Events

Welcome to stop #119 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Monochrome Brewing, 2101 S. Carpenter St., Chicago 4 (of 5) stars Train line: CTA Orange Line, Halsted Time from Chicago: 10 minutesDistance from station: 900 m I'm sorry I never got to Lo Rez Brewing, which closed just a year ago. But I am glad my Brews & Choos buddy and I got to the space yesterday. Despite its industrial-belt location in the Lower West Side a long walk from the Pilsen Historic District, it felt comfortable and inviting...

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery. Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my...

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS: Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will...

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...