Events

Naturally, the press had a lot to say about the largest protest in my lifetime (I was born after the Earth Day 1970 demonstration): As many as 250,000 people turned out for the downtown Chicago event, which included a procession that carried a 23-meter replica of the US Constitution, and resulted in zero arrests or reports of violence. (The video of the procession leaving Grant Park is epic.) David Graham of The Atlantic explains why the protests got under the OAFPOTUS's skin: "Trump’s movement depends...

We've had a fairly warm autumn so far, but this morning we got a nearly-normal temperature at O'Hare and the coldest temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ since April 27th. O'Hare saw 5°C this morning, a scoche below the normal October 20th low of 6.7°C. We're also starting to get fall colors. I've been watching a locust tree down the block, and I'll have some photos of its progress later this week.

I thoroughly enjoyed our performance yesterday. After the No Kings demonstration, between the dress rehearsal and the concert, and well before the rain hit, Millennium Park looked pretty nice: After the concert, I did not enjoy the rainstorm that greeted us when we walked over to the place where we had our post-concert drinks and snacks. I got home well after midnight, which fortunately Cassie didn't mind because she was at sleepaway camp.  Cassie, now home, seems to be recovering from the trauma pretty...

I'll be in tonight's Ear Taxi Festival performance at Harris Theater in Millennium Park, singing Damien Geter's African American Requiem. I'm really enjoying the piece. Even though our call time (1:30pm) makes it impossible to participate in the No Kings demonstration happening just 400 meters away from the concert venue, I think the chorus are doing their parts as Geter's message is relevant to the day. If you're in Chicago, come for the demonstration and stay for the concert! If you're not in Chicago...

I jotted down two notes earlier this week about things I heard that made me think. They come from two journalists who I've followed for a while, both of whom have reasoned and careful takes on events in their home countries. The first came from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posted a video on Monday discussing Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought, about whom Politico ran a depressing article just this morning. Bouie says Vought believes that "if you can get rid of the...

The Kansas Young Republicans organization has been disbanded after several of their members were caught sending texts praising Hitler and advocating for gassing their adversaries: Kansas Young Republicans chair Alex Dwyer and vice chair William Hendrix were among the members of the leaked Telegram group chat, titled “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM.” Dwyer is a University of Kansas alumnus and founder of KU’s Turning Point USA chapter. Leaders from Young Republicans chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont...

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...