Events

After taking Cassie to the St James Farm Preserve, I did something I had not done in 335 days: I fueled my car. Between February 2nd and yesterday, I drove 3,335 km (2,073 mi) and used 34.4 L (9.1 gal) of gas for an average economy of 1.03 L/100 km (228.2 MPG). This is what happens when you live somewhere with decent public transportation and drive a plug-in hybrid. Sadly, as a plug-in car gets older—I've had mine for just over 7 years now—the battery slowly loses its capacity. In 2019 she got about 51...

Yesterday evening at Spiteful Brewing: I swear that dog would consider leaving me for a taco. But she seemed pretty happy to be home: Then this afternoon we took a walk with her friend Kelsey at the St James Farm Preserve out in Suburbistan: The weather was pretty good for January, and the dogs got at least 40 minutes of off-leash time. They also discovered frozen horse poop, which fortunately they didn't eat a lot of. I do need to talk to Cassie about her breath, though. Tonight we're on the couch, and...

The three best takes I've seen so far on the OAFPOTUS hoping anything is more interesting to the public than his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein start with Josh Marshall: I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezuela for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with...

The events in Venezuela earlier today are a bit more important than the soft launch of a beta blog engine's dev-test environment. Still, if you're curious what I've been working on for (checks Git log) more than five years, here is the Daily Parker's next iteration. A big caveat: It's still in development. I've gotten to the minimal feature set where I feel comfortable letting people play with it, but it still has a ways to go before I can move this blog off BlogEngine.NET. I still need to add search...

The United States invaded Venezuela this morning and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife: The United States launched a “large scale strike” on Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them out of the country, President Donald Trump said in a social media post early Saturday. Overnight, explosions shook multiple locations across Caracas, including at key military facilities, and aircraft were seen flying over the Venezuelan capital. Venezuelan Vice President...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

Here are the books and other media I consumed in 2025. (Here's 2024 for comparison.) Books Spending less time traveling meant less time reading, unfortunately. That said, I managed to read 29 books and finish 25, including: Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Totally different than the TV series (see below) but just as fun. Iain Banks, The Algebraist. Very fun novel that's worth its 900 pages. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, his...

I remember 2025 like it was yesterday...and in that long-forgotten year: I posted 459 times on The Daily Parker, down 21 from 2024 and 41 from 2023. But the blog had it's 10,000th post sometime in August, which is something. I flew less in 2025 than in the previous three years, with only 7 flight segments totaling 8,371 flight miles. I didn't leave the US in 2025, about which I am sad. And I only visited five states: Tennessee,  Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and California. Strangely, I didn't even make...

I've just pushed Weather Now release 5.0.9497, which has a few minor tweaks plus one really obvious one: I switched typefaces. For consistency with the new Daily Parker and the soon-to-be-refreshed Inner Drive Technology corporate site, I decided to switch to the IBM Plex Sans typeface. The app had used Łukasz Dziedzic's Lato typeface, which I like a lot. I think Plex has a cleaner design, no more modern than Lato but just more to my taste. Check out the Weather Now refresh, and let me know what you...

Because I've spent almost all my computer time on my real job and on getting the next version of The Daily Parker ready for its Beta launch, I haven't had many of these link roundups for the last couple of weeks. Another reason: all the end-of-year retrospectives, floofy non-news stories, and all those damned "send us money" emails. I promise you, I will never send you an email begging for money. Of course, if you enjoy either this blog or Weather Now, or find them vaguely useful, please consider...