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Snow record for us
We almost made it to December 31st without measurable snowfall, which would have broken the record of 290 days. Alas, at day #288...I snapped that photo with the wind at my back and quarter-sized...
View ArticleSeeing through the blur of 2020...or 2021?
Today is the second anniversary of the first reported Covid-19 case, a fact I had forgotten when I booked my booster shot two weeks ago. Since 2019, about 5.8 million people have died of it, 822,000 of...
View ArticleBoost to the arm
So, 18 hours later, my third Pfizer dose made my arm sore and disrupted my sleep a little. Otherwise, no side effects.Updates as conditions warrant.Update: OK, there's quite a bit of fatigue. And a bit...
View ArticleFirst deployment of 2022
All of my apps run on servers that use UTC. As it's now 00:40 UTC, that means the code I just pushed to a dev server will start running on January 1st UTC, which is in fact why I waited until after 6pm...
View ArticleA full year later
I've timed this post to hit just after midnight January 1st in the Pacific island nation of Niue, the westernmost inhabited place on earth—as far as time zones go. When Niue ticked past midnight way...
View ArticleStatistics: 2021
After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures:In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five...
View ArticleWeather Now 5 soft launch
After 15 months of on-and-off work, I'm finally ready to show off Weather Now v5.0, currently in development.I started building the API and UI projects on top of the core and automation features around...
View ArticleThe most important stories of the day
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle read through a week of newspapers to understand the hot topics of 100 years ago:First, there is news of the great Washington Naval Conference, which has...
View ArticlePandemic + guns = mayhem
Chicago had almost 800 murders last year, the first time since 1996 that we've seen so many:But that total count does not include people shot and killed in shootings on Chicago expressways, as they are...
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Winter, CPS, CTU, and THC
Every so often in the winter, a cold front pushes in overnight, giving us the warmest temperature of the day at midnight. Welcome to my morning:The sun actually came out a few minutes ago—right around...
View ArticleThe Paper Anniversary
In the US and UK, it's customary to give gifts of paper for the first anniversary. In that spirit, I say we give all the insurrectionists new subpoenas today.President Biden marked the occasion with a...
View ArticleSchool's still out
The Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union keep butting heads, resulting in CPS closing the schools for another day tomorrow:Chicago Public Schools and the teachers union have filed...
View ArticleCold again
Today's temperatures have hovered around -9°C, with a forecast of bottoming out around -18°C tomorrow morning. But hey, at least the sun is out, right?Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:James Fallows,...
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Winter in Chicago
The temperature bottomed out at -14.4°C around 1:30 am, and has climbed ever so slowly since then to -0.3°:Will we get above freezing? The forecast says yes, any moment now. But the sun will set in...
View ArticleTechnically a good landing
The pilot of a Cessna 172H that crash-landed near Burbank, Calif., earlier this week survived with non-life-threatening injuries, but he came uncomfortably close to a really bad landing—and they most...
View ArticleAbout as well as expected
NPR's Steve Inskeep worked for six years to land a 15-minute interview with the XPOTUS, and yet no one felt any shock or surprise when it ended abruptly:Trump and his team have repeatedly declined...
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Yes, this definitely slipped right by me
I note with some amusement an email I just received from the Chicago Tribune:Yes, I subscribed all the way back in 1960, more than a decade before I was born. Thanks for remembering!
View ArticleThe sign of a dying culture
In his final novel, Friday (1986), Robert Heinlein spoke through an atavistic character to warn America of its impending doom:Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a...
View ArticleHot time in the city, again
It turns out, 2021 wasn't the hottest on record for the planet, nor were the most records set, nor was Arctic sea ice at its lowest level, or rainfall at its highest. But 2021 was the 7th year of a...
View ArticleFed up with all that
Three items:James Fallows reminds us that the US Senate filibuster "is a perversion of the Constitution," that "enables the very paralysis the founders were desperate to avoid," among other things. (He...
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