Events

We have a typical cloudy autumn day, good for reading and not so good for long walks with the dog. So I'll read and Cassie can wait for a bit: Turns out, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is even more of a scary, right-wing Christian nationalist nutter than most people knew. Paul Krugman concurs, warning that Johnson wants to eliminate the social safety net entirely. Actor Matthew Perry drowned in his California home yesterday. He was 54. New DNA evidence confirms that the Assateague horses...

I really love the Lakewood-Balmoral neighborhood in Chicago's Edgewater community area. I only had 25 minutes to walk Cassie while my car got serviced nearby, so I didn't stop to photograph everything. But I did snap this at the corner of Magnolia and Bryn Mawr: And then, just 200 meters away on the 5400 block of Wayne, this: That's not too creepy, is it?

Yesterday's temperatures at IDTWHQ fell off a cliff right before dinner: (I know, we play this game a lot.)

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles: Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel. Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home. Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?" Paul Krugman bemoans the...

I've had a few things on my plate this week, including a wonderful event with the Choeur de la Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris at Old St Patrick's Church in Chicago. We had a big dinner, they sang for us, we sang for them, and then some of us hosted some of them in our homes. Tonight I'm hearing their real performance at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston. Sunday night I saw comedian Liz Miele at the Den Theater. I'm totally crushing on her and highly recommend you catch her on this tour: And naturally I...

House Republicans have (finally) elected a Speaker, far-right Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), an election denier who tried to popularize the "independent state legislature" malarkey after the 2020 election: Elected to Congress in 2016, Mr. Johnson is the most junior lawmaker in decades to become speaker. He may also be the most conservative. An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson is the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee and sponsored legislation to effectively bar the discussion of sexual...

It's 22°C and sunny right now, making me wonder what's wrong with me that I'm putting together a software release. I probably should fire off the release, but I'm doing so under protest. I also probably won't get to read all of these things I've queued up: Peter Hamby expresses concern about the rise of the illiberal left in the younger generation. Despite the ravings of Fox News and other right-leaning propagandists, the US economy is actually doing better right now than at any point since Obama was in...

Yesterday I complained that some combination of factors had made it impossible for me to evaluate an expensive tool for my day job. The manufacturer responded overnight: First, we want to express our apologies for experiencing login problem. This is really uncommon and is usually related to OS restrictions. We also want to thank you very much for your interest in Telerik products. We are sure you will be able to build beautiful applications with lots of rich functionality really easy with guaranteed...

For my real job, I'm evaluating graphics packages to report (informally) at tomorrow's sprint review which ones I think we should investigate further, so that at the next sprint review in two weeks, I can recommend which one we should buy. These packages cost between $1000 and $6000 per year to license. You would think that helping me choose would top the priority list of everyone involved in the demo and trial process. With that preface, here is the bug report I filed with Telerik earlier today: When...

Writing in the current Atlantic, Joe Pinsker points out that emulating the pastimes of happy cultures won't actually create a happy culture: With the release of each [World Happiness] report, which is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the question is not which country will appear at the top of the rankings, but rather which Northern European country will. Finland has been the world’s happiest country for four years running; Denmark and Norway hold all but one of...