Events

When I moved to my current house, I planned to hook up my ancient cassette player to a stereo system in my library. So I got my ancient cassettes out of storage and brought them to the new place. It took a couple of stages (ordering bookshelves, getting the bookshelves, waiting for them to fix the adjustable shelf in the center bookshelf) over a few months. In that last phase it looked like this: You're reading that right. I packed that box of cassettes on 3 January 2005, and put a sticker on it when I...

The Federal Infrastructure Bill that President Biden signed into law in 2021 allocated $66 billion to Amtrak, which they plan to use to bring US rail service up to European standards (albeit in the mid-2000s): Amtrak’s expansion plan, dubbed Amtrak Connects US, proposes service improvements to 25 existing routes and the addition of 39 entirely new routes. If the vision were to be fully realized, it would bring passenger rail to almost every major city in the US in 15 years. (Right now, only 27 out of...

Cassie did not understand why she could not try my Indian food last night: And somehow, with the rudimentary editing controls on my phone, I accidentally turned her into an Andrew Wyeth painting. Huh.

The Screen Actors Guild/AFTRA voted to strike today, halting most TV and film production worldwide (and even ending the Oppenheimer red carpet). The Times explains: About 160,000 television and movie actors are going on strike at midnight, joining screenwriters who walked off the job in May and setting off Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years. The leaders of the union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a strike on Thursday, hours after contract talks with a group of studios broke down. Actors will be...

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today. While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored: The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of...

The United States has had an explosion of craft brewing in the past 15 years, thanks to relaxed regulations and a nearly-universal revulsion among serious beer drinkers for the mass-produced swill from the InBev/MillerCoors duopoly. One could argue, however, that the first true craft beer in the US came from San Francisco in 1896. Sadly, the 127-year-old Anchor Brewing Co. announced this week that it would cease operations and liquidate this summer: In a press release, Anchor Brewing spokesperson Sam...