Events

How my week is going so far. Wednesday evening: Yesterday evening: You can hear Weird Al on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! this weekend.

Emma Camp, an assistant editor at Reason, initially found an autism diagnosis comforting, but now has second thoughts: In many online circles — particularly those frequented by young, white, middle-class women like me — certain diagnoses are treated like a zodiac sign or Myers-Briggs type. Once they were primarily serious medical conditions, perhaps ones of which to be ashamed. Now, absent social stigma, mental health status functions as yet another category in our ever-expanding identity politics...

First, because it's April 20th, we have a a couple of stories about marijuana: Daniel Wolfe calls on cannabis sellers to pick names that actually provide brand differentiation. Cannabis companies here in Chicago (and, one expects, elsewhere) provide buses to private events to get around public-consumption laws. (The Daily Parker owns shares in Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries.) Second, because it's the 21st Century, we have a collection of articles about the end of democracy: Thomas Edsall...

Freelance writer John Carpenter (a "husky man of 60, with the approximate flexibility of a rusty old tractor") explores some of the abandoned railroads that now have bike paths on them in the Chicago area: Chicago is teeming with them — rail trails, I mean. Once extolled by the poet Carl Sandburg as the “player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler,” it remains a national railroad hub. That means there are bike paths along existing lines, like the Green Bay Trail beside Metra’s North Line, and...

WBEZ reporter Michael Gerstein went out to the IKEA in Schaumburg, Ill., to test our transit system and its navigation apps. It went fine, but Gerstein had an unusual experience: Major construction projects have snarled the Kennedy Expressway and the Blue Line’s weekend service, so my editor sent me on a 29-mile odyssey to Schaumburg. The idea was to test how Chicago’s regional transit agencies (CTA, PACE, Metra) work with each other and how many apps, trackers and planning devices I’d need to use to...

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why. Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day: Jennifer Rubin foresees years of aftershocks from the Tennessee legislature's expulsion of two Black members last week. Why are right-wingers making up conspiracy...

As happens about every other year, we woke up this morning to barely-above-freezing temperatures and this crap on the ground: After record warmth last week, April decided to balance the scales yesterday: All of the snow will melt in the next 24 hours as tomorrow's forecast calls for 11°C and sun, going up to 22°C by Thursday, but not before we get "scattered rain and snow showers" all day with winds up to 45 km/h. But then it goes back down to 2°C by Saturday...because April.

Not five minutes after my last post, I discovered a completely borked feature, caused by a change to the way Azure.Data.Tables executes queries. The Daily Temperatures feature stores data in the same table as the History feature. Each row represents a weather report, where the table partition key is the weather station identifier and the row key is the date and time of the report. So, for example, the first row of data for Chicago-O'Hare in the 2023 table has a partition key of KORD and a row key of...

It took a few weeks at odd hours, but I have finally deployed the latest version of Weather Now (5.0.8507). I didn't update anything visual, but all the plumbing got a refresh. It's now running in .NET 7 (until November, when .NET 8 comes out), and I did a top-to-bottom review of its asynchronous code. The app now runs noticeably faster, and I believe the corrections to the async bits will cure the nagging (but invisible) problem of thread exhaustion that happened from time to time. Now I can start...

The next 48 hours will take Chicago from a 28°C summer afternoon to a 1°C winter morning: We had a good run of four days over 26°C, and now spring returns. Tant pis.