Events

Today is Cassie's 7th birthday, and it breaks my heart that she has to spend it in the Cone of Shame: (I'll clean this photo up before the end of the day.) She has adapted to the cone just fine, of course, and it'll come off on Wednesday. I could potentially take it off today, but I think it's important to wait until her stitches come out. I just don't want her to hook a suture and open up the incision. Also, to further ruin her birthday, I'm at the office downtown until just after noon. We'll have...

Weather Now release 5.0.9330 came out this afternoon. The only difference is the way it stores weather lists. When you go to the site, it shows you the weather in a short list of places from around the world. If you register by logging in with a Microsoft account, you can personalize this list. Previously the app stored this personalized weather list as part of the user's profile and stored the system default list (shown to unregistered users) as a simple configuration setting. This release moves...

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all: The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely. In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple...

At a friend's prompting, I spelunked through a bunch of old Garmin tracks that I recorded in the aughts when I did a lot of road biking. I used to put a lot of the stats online, too, but that ended in 2007 when I switched braverman.org entirely to this blog. Anyway, I uploaded some of the tracks to my Garmin account, and now I want to go for a very long bike ride of the type I used to do before my knees told me not to. For example, my longest rides of 2006 (120 km) and 2007 (128 km) were both in...

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

I have to finish a feature today, and had a ton of meetings yesterday, which is why I missed posting yesterday. If I finish the feature before it gets dark I may even read a bunch of stuff that has piled up in my browser. Until then...

Economist Paul Krugman started what has become a 7-part overview of inequality in the United States: how it started, how it's going, and how it has corrupted our politics to an extent not seen since the 1890s: Between World War II and the 1970s income disparities in America were relatively narrow. Some people were rich and many were poor, but overall inequality among Americans in terms of wealth, income and status was low enough that the country had a sense of shared prosperity. Things are very...

As everyone should know by now, everything the OAFPOTUS or anyone around him does is in the service of self-enrichment. We can include "enriching friends" as well. And in the grand tradition of privatizing things that government absolutely does better than industry, it looks like the Administration intends to cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so their friends can start making rents from the vital functions it performs. Enter Neil Jacobs, nominated to head NOAA, who...

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens. In other fun news: Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and...

Short lifespans have plagued tech more in the last 25 years than at any point in the past. I particularly hate when a bit of tech goes obsolete for no reason other than the manufacturer decided it doesn't want to support it anymore. I want to take the CEO by the lapels and remind them that they sold these products and they had better support them for a while. Belkin has become the latest company to exit a product line that I have used practically since it came out. They announced today that they will...