposed rail lines and bike paths...

Revolution announced on 1 November 2024 the brewpub will close on December 14th. Welcome to stop #60 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Revolution Brewpub., 2323 N. Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, California Time from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 200 m I've enjoyed Revolution beers for such a long time I can't really review them like I do the ones I've just met. When I met some friends for dinner at their brewpub (cf. the Revolution Taproom on Kedzie), I did try a...

There's just something about how she sits on the couch that makes me smile:

As I pointed out in the last Chicago Sunrise Chart, tomorrow morning the sun will rise in Chicago at 7:30:11, the latest sunrise in most people's lifetimes. I found only one occasion from 1975 to 2040 when the sun rises later: at 7:30:35 on 6 November 2032. The last time the sun rose after 7:30 was at 7:31:26 on 26 February 1974, after Chicago started daylight saving time on 6 January 1974, due to the oil crisis. Chicago also observed year-round daylight saving time during World War II, from 9 February...

In his subscriber-only newsletter this morning, economist Paul Krugman speculated about why so many people have left their low-wage jobs recently: The experience of the pandemic may have led many workers to explore opportunities they wouldn’t have looked at previously. I’d been thinking vaguely along these lines, but Arindrajit Dube, who has been one of my go-to labor economists throughout this pandemic, recently put it very clearly. As he says, there’s considerable evidence that “workers at low-wage...

The software release yesterday that I thought might be exciting turned out to be fairly boring, which was a relief. Today I'm looking through an ancient data set of emails sent to and from some white-collar criminals, which is annoying only because there are millions and I have to write some parsing tools for them. So while I'm decompressing the data set, I'll amuse myself with these articles, from least to most frightening: The Chicago Tribune lists six breweries they think you should take out-of-town...

I'm not even a little surprised that Republican Glenn Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Viriginia governor's race last night. The margin of 80,000 votes is just over 2% of the vote, so Youngkin can't exactly claim he won in a landslide. And, let's face it, President Biden doesn't exactly have Obama levels of popularity today. (He's still more popular than the last guy. And Gerald Ford.) I worked in Virginia for six months in 2003, and I can tell you most of the state has, shall I say, not...

It's 22:20 on the last day of my sprint, and I have finally completed the refactoring project I started at the beginning of the sprint. And...bing! "Azure DevOps [Build Succeeded]" email. Whew! Tomorrow we'll have a boring release of last sprint's code, since it has sat quietly in our Production Build pipeline just waiting for me to push it to the Production Deploy pipeline for two weeks. Sometimes this happens. Both the (delayed) release tomorrow and the refactoring this sprint solve two major problems...

This morning, the official temperature at O'Hare briefly alighted on 0°C around 7am, for the first time since April 22nd. Also around the same time, I turned my heat on for the first time since May 13th (according to my Google Home app). As it happens, October ranks as one of the warmest and wettest in Chicago and Illinois history: The preliminary statewide average October temperature was 15.4°C, 2.8°C above the 1991–2020 average and eighth warmest on record going back to 1895. The preliminary statewide...