I thought I was done with last week's cold, but no, not entirely. So I'm spinning my wheels looking at code today. I want to be writing code today, however. My brain wants to be three meters west and three meters down from IDTWHQ (i.e., in my bed).
I will note that Columbia Journalism professor Alexander Stille just came to the same realization Josh Marshall came to over nine years ago, that the OAFPOTUS resembles Benito Mussolini in all the ways that matter:
The comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics between 1993 and 2011, are obvious and help us understand Trump’s initial political ascent and his first term in office. Both made their initial fortune in real estate, were better salesmen than businessmen, and developed a second career in television.
But Berlusconi’s political aims, by comparison, were comparatively modest.
Trump’s narcissism is very different from Berlusconi’s. Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.
All this served him well at first. But when he began to move outside of Italy—creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II—his fundamental provincialism, his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his own instincts over objective facts did him in.
Mussolini careened from crisis to crisis—the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the invasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his career is any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats require crisis to justify the extraordinary—and often illegal—measures they take and to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actually improving the lives of ordinary citizens.
Don't worry, though. We only have 1,368 more days of this presidential term.
We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.
Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:
Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.
I've added a bunch of small but useful features to Weather Now:
- Users can now set their preferred measurement system (metric, Imperial, default) and time/date formats.
- On Nearby Weather and Nearby Places, users can double-click the map to re-center and load new info.
- Moved the Weather Score column on lists to increase usability.
- Tweaked the Weather Score formula.
- Several other bug fixes and feature tweaks.
So if you set up a profile, which you can do simply by logging in with any Microsoft ID, you can customize the app in a bunch of ways. (There's no cost, but I'd appreciate it if you'd subscribe on Patreon.)
Have fun with it. I'm probably going to slow down on Weather Now updates for a bit as I change focus to replacing BlogEngine.NET.
In just a few hours, though, I'm going to a work conference in Nashville, Tenn., where I will have the opportunity to visit at least three breweries. Stay tuned!
Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you?
- Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous!
- Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry.
- Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL), the last sane Republican, calls the "desperate, weak, and ultimately meaningless bluff" that the OAFPOTUS won't honor President Biden's pardons.
- James Fallows steps through the "correlation of forces" that defines the struggle between the OAFPOTUS and the Constitution.
- Jennifer Rubin interviews Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), "a man refreshingly candid about his disgust with the current administration's policies and its lack of humane leadership."
- Yascha Mounk thinks "the World Happiness Report is a scam," just a pile of elite misinformation.
- A sophisticated supply-chain attack may have put 20,000 GitHub projects at risk of subtle but far-reaching security problems.
Finally, the snow that covered Chicago and parts north and west has indeed melted in the past few hours, even though we've barely gotten above 2°C:
Ten years ago today, a bunch of these arrived at work:
The Microsoft Surface 3 tablet (shown with optional detachable keyboard) had really great features for its time, with 128 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM. When I left the company, they let me keep mine, so for the last 10 years it's been the personal device I use at work and the lightweight but fully-functional device I take on the road. My little blue Surface has been all over the world.
It was therefore no small irony that on my Surface's 10th birthday, I got an email from Microsoft:
End of support for Windows 10 is approaching
What does this mean for me?
After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10.
What can I do with my old computer?
Trade it in or recycle it with local organizations.
Will my Windows 10 PC stop working?
No. Your PC will continue to work, but support will be discontinued.
Well, that's disappointing. Inevitable, though. I don't really want to buy a new tablet right now, so I'll just have to keep this one limping along until autumn and get a Surface Pro 11 in October or November. Who knows, maybe the 12s will be out by then?
Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery.
Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my Brews & Choos buddy at a relatively new place in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. We managed to visit five South Side breweries, and—here's the science part—consumed no more than 3 pints of beer over 5 hours. It was a marathon, not a sprint, after all.
In any event, I've got a lot of photos to go through and a lot of reviews to write, so look for them to come out over the next few days.
And hey, if you want to see more Brews & Choos reviews, contribute to The Daily Parker! Your $5 contribution keeps the site running for a day—or buys a tasing-size beer.
Another reason to contribute: I've started re-developing The Daily Parker's code from scratch. I changed direction slightly on an existing project to make it a blog on steroids, and I think it'll be super-cool when complete. So how about throwing in another $5 a month to support that, too?
As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more.
The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer, those days might be behind me—even though the weather never stops.
So, hey, buy me a coffee. I'll put your name in lights!
It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!
Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:
The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.
This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.
Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.
Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.
Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?
Meanwhile...
Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.
Weather Now v5.0.9194 just hit the hardware, with a new feature that allows you to browse the Gazetteer by finding all the places near a point. (Registration required.) I also added a couple of admin features that I will propagate to every other app I have in production, and made a few minor bug fixes.
Only one minor hiccup: I forgot to add a spatial index to the Gazetteer, which caused searches around a point to take minutes instead of seconds in production. I added the index to the database definition, and after about an hour it had indexed all 15 million locations in the database. So the Nearby Places feature should work perfectly now.
This is one of those things you don't notice in a dev-test environment. The dev-test database only has about 200,000 records in it, so even without the index it only took a moment to find all the places around a point. Nothing like testing in production to find a huge performance miss!