Events

It turns out, December was a lot colder (relatively) than the rest of 2010: So after nine months of above-average temperatures, including three in the top-10 warmest in recorded history, we got December, in the top decile of coldest months. I'm happy about the last two days when we had a brief, spring-like spell of 10°C temperatures, but wow, what a tease.

Happy new year, Chicago; winter's back:

My year in numbers: Air miles flown: 66,674 Flight segments: 50 (Of those, arriving or departing O'Hare: 43) Countries visited: 7 (UK, India, Japan, China, Finland, Russia, Estonia) Hours working for pay: 1,488 Hours working for free: 128 Hours working for school: 848 Hours walking Parker: 146[1] Blog postings: 398 Photos taken: 4,633 CDs purchased: 12 Books read: 51 Movies watched: 61 (In theaters: only 8, sadly) But really, the only statistic that matters is: Duke MBAs earned: 1 [1] He got much more...

The last Kodachrome processing machine is gone: In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced [to Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas], transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of...

I keep getting asked about my Facebook notes: why did I leave out the punchline? Where's the rest of the post? Why do you post three at once at odd hours? The simple explanation: I post on my blog, The Daily Parker, throughout the day; Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed at 8-hour intervals; and the RSS Feed only has the article blurb. Facebook also rearranges embedded links and photos, so sometimes pictures attached to blog entries just seem to vanish. Fascinating, no?

Constitution scholar and writer Garrett Epps lays out the case for the constitutionality of requiring Americans to "maintain a minimum level of health insurance." Well, for starters, it doesn't: This snappy apothegm is the logical equivalent of saying that the Defense Appropriations Act "requires that every United States citizen, other than those who leave the country, engage in accepting a minimum level of protection by the United States military." The provisions of the Health Care Act provide a...

Via Bruce Schneier, a retired CIA codebreaker recently decoded a message sent to Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton in July 1863: The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War. The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton. "He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have...

Welcome to the semi-annual update of the Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2011 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct. 29th 07:19 16:32 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:51 5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:11 20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:30 10:50 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:29 17:39 11:09 12 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr. 17th Earliest sunset until Oct. 26th 06:08 17:54 11:45 13 Mar...

Throughout my career in software development, I have spent many, many hours in meetings. Endless meetings. Soul-sucking meetings. Insurance companies are the worst, and they hire lots of developers, which just increases the aggregate lifetime meeting time-suck of the average developer. It's fun to figure out after the meeting not only how much time just disappeared from the universe, but also how much it cost. So I am overjoyed to discover that Scott Adams sells this on his website: When meetings are...

Reader MB sent some art from Murphy, N.C.: She writes: [I] saw your request for winter wonderland pictures on Facebook and thought you may be interested to see what Murphy, N.C., looked like during the past few days. We were supposed to get a max of 8 cm on the 25th according to initial reports, but I think the total was closer to 40 cm as of 10am [Monday] morning when the sun finally decided to show its face. Meanwhile, the rest of the East Coast continues to dig out. Today's snow pack map from NOAA's...