Events

Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96: Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them. “We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an...

Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm: Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:

Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit. For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the...

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these: Michelle Goldberg sticks her tongue firmly in her cheek, declaring Matt Gaetz (R-FL) "the perfect man for the job" of running the Justice Dept. Annie Lowry explains the economics behind keeping minimum wages so low no one can possibly live on them. The Sun-Times published two stories today about how ComEd, the Illinois power...

The Brews & Choos Project had a net shift of zero in the last two weeks. I am pretty bummed about the loss, but intrigued by the gain. The loss: Long-time Evanston microbrewery Temperance closed up shop on October 27th. I am sad: Evanston didn’t have a brewery before Temperance Beer Co. arrived at the end of 2013. The suburb’s first brewery was a historic moment, and the taproom quickly became one of the city’s finest with hits like Might Meets Right and Gatecrasher IPA. Temperance represented the...

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media: The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation...

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes. I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next. These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize...

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write. Meanwhile: The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party...

The domain name wx-now.com went live on 11 November 1999, 25 years ago today. The earliest known Wayback Machine capture of the old Active Server Pages site was in September 2000; this screen shot from January 2001 looks a bit closer to what it looked like when it went live: In 2008, Katie Zoellner gave it a facelift that lasted pretty much until March 2022, when I completely overhauled the app, writing an entirely new UI and refactoring about 50% of the internal code. I still have all the old source...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutesTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 300 m Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing...