Events

Today is Harry Potter's and Neville Longbottom's 40th birthday. And they never learned how to spell. Also, apparently, Harry's wife Ginny is, at 39, the sports editor for the Daily Prophet. TIL.

First, this chart: And yet, there are so many other things going on today: NPR has the clearest take-down on the president's election-postponement trolling I've seen today, noting in particular that "Trump's tweet came about 15 minutes after news of the worst-ever-recorded quarterly performance of the American economy." Josh Marshall just says "don't cower." Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens believes people like him "lost the battle for the Republican Party's soul long ago:" "I feel like...

Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather's Pizza and notoriously uninformed candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2012, has died of Covid-19: Cain, 74, was hospitalized earlier this month, and his Twitter account said earlier this week he was being treated with oxygen in his lungs. It is unknown where Cain contracted the virus. As a co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, Cain was one of the surrogates at President Donald Trump's June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma—which saw at least eight Trump...

The president and his eldest son both promoted a video, since taken down by all the major platforms, that featured what they seem to believe passes for medical expertise: After social media companies removed a viral video showing doctors spreading unsubstantiated information about the novel coronavirus, a phrase inspired by one doctor’s past claims began trending on Twitter: demon sperm. It turns out Stella Immanuel has a history of making particularly outlandish statements — including that the uterine...

First: the difference between how Garmin handled a global outage that lasted 5 days, and how SendGrid managed one that lasted 5 hours. SendGrid handles billions of emails per day, including for Microsoft and other massive companies. So SendGrid going down didn't inconvenience a few athletes and pilots; it crippled Fortune-500 companies' marketing departments. (And it delayed a scheduled release on my own team.) Within about an hour of their outage, SendGrid created an incident response page to which...

Even as Garmin picks up the pieces from what they now admit was a massive ransomware attack, bulk email provider SendGrid has gone down spectacularly. I use SendGrid, as does my company, for status emails and such. Here's my problem, though: I have a code update to put out that specifically targets a bug in SendGrid's .NET library that they claim to have fixed. My automated build pipelines won't release new code unless all the unit tests pass. Right now, the SendGrid tests fail sporadically, and at...

Today I finally solved a problem that has nagged me for months: Given a .NET Core 3.1 Web API, NLog, and a custom log target for NLog, how could I pass secrets into the log target using Azure Key Vault? The last bit required me to add Azure Key Vault support to the InnerDrive.Logging NuGet package, which I did back in February. The KeyVaultSecretProvider class allows you to retrieve secrets from a specified Azure Key Vault. (I'm in the process of updating it to handle keys as well.) Before that, you'd...

It has cooled off slightly from yesterday's scorching 36°C, but the dewpoint hasn't dropped much. So the sauna yesterday has become the sticky summer day today. Fortunately, we invented air conditioning a century or so ago, so I'm not actually melting in my cube. As I munch on some chicken teriyaki from the take-out place around the corner, I'm also digesting these articles: James Fallows points to the medieval alcohol-distribution rules in most states as the biggest threat to craft brewing right now....

It is hot in Chicago: 34°C that feels like 38°C because of the 22°C dewpoint. Last night the temperature didn't even go below 77°C. I helped a friend move a couple of things into storage this morning and I'm now soaked through. Parker hates it especially because he has two fur coats. (He deposited a significant amount of one of them around the house this week, though.) I plan to spend the rest of the day inside with my air conditioning. You know where else it's way too hot? East Antarctica. And that...

I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up: Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly. The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting. Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it." Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore. Garmin's entire production...