The Daily Parker

Dar Williams performing tonight at Park West, just a few blocks from my house:

Canon 7D at ISO-6400, 1/50 at f/5.6, 250mm

As an added bonus, Joan Osborne opened for her:

Both of them:

Via Sullivan, a time-lapse of half an orbit from the ISS:

Via Fallows, you just have to see this:

Yikes.

I stopped at Jiffy Lube today because I had a nagging sense that I hadn't gotten an oil change in a while. When I got the bill, I realized why. I really don't drive a lot.

Right on the Jiffy Lube receipt is shows that since my last oil change on November 23rd, I've driven 2,165 km. A quick glance through Quicken says I've filled up six times since then, most recently two weeks ago. That all means I drive about 7 km per day, on average. Wow. And most of the time I didn't have trouble like this.

On the other hand, in the past 12 months I've flown 95,000 km and (yay Quicken!) spent $750 on public transportation and more than that on cabs.

But really, I thought I drove more than that. I'm glad I got the oil change...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title.

The Daily Parker is about:

• Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until a few months ago when I got the first digital camera I've ever had that rivals a film camera. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
• Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.

I've deprecated the Software category, but only because I don't post much about it here. That said, I write a lot of software. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got about 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. Facebook's lawyers would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior claims, which contravenes four centuries of law.

Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it (unless otherwise disclosed). I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. My photos, however, are published under strict copyright, with no republication license, even if I upload them to other public websites. If you want to republish one of my photos, just let me know and we'll work something out.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

NPR reported this morning that Brazilian police arrested a man carrying packages of cocaine in his intestines adding up to a full kilo:

The Irish guy was reportedly taken to the Santa Misericordia Hospital where the capsules were removed from his body. How exactly? That isn't clear from the press coverage....

Surgical removal of the packages is one option. But as doctors reported in the Canadian Journal of Surgery two years ago, surgical removal is far less likely than it used to be. Cocaine-filled packages can rupture during surgery, endangering patients, and there are other complications.

The NPR posting includes the guy's CT scan, which is either a lovely bit of representational art or deeply disgusting. Or both.

Apparently my creativity isn't alone in its suffering this time of year. I'm also finding it a lot harder to learn Japanese than I expected.

Anyone else feeling a little leaden the past couple of weeks?

On this day in 1986, I got my first PC: an original, 1982-vintage IBM PC, with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 256 kB of RAM, twin 360 kB drives, a 30 cm 80 x 25 character green monochrome monitor, and a steel clickety-clackety keyboard.

The laptop I'm writing this on, 25 years later, has a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB of RAM, an internal solid-state 250 GB drive, a 36 cm 1280 x 800 pixel monitor with 16 million colors, and a silent keyboard. And this laptop cost less than half what the PC cost in nominal terms, which makes it about one-sixth the cost in real terms.

Twenty five years of computing, and I still don't have a fast-enough computer.

In a move that brings progressives and libertarians together better than a runaway defense budget, Gotham has banned dogs from bars:

Since the health department adopted a letter grade system for bars and restaurants last year, bar owners say, health inspectors are allowing no wiggle room for four-legged patrons.

The stricter enforcement is apparently bringing to an end a rich tradition of dog-friendly bars in New York.

The health department issued 469 violations for live animals in food-service sites from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, though the agency did not provide a breakdown of the different kinds of offending animals.

During inspections, many owners said they were surprised to learn that dogs were not allowed even in outdoor seating areas. Neither does a bar’s dearth of actual food products provide any cover. “Beer, wine and spirits have always been classified as food,” a department spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. Only service dogs are permitted in spaces that serve food or drink of any kind.

Chicago allows dogs on outdoor patios when the owners pay a modest fee, but officially prohibits dogs in bars as well. However, I can't imagine the Chicago health department cracking down. There'd be outrage—not just from the dog owners, but also from the pub owners, who might get mad enough to stop paying bribes other license fees.

Oh, the humanity.

Beloit College, just across the Wisconsin line and just outside the Chicago area, puts together a list every year to describe the incoming class of first-years. Last year's list made me cry. This year's list provoked a different emotion, one that I can't quite make out with my age-addled brain:

2. Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents.
12. Amazon has never been just a river in South America.
22. John Wayne Bobbitt has always slept with one eye open.
39. Moderate amounts of red wine and baby aspirin have always been thought good for the heart.
60. Frasier, Sam, Woody and Rebecca have never Cheerfully frequented a bar in Boston during primetime.
75. The New York Times and the Boston Globe have never been rival newspapers.

OK, time for my Geritol...