Frozen Solid

I want to say that there were no major scandals to write about this week but I almost forgot that another dump of Epstein files went out, implicating even more rich and powerful men. It almost feel calm though, so forgive my lapse. Things are happening, things that in normal times would be considered "big" but in these tumultuous days are just line items.

• US warships are days away from Iran, Trump strongly hints that there will be kinetic action when they arrive
• New Epstein files
• Partial US Government Shutdown Speaking of the shutdown, I want to provide an update there because my last post sounds hysterical in hindsight. The houses have agreed to partially fund the government, except for DHS, which they will debate and come back to. They are kicking the can, but more importantly it doesn't seem like the GOP wants to shutdown the government.

I'm writing this on a Monday so we'll see how the week turns out.

In other news, our weather station has gone down once again, right in the middle of a historic freeze here in Alexandria VA. I think I mentioned this last time but I need a backup device so that I always have one that's running to minimize the downtime.

We've made a number of improvements to the LLM service, the website itself, and the way we store data, so we should be able to do historic record keeping, lowest and highest temps we've ever recorded for a given date, things like that. We've gotten it to a place where I can really hand off the project to the kids and let them make improvements as needed.

Also, the Ruff Registrar open source student registration system designed for homeschool co-ops has been making really great progress. I deployed an alpha version to production over the weekend and I'm working on hardening it and preparing it for a beta release soon. I'm wondering if I should bite the bullet and make this a SaaS product instead of giving it away completely for free.