Cassie and I are taking a moment after a visit to Horner Park, where she met a bunch of new friends:
Note that the woman in the photo is not the beagle's human, which the beagle finds irrelevant if she can get her snoot deeper into that bag.
We have stopped for a moment to enjoy a beer (Hazy Sunday IPA) and crack-soaked popcorn at Burning Bush near the park. I feel no urgency about anything at the moment. It's a good day.
Yesterday I had non-stop stuff from waking up until going to sleep. Today it's sunny and seasonably cool. In other words: as soon as I take a quick nap, I'm taking Cassie for a decent walk, then not doing anything productive until tomorrow.
Enjoy the weekend.
Cassie and I found a 20-minute gap in the rain this morning so she could have a (slightly-delayed) walk. Since around 9 am, though, we've had variations on this:
Good thing I have all these heartwarming news stories to warm my heart:
- Dane County, Wis., Judge Susan Crawford beat Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel 55% to 45% for the vacant seat on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, despite the $25 million the Clown Prince of X donated to Schimel's campaign. The CPOX himself drew laughs from people with IQs above 80 by claiming he didn't really try to buy the seat for the right-wing Schimel.
- Paul Krugman reminds the credulous that "there's no plan, secret or otherwise" behind the OAFPOTUS's tariffs. ("Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?") Timothy Noah concurs.
- Scholar Larry Diamond lays out the ways we can get through the constitutional crisis the OAFPOTUS has created.
- A Federal judge has dismissed corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Johnson, but enjoined the US Attorney from threatening more charges. It's only a partial win for corruption in the US, but still a win.
- The Times looks at Brightline's success and asks, "What's so hard about building trains?" After pointing out that "in Florida, Brightline has proved that it can operate reliable, well-designed passenger trains that people want to ride," they fail to project that it will probably get bailed out at least once in the next 25 years by state and federal money.
- The Onion imbues the Chicago Transit Authority with "an unconscious fear of success manifesting through self-sabotage." They're not wrong.
Finally, Bruce Schneier and a colleague published a paper yesterday lauding "Rational Astrologies and Security." In the paper, the authors analyze beliefs like "Nobody every got fired for buying IBM" and "It's always been done this way" as rational, and how security professionals can use them. The timing of the paper's publication in no way affects the soundness of these conclusions, of course.
We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.
Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:
Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.
First, yesterday's temperatures at Inner Drive Technology World HQ gave us whiplash:
Not shown: the violent thunderstorm that hit around 2:30, while I was driving up to Evanston where I made a critical error in the final trivia round that cost us the win.
Yesterday I also came across this graphic, which says so much about how North America screwed up its built environment while showing us how we can fix it:
Really, if we wanted to, we could get back to the 1920 pattern in my lifetime. Too bad we're busy trying just to keep our democracy.
The cold front that pushed through yesterday has moved north again, giving us this today:
As you can see from this map, we're now in the warm sector of a classic continental low circulation:
When the low pressure center passes over us later today, the temperature will plummet once again, and we might actually have a few snow flurries.
Because, you know, it's March.
Good thing I was inside and could close the windows when the temperature dropped 8.3°C (15°F) between 3:35 and 4:35 pm:
I got the dogs out around 2 (I'm dogsitting Butters again), and they have fur coats, so they did not mind at all. It's now just over 9°C outside with a forecast low of 5°C tonight, yet I had the windows open last night. Spring in Chicago continues apace.
But I must, must share this ad from Canada's Liberal Party. Wait for the end:
I completed two surveys related to my work conference this week. The first one included the question, "To confirm that you are still reading this, please select 'Disagree.'" The second one assigned point values to the multiple-choice questions, so that the three items I answered "Somewhat OK" instead of "Excellent" brought my grade down to a B-minus.
These are the kinds of things that make one wonder how valuable the survey data really is.
Meanwhile, I've got a ton of things to do today, including getting Cassie her lunchtime walk before a line of storms comes through around noon.
More later, including two Brews & Choos reviews from Nashville.
Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction:
Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever.
I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train:
It may be a really sad attempt to have real public transportation, but it's also a train station, meaning there are Brews & Choos-qualified breweries right by my hotel. I'm planning to visit one today. You'll have to wait until at least Friday for the reviews, though. And also for better photo editing.