Events

After almost two years, Chicago's "rat hole" continues to leave an impression on people: Initially, the origin story of the hole seemed straightforward: a brown rat scurried onto a wet layer of concrete and became trapped. There were no signs of escape, so the rat most likely died and was somehow eventually removed, leaving behind a cavity as the concrete dried. The series of events seemed plausible in Chicago, which was named the country’s “rattiest” city for the 10th year in a row in 2024 by the pest...

(This will be a nerdy post about .NET development.) I've spent some time over the last few days experimenting with GitHub Copilot's abilities to handle some specific programming tasks. Specifically, I asked a few of the models to do these tasks: Examine all of the projects in this solution and add the parameter "CancellationToken cancellationToken = default" to all async methods, with appropriate XML code comments. Now propagate the cancellationToken values to all method calls in the updated methods....

The Nielsen/Norman Group, founded by usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen, rolls its eyes at Apple's new iPhone UI: Apple describes Liquid Glass as: “a translucent material that reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more.” Translated: the interface now ripples and shimmers as if your phone were encased in Jell-O. At first glance, it does look cool....

I spent about 6 hours today making dozens of performance and stability updates to the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture and the Inner Drive Gazetteer (which provides geographical services for Weather Now). Cassie spent about that much time outside, including Riding In The Car!, which she also loves. Tomorrow I should have some more interesting things to say about how I did about 40 separate refactorings in just a few hours. Hint: Chat GPT 5 and 5-mini. Sometimes they were laughably wrong, but about...

Despite driving 55 km up to the suburbs to have lunch with a friend, I've had a productive day. I'm aiming to release a new round of performance improvements for the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture in about four weeks, when .NET 10 comes out. I have to put that aside right now because a certain fuzzy, vaguely stinky animal is poking me with her nose and appears to have some needs that I don't want her to satisfy in the house. More on this later.

I attended an event last night at Chicago's Old Post Office. It was a lovely night in (and on top of) a lovely building: That's all, just some pretty photos.

But today? 10/10 would recommend! Ah, ha ha. Ha. Everything else today has a proportion of funny to not-funny that we should work on a bit more: The administration served up two full helpings of corruption today: indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James as payback for prosecuting the OAFPOTUS, and finalizing a $20 billion gift to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's friends under the guise of propping up the Argentine Peso. US District Judge April Perry (NDIL) has blocked the National Guard from...

Yesterday, I posted about author Hilary Layne's argument that the whole-language method supplanting phonics as the favored method of teaching reading to young children is the principal reason that late Millennials and Gen Z Americans have such difficulty understanding what they read. In the video that I embedded, she maintains that whole-language instruction led directly to teaching critical literacy rather than critical thinking, which in turn led to a generation and a half of American college...

The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that I got over 10 years ago continues to work just fine; in fact, I'm writing this post on it. Sadly, Microsoft will stop providing updates to Windows 10 in a week, and the tablet is so old I can't update it to Windows 11. Not only does the prospect of spending $600 to replace something that doesn't need replacing annoy me, but it also means I'm going to have to spend several hours installing and configuring everything. And next week I have 5 rehearsals and a performance, so...

In the news today: Brian Beutler reminds history buffs that in "the median experience of tyranny" life doesn't change much right away. Paul Krugman mines the data to understand why gold prices have soared in the last couple of months. But, he argues, "holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest." Jeff Maurer reminds the smitten that, no matter how well-intentioned, activists are just "dumb assholes like you and me:" "[T]he...