Events

Mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at the age of 97: Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Alma (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved. In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his...

As promised, I just pushed new bits for Weather Now. Release 5.0.9340 corrects a couple of regression issues I introduced with the previous release, which happens more often than not after an architecture refactoring. End users will probably not notice any differences, except that for the last 10 days no one other than system admins have been able to edit their own home page weather lists. Now they can. I have one more release of Weather Now planned for this summer, which will allow users to create...

I've spent a lot of my day cleaning my house and doing some housekeeping on the Daily Parker. In the latter case, I finished adding the ancient Site News entries that ran from July 1997 to March 1998, bringing the total active posts up to 9,984 (though the blog engine thinks there are 9,988). That means that the 10,000th Post will happen in about two weeks at my present rate of posting. I also uploaded a few more Fitbit tracks into my Garmin account, including a 14.5 kilometer walk with Parker in June...

Historian Timothy Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, takes us through a short history of a not-so-long-ago German Chancellor's war with his country's apolitical civil service: A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, [future war criminal Hermann] Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to...

It looks like the temperature peaked at Inner Drive Technology World HQ a few minutes ago, hitting 32.7°C with a heat index of 42.3°C. The 26.4°C dew point is higher than I like the temperature to be. It may cool off later today when the thunderstorms finally start, but as I would like to get home from the office before then, I will have to go back out into this soupy mess soon. The only story of note this afternoon: Wrigley Field will host the 2027 All-Star Game. That's pretty cool, especially for the...

Cassie's stitches came out and her cone came off this afternoon: Tomorrow she goes back to day camp. This weekend, if the weather allows it, we'll go to the dog beach. We are both so freaking happy not to have the cone anymore. Also, her left ear doesn't look as out of place as I'd worried. We'll see how it looks when all her fur grows back in a couple of weeks.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has passed 32°C (with a 42°C heat index!) and it keeps going up. Welcome to the summer heat advisory season, with 30 million hectares of maize corn sweating to our west. Speaking of an uncomfortable atmosphere, the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have had a bad couple of days, which they responded to by making everyone else's days bad as well. First, on yesterday the US Court for the District of New Jersey declined to allow acting US Attorney Alina Habba (whom...

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years. In other news: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs. Tom Nichols points out that the...

While walking Cassie this morning I saw an unusual number of free eDivvy bikes in my neighborhood. So I thought, why not take one to work? Including stopping at a Starbucks downtown, it took about 5 minutes longer than it usually takes on the Metra, probably because I didn't have to walk as far or wait for the train. I think I last rode a bike to work in 2011. The electric bike was only slightly less effort, and about the same average speed. I may have to do this again when the weather cooperates.

For the past few weeks I've been going through things I've got in storage, some of them my mom's from before I was born. It's a lot of stuff, but has yielded some interesting finds. For example, in 1983 or 1984 I bought What's Where in the Apple, a comprehensive look at the Apple ][ and //e architecture. Stuffed inside it I found notes and some source code I wrote to explore the inner workings of the Apple, and a Beagle Bros. "Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers" poster from 1983. I also found the Glenbrook...