Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300 only in 2016, and neither Parker nor Cassie tried to destroy it until this spring.
Here's Cassie's final expression of the piece. Note not only the center section, which Cassie exfiltrated from the house a small bit at a time, but also the left edge, where she expressed a more compelling feeling of the interplay between organic lines and straight edges:
Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories:
Finally, Michelin has handed out its 2022 stars for Chicago. Nothing surprising on the list, but I now have four more restaurants to try.
* Except that I volunteered to help a church choir do five Messiah choruses on Easter Sunday, so I've got two extra rehearsals and a service in the next 12 days.
Bonus update: the fog this morning made St Boniface Cemetery especially spooky-looking when Cassie and I went out for her morning walk:
Editing photos on my phone doesn't always produce the best results. Faster, cheaper, better, pick two, right? Fortunately I have Adobe Lightroom at home, and deploying software yesterday took a long time.
Here are my re-edits. Better? Worse? At the very least, they're all correctly-proportioned (2x3) instead of whatever I guessed on my little phone screen.
Thursday's sunrise at Nicura Ranch:
Berea College:
One of the ranch's permanent residents:
Down the road from the ranch:
Cinnamon, who rather preferred that I keep Cassie outside the pasture, thank you very much:
I've got a couple more from the past two weeks I'll post after lunch.
I've just switched the DNS entries for wx-now.com over to the v5 App, and I've turned off the v4 App and worker role. It'll take some time to transfer over the 360 GB of archival data, and to upload the 9 million rows of Gazetteer data, however. I've set up a virtual machine in my Azure subscription specifically to do that.
This has been quite a lift. Check out the About... page for the whole history of the application. And watch this space over the next few months for more information about how the app works, and what development choices I made (and why).
Just for posterity, here's what the v4 Current Weather page looked like:
Good night, v4. You had a good 8-year run. And good night, Katie Zoellner's lovely design, which debuted 15 years ago.
We're about to get back on the road for our 700 km drive back to Chicago. Before leaving, I just wanted to highlight Ravinia Festival's upcoming 2022 season. In particular, note who they're partnering with for these performances of La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni.
Oh, yes, I will be there.
The day started like this:
Then it became this:
And returned to this:
But because of this:
It is now this:
As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way.
Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out where to have dinner later, I'm going to head back and hope that Cassie hasn't figured out how to open doors.
(Also, I'll edit the photos properly when I get home and possibly re-post them.)
Cassie and I are at a lovely ranch in Kentucky where tomorrow she'll meet goats and tonight I've met a 1990s-era Internet connection. Well, I didn't come here to surf the Web, so I'll just deal.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting outside listening to frogs. Lots of frogs. And a hound somewhere down the road.
I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak.
The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about 200 meters from my house.
Updates as conditions warrant.
I mentioned yesterday that I purged a lot of utterly useless archival data from Weather Now. It sometimes takes a while for the Azure Portal to update its statistics, so I didn't know until this afternoon exactly how much I dumped: 325 GB.
Version 5 already has a bi-monthly function to move archival data to cool storage after 14 days and purge it after 3 months. I'm going to extend that to purging year-old logs as well. It may only reduce my Azure bill by $20 a month, but hey, that's a couple of beers.
As for Weather Now 5, if all goes well, I'll start downloading weather in the Production environment today, and possibly deploy the app over the weekend. Stay tuned...
A year ago today, Cassie and I adopted each other, which was obvious even on the drive home from PAWS:
Right now she's sulking on the couch because she didn't get breakfast this morning. That's because in about 15 minutes she's going to the vet to get her teeth cleaned. Pobre perrita.