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Stuff read while waiting for code to compile: Alex Shephard rolls his eyes at the Republican Party's unhinged response to the XPOTUS's indictment. California's Tulare Lake used to be the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, until agriculture drained it. Thanks to record rainfall, it has returned. Stanford Law 3L Tess Winston writes that 10% of her class generates 95% of the noise, but the 1L and 2L classes are worse. The head of Chicago-area concert promoter Jam Productions testified to the...

The fridge that the previous residents of my house paid $4,000 for has sat quiet and warm since noon. Around 6pm I checked under the freezer drawer to see if anything had thawed out and discovered a centimeter-thick layer of ice on the bottom of the freezer. Actually, by 6pm it was more like a 5 mm layer of ice floating on 5 mm of water. Fifteen minutes and two towels later I managed to get most of the ice into the sink and most of the water out of the freezer. But wow, scraping a half-liter of rime ice...

Designer Josh Gee spent two years trying to put Boston city government forms online: Getting city workers to accept online submissions rather than traditional paper ones is the bulk of this work. On average, it took me about 30 minutes to make a digital form and five weeks to meet with, earn the trust of, and get buy-in from the employees who would use it. Even if they were excited, the nitty gritty details took a lot of back and forth. While I avoided a bunch of process change, there were some...

I spent over 3 hours in my car today in principal because there were no public transit options to my remote, suburban destination. That, plus all-day meetings, means that instead of outlining what I'm planning for the weekend—I'll do that tomorrow—I'm just going to line up some articles I want to read: The Daily WTF explains why medical insurance is so expensive. The Intercept describes a reporter's life in the War on Terror. Jeet Heer calls the president an abusive patriarch, not a toddler. Don Norman...

Too much to read today, especially during an hours-long download from our trips over the past two weeks. So I'll come back to these: The CIA recently fired Lulu, a black Lab, because she didn't want to sniff for bombs after all. But more seriously: Josh Marshall calls out White House Chief of Staff for making the detestable argument that an attack on the President is an attack on the troops. Alex Shepard at New Republic just shakes his head sadly. London is running adverts aimed at cleaning up its air...

I'm on the Board of Directors for the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, and information technology is my portfolio. Under that aegis, I'm in the process of taking all of our donor and membership spreadsheets and stuffing them into a new Neon CRM setup. So far, it's going well, and it's going to make the organization a lot more effective at managing membership, events, and donations. That said, in the last 24 hours I've logged five bug reports, including one of the most frustrating user experience (UX) bugs...

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has created brilliant listening guides for audiences: Hannah Chan-Hartley is the managing editor and musicologist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). She oversees the production of the orchestra’s various printed programmes, from designing layouts and writing and editing content, to the creation of its intriguing ‘listening guides’ with graphic designer Gareth Fowler. A deft mix of text and graphics, the guides can be read while listening to the performance, their...

I'm totally swamped today, so here are the things I haven't read yet: How smart people can believe crazy things (e.g., Ben Carson's crazy) What Miami is doing about rising sea levels Richard Florida explains how people choose where they live The agony of Lake Shore Drive will get worse before Thanksgiving ReSharper 10 has some bugs, including one that is getting in my way big time USCIS is no better at managing IT projects than anyone else How does American Airlines set its prices? Veterans react to the...