Events

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years. In other news: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs. Tom Nichols points out that the...

While walking Cassie this morning I saw an unusual number of free eDivvy bikes in my neighborhood. So I thought, why not take one to work? Including stopping at a Starbucks downtown, it took about 5 minutes longer than it usually takes on the Metra, probably because I didn't have to walk as far or wait for the train. I think I last rode a bike to work in 2011. The electric bike was only slightly less effort, and about the same average speed. I may have to do this again when the weather cooperates.

For the past few weeks I've been going through things I've got in storage, some of them my mom's from before I was born. It's a lot of stuff, but has yielded some interesting finds. For example, in 1983 or 1984 I bought What's Where in the Apple, a comprehensive look at the Apple ][ and //e architecture. Stuffed inside it I found notes and some source code I wrote to explore the inner workings of the Apple, and a Beagle Bros. "Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers" poster from 1983. I also found the Glenbrook...

Today is Cassie's 7th birthday, and it breaks my heart that she has to spend it in the Cone of Shame: (I'll clean this photo up before the end of the day.) She has adapted to the cone just fine, of course, and it'll come off on Wednesday. I could potentially take it off today, but I think it's important to wait until her stitches come out. I just don't want her to hook a suture and open up the incision. Also, to further ruin her birthday, I'm at the office downtown until just after noon. We'll have...

Weather Now release 5.0.9330 came out this afternoon. The only difference is the way it stores weather lists. When you go to the site, it shows you the weather in a short list of places from around the world. If you register by logging in with a Microsoft account, you can personalize this list. Previously the app stored this personalized weather list as part of the user's profile and stored the system default list (shown to unregistered users) as a simple configuration setting. This release moves...

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all: The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely. In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple...

At a friend's prompting, I spelunked through a bunch of old Garmin tracks that I recorded in the aughts when I did a lot of road biking. I used to put a lot of the stats online, too, but that ended in 2007 when I switched braverman.org entirely to this blog. Anyway, I uploaded some of the tracks to my Garmin account, and now I want to go for a very long bike ride of the type I used to do before my knees told me not to. For example, my longest rides of 2006 (120 km) and 2007 (128 km) were both in...

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

I have to finish a feature today, and had a ton of meetings yesterday, which is why I missed posting yesterday. If I finish the feature before it gets dark I may even read a bunch of stuff that has piled up in my browser. Until then...

Economist Paul Krugman started what has become a 7-part overview of inequality in the United States: how it started, how it's going, and how it has corrupted our politics to an extent not seen since the 1890s: Between World War II and the 1970s income disparities in America were relatively narrow. Some people were rich and many were poor, but overall inequality among Americans in terms of wealth, income and status was low enough that the country had a sense of shared prosperity. Things are very...