Hello friends. Some professional news, as they say:

I’ve accepted a job with NPR as Senior News Apps Developer, to start toward the beginning of next month. I greatly admire this team (both past and present members) which I’ve looked up to, asked for help from and shamelessly stolen open source code from since the beginning of my career. I’m excited to be a part of it.

At the same time, I’ll be sad to leave St. Louis Public Radio (where I’ll just miss the ten-year mark). I’ve grown significantly as a data journalist, developer and person in my time there. I deeply appreciate my colleagues (again both past and present) for the opportunities to collaborate on stories, their interest in learning data skills and their willingness to try new things, whether that’s ideas for presenting projects, being open to new tools for improving our workflow or adding a drone to a radio station newsroom’s toolbox.

On my wife’s work trip to Japan this summer, she brought me back this. Seemed like a good enough night to open it. Pretty good stuff.

Finally got a few paw paws from the woods behind the house. Lots of trees back there, but only a couple are mature enough to fruit. Hopefully in a few years we’ll have a bounty. For now I’ll enjoy these.

Tough to believe we’ve reached the point where a former president turning himself in at a jail for booking and a mugshot isn’t front-page news, but looking at today’s front pages there seem to be an awful lot of without the story. Deadlines, maybe.

Thank you, past me, for making ham and bean soup and freezing the leftovers, thus providing me with lunch today. It was delicious. Warmest regards, present me.

A calliope probably wears out its welcome in short order, but I sure do enjoy one when I happen to encounter it in the wild.

The image is dominated by a blue sky with clouds, it is orange at the horizon, though the sun is not visible. The foreground is a sea of green theater seats, leading down very far to a stage. An image on a curtain or screen on the stage shows two closed fists meeting knuckles-to-knuckles. The left fist is red with a gold hammer and sickle. The right fist has the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. A tall overhead fan on a post rises from the seats on the right.
A panorama of an outdoor theater: a blue sky with clouds, it is orange at the horizon, though the sun is not visible. The foreground is a sea of green theater seats, leading down very far to a stage. An image on a curtain or screen on the stage shows two closed fists meeting knuckles-to-knuckles. The left fist is red with a gold hammer and sickle. The right fist has the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. A tall overhead fan on a post rises from the seats on the right.
A theater stage, with people's heads in the foreground and an orange sky in the background. An image on a curtain or screen on the stage shows two closed fists meeting knuckles-to-knuckles. The left fist is red with a gold hammer and sickle. The right fist has the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. A tall overhead fan on a post rises from the seats on the right. The corner of a large chess board can be seen peeking out from below the curtain in the center of the stage. An American flag hangs to the left of the stage (from the viewer's perspective).

CHESS at the MUNY is closing tonight, 51 years to the day after the World Chess Championship of 1972 between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky kicked off. I was lucky enough to see it from the free seats on Thursday and enjoyed it very much.