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Lovely day for a walk (or two)
Cassie and I walked all the way to the Horner Park Dog-Friendly Area yesterday, taking advantage of the 19°C weather and forbearance of rain clouds. We went a little out of our way on the first walk,...
View ArticleMr Toady's Wild Lie
In one of those stopped-clock-is-correct-twice-a-day moments, the XPOTUS and I have similar assessments of former US Attorney General Bill Barr:“Bill Barr cares more about being accepted by the corrupt...
View ArticleAn example of why free societies have better armies
In an authoritarian regime, telling your boss that he did something wrong can have fatal consequences. Therefore people avoid mentioning problems up the chain. Like, for example, that mandating the...
View ArticleNot quite back to normal yet
We had two incredible performances of Bach's Johannespassion this weekend. (Update: we got a great review!) It's a notoriously difficult work that Bach wrote for his small, amateur church chorus in...
View ArticleUS lurches to ending seasonal clock changes
As if from nowhere, the US Senate yesterday unanimously voted to pass S.623 (the "Sunshine Protection Act of 2021"), which would end daylight saving time by making that the new standard time, effective...
View ArticleSmall victories
I just finished upgrading an old, old, old Windows service to .NET 6 and a completely different back end. It took 6.4 hours, soup to nuts, and now the .NET 6 service is happily communicating with Azure...
View ArticleProblems with air pressure
I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots...
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Updated photos
Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long...
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Two more from Kentucky, and one from Chicago
I took Cassie for a 40-minute walk around Lexington's historic district on the way back from Berea:The light really wasn't great, so I didn't take a lot of photos. Plus Cassie has a way of adding...
View ArticleChugging along with data consolidation
Sunday night I finished moving all the Weather Now v4 data to v5. The v4 archives went back to March 2013, but the UI made that difficult to discover. I've also started moving v3 data, which would...
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Strange data patterns
The data transfer from Weather Now v3 to v5 continues in the background. Before running it, I did a simple SQL query to find out how many readings each station reported between September 2009 and March...
View ArticleHow long will this take?
It takes a while to transfer 162.4 million rows of data from a local SQL database to a remote Azure Tables collection. So far, after 4 hours and 20 minutes, I've transferred just over 4 million rows....
View ArticleContradictory transit incentives
Two stories this morning seemed oddly juxtaposed. In good news, the City of Chicago announced plans to spend $15 million on 77 km of new bike and pedestrian trails over the next couple of years:Several...
View ArticleThe update rolls on...
As of 17:16 CDT, the massive Weather Now v3 to v5 import had 115,441,906 records left to transfer. At 14:28 CDT yesterday, it was at 157,409,431, giving us a rate of ( 41,967,525 / 96,480 seconds = )...
View ArticleQuick update
The Apollo Chorus performed last night at the Big Foot Arts Festival in Walworth, Wis., so I haven't done a lot of useful things today. I did take a peek at the other weather archive I have lying...
View ArticleMondays are still long
I realize posting has slipped a little in the past couple of weeks. It should resume its normal frequency tomorrow, as I actually have five consecutive weeks of a routine schedule coming up.That...
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Early afternoon roundup
Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories:The Economist...
View ArticleSomebody call lunch!
I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical...
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The artist and her work
Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300...
View ArticleWeb3 is coming for your kitchen
Via Molly White, a new company called Gripnr wants to monetize your D&D campaign, and it's as horrible as it sounds:Gripnr plans to generate 10,000 random D&D player characters (PCs), assign a...
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