Events

Welcome to stop #69 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Double Clutch Brewing, 2121 Ashland Ave., EvanstonTrain line: UP-N, Central StreetTime from Chicago: 16 minutes (Zone C)Distance from station: 800 m This car-themed brewery opened on October 31st, about 18 months after their originally-planed April 2020 opening. (This has become a theme of the Brews & Choos project.) That gave them enough time to figure out their operations, however, and also to get a foothold in local restaurants and liquor...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters bottomed out at -16.5°C around 8am today, colder than any time since February 15th. It's up to -8.6°C now, with a forecast for continued wild gyrations over the next week (2°C tomorrow, -17°C on Monday, 3°C on Wednesday). Pity Cassie, who hasn't gotten nearly enough walks because of the cold, and won't next week as her day care shut down for the weekend due to sick staff. Speaking of sick staff, New Republic asks a pointed question about the...

The Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union keep butting heads, resulting in CPS closing the schools for another day tomorrow: Chicago Public Schools and the teachers union have filed unfair labor charges against one another, with each side asking state officials to end the current dispute over in-person learning in their favor. The latest escalation in the conflict over adequate COVID-19 safety measures in schools comes as CPS saw a new record number of coronavirus cases Tuesday — the...

In the US and UK, it's customary to give gifts of paper for the first anniversary. In that spirit, I say we give all the insurrectionists new subpoenas today. President Biden marked the occasion with a speech excoriating his predecessor: “The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election,” Mr. Biden said, standing in the same National Statuary Hall invaded by throngs of Trump supporters a year ago. “He’s done so because he values power over...

Every so often in the winter, a cold front pushes in overnight, giving us the warmest temperature of the day at midnight. Welcome to my morning: The sun actually came out a few minutes ago—right around the time the temperature started dropping faster. The forecast says temperatures will continue falling to about -12°C by 3pm, rise ever so slightly overnight and tomorrow, then slide on down to -17° from 3pm tomorrow to 6am Friday. And, because it's Chicago, and because the circumpolar jet stream looks...

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...