Events

(After Dave and Bob got so excited about yesterday's post, I just had to give them more of what they came for. You're welcome.) It turns out, several people use RSS to keep up with The Daily Parker. I hadn't planned to write an RSS feed component before launch, but as I don't want to cut them off, I've reprioritized the feature. Plus, I have a couple more things to do before I can cut over to the new production environment: Implement Real Simple Syndication (RSS); Fix a bug caused by the interaction...

I did not watch the Bears-Packers playoff game last night, but I got real-time updates from my friends and family. You can bet I'm going to watch the highlight reel this afternoon: The Bears won this way all season and delivered yet another thriller Saturday to stay alive in the playoffs. They rallied from a big deficit to beat the Packers 31-27 in their wild-card game at Soldier Field and advanced to host the Rams or defending champion Eagles in the divisional round. It was their first playoff victory...

As I type this, Azure DevOps is banging away at the new blog engine's dev-test pipeline so that I can confirm the last few bits of it are correctly configured. The production environment is up and working, except for icons and RECAPTCHA, which explains the rebuild. Google: your dashboards are really confusing. Creating the production environment took 57 minutes this morning, and creating the production release pipeline (which included setting all the Azure roles properly on things like the database and...

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

Despite the annoyances with the soon-to-be-decommissioned BlogEngine.NET version of the Daily Parker, I actually had some things to say today. Mainly: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs know they're losing everywhere that matters, and they know they only have slightly less than a year before the next Congress effectively shuts them down, so they're going for broke. And the last 36 hours are just the beginning. Top of mind is yesterday's murder of Renee Good, a mother of three shot in the face by a...

The BlogEngine.NET version of The Daily Parker seems to know it has run out of time. It won't let me log in this afternoon. No errors, nothing in the logs, the authentication cookie looks correct, just...no author controls. It knows. So once I'm done writing this directly in SQL Server, I'll start creating the production environment. Last orders, please.

Republicans want to make your life worse; Democrats want to make it better. This has been largely true since 1980, when Ronald Reagan and his friends took the Republican Party sharply to the right and want to keep going until it's just billionaires and peasants in the US. The Democratic Party is a huge amalgam of constituencies that account for the majority of voters in the majority of states. Almost to a person, we think the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible people who should never hold positions of...

I had planned to develop the full-text search feature for the new blog engine before starting to deploy anything to production, but I hit a snag. Microsoft Azure only allows you to have one free search service per subscription. Since my dev/test subscription already uses one (for the Weather Now dev environment), I'll have to create a free search instance in my production environment. And because I don't want to deal with cross-subscription security and all that shiznit, that means I'll have to create...

Yep, I'm still doing these, because I still have meetings and have to queue stories up: Brian Beutler has another "30 thoughts on the illegal Venezuela war." Heather Cox Richardson picks apart Secretary of State Marco Rubio's appearance on ABC's This Week yesterday. It...did not go well. Because they have no plan. Paul Krugman drags the administration for "seeking cash and an ego boost," i.e., "the real Donroe Doctrine." Of all the horrible aspects of our Venezuelan adventure, Adam Kinzinger was most...

After taking Cassie to the St James Farm Preserve, I did something I had not done in 335 days: I fueled my car. Between February 2nd and yesterday, I drove 3,335 km (2,073 mi) and used 34.4 L (9.1 gal) of gas for an average economy of 1.03 L/100 km (228.2 MPG). This is what happens when you live somewhere with decent public transportation and drive a plug-in hybrid. Sadly, as a plug-in car gets older—I've had mine for just over 7 years now—the battery slowly loses its capacity. In 2019 she got about 51...