Events

Allie Brosh has returned after an 18-month absence with a new post: [T]hat's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem. It would be like...

The Tribune reports this morning that some groundskeeping duties at O'Hare will soon get turned over to a herd of goats: The city's Department of Aviation is expected to announce Wednesday that it has awarded a contract to Central Commissary Holdings LLC — operator of Lincoln Park restaurant Butcher & The Burger — to bring about 25 goats onto airport property, helping the airport launch its pilot vegetation-management program. Joseph Arnold, partner at Butcher & The Burger, said the goats now live on a...

Pollen levels in Chicago have exploded in the past week: The area’s pollen values surged Tuesday to the highest levels of the year, the latest development in a allergy season which has brought misery to many across the Chicago area. Dr. Joseph Leija, allergist at Loyola Gottlieb Memorial Hospital and provider of this area’s pollen counts, lamented in his daily report that the slow pace of spring warming has combined with the season’s huge rain tallies to bring high tree counts at the same time high...

Illinois Republican Party chair Pat Brady has quit: With same-sex marriage legislation pending in the Illinois legislature, Brady this year voiced his support for the proposal despite a plank in the state GOP platform that said marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman. Brady said he made the endorsement personally, not as Republican chairman, but conservatives in the top echelon of the GOP party quickly complained. Though Brady survived immediate attempts to dump him, a meeting of the...

Over the past week, the city replaced the north leaf of the Wells St. Bridge. This morning it looked like this: Previous coverage here.

Unfortunately, as Paul Lukas points out, people have forgotten the difference: Here's the deal: Virtually any software that includes a typography function (whether for word processing, desktop publishing, graphic design, or whatever) now employs something called "smart quotes." The idea behind smart quotes is that the software recognizes when there's a blank space immediately before or after a quotation mark and adds the appropriate curvature to the mark, creating open-quotes and close-quotes. That way...

Since its purchase by InBev (Anheuser Busch) two years ago, Goose Island Brewing Co. has increased production significantly by brewing beer in other states. While this does allow them to produce more beer and to sell it nationwide, it has also changed the beer. Green Line Pale Ale now comes from Baldwinsville, N.Y., which I'm pretty sure doesn't have an El. Flagship 312 Urban Wheat Ale comes from Baldwinsville (area code 315) and Fort Collins, Colo. (area code 970). Since water is the principal...

I just listened to a This American Life segment by Andrew Forsthoefel, a 23-year-old from southeastern Pennsylvania who walked across the U.S. for a year. Fascinating. He wound up, after walking 6,000 km, in Half Moon Bay, Calif., about 800 m from my family's house. I have to say, if I were to walk across the U.S., I'd want to wind up in Half Moon Bay, too. What a start to this kid's life. I'm looking forward to hearing more from him.

After a lot of really difficult work and evaluating a half-dozen 3rd-party libraries, I've finally gotten a round-trip between a local ASP.NET application and SalesForce. This is the first victory in two big battles against the SalesForce integration model I've been fighting for the last two weeks. The next hurdle will be to get the SalesForce API to accept my application's SAML assertion after the user is authenticated. I really have no idea how to do that yet—and no one I've spoken with knows, either....

OK, Papa John's, you're out of the doghouse. Sort of. About six months ago, Papa John's CEO John Schnatter speculated about cutting worker hours to avoid some of the Affordable Care Act's requirements. As a direct result of this, I joined the millions of other Americans in a quiet boycott of the chain. It's unfortunate. They make the best pizza in their category (cheap and delivered). I mean, of course I'd rather have a thin, wide, gooey slice from some nameless deli on the Lower East Side of Manhattan...