We seem to get a lot of pneumonia fronts lately. Here's yesterday's:
The temperature at IDTWHQ was 23.5°C at 17:35, 22.6°C at 17:45, 20.9°C at 18:00, and down it went, to 15.9°C by 19:00. (For the Philistines, that's a 14°F drop in 90 minutes.) At about that time, smoke from fires in Alberta combined with rapid condensation aloft (i.e., clouds from the cold front) to give us one hell of a filter for the sun:
I used a daylight color temperature (5700K) for that shot so you can see the color I saw.
Here's the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory map from that moment:
Strangely, the air-quality index at WHQ—right now, a super-healthy 15—suggests not a lot of the smoke is getting to the surface. It still seems a bit hazy though. And we're likely to have another beautiful sunset tonight.
The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML.
A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years:
- Old Man Moskowitz, sent in by an old friend in New York, 26 May 1998.
- My all-time-favorite Jewish joke, 23 June 1998. (And my second-favorite, 31 January 2003.)
- My all-time-favorite engineering joke, 11 February 2000.
- An essay on conspiracies and coincidence, 22 January 2006.
- Rant about Microsoft certification exams, 29 June 2006.
- Feeling sad about the end of Kodachrome, 31 December 2010.
- My friends and I debate the merits (such as they were) of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), 26 March 2011.
- An examination of the Astrolabe lawsuit against the Time Zone Database, 22 October 2011, and Astrolabe's response on 14 October 2011.
- A rant about Tea Party Republicans, 14 August 2012.
- Three articles in the New York Times inspire two lengthy explanations and a rant, 18 December 2012.
- The Y2K problem and other date disasters in programming, 29 April 2018.
- The Music Theory A-Z challenge, starting on 1 April 2019.
- The entire series on logical fallacies, July-August 2019.
- My obituary for Parker, 18 November 2020.
- Star Trek: Discovery's 3rd season irked me, 3 December 2020.
- Neon CRM also irked me, 10 February 2021. (Hmm...I wrote longer blog posts in the months when I didn't have a dog.)
- Cassie comes home from PAWS, 16 March 2021.
- My struggles to play SimCity 4, 25 years after I bought it, 8 May 2021.
- Lots of posts tagged "Photography," but particularly around the time I finished scanning all my slides (from 1983 to 2001).
Also interesting is how I can chart key events in my life just by looking at how often I posted:
Right now, I'm predicting the 10,000th post on 5 August 2025. Keep reading and find out.
We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading:
Finally, today marks the 30th anniversary of Aimee Mann releasing one of my favorite albums, her solo debut Whatever. She perfectly summed up the early-'90s ennui that followed the insanity of the '80s as we Gen-Xers came of age. It still sounds as fresh to me today as it did then.
Ah, Spring in Chicago, when the wind shifts ever so slightly to make you wish you'd layered better:
WGN's Tom Skilling explains what happened:
Temps down more than 16°C from Sunday’s levels Monday, largely the product of winds off the 9°C lake waters—warming returns over coming week with temps surging from 21°C Tuesday to 25°C Wednesday, 27°C Thursday and 26°C Friday but expect easterly lake breezes to cool immediate lakeshore areas each day this week. Weather dries and mixed sun appears Tuesday with lots of sun Wednesday, but wet weather returns with gulf moisture late week and this weekend.
The southbound pneumonia front which induced Sunday afternoon and evening’s sharp pullback ignited explosive t-storm development mainly south of Chicago late Sunday into Sunday night. These storm’s lightning displays and hail production were impressive with some stunning rainfalls—like the 92 mm which fell at Grant Park in Kankakee County and the 82 mm in Will county’s Wilmington. Other impressive totals include 81 mm at Mendota, 71 mm at Carbon Hill and 62 mm at Channahon. But, while those rains were impressive, only 4 mm were reported at O’Hare and 3 mm at Midway Sunday into Monday.
It's unusual for me to go from A/C to heat in one day, but again, this is Chicago in May.
Today got away from me. I performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony last night and caught up on Cassie time today. We had beautiful, warm weather until about 8pm, too, so I didn't do any work at all.
Tomorrow we have crappy weather, so I'll post as usual.
If you look at the history of Weather Now, you can see that development tends to happen in bursts. Apparently I'm in one now. Yesterday I fixed a nagging irritation with the UI layout, and today I'm working on connecting to a new data source I've been meaning to add for years.
Stay tuned.
I just released a couple of minor fixes to Weather Now. Build 8126 has slightly tidier top and nav bars, and I can configure the front page "latest weather" list on the fly. Previously the list lived in a static application config file that I could only change by redeploying the app.
Enjoy.
Graupel are snowflakes covered in rime ice. They're like big styrofoam snowflakes, and because they form in warmer air, they melt almost immediately on contact with anything solid. Yesterday the Chicago Tribune had a handy explainer on the back page, just in case people were curious what was hitting them on the head standing on "temporary" railway platforms this morning. (Fuck Bruce Rauner and his entire party.)
Sorry. I get a little grumpy when I wake up on May Day to mid-March weather. With graupel.
The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why.
Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day:
Finally, I've started reading The Odyssey, so I applaud National Geographic's article this month on the history of the ancient world in which Homer set the poem.
As happens about every other year, we woke up this morning to barely-above-freezing temperatures and this crap on the ground:
After record warmth last week, April decided to balance the scales yesterday:
All of the snow will melt in the next 24 hours as tomorrow's forecast calls for 11°C and sun, going up to 22°C by Thursday, but not before we get "scattered rain and snow showers" all day with winds up to 45 km/h. But then it goes back down to 2°C by Saturday...because April.