Events

It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon. So, posting may be light this weekend.

A few articles caught my attention this week: Jennifer Rubin says the GOP's opposition to literally everything President Biden has proposed is killing their popularity. The New Republic, in collaboration with the Chicago Reader, tells the story of the last remaining men's hotel in Chicago. NPR host Steve Inskeep describes his difficulties getting his adoption records from the State of Indiana. Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Alcarón mourns the loss of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory last December....

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud: Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline. The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the...

Amtrak has big plans—especially for Chicago—if it gets a piece of President Biden's $2-trillon infrastructure bill: Chicago passenger-rail riders ought to thrilled. A proposed map released by Amtrak shows rail service out of the Windy City absolutely exploding, with enhanced service to Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other locales, plus new service to cities including Minneapolis/St. Paul, Green Bay, Iowa City, Rockford, Cleveland and Louisville. According to spokesman Marc Magliari...

Someone has lost her unsupervised time for a while: I have no idea why she attacked the table. When I last saw the room, all the pillows were on the couch and the table had straight edges. That was an hour ago. Cassie is now confined to my office until further notice.

At the dog park: After the dog park, phase I: Phase II: Not that I was trying to read, mind you. Sometimes one makes sacrifices for one's companions.

Back in May, which seems like ten years ago rather than ten months, I started going through all my CDs in the order that I acquired them. I don't listen every day, and some (like Bizet's Carmen) take a bit more time than others (like a 4-song mini CD of Buddy Holly songs). I've now arrived at about the middle of my collection, with a set of four CDs I bought on 19 September 1993. Holy Alternative, Batman. I had just started doing one shift a week at WLUW-Chicago, Loyola University's radio station...

We've spent 54 weeks in the looking-glass world of Covid-19. And while we may have so much more brain space than we had during the time a certain malignant personality invaded it every day, life has not entirely stopped. Things continue to improve, though: A local Evanston bookstore has joined a class-action suit against book publishers and Amazon for fixing prices. Natalie Shure criticizes the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, saying they have "dramatically exited one country's putrecsent ruling...

In case you needed proof that the world didn't suddenly become an Enlightenment paradise on January 20th, I give you: Georgia Republicans (and perhaps soon Florida Republicans) seem to have blundered badly with their new anti-voter law. Frank Bruni wants to retire the phrase "gun control." In a shocking development, police brutality at protests aimed at curbing police brutality have sparked yet more protests. Illinois auto dealers, a collectively useless lot of people who provide a parasitic service...

The Ever Given continues to plug up the Suez Canal, halting some $10 billion a day in global trade: Canal authorities said on Saturday that dredgers had managed to dig out the rear of the ship on Friday night, freeing its rudder, and that by Saturday afternoon they had dredged 18 meters down into the canal’s eastern bank, where the ship’s bow was stuck solid. But after a salvage team failed once more to dislodge the four-football-field-long leviathan from the sand bank where it ran aground on Tuesday...