Events

After a lot of struggle trying to get Cassie to stop pulling on her leash, I finally gave up today and got her a prong collar. Dogs don't much like them, and neither do I, but no amount of treats or yanks on her harness worked with her. As soon as I switched the lead from her harness to her prong collar, Cassie suddenly knew exactly where to walk on a heel, and only pulled enough to make the prong contract before falling right back to my side. We walked about 4 blocks total, and she never pulled enough...

With my real job's first deployment of 2022 having just gone to production in a delightfully boring way, I can take a few minutes to look at today's headlines. And let me just say that even though I'm usually happy not to be in Northern Virginia, I am especially happy today: An accident plus a bit of snow halted traffic on I-95 south of DC for almost 19 hours overnight. The State of Illinois has started cracking down on "fly by night" Covid testing facilities that the governor says are fleecing...

Chicago had almost 800 murders last year, the first time since 1996 that we've seen so many: But that total count does not include people shot and killed in shootings on Chicago expressways, as they are the jurisdiction of the Illinois State Police. When that number is included the city reached at least 800 homicides, according to Tribune reporting in 2021. The CPD figure also does not include self-defense shootings or fatal shootings by police officers. All told, there were at least 4,300 gunshot...

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle read through a week of newspapers to understand the hot topics of 100 years ago: First, there is news of the great Washington Naval Conference, which has commanded half of the front page since opening in mid-November. The idea of the conference is for the great powers to jointly reduce their armaments, so everyone can spend the money on better things. Inside the paper, we may spend some time browsing the ads, perhaps pausing over the homage to the REO Speed Wagon...

After 15 months of on-and-off work, I'm finally ready to show off Weather Now v5.0, currently in development. I started building the API and UI projects on top of the core and automation features around Thanksgiving, spending about 45 hours over the past 5 weeks on it. Overall, I've worked about 200 hours to get it to this point, starting with an empty Visual Studio solution file and an empty Microsoft Azure subscription. Since about 99% of what you can't see already exists, I don't expect it will take...

In law school, we often had "issue-spotting" tests. We'd get a short story, usually about half a page long, describing a situation. The exam question would be simply: "What issues does this raise, and how would you advise this client?" Cue an hour of feverish writing and flipping through statute books. Then kick yourself when you get the paper back and see what you missed. A business email should never seem like an issue-spotting exam. If you're organizing a major conference with a thousand participants...

Despite the forecast of 200+ mm of snow overnight, we got about 50 over here. O'Hare reported 100 mm of snow on the ground at 6am, which again didn't even come close to the dire warnings we got Friday night. Still, the sidewalks by my house have snow, slush, and salt all over them, which Cassie discovered (mostly to her delight) first thing this morning. Within 10 minutes, she'd gotten ice and salt lodged into one of her pads and had to hop the last 20 meters to the door. I have a solution for that: dog...

After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures: In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five segments came in 3rd lowest, ahead of only 2020 and 1999. I only visited one other country (the UK) and two other states (Wisconsin and California) during 2021. What a change from 2014. In 2020, I posted a record 609 times on The Daily Parker; 2021's 537 posts came in about average for the modern era....

All of my apps run on servers that use UTC. As it's now 00:40 UTC, that means the code I just pushed to a dev server will start running on January 1st UTC, which is in fact why I waited until after 6pm to push the code up to DevOps. It looks like Chicago will get about 150 mm of snow tomorrow during the day, giving me plenty of time to continue my four-day weekend of coding. If I can get a couple of things out of my backlog and onto my dev environment before Sunday night, I may just release the link to...

I've posted the Chicago 2022 chart. I've had some curiosity about other locations, though, so I might post a new one later today. We'll see.