House of the rising Moonglum

The brain is a strange and mysterious thing. I just heard a cover of a song and was unable to place it. My brain kept flipping between thinking that it was a Led Zeppelin song that I have listened to for years and a Bob Dylan song that I have listened to for years.

It is a cover of both of them. I had to listen to the Dylan and Zep versions one after the other for my brain to categorize them as the same song, and I still don’t quite believe it. Seriously, I must have listened to the Led Zeppelin version about a thousand times in Jr. High School, and the Dylan version a hundred in High School, and my brain just never connected them before.

Dylan and Zep now are higher up on the iPod playlist. Guess I don’t “know that highway like I know my hand” after all.

This is awesome. iFixit just released all their (awesome IMO) manuals as open source. Now we all have free access to this incredible resource. I have used them for years, and only last year got rid of my Pismo, thanks to their manuals. That thing have every single items except for the case replaced or repaired, up to and including the display and inverter. Given that I work in the industry I probably hold on to my tech too long, but it does make me feel like I am at least doing a small part for the planet, not junking it up with more rapid upgrade cycles.

So, I went to the Participatory Democracy meeting put on by the 49th ward tonight because there was a flyer on my door, and it was close to where I live. I didn’t really realize what I was getting myself into. Turns out this is actually a bit of a big deal. It is a type of budgeting that has been done in many other cities all over the world, but never before in the United States. So because of that, besides the alderman and the steering committee, there was a professor who studies this and helps implement it from Brown University, along with a bunch of other people including someone making a movie about this process. Not to mention about 20 people from the ward. And about 8 from the area that this meeting was supposedly for. Guess it is good I went after all.

So actual attendees were vastly outnumbered by organizers and hangers on. But the alderman was there and the ideas were shared. And it is a reasonably neat idea. Basically the alderman is giving up authority over his capital improvements fund for the ward, and allowing this community based process to drive it. The other neat thing is that the vote when the final budget meeting (open to the entire ward) is actually binding.

The main problem with this is how limited it is. The aldermanic “menu”, the money for capital projects in the ward, is such a small part of the over all city budget, that it is unclear to me how much light this will shed on where the money is really going. Also, there is a difference between saying “we want money spent on X” and actually getting that money spent efficiently. I bet that the breakdown of capital project that we actually get will be very very close to what we would have had under the old system. And finally, even if we did do this on a city wide basis, we would still have the TIF districts. The alderman does a reasonably good job at capital projects and there is pretty good accountability there already. It is the off budget items like TIF spending that really wreck this city.

So, all in all the meeting didn’t really do it for me, but it is an interesting idea. I will certainly be watching this going forward, and if it takes off for more of the city’s budgeting bodies it could actually make a difference.

Oh, and I did get an awesome Joe Moore quote, “I’ve been acting like a benign dictator, if you will.” said in reference to what he is trying to change by switching from the “aldermanic menu” to this “participatory budgeting” system. Hah! You only wish, Joe. There is only one dictator in this town, and it is not you.

Review of the show for those who couldn’t make it. Sorry you couldn’t be there, Ron, but thanks for the ticket!!

The show started by heading out to the remote (31st street) lot to get me some $10 parking instead of the $40 parking next to the stadium. (OUCH!) I’ve used that remote lot before though, and it is no problem. Only U2 spent so much on the stage that I guess they couldn’t afford to run the shuttle bus! So we got all warmed up before the show with a nice walk from 31st to Soldier Field. There was a little girl pulling her dad along. Apparently her older brother got to go to the last tour, but she wasn’t old enough. So she is very excited about going to this one.

Snow Patrol was pretty good (you know “Chasing Cars” at least) and gave me some time to check out the swag. The guy sitting next to me just flew in from DC for the show. The stage was amazing. I took a bunch of pictures, but the Trib’s give you a better sense of just how huge it is. There is a massive movie screen in the middle that they project huge Bono on. (Actually the trib has a full review and some up close pics off that review, but my review is better.

The show opened with “Rocket Man” playing and the space ship taking off. Smoke generators out the top and the bottom! Pretty neat. Then they got some very dark side of the moon clocks going and played Breathe. (The U2 one not the Pink Floyd one.) No line was next with lots of clips from the DVD. The video and the music combined to rock out so much that I was starting to hope that they played the whole album, al la LiveCrime. Continuing with a rocking version of get on your boots (see bono in the pic above) and an absolutely amazing Magnificent. They did some kind of video wizardry to make it look like gold flecks were flying everywhere behind the band on the screen, but the screen was so huge it really did give the illusion that there were these gold flecks flying everywhere. (Couldn’t get a good shot of that one.)

Unfortunately (?) my hopes of getting the entire no line album were shot with Beautiful Day coming up. This did not upset the audience. Bono said “we’re going to give the album a rest for a bit here.” which I thought was pretty funny. Made it sound like he wanted to play the whole thing. After rocking out, he changed gears and sang Blackbird. A little incongruous, but that’s Bono for you. After that he did this really long introduction of all the band members. I’ve never seen that before, and I think he made them a little uncomfortable. Especially when he told the audience that Adam Clayton because he is well endowed. I don’t know if he really meant to say that, but we were all dying. It might have just been a lead into Elevation though. Bono also gave a sideways compliment to the audience claiming that he gets to be arrogant, because we are all so cool. (That was odd.)

It was about now that I noticed a helicopter circling the stadium and occasionally flying directly overhead. It was a statement to the speaker system that I never heard it. And on the topic of the speakers, they were amazing. Normally there is tons of distortion and I can barely make out what is being played, let alone what Bono is saying. Here I could hear every word, and it only got distorted when they got really loud.

After that they took it down a notch with bono talking about how long they’ve been doing this for but … he still can’t find what he’s looking for. For old time sake I guess, he segued into stand by me. During the next set of four songs (Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of, Unknown Caller, The Unforgettable Fire, City Of Blinding Lights) the screen exploded! Well expanded anyway. I didn’t actually mean to take a picture of it, but when I was looking at them later I noticed that I got it! So above for your viewing pleasure, you can see the screen getting bigger. It was actually really really cool. Made it be less of a movie screen (though you could still see the pictures) and more of a curtain of lights, like from the tour before last. Really neat stuff.

The pulled it back together and had crazy spinning video of them playing for Vertigo. Then one of my favorite moments in the whole show, they had army of U2 heads bobbing to the beat all next to each other in 360 for I know I’ll go crazy. It was pretty amazing actually, and I couldn’t get a picture of it, and am not sure if I can even describe it. Basically they took each band member’s head shot video and lined them up next to each other on the screen. And they were doing the “walking chicken head” dancing thing to the beat of the music. I think I may have gone crazy, if I didn’t go crazy last night watching that. They also had this disco ball at the top and bottom of the space ship which had me mesmerized for quite a while. The rays of light that came off of it were moving independently from each other! The origin for the rays weren’t moving either, so the incoming light couldn’t have been moving, there must have been some sort of moving lasers on the “disco ball” instead of a normal rotating ball. Pretty cool, and yes I am easily distracted, and yes this is the sort of thing I think about in the middle of a concert.

They closed out the set with a bunch of old stuff and a lot of political activism. They had some really moving video of Iranian protesters for Sunday Bloody Sunday, and some nice arabic radio in the background. It worked really well, for Pride and MLK as well. Then they did this huge and pretty creepy thing on Aung San Suu Kyi for walk on. They took a bunch of people from the audience and had them all walk out on stage with masks of her face. That was pretty darn creepy. Not sure I got it.

Finally they closed the set out with where the streets have no name. For the first encore they had Desmond Tutu come out and tell us how cool we all are for joining the one campaign because we bought 3.5 million africans anti viral medication. He is a funny dude, and that was really great of him to agree to do that. After he finished the band came back out and played One, and Bad with 40. Of course they couldn’t get away with only one encore so they came back out … and Bono was in a FREAKING LASER SUIT!! This is another thing that didn’t photograph well, but his suit was covered in red laser beams that made him look like a spider in the middle of a web because of all the smoke that that space ship was pumping out. (I have to say that thing did pump out a lot of smoke over the course of the show. From the top and bottom they basically had the stadium filled!) But they played Light my way and with or without you. Then they ended on moment of surrender from the new album which I absolutely loved. That’s by far my favorite song on the new album and it was really great to end with it. They did that goofy cell phone light thing, but it looked neat on the screen. That’s that last picture above.

Coming home was actually another adventure in itself. Nobody knew where to go, and there were a ton of people waking down to 31st street who actually wanted to take the bridge over the tracks. Some drummer boys were under McCormick in the tunnel to the remote lot pulling in some good coin, but the coppers came and ran them out. Those guys don’t have anywhere they can play any more. But I was walking with an old couple that was trying to get to 25th and State, and was asking me how to get through. (They wanted to take the bridge too, but it was too late for that.) They thought they were going to go to 31st, but that was pretty far, so I offered to drive them. They were so thankful it was crazy. I tried to get them to not pay, but the guy insisted on covering my parking. Apparently it was their first concert ever! I’m glad I was able to help the end of the evening be a little nicer. The rest of the drive through the south loop was pretty intense. There were U2 fans everywhere! A couple more people hit me up for rides, but no one who was going the right direction.

All in all an excellent evening.

So there I was coming home on the El the other day with a friend of mine, and I couldn’t help but stare at the shirt of the guy standing behind her. In huge letters, a certain word was clearly emblazoned across his chest. Unfortunately since he was standing right next to us, I wasn’t able to show my friend without attracting his attention as well, so she never saw it. The person sitting next to us did though, which it good because I’m not sure I would have believed it otherwise.

Apparently, University of South Carolina’s mascot is the gamecock. This has to be one of the most understated wikipedia entries ever. “While the men have traditionally been the Fighting Gamecocks and the women were previously the Lady Gamecocks, this distinction was discontinued in part to help eliminate gender bias in their athletic department.” Because that really gets rid of any gendered connotation in that name. I am still shaking my head about that one. You have to have more collegiate pride than me to walk around with that shirt on.

The trib did a cool story on how Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast. I love how top secret their base of operations are.

I think I may have to start trying NetFlix out. We have a blockbuster one block from us, which we use regularly, but I’m thinking the advantage of the queue is too good to pass up. Anyone have thoughts? Cost/benefit? Do you watch more than the three movies per month that it takes to beat Blockbuster on cost? Or is that missing the point?

It makes sense. What with the saxophone and all. You can’t really get any more 80s than Shooting Shark. But I noticed that Revölution by Night briefly was the #1 selling album (very briefly I imagine) and wondered why. So I started looking around, and wiki claimed that Shooting Shark was one of the most requested videos (again, probably only briefly). So of course I had to look for it. I would also like to mention that I am sitting at home, totally drugged up, trying to get over this cold as quickly as possible. Suffice it to say, when presented with this video, it all became clear.

This has to be one of the best 80s videos ever. On par with Total Eclipse of the Heart. The 80s were amazing. ly bad.

I found myself wandering State street this evening (as I seem to often lately) when I passed a street-corner preacher. I was engaged at the time, so couldn’t pick up any tracts nor hear what he was preaching about. For some reason this week I have had a number of discussions about religion so I actually was a little interested when I went back by him stopped for a moment to listen. “And if you are gay you can not get into heaven and will go to hell.”

Talk about blood pressure rising and anger surfacing. I’m not sure what made me, but since I already was heading over to hear what he was saying and maybe chat with him, it just came out. I had to quote some Matthew 19:19 at him, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

His response was very interesting. At first he smiled as he caught bible being quoted, then frowned as he realized what part. Then he went back to “fear the lord” and just ignored me. It probably didn’t do anything, but I like to think that it made him think, even if just for a second.

If I could have done anything different it would have been to remember the Romans quote rather than the Gospel: “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love does no harm to its neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:9-10) But I only know like three bible verses, so I’m pretty surprised that one came unbidden at all.

Second book read on the train. During February, I am behind on posting my book reviews. Three more coming up.

This is a hilarious book. It is a “travel diary” describing Sarah Vowells efforts to go and see the sites that relate to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. In the process you get a good deal of the history surrounding the time of death of the three presidents. Lincoln is by far the most famous and thus has the most assassination memorabilia scattered around the country and thus the most of the book devoted to him. Garfield, being completely unknown (having served for so short a time) gets the shortest chapter, though a lot of introspection on what it means to be remembered. In addition to educating us on the history surrounding the deaths of these three presidents, we also learn the personal histories of the presidents and their assassins.

All of this comes to us, however, in the rambling style of Sarah Vowell. Which is to say distracted storytelling that jumps from one thought to the next without a care or concern in the world. This leads from hilarious notes about the friends and family that she drags with here on these expeditions (she doesn’t drive) to more somber reflections on the people who care for the museums and sites of such macabre topics. Mostly the book ends up being good old fashioned storytelling rather than a history lesson. But there is plenty of history to pick up along the way.

All in all this is an excellent and rather quick read, all the better for me because my knowledge of Lincoln and Garfield was so limited. (Strangely, since I was really interested in the history of Hawaii at one point, I actually knew a bit about McKinley.)

Probably the most interesting bit of history you get out of the book though are the tidbits of Robert Todd Lincoln’s life. What a strange and tragic character.

OK, I’m wrong. This has been the coldest winter since I lived here. I was hanging out with a High School friend recently and she wanted to know my thoughts on this winter. Well at that point it was the coldest winter since 96 so I could just say “I’ve felt colder.” That is no longer true. This has been a heroically cold winter. This is also I suppose why she is fleeing back to California.

Also, I love Tom Skilling’s blog. It is totally info-porn with awesome graphics and everything.

On noes! The spammers have found slow reCaptcha break. It seems to work at a rate of about 20-30 a day (human assisted I wonder?). Of course none of them get through, but I do have to moderate them. So I have instituted a fairly draconian black list. If you notice that a comment of yours isn’t approved in a couple days (or immediately if you are pre approved) please let me know and I will try to root it out of the spam bin. (7k and counting…) Next time I get a couple minutes I’ll have to look for new anti-spam technology.

I haven’t been posting much lately because I have been working 2.5 clients, 1.5 of whom need me to be onsite. This is driving me a little bit crazy, but I have gotten a sick joy out of joining the commuting masses. I feel like I have become part of the US of A in some way that I wasn’t before. Interestingly, while I am in Roger’s Park, I am far enough from the red line to make getting downtown take a bit longer than one would hope. Car is of course the shortest at about 40-50 minutes depending on time and traffic. (And the most expensive at $14 when I park in my secret (cheap) lot.) Public is a little tricky. Purple Express is the best (and cheapest), but you have to time it right. And getting to the Howard stop is about 20 mins. I’ve been averaging 1:30 total on public, but did better this morning. And the Metra is really nice, but doesn’t go very close to me on the other end, and there’s no bus if it is -10 and I don’t feel like walking. One of the things that has been slowing me down of course is that ROGERS IS GONE. Behold:

A Big Hole

Working street construction in the middle of winter. That is a job I don’t want.

Ha, I just discovered that I was the only one able to post comments for about a month here. Sorry about that. Feel free to comment away. Of course everyone who used to read this blog reads twitter or Facebook now instead. Twitter is ok, since I can get an rss feed off of it, but Facebook doesn’t seem to have one. Seriously people, no RSS feed? That is so 90s. Heck I want category based RSS feeds. Waaay too many really active people linked to me for me to be able to keep track of all that. Of course it does mean that the LJ load is lower and easier to keep up with.

So, to celebrate comments being open again, I pose a question: which methods do you use to keep up with friends, and how often do you check them.

People need to learn how to scrape the snow off the roof of their car BEFORE getting on the interstate. Watching a six foot slab of ice fly off the roof of a speeding SUV and float away like a snowflake is quite beautiful. Watching it come down and slam into your windshield is less so. Fortunately no damage was done, other than to my heart. But if it hit edge first instead of sideways I could have seen a quite different result. At least that guy got off the road and scrapped his SUV down then. On the other hand, I saw similar flying slabs of snow or ice at least three more times on my drive home.

One of the things that the iPhone was initially supposed to do was change the way that cell phone purchasing was done. In particular, instead of sticking around for forever in the phone store, dealing with surly salesmen, you would buy the device, head home, and register and pick a plan in the privacy of your own home. The reason Apple was able to get away with this unbelievable invasion of AT&T’s personal space was by offering them exclusive rights to the phone in the US. That worked out great for a while, but the other side of that is that since AT&T has this long contract, they can start demanding things after a while. Too much grey market of their subsidized iPhones you see. So it was with some trepidation that I went to the AT&T store to purchase my iPhone today.

I couldn’t have had a better or more satisfying purchase experience. The staff was well trained, knowledgeable and excited about the product they were selling. They took my name and (once they heard I was switching from another network) saw us right away. I stated that 10 years ago I left AT&T and swore never to return. They asked what my issues were, helped pick a plan that would avoid those issues going forward, and brought out the store manager who gave me his card and told me to call him if I had any problems at all. In particular apparently over the course of the past year AT&T has been giving more empowerment to the individual employees to deal with specific customer complaints. Apparently working with Apple has taught them something about customer satisfaction.

So that initial impression made me much happier. Then it turns out that the employee I was working with was previously a Sprint employee. I said that I really liked my current sprint plan. He agreed that AT&T didn’t have exactly the same plan, but showed me how he could build a very similar plan. In fact it was (with the exception of SMS messages, and the tier-ing of overages) exactly the same plan. Not only that, but he knew exactly what needed to be done to get the phone numbers transferred over with no fuss no muss. He did all the leg work all we had to do was chat with him about the pros and cons of different plans. Then he asked who my and my wife’s employers were. Turns out they give a 15% discount on the monthly plans for teachers!!!

So to sum up, after being jerked around by Sprint for the past year and totally fearing dealing with AT&T, I not only have two iPhones (one for me and one for my wife) for less that one would have cost me a year ago, my new monthly plan actually costs LESS than the one that I had with Sprint that I was totally happy with. Now the only thing I have to do is be careful of not going over on minutes for the first couple months so I can bank some roll over minutes. I went from not really wanting to be an AT&T customer to being a totally satisfied customer in about a half an hour. That AT&T customer service rep totally earned his (hopefully large) commission.

Now I need to build a special iPhone version of this blog.

“No no dude, you need to listen for the paper.” My wife schooling me on how to unjam the printer when I missed the paper falling out. It turns out I am married to the printer whisperer.

And Obama goes on about his energy policy. *sob* I want him as my president so bad. Someone asks a simple talking point question and he goes on without interruption, about the different viewpoints he has been synthesizing, and much of the fallout of what energy policy impacts across the country, from single point of failure food production to the weaknesses of the cap and trade system. PLEASE COUNTRY vote for him! It has been so long since we have had a president who I can actually listen to expounding on difficult topics.

It really is a great overview of his energy and tax policy and you should read it if you haven’t heard him talk about it before. The best thing in my opinion is that it shows that he understands how intertwined energy is with everything else we do.

Stella

1.30.04-10.2.08

Stella home for the first time.

Stella today.

Good for google. I went to two weddings this summer that requested that the gifts be donations to No On 8 initiatives, so I have sent my money in. But it is nice to see some big names jump into the ring. I wonder if this will lead to the Baptist Convention boycotting google?

The news report said it was the worst 24 hours ever in terms of amount of rain on the ground. It was also pretty consistent from one day to the next. And in two days almost made it one of the rainiest Septembers ever. However, my wife and I were driving around, and saw the madness, but it didn’t effect us directly, so my thinking was that the deep tunnel project worked. In fact we even went to a party the next day. Not so for the entire county. Albany Park in Chicago was completely flooded. We managed to bypass it by sheer luck. Des Plaines was also hit hard. Makes the lakes we drove through in Lincolnwood seem downright tame by comparison. All of a sudden I am feeling that the money spent on that new ejector pump was well spent. Still given that this is a once in a 150 years rainstorm, the city did pretty well for itself. Gotta say that deep tunnel project paid itself off last weekend. All the flooding seemed to be constrained to areas near natural waterways.

At least I know why we couldn’t get on at Pratt. I wish I’d known that there was so much trouble in Albany Park. That isn’t too far away and I could have helped make sandbags or something. At least it is dry this week. Give the sewers time to empty.