The Daily Parker

Lots of things popped up in my browser today:

• New Republic's Adrian Daub reviews the new Netflix series Babylon Berlin.
• The Illinois State Climatologist points out that we had a cold and snowy first half of February—which will now become not as cold but rainy. And today, it's 6°C, with all that implies for the piles of snow all over the city.
• Two articles on buildings with horrifying pasts, some in San Francisco, and one in Chicago.
• President Trump's longtime personal lawyer admitted paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket, but left out whether Trump reimbursed him.
• Bruce Schneier bemoans the likelihood that consumers' online data really can't be protected.
• Writing for Crain's, Mark Glennon suggests what Illinois can do "to avoid utter collapse." (My first thought: quit exaggerating the problems.)

And now, back to work.

Over the weekend I made a couple of minor updates to Weather Now, and today I'm going to spend some time taking it off its Azure Web Role and moving it to an Azure Website. That will (a) save me money and (b) make deployments a lot easier.

Meanwhile, a number of articles bubbled up overnight that I'll try to read at lunchtime:

• Cranky Flier is annoyed how United has implemented basic-economy seat assignments.
• Josh Marshall outlines what the FBI knew about Trump campaign advisors in the summer of 2016. (Seems so long ago, dunnit?)
• Both Jennifer Rubin and Greg Sargent think the Nunes memo will cause serious problems for the Republican Party pretty soon.
• I haven't yet seen all the ads from yesterday's football game, but that didn't stop me from reading AdAge's coverage.
• New research suggests that fertilizers contribute to Southern California's smog.
• And maybe I should file for Subchapter S treatment of my corporation?

Back to Azure deployment strategies.

I've got a lot going on today, with a final rehearsal tonight before Saturday's dress for Carmina Burana (get tickets here) and two business trips in the next 10 days. But there are a few articles to note in today's media:

• Dove ran a commercial this weekend that suggests an African woman can use their soap and become Irish. There has been some response.
• Politico reported that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's cell phone got tapped. Schneier points out that all politicians should assume this about off-the-shelf phones.
• James Fallows weighs in on what retiring US Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) said about President Trump over the weekend, and what that means. Or doesn't.
• Meanwhile, outside politics, Hoa Loranger at NNG lays out what she wishes she'd learned about UX when she began her profession.
• The Atlantic looks at the similarities between Blade Runner 2049 and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Back to work now.

Articles I haven't got time to read until later:

• Tropical storm (and former hurricane) Harvey has dumped more rain on Houston than the city has ever seen, and it's still coming down.
• The Chicago Tribune recaps last night's Game of Throne finale. (I've already read the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.)
• Greg Sargent says President "Trump is dragging us towards a full-blown crisis" which leaves open the question what the ongoing crisis actually was already.
• On the same topic, James Fallows explains why the Arpaio pardon matters. And Brian Beutler points out that the Republican Party completely owns it.
• Josh Marshall asks, in all seriousness, "Should we be punching Nazis?" A hint: "On a basic philosophical level, embracing violence to combat political and moral evils like racism and fascism is simply not equivalent to embracing violence to advance these evils."
• Burger chains are leaving Chicago. Darn.

That's all for now. Busy weekend behind me, another one ahead.

Among the browser windows I have open are these:

• An AI is getting inspirational posters horribly wrong...or is it?
• An 80-year-old woman wanted good luck on her flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou threw coins in one of the engines, causing a 5-hour delay and $140,000 in damage.
• Crain's looks at census data in an interactive feature on Chicago's wealth divides.
• Republicans still refuse to acknowledge that the goal of their Obamacare repeal efforts is to get millions of people off government-backed health insurance.
• Actor T.J. Miller gave an interview about his break-up with "Silicon Valley."
• The New York City Subway is in an awful state, but Citylab's Laura Bliss doesn't think overcrowding is one of its problems. (The New Republic has an amusing take on this.)
• TNR's Sarah Jones examines Jon Ossoff's email campaign ("like they were written by a suicidal girlfriend"). 

Now, back to coding. In Ruby, yet.

For reasons that shall not be explained here, I have, for the last two weeks, binged on Lena Dunham's "Girls." For context, I'm in the middle of season 2 while simultaneously just done with season 6, episode 9.

It's fookin' brilliant.

More context: I went to school in New York. I lived through the late '90s in New York. I was, back then, in my 20s. I watched "Sex and the City" and wondered who those people were, even as I went to the same clubs and bars. I made horrible mistakes. No one guided me. Just like every other 20-something in history.

Basically, in my 20s, people like Shoshanna, Elijah, and Hannah were my friends. As I watch "Girls" I see them clearly. It's almost as if the same problems come around to every generation, and every generation feels like they're the first to feel this way. (</sarcasm>)

But I keep watching, for a simple reason: Dunham can tell a story. I have no idea how closely her feelings align with her character Hanna Horvath's, but Dunham sells it regardless. And I hope I'm not projecting when I say it seems like Dunham has enough perspective on "Girls" to know how to present modern urban adolescence best.

Being 20-something in the '90s sucked. Apparently it does in the 2010s as well. I hope to find out for whom the 20s didn't suck, and why.

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption:

• Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country.
• Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions.
• Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season.
• Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years.
• Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part of Germany) disappearing?
• Microsoft has some new guidance on building scalable solutions with DocumentDB.

Now, I must prepare...for Whisky Fest!

And in honor of his birthday, one of my all-time-favorite riffs on his style from the 1980s TV show "Moonlighting:"

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago are literally in the mix of the upcoming Netflix show Sense8. You can hear us in this promo.

We haven't been able to share this information until just now. The chorus recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" at our November 21st rehearsal. (I unfortunately missed the rehearsal, so I'm not singing in the episode. Boo.)

I wasn't quite 100% today and neither was a fried of mine, so we're taking the opportunity to re-watch (or watch for the first time in the friend's case) HBO's Westworld. I've seen the first 9 episodes—tomorrow night is the 10th and final episode of the season—so the nuances and clues are making a lot more sense on second viewing.

This show is almost as good as Game of Thrones. Seriously.