Events

Given Gerrymandering, the Senate's design favoring rural states, and a host of other factors, most Republicans in Congress will keep their jobs in January. Even though the best likely outcome of November's election is just two more years of gridlock before Democrats re-take the Senate, the vast majority simply don't care: It seems relevant, for instance, that while President Trump and a few Republican incumbents seem to be in genuine trouble, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are certain to...

This colorized and upscaled video is fascinating:

No, not about The Daily Parker (though I'm hoping to keep extending the record I set yesterday). I mean Lake Michigan: The Lake Michigan-Huron system ended July at 177.5 m MSL, averaging just below that for the month, and setting a monthly-average record for seven consecutive months. The normal (technically, the "chart datum") water level is 176.0 m, and the previous record for July was 5 cm lower. The US Army Corps of Engineers predicts the lake will drop 5-10 cm by September 1st, which could still...

This is my 55th post this month, and the fifth month in a row in which I've posted over 50 times. That brings my 12-month total to 581, the third record in a row and the fifth record this year. I guess Covid-19 has been good for something. Here's what I'm reading today: Authorities in Tampa have charged 17-year-old Graham Clark with masterminding last month's massive Twitter hack. The Atlantic's David Graham says the president is trying to destroy the election's legitimacy. George Will points to the...

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...