Events

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

Despite the annoyances with the soon-to-be-decommissioned BlogEngine.NET version of the Daily Parker, I actually had some things to say today. Mainly: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs know they're losing everywhere that matters, and they know they only have slightly less than a year before the next Congress effectively shuts them down, so they're going for broke. And the last 36 hours are just the beginning. Top of mind is yesterday's murder of Renee Good, a mother of three shot in the face by a...

The BlogEngine.NET version of The Daily Parker seems to know it has run out of time. It won't let me log in this afternoon. No errors, nothing in the logs, the authentication cookie looks correct, just...no author controls. It knows. So once I'm done writing this directly in SQL Server, I'll start creating the production environment. Last orders, please.

Republicans want to make your life worse; Democrats want to make it better. This has been largely true since 1980, when Ronald Reagan and his friends took the Republican Party sharply to the right and want to keep going until it's just billionaires and peasants in the US. The Democratic Party is a huge amalgam of constituencies that account for the majority of voters in the majority of states. Almost to a person, we think the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible people who should never hold positions of...

I had planned to develop the full-text search feature for the new blog engine before starting to deploy anything to production, but I hit a snag. Microsoft Azure only allows you to have one free search service per subscription. Since my dev/test subscription already uses one (for the Weather Now dev environment), I'll have to create a free search instance in my production environment. And because I don't want to deal with cross-subscription security and all that shiznit, that means I'll have to create...

Yep, I'm still doing these, because I still have meetings and have to queue stories up: Brian Beutler has another "30 thoughts on the illegal Venezuela war." Heather Cox Richardson picks apart Secretary of State Marco Rubio's appearance on ABC's This Week yesterday. It...did not go well. Because they have no plan. Paul Krugman drags the administration for "seeking cash and an ego boost," i.e., "the real Donroe Doctrine." Of all the horrible aspects of our Venezuelan adventure, Adam Kinzinger was most...

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...