Events

As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more. The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer...

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th. I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there. Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would...

Take today's temperatures, for example: Fortunately, Cassie got a half-hour walk at 7am and a 25-minute walk at noon, just before the cold front came through. And the next couple of days will be...more Spring: This AfternoonSnow. Steady temperature around 1. Breezy, with a northwest wind around 45 km/h, with gusts as high as 70 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than one centimeter possible. TonightSnow showers likely before midnight, then isolated flurries...

This quote from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov sums up the last six weeks: "The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision." Or, as Dana Milbank wrote this morning, the OAFPOTUS has taken less than a week to set the country back 100 years: Armed with a portfolio of fabricated statistics, Trump judged that “the first month of our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation — and what makes it even more impressive is...

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election! Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the...

Weather Now v5.0.9194 just hit the hardware, with a new feature that allows you to browse the Gazetteer by finding all the places near a point. (Registration required.) I also added a couple of admin features that I will propagate to every other app I have in production, and made a few minor bug fixes. Only one minor hiccup: I forgot to add a spatial index to the Gazetteer, which caused searches around a point to take minutes instead of seconds in production. I added the index to the database...

James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss: In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can...

Jennifer Rubin gets it right: Given the scope of the MAGA assault on the foundations of our democracy, many Democrats, responsible media outlets, and concerned Americans have (understandably) been focused on its attempt to obliterate the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment. But we should never lose track of the abject immorality that is part and parcel of an ideology based on vengeful victimhood, conspiracy-mongering, and repudiation of science. From the outbreak of measles to...

The National Weather Service Chicago office released its report on the 2024-25 winter today, the first day of meteorological spring. Highlights: Average temperature: -2.6°C (0.4°C below normal) Total snowfall: 302 mm (450 mm below normal, 10th least snowiest) Total precipitation: 113 mm (42 mm below normal) They go on: At Chicago, the average high temperature was 34.1 degrees, which is 0.5 degrees below normal. The average low temperature was 20.5 degrees, which is 1.1 degrees below normal. The mean...

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this: The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy. As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from....