Events

Enjoy this great photo from the GOES-East satellite showing the band of snow that fell yesterday: And if you look closely at the animated version, you can see the snow melting along the edges.

Winter officially has another week and a half to run, but we got a real taste of spring in all its ridiculousness this week: Yesterday the temperature got up to 13°C at O'Hare, up from the -10°C we had Monday morning. It's heading down to -11°C overnight, then up to 7°C on Sunday. (Just wait until I post the graph for the entire week.) Welcome to Chicago in spring. Elsewhere: Republicans in New York and Illinois have a moan about the redistricting processes in those states that will result in...

A couple more resources about "web3" (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, etc) crossed my inbox this week. Even before going through these stories and essays, the only way I can understand the persistence of the fantastic thinking that drives all this stuff is that the people most engaged with it turn out to be the same people who believe all kinds of other fantasies and wish-fulfillment stories. Case in point: the extreme right-wing protestors up in Canada have received almost all of their funding from...

And wasn't it just Tuesday? I got an email from HR this morning reminding me that I'm approaching the upper limit for paid time off in my bank. I thought, what with taking half a day here and there over the past year, I might not already have almost a month of vacation to use. Cue searching on VRBO for places Cassie and I might like. Meanwhile, back in the present: Satirist and frequent Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me panelist PJ O'Rourke has died at 74. Anne Applebaum screams in frustration about how Western...

Today is the 20th birthday of the Microsoft .NET Framework. I remember it vividly, because of the job I had then and its weirdly coincidental start and end dates. I joined a startup in Chicago to write software using the yet-unreleased .NET Framework in 2001. My first day of work was September 10th. No one showed up to work the next morning. Flash forward to February 2002, and our planned release date of Monday February 18th, to coincide with the official release of .NET. (We couldn't release software...

Welcome to stop #71 on the Brews and Choos project. Note: Exit Strategy closed permanently on 29 October 2023. Brewery: Exit Strategy Brewing, 7700 Madison St., Forest ParkTrain line: UP-W, River Forest (also CTA Blue Line, Forest Park)Time from Chicago: 18 minutes (Zone B)Distance from station: 1.3 km (800 m from CTA) Forest Park used to have a reputation for anchoring one end of Chicago's skid row. No longer: the village has great restaurants and cute neighborhoods, including Exit Strategy Brewing. I...

Something about some sheep defending their pasture against cats? Do I have that right? I'm working through Best Picture nominees and generally chilling out, so I might have to miss it. Let me know which of the barnyard animals wins.

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Welcome to stop #70 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Afterthought Brewing, 218 E. St. Charles Road, LombardTrain line: UP-W, LombardTime from Chicago: 46 minutes (Zone D)Distance from station: 500 m In my conversation with the staff at Afterthought Brewing, I mentioned that they are almost precisely the opposite of Goldfinger. Where Goldfinger precisely controls yeast strains, brewing times, temperatures, and their immaculate Euro-style taproom, Afterthought lets nature do her thing and decides...

Via Josh Marshall, Canadian journalist Matt Gurney raises the alarm about the other group of truckers camping in Ottawa: You may have heard reports of a secondary encampment that is well removed from the main protest sites around Parliament Hill. I certainly had. It has been described in different reports as either a logistics area or some kind of staging ground for protesters. This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them...