My home town's village board caught sleeping
After rejecting several proposals for what to do with a 51-hectare golf course that closed in 2018, the Village Trustees in Northbrook, Ill., woke up this week to discover that the DuPage County Water...
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If you love dogs, get a mutt
Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz, author of the excellent book on dog psychology Inside of a Dog, explains how breeding dogs for specific characteristics inflicts pain and suffering on the...
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Solar storm tonight, aurorae possibly visible in Chicago
NOAA has predicted a severe geomagnetic storm watch for tonight:NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) — a division of the National Weather Service — is monitoring the sun following a series of...
View ArticleHealthy, happy dog once again
Cassie and I just got back from her vet, with a good 2 km walk in each direction and treats at both ends. The semi-annual wellness check was only $88, and pronounced Cassie in perfect health. Even her...
View ArticleWhen is bad butt not bad butt?
Cassie got a bad result from the lab yesterday: a mild giardia infection. It's a good-news, bad-news thing: The bad news, obviously, is that she can't go to day camp (meaning I can't spend a full day...
View ArticleThey're almost here!
Cicadas were spotted inside the city limits this week:Some Block Club readers in Beverly on the Far South Side reported spotting the large insect Friday for the first time since 2007.Cicadas are...
View ArticleHeading for another boring deployment
Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first...
View ArticleHeads-down research and development today
I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly...
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When the rain comes
I took Cassie out at 11am instead of her usual 12:30pm because of this:The storm front passed quickly, but it hit right at 12:30 and continued for half an hour with some intensity. It'll keep raining...
View ArticleBack in the Loop office
Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like...
View ArticleLast days of spring
I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month...
View ArticleVerdict in XPOTUS trial
The Manhattan jury in the first felony trial of a former president took only about 10 hours to reach a conclusion. He's GUILTY.Let the op-eds flow!
View ArticleWhat a lovely day to end Spring
Despite a high, thin broken cloud layer, it's 23°C with a light breeze and comfortable humidity at Inner Drive Technology World HQ. Cassie and I had a half-hour walk at a nice pace (we covered just...
View ArticlePiping plover egg spotted at Montrose Beach
Piping plovers Imani and Searocket, the former an offspring of the famous pair Monty and Rose, are expecting:A piping plover nest has been spotted at Montrose Beach.The nest, which has one egg, is the...
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Lovely Sunday, pretty warm Monday
The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable...
View ArticleAnother boring release
Every other Tuesday we release software, so that's what I just did. It was so boring we even pushed the bits yesterday evening. In theory we always have a code-freeze the night before a release, but in...
View ArticleNetworks of contracts waste a lot of money
Via Bruce Schneier's recent essay on complexity, I found a blog post on the work of Ronald Coase, which really resonated:Ronald Coase observed that an organisation could be considered as a collection...
View ArticleFinally get to breathe
But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website,...
View ArticleFrazzled morning
I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we...
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Two anniversaries and a passing
Seventy-five years ago today, George Orwell published1984, a horrifying novel that gets closer to reality every day. Also on 8 June 1949, the FBI released a report naming acting stars and filmmakers...
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