The Daily Parker

I've opened nearly every window in my house to let in the 15°C breeze and really experience the first real fall morning in a while. Chicago will get above-normal temperatures for the next 10 days or so, but in the beginning of October that means highs in the mid-20s and lows in the mid-teens. Even Cassie likes the change.

Since I plan to spend nearly every moment of daylight outside for the rest of this weekend, I want to note a few things to read this evening when I come back inside:

• TFW your bogus election recount in Arizona finds your guy lost by 360 more votes than the official count reported in November. Sad!
• Speaking of the XPOTUS, he does not like the January 6th commission.
• Ed Kilgore advises the current POTUS on what to tell recalcitrant members of his own party.
• The New Yorker's Ben Crair reports on a German biologist who has elucidated how species become species.
• In an Atlantic article from May, writer and journalist Joshua Sharpe explains why "we should all be more afraid of driving."

Finally, if you really want to dig into some cool stuff in C# 10, Scott Hanselman explains implicit namespace support.

So these things happened:

• The FBI withheld REvil decryption keys from victims so not to tip off the criminals.
• Anonymous hackers have doxxed an ISP that provides services to right-wing hate groups.
• Two disbarred lawyers have filed suit against the doctor who admitted to performing an abortion in contravention of Texas law.
• As feared, Chicago-area animal shelters have started to fill up as selfish people return the pets they took home when Covid made them lonely.
• Josh Marshall frames the current squabbles in the Democratic Party as "policy vs. positioning."
• Molly Jong-Fast decries the attention given to the pretty 22-year-old white girl murdered in an area that saw over 700 non-white people go missing over the last 10 years.

And finally, break out the Glühwein: Chicago's Christkindlmarket will return to Daley Plaza and Wrigleyville this winter.

Eddie Lampert, corporate murderer, has managed to drive his once-great company out if its home state:

Sears' last Illinois location, at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, is set to close in November.

The Hoffman Estates-based retailer’s parent company, Transformco, announced the decision today.

"This is part of the company's strategy to unlock the value of the real estate and pursue the highest and best use for the benefit of the local community," the company said in a statement.

Ah, yes, because under the sociopathic, finance-driven Lampert, Sears is nothing more than a series of cash flows. It has no people, no history, no relevance, no value to him, other than money.

Obviously Lampert isn't unique. Venkatesh Rao wrote a magnificent description of modern corporate thinking in 2009 based on the TV series The Office. Sears just inhabits the end stage of the "MacLeod Life Cycle," as Rao describes it. But it's a particularly tragic example.

It's another beautiful September afternoon, upon which I will capitalize when Cassie and I go to a new stop on the Brews & Choos Project after work. At the moment, however, I am refactoring a large collection of classes that for unfortunate reasons don't support automated testing, and looking forward to a day of debugging my refactoring Monday.

Meanwhile:

• Melody Schreiber praises the "radical honesty" of President Biden's new mask mandate, while Josh Marshall praises its good politics.
• Andrew Sullivan finds an overdue skewering of Woke Elite culture in HBO's The White Lotus.
• Pilot Patrick Smith remembers 9/11 and reflects on how it changed many of the wrong things. Spencer Ackerman draws a line between 9/11 and 1/6.
• Robert Daniels really did not like Dear Evan Hansen. But Edwin Rios really enjoyed the new Candyman.
• Arthur Brooks warns that the "soul mate" narrative causes a lot of damage.

And now, more refactoring.

Well, one of us is working, anyway...

I completed a long-overdue project for my condo board today, made more tolerable by sitting in my relocated office with all the air and light it provides.

Having completed that project, I will shortly take Cassie for another hour-long walk.

Summary: When displaying a notification over a paused activity, swiping down will delete the paused activity instead of the notification, without an Undo feature.

Severity: High (accidental but irrevocable data loss)

Steps to reproduce:

1. Take a PTO day to enjoy a 7-hour outdoor exercise.
2. Start the exercise on the Garmin Venu device.
3. Spend 82 minutes in the exercise.
4. Press Button A on the Venu to pause the activity. The activity will show as Paused, with a Discard (X) indication on the top of the display and a Save (check) indication on the bottom.
5. Have a friend innocently text you about a nonessential matter. A notification shows up on the Venu display.
6. As you have done thousands of times before, swipe down to dismiss the notification. The activity is deleted, but the notification just stays there, mocking you.
7. Stare at the device for a moment in stunned silence.
8. Frantically swipe up on the device to try to undo the deletion. Nothing happens because there is no Undo feature for this action.
9. (Omitted)
10. (Omitted again, but this time with reference to the usability engineers at Garmin who apparently forgot the rule that inadvertent data loss must never happen.)
11. (Omitted once more, but this time with reference to said engineers' standardized test scores, parentage, and general usefulness to humanity.)
12. Begin drafting a strongly-worded bug report to share with the above-mentioned Garmin usability engineers.
13. Spend the next five and a half hours trying to calculate split times without knowing for sure that the first activity was 82 minutes, not 75 or 90.

Device details: Garmin Venu, SW version 6.30, API version 3.2.6

The first day of autumn has brought us lovely cool weather with even lovelier cool dewpoints. We expect similar weather through the weekend. I hope so; Friday I plan another marathon walk, and Saturday I'm throwing a small party.

Meanwhile, we have a major deliverable tomorrow at my real job, and Cassie has a routine vet check-up this afternoon. But with this weather, I'm extra happy that I moved my office to the sunroom.

Only about 7 more hours of meteorological summer remain in Chicago. I opened my windows this afternoon for the first time in more than two weeks, which made debugging a pile of questionable code* more enjoyable.

Said debugging required me to put these aside for future reading:

• No, we did not leave $85 billion (or even $85 million) in equipment in Afghanistan.
• Somehow, even walking vs. driving has a partisan angle these days.
• Facebook can't stop promoting propaganda because it's their entire business model.
• Post-9/11 architecture in New York reflects our "fear and timidity."
• Speaking of architecture, Helmut Jahn's death earlier this year has exposed some weirdness in his and his firm's finances.

Finally, one tiny bit of good news: more Americans believe in evolution than ever before, perhaps due to the success of the SARS-COV-2 virus at evolving.

Goodbye, Summer 2021. It's been a hoot.

* Three guesses who wrote the questionable code. Ahem.

I've just spent the last 45 minutes transferring all my auto-pay accounts to a new credit card after my bank notified me that someone in Berlin tried to use my old card to buy something on a French website. Since this happened just a couple of days after T-Mobile once again lost control of millions of customer records, I assume that's how my card number wound up with a European criminal.

Or maybe it came from one of the companies whose accounts I just had to update? According to C-Net, "T-Mobile says there's no indication any consumer financial data, such as credit card or other payment information, was compromised." Uh huh.

Until companies have to endure real consequences for their own crappy security, this will continue to happen.