The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's:
Talk about on-the-nose commentary!
Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday:
Finally, the New York Times dips into the history of chicken tenders, an American pub staple that (allegedly) turns 50 this year. Love me tenders, love me sauce...
I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.
I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.
Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.
In about 23 hours I should be taking off from O'Hare on my favorite flight, American Airlines 90, the best flight I've found to snap into a European time zone in just one night. People tend to prefer the evening flights that get to Heathrow the next morning so they "don't lose a day," but I've found that even when flying business or first class (and thus getting actual sleep for a couple of hours) I lose the first day in Europe anyway. Sleeping on planes just sucks.
American 90, on the other hand, takes off from Chicago before 9am (most days) and gets to Heathrow before 22:30 (most days). That's still early enough to catch the Tube or Elizabeth Line, though on a couple of occasions I've had to catch the Night Bus. More important, for 48 weeks of the year, 22:30 in London is 16:30 in Chicago. Assuming I get to the Tube by 23:00, I'll be at my hotel before midnight and asleep before 2. Next morning, I'm totally fine.
I also like that the flight rarely sells out. Just look at my good luck tomorrow:
My whole row is empty, and so is the one in front. Even if they sell half of those seats in the next 22 hours, I expect they won't fill the middle seats in our row, with aisles and windows still available nearby.
Even though the flight works great for jet lag just because of its schedule, I still got up wicked early this morning to help the process along. Cassie and I took a 5½-kilometer walk around the neighborhood and caught Our Lady of Lourdes just as the sun came up:
Not a bad way to start the day.
I went out to Suburbistan to have dinner with an old family friend, and he surprised me with an unusual and very cool heirloom that his own father, Bill, left him:
That's an HO-scale model that Bill built out from kits probably back in the 1970s. Must have taken him weeks, with the detailing and the weathering. I thought putting it in front of a 1970 edition Britannica fit pretty well.
But since I went out to Suburbistan, Cassie had to wait bloody hours for dinner. She didn't seem to mind getting a little couch time afterward:
Today I'm working from home so she doesn't see any need to follow me around. And she's about to get a 30-minute walk, which should help with any residual feelings of neglect that may linger from yesterday.
The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.
I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:
- Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
- The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
- A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
- A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
- Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.
Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.
I'm dog-sitting this weekend, so this is the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes just before 7am:
Telling Butters to go away had the opposite effect of what I'd intended:
Believe it or not, this pathetic look came after I fed them both:
They're now asleep on the couch together. At some point today, they're getting an hour-long walk—which won't actually go that far, because beagles are scent hounds. Every blade of grass must be sniffed.
I've added a new feature to Weather Now: user profiles. It's only the most basic implementation and, at the moment, doesn't actually do anything. But it will lead to a whole range of features that the application hasn't had since it was an old Active Server Pages app in 1999.
Unfortunately, the deployment required setting up additional features on the weather API, so that user IDs travel from the UI to the API securely. The deployment took two hours, and threw up several pipeline failures for a reason having nothing to do with the API changes.
Anyway, now that the base user profile feature works, I can now add:
- User preferences for measurement systems (metric or Imperial);
- User-selected home locations;
- User-selected home page weather lists;
- Multiple custom weather lists; and
- Lots of other personalization features.
At some point I'll also finish importing the whole (9-million-plus record) gazetteer, so users can search for more places.
Now, however, I'm going to make some lunch now and take Cassie on a very long walk in the amazing autumn weather we have today.
As promised, I took a 25-kilometer walk up the North Branch Trail yesterday, which did not disappoint:
The weather cooperated brilliantly (though it did get a little warm towards the end), and my multiple applications of SPF-50 sunscreen seems to have kept me from crisping. The trail, of course, is lovely:
In total, I got 40,707 steps, which would have been a personal record back in the day but I'm pleased to say didn't even get into my top-10 step days since 2014.
Cassie spent the day at her usual day camp, but still got an hour and a quarter of walks. Of course she didn't accompany me on the 4-hour trail hike, but she nevertheless plotzed before I did:
Also, a shout out to my Hoka Stability shoes. My feet feel just fine today, and in fact given the forecast (23°C and sunny) I will probably get another 10 km today. Or, at least, spend lots of time outside.
As of 3pm, the 37.2°C temperature at O'Hare made today, officially, the hottest day of 2024—and we even broke the previous record, set in 1973 (36.6°C). My house has has cooled down slightly from a couple of hours ago, but I still get to walk home from doggy day care in a 39°C heat index.
We're taking the shortest route possible. And I plan to shower more or less immediately on getting home.
The forecast still predicts today will be the hottest day of the year. Last night at IDTWHQ the temperature got all the way down to 26.2°C right before sunrise. We have a heat advisory until 10pm, by which time the thunderstorms should have arrived. Good thing Cassie and I got a bit of extra time on our walk to day camp this morning.
Elsewhere in the world:
Finally, Garmin has released its latest fitness watch that doubles as a freaking Dick Tracy wrist phone. I mean, first, how cool is that? And second, how come it took 90 years after Dick Tracy got one?