Events

You'd think no one would say this out loud, especially 56 days until the election, but JD Vance is a special kind of asshole: Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance on Thursday called school shootings a “fact of life” that he dislikes, saying in the wake of the Apalachee High School killings in Georgia that stricter gun laws are not the answer and that schools must beef up security. “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix where he...

Just a quick note while I've got my head down with an ugly commit and probably a few follow-up fixes. After a lovely autumn-cool weekend, today we have some summer-like weather, just warm enough to make me wonder whether I should turn on the air conditioning. I'll decide around 6, I think. On the other hand, I wonder why I'm sitting inside on one of the last days like this we'll have for six months?

So, I finally figured out why Weather Now kept struggling: I deployed it to a too-small App Service Plan for the load it was getting. And since most of the load is coming from bots, I hope that the robots.txt file I finally deployed properly will get them to stop. I fixed the mysterious exceptions being thrown, too. But it turned out, the problem was simply load. A bigger App Service Plan brought the effective CPU from 100% to 28% immediately. And it'll only cost another $66 per month... I'll experiment...

I spent hours this weekend and a couple of nights this past week fixing Weather Now. The app has gotten a lot more traffic than usual lately, mostly because I didn't put the robots.txt file in the right location. Unfortunately, all the extra traffic made it really obvious that the app had some serious performance issues, which I traced to some bad asynchronous code design. The miracle cure for these issues came from Microsoft, and the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Threading.Analyzers package. This easily found...

I'm dog-sitting this weekend, so this is the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes just before 7am: Telling Butters to go away had the opposite effect of what I'd intended: Believe it or not, this pathetic look came after I fed them both: They're now asleep on the couch together. At some point today, they're getting an hour-long walk—which won't actually go that far, because beagles are scent hounds. Every blade of grass must be sniffed.

I just finished a 75-minute open-level French test as part of a QA study that Duolingo invited me to participate in. What an eye-opener. And quelle épuisement! The test started well enough but got a lot harder as it went on, for two principal reasons. First, the order of sections went precisely in the order of my abilities: reading, writing, listening, speaking. Turns out I read French a lot better than I write it, write it better than I understand it, and speak it like a reject from a Pink Panther...

So far this autumn, we've had ridiculous amounts of sunshine in Chicago, with 99% of our rapidly-declining minutes of daylight delightfully cloud-free. We haven't had such a sunny first week of September since 1955, it turns out. For that reason I ate lunch outside today, and unless something truly bizarre happens in the next few hours, I'll have dinner outside as well. Not a bad Thursday. As for the title of this post, when you multiply six by nine, you get 42 base 13, in fact: the answer to the...

I spent 56 minutes trying to get ADT to change a single setting at my house, and it turned out, they changed the wrong setting. I will try again Friday, when I have time. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world: James Carville lays out a strategy for Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House in *ulp* 62 days. Arizona officials continue to deal with the election-denier loony fringe despite (or maybe because of?) reality winning every time it's tested. A Federal judge in Rockford, Ill., has ruled that...

Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today: Two Boomer economists point out that the Boomers have made an art form of siphoning wealth from the younger generations, meaning we Gen Xers will have to work longer for lower Social Security (state pensions) payments. Typical. Chicago's meteorological summer was warmer and drier than normal, the 18th-warmest since 1871. Ravinia Brewing Company and...

The weather today requires that I leave work as early as permissible and take Cassie home the long way. Of course, in order to do that, I have to eat at my desk. (I suppose I could have taken a long lunch, but then I wouldn't have as much time with my dog. Choices.) Last night I fired up the ol' grill. I am proud to report I have gotten steak grilling just right; this guy was a perfect slightly-rare-of-medium and every bite was juicy and tender: Dinner tonight (and probably tomorrow) will be leftovers...