The Daily Parker

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:

The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.

• As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from. For example, as Joyce Vance describes, the Clown Prince has cancelled a $2.4 billion Verizon contract to modernize our air-traffic control infrastructure and given it to...Starlink, which the Clown Prince owns.
• Radley Balko highlights the OAFPOTUS's "full-frontal assault on democracy" over a five-day period this month.
• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that all of the chaos from the administration has caused an economic slowdown that will only get worse.
• The Economist have published their 2024 global democracy index, which kept the US at "flawed democracy" and saw Bagnladesh plummet from there to "hybrid regime (lower half)."
• Yascha Mounk wants the US to end the requirement to have a prescription to buy glasses, and jokes that maybe DOGE can see to it.
• The Chicago Transit Authority plans to build a four-kilometer walking path with dog parks under the new Red/Purple trestle between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr.

All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:

Cassie didn't like how I came home late (8pm!) last night, but she forgave me. She really is the sweetest dog:

I happened to be on the 40th floor of a downtown high rise at just the right moment yesterday:

We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday.

Unrelated to the weather are these two things I liked from the past week. Yesterday I went over to a friend's house to help her set up a new computer and back up her old one. It turned out she was fostering this little guy, Hayes:

She texted me last night to say thanks and also that she's going to fork over the $495 adoption fee for him. Because of course she will. He's a sweet Lab-something mix whose pregnant mom got rescued from the side of the road in Arkansas. He'll have a much better (and longer) life with my friend than he would have otherwise.

I also liked the way the sun played around with the Civic Opera Building and 110 North Wacker (the mirrored building behind the Civic Opera) on Tuesday afternoon:

My new office is farther west than my old one, but still facing north, so it won't get any direct sunlight, ever. That said, on Tuesday I discovered that the mirrored windows at 110 North Wacker will give me pretty intense reflected sunlight, which is almost as bright. I'm still only going in once a week, but it's a nice perk.

Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm:

Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:

A week ago Sunday, my friends picked me up in Aix-en-Provence and took me to their house in St-Martin-de-la-Brasque, about 30 km north, just south of the Luberon massif. I can see the appeal:

We then drove about 10 km to the Commune of Lourmarin, which may be even prettier than Aix:

Yes, Provence really does look like that. I really need to go back.

Let me tell you how much I suffered in Aix-en-Provence. I mean, just look at this stuff, starting with the street my hotel was on:

The Passage Agard, off Cours Mirabeau:

The Fontaine du Roi René at the east end of Cours Mirabeau:

Rue Aumône Vielle:

Finally, the Palais de Justice (the local courthouse) just past 9am on the 23rd:

Tomorrow: Lourmarin and St-Martin-de-la-Brasque.

During this last full week of summer, I haven't had a lot of time at home because we had to work in the office every day. And what a week.

I got home from work (and got Cassie home from day camp) right before some pretty impressive storms hit on Tuesday:

After discussing with a friend how a lot of the humidity we've experienced this summer comes from corn and soybean transpiration to our west, he discussed it with Bing's DALL-E 3:

(Not sure what happened with the spine of the book...or the windmill in the cover photo...or the title...but I did laugh.)

Relief is coming, though. A line of thunderstorms went through just before sunrise, and the cold front driving them will drop the dewpoint from 21°C now to 15°C by this time tomorrow:

Then Wednesday night my doorbell camera picked something up that I didn't expect:

Turns out, I have a new houseguest, who has politely set up shop by my front door to help keep mosquitoes (and one unfortunate cicada!) out:

That is a furrow or foliate spider, as far as I can tell.

Wednesday evening she even got a visitor:

Sadly, as is typical of orb weaver romances, her gentleman caller probably did not survive the evening. I don't judge; she's caught a lot of mosquitoes, she's entitled to celebrate. And I think I saw some baby spiders last night, so maybe I'll invite a couple inside?

Today, I'm taking a PTO day to catch up on everything, and to clear a path for my 4-hour walk tomorrow.

Cassie found a comfortable position on the couch while I was making lunch yesterday.

I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog and retouch my photos. Like any complex piece of software, it has a lot of features I haven't learned how to use yet. So I decided to play around this morning. Here's a new edit of Cassie's Gotcha Day photo from March:

Here's the photo as previously published:

Other than the aspect ratio change, the changes are subtle, but I think the top photo is better. And Cassie is just as adorable in both.