Events

I spent all day updating my real job's software to .NET 7, and to predominantly asynchronous operation throughout. Now I have four stubbornly failing unit tests that lead me to suspect I got something wrong in the async timing somewhere. It's four out of 507, so most of today's work went fine. Meanwhile, the following stories have backed up: The Economist wonders what our friends should think of the XPOTUS's dog and pony show. Alex Shephard worries that television and cable news just don't have the...

I woke up this morning to about 450 error messages because our team's Twitter account got suspended at midnight UTC—that is, at 7pm last evening. No one knew about it because we never considered Twitter errors critical enough to keep them in our inboxes; they all go to an Outlook subfolder. Apparently, Twitter finally decided that our 15-minutes-apart API calls violated a policy, but we never got informed that this would happen or that we needed to correct something. As near as I can figure out...

Cassie and I ran the last block of our first walk of the day because I underestimated how fast a squall line was moving. You know what comes after a squall line? A cold front: Because who doesn't love a 10°C temperature drop in 2 hours? The forecast for the rest of the week is for gradually warming temperatures and dry skies.

I thought that the two most important races near my house would take days to resolve because so many people voted by mail, but it turns out, people I like won both. First, in Chicago, Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson defeated Republican former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas for mayor: “Chicago, tonight is just the beginning,” Johnson said as he kicked off a emphatic victory speech, which aimed to strike a conciliatory and upbeat tone after a polarizing campaign against former Chicago...

The New York County District Attorney charged the XPOTUS with 34 felony counts stemming from his payment of hush money to Stephanie Clifford, aka adult film actor Stormy Daniels: The indictment against the former president, People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump, Indictment No. 71543-23, has been unsealed. The former president was charged with 34 felonies and pleaded not guilty before State Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan. The charges include filing false business records in the...

No, not that incompetent authoritarian; that bit of history hasn't happened yet. I mean the one whose adventure in Ukraine has succeeded in adding 1,300 km to his border with NATO: Finland has become the 31st member of the Nato security alliance, and its flag will soon be raised at the alliance's headquarters. The Finnish foreign minister handed the accession document to the US secretary of state who declared Finland a member. Finland's accession is a setback for Russia's Vladimir Putin, who repeatedly...

Stuff read while waiting for code to compile: Alex Shephard rolls his eyes at the Republican Party's unhinged response to the XPOTUS's indictment. California's Tulare Lake used to be the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, until agriculture drained it. Thanks to record rainfall, it has returned. Stanford Law 3L Tess Winston writes that 10% of her class generates 95% of the noise, but the 1L and 2L classes are worse. The head of Chicago-area concert promoter Jam Productions testified to the...

The City of Lights has done a mitzvah for its citroyens, essentially banning cars from the city center in part by providing real alternatives: French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism...

I'm taking a quiet day after our annual fundraiser. I should find out by next week exactly what our fundraising haul was. I do know that one of my friends outbid me for something I'd stored at my house since our 2019 fundraiser, which means I'll have to store it at my house again for a couple of weeks until they pick it up. Otherwise, a really fun evening, with something like 800 photos that I have to go through now at some point soon.

I mentioned Thursday that the Disney Corp. appears to have beaten Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' (R) plan to penalize them for taking a pro-queer stance. Our side are laughing out loud at how incompetent the DeSantis Administration had to be to let this happen, given it took Disney 10 months of public hearings to neuter the incoming board. But as Josh Marshall points, DeSantis never cared about the win; he only cared about the spectacle: Florida has particularly robust public notice laws. So this was...