Something not often seen (or felt): a 7.0 earthquake just hit Haiti.
Apparently I got back to Chicago just in time for a heat wave:
Arctic air's grip on Chicago's weather enters its 19th day Tuesday. But far-reaching changes in critical upper level steering winds taking place on a continental scale are to undermine the frigid air's dominance. The break in arctic-level temperatures may span much of the coming two weeks. Not until month's end may bitter winds of arctic origin return brutally cold air to the metro area.
Coming days will offer winter weary Chicago area residents a noticeable respite from the bitter air at the heart of January's 13.9-degrees average temperature to date--a reading more than 5°C below normal. But the "warming" predicted which is to include the city's first above freezing afternoon readings since Christmas (Dec. 25), may occur a bit more slowly than many might hope.
Today the temperature at one reporting station (Waukegan) did, in fact, go all the way up to 0.6°C, but alas the city's official high today looks like 0°C on the nose.
Bonus: A propos of nothing, here's a set of outtakes from ABC's Better Off Ted (NSFW). Worth a chuckle.
Via several sites, a NASA photo of Great Britain from Thursday noontime:
The U.K. doesn't usually get a snow cover at all, let alone one this thorough. The U.K. Met Office has an explanation:
In most winters, and certainly those in the last 20 years or so, our winds normally come from the south-west. This means air travels over the relatively warm Atlantic and we get mild conditions in the UK. However, over the past three weeks the Atlantic air has been ‘blocked’ and cold air has been flowing down from the Arctic or the cold winter landmass of Europe.
Funny on so many levels:
File under "lazy Sunday posting."
Software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky says that's a good start, but only part of it:
[L]et’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.
And that’s when you discover that:
- The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
- The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn’t backed up
- The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
- Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can’t get another LTO drive for three days
- And a million other things that can go wrong even when you “have” “backups.”
The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.
As someone who's got reliable, clockwork backups running, and has had them fail for one of the reasons Spolsky listed (and others that he didn't), I think this is tremendously good advice.
Each day that we spend getting Parker to exist peacefully with the cats brings us closer to the goal of peace and harmony. This, I think, is what Parker fears (and the cats want):
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(Hat tip DK.)
Yesterday, for example, one of the cats (Lily, the boldest) let Parker sniff her. Of course, I had my hand on his collar the whole time, but still, progress. Then, later that day, another cat (Nick, the ball of orange spite that makes Bucky look like a model citizen) tried to hit him for no reason. Oy.
But not this:
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The Chicago area was bracing for a long, hazardous evening rush hour as it continued to be socked by a major snowstorm that has canceled more than 500 flights, closed more than 150 schools and caused numerous spin-out accidents on expressways.
The Illinois State Police is warning of "extreme travel times" for the rush hour.
Tonight also will turn bitterly cold with wind chill values as low as -17°C to -24°C.
Today's high temperatures are expected to be [around -5°C].
At the peak of the morning rush hour, travel times on some expressways were well over an hour above the norm. Travel conditions are expected to be worse this evening as winds pick up and snow begins to drift across roadways.
Like I said yesterday, Chicago weather builds character—but I have enough for now, thanks.
The Duke CCMBA has a five-term course called "Culture, Civilization, and Leadership" that gives us structures to help us understand—wait for it—cultures and civilizations. At the end of each term, each team produces a paper analyzing the place in which we started the term. This term, I drew the short straw volunteered to write the first draft. We just submitted the final paper, after a few days of revisions. If you're interested, here it is.
We didn't put it in the paper, but throughout the process, I kept hearing Ozymandias in my head. Can't think why:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
We'll see.
It turns out, Raleigh isn't that cold. All my life I've just accepted that Chicago winters build character. But I'm not sure anymore, especially after three sunny, 5°C days here while temperatures back home have skulked around -12°C. Then, today, this:
A winter storm warning will be in effect across the Chicago area from this evening through Friday morning.
By the end of that warning, anywhere from 15 to 30 cm of a fairly fluffy snow will have come down, according to the National Weather Service. The heaviest snows are expected near the lakefront.
... The heaviest snowfall will occur between noon and 6 p.m. Thursday, with snow falling at about an inch an hour, [said Charles Mott, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service].
Forecasters predict snow in Raleigh tonight, too: about 1 cm or so. Of course, that amount could halt all commerce in North Carolina, so we'll be stocking up on bottled water later.
Seriously, though, Raleigh averages 19 cm of snow annually; Chicago, 98 cm. Then there are the normal temperatures of both cities. I'll say nothing else right now except that the average January daily high temperature in Chicago is the average January daily low temperature in Raleigh.
Let's see how I like Raliegh in July. But today, it's fine.
Diane and her sister made Parker a bed for Xmas. I think he likes it:
Three guesses what he's staring at.