The world still spins
As much fun as Cassie and I have had over the last few days, the news around the world didn't stop:After 448 days, Illinois will finally reopen fully on Friday.Security expert Tarah Wheeler, writing on...
View ArticleWednesday afternoon
I spent the morning unsuccessfully trying to get a .NET 5 Blazor WebAssembly app to behave with an Azure App Registration, and part of the afternoon doing a friend's taxes. Yes, I preferred doing the...
View ArticleIt's over (mostly)
After 448 days, the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago have lifted all capacity limits and most other intrusive Covid-19 mitigation factors. We haven't gone completely back to normal, but it...
View ArticleView From Your Window contest
Welp, I was about 99% correct, but this week they had over 100 correct answers, so no prize:It’s the John A. Blatnik Bridge connecting Duluth and Superior. It was finished in 1961, when I was about 10,...
View ArticleAll work and dog play
Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit...
View ArticleSo, nu, how's by you?
After taking Cassie on a 45-minute walk before the heat hits us, I've spent the morning debugging, watching these news stories pile up for lunchtime reading:The US Supreme Court once again upheld...
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A note on the Lake
The Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has fallen for 12 straight months. But not a lot:So even though water levels have fallen 50 cm or so, they're still 40 cm higher than the long-term average....
View ArticleHe was a Champ
President Biden's 13-year-old German shepherd died earlier this week:Champ Biden, one of two German shepherds belonging to President Biden and his family has died, the president and first lady Jill...
View ArticleRelaxing weekend
Cassie and I headed up to Tyranena Brewing in Lake Mills, Wis., yesterday to hang out with family. Today, other than a trip to the grocery and adjacent pet store where Cassie picked out an...
View ArticleHotels on Rails from Paris in 2024
French start-up Midnight Trains plans a set of overnight train routes of 800-1,500 km in length, from Paris to Edinburgh, Madrid, Copenhagen, and Rome:The founders say the aim is not to match the...
View Article"F*** school, f*** softball, f*** cheer, f*** everything" wins with SCOTUS
Brandi Levy, a 19-year-old student from Pennsylvania, won her appeal to the US Supreme Court after being suspended from cheerleading for a year after Snapchatting the above sentiment:She sent the...
View ArticleCanadians pretending to be American
We know our neighbor to the north has its own contingent of crazy. But usually they just behave in Canadian-crazy ways. Apparently now, a group of anti-vaxxers has blockaded the Trans-Canada Highway at...
View ArticleBrexit, five years on
Not everything I predicted about the idiotic Brexit vote on 23 June 2016 has come true, but the UK still remains as divided as then:Five years after Britons voted to leave the European Union, the...
View ArticleHow to screw up both time *and* money
Credit-card processing company Worldpay mixed up two fields in a batch on Tuesday (that they mixed up with a batch from April 18th), resulting in hilarious (in retrospect) errors processing charges...
View ArticleMisunderstanding national happiness
After the World Happiness Report comes out each year, everyone wants to live in Scandinavia, which usually dominates the top 10 every time. But people seem not to understand why Norway, Denmark,...
View ArticleThought-provoking analysis of our "four countries"
The Atlantic's current issue adapts veteran writer George Packer's latest book, in which he argues that the US has fractured into four distinct world views:National narratives, like personal ones, are...
View ArticleCosplaying soldiers arrested in Massachusetts
I mean...Police in Massachusetts arrested 11 people Saturday after an hours-long standoff with a group of heavily armed men near Interstate 95, sparking stay-at-home orders for nearby residents and a...
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Busy 4th
Cassie and I had a long day yesterday, which included several rides in the car and lots of play time. It also involved tons of fireworks. And a raw, marrow-filled bison bone:Adding more data to the...
View ArticleDown the Memory Hole
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder warns that "memory laws" recently passed in several Republican-held states bear a strong resemblance to similar laws supported by horrifying regimes:After the...
View ArticleWe're dumb, but we're not that dumb
Two sad-funny examples of how, nah, we're exactly that dumb. The first, from TDWTF, points out the fundamental problem with training a machine-learning system how to write software:Any ML system is...
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