Events

Parker got about 3 hours of walks this weekend because of weather and apartment showings. And I had about 6 hours of work to do for my real job. And I had lunch with people way the hell across town for Día de la Papusa. So I completely forgot to post anything. I've also added Evanston back into the mix for my apartment search. Essentially, it suits my personality pretty well (aging Gen-X quasi-intellectual progressive), and you can get more apartment for less money than in any comparable neighborhood in...

Colin Cameron, owner of Duke of Perth (my remote office) told me a couple weeks ago that this was in the works, but swore me to secrecy. Now that it's in Crain's, it's out there: If you've been mourning the loss of La Creperie since it closed Aug. 22 when its owner retired, take heart: The iconic little French bistro at Clark and Diversey is scheduled to reopen, most likely in December. Duke of Perth proprietors Colin Cameron, his cousin Jack Crombie and Jack's wife, Pam, have purchased the property...

I did not see this coming: Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has named former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas as his Democratic running mate for next year's election. Vallas, an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2002 against Rod Blagojevich, fills the vacancy on the ticket left by incumbent Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon's decision to run for state comptroller next year. After leaving CPS, Vallas headed public schools in Philadelphia, New Orleans and, most recently, Bridgeport...

Chicago's bike share program could become the nation's largest, thanks to Federal subsidies: There are currently 300 Divvy stations up and running around Chicago, with 100 more stations in the works to be installed by next spring. Officials from the Chicago Department of Transportation said Wednesday they’ve secured a $3 million federal grant to build 75 additional stations next year, bringing the total to 475 by next year. The grant comes from the US Department of Transportation’s Congestion Mitigation...

The person most directly responsible for the HealthCare.gov debacle is "retiring:" The chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, whose office supervised creation of the troubled federal website for health insurance, is retiring, the Obama administration said Wednesday. The official, Tony Trenkle, will step down on Nov. 15 “to take a position in the private sector,” said an email message circulated among agency employees. As the agency’s top information officer, Mr....

The Illinois legislature has finally, finally, approved marriage equality: Gov. Pat Quinn said he intends to sign the bill, which would take effect June 1. It's the Democratic governor's latest step in taking Illinois in a more liberal direction. Under Quinn in the past three years, Illinois has banned the death penalty, legalized medical marijuana, provided driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants and approved civil unions. Resolving the gay marriage question also allows state leaders to get a...

The flights, between Newark, N.J., and Singapore, is the longest in the world: The two all-business-class flights, which operate between Singapore and Newark, New Jersey, take around 19 hours and cover 15,300 km. But late last month, Singapore airlines announced that it would be cancelling the services, along with another between Singapore and Los Angeles that is almost as long. The title for the world's longest flight...will now shift to Qantas, which operates a 13,800 km service between Sydney and...

Completely swamped today by a production error on an application I hardly ever work on. The problem was around something I'd written, but not caused by anything I wrote; still, it fell to me to fix the problem, which caused me to fall behind in everything else. I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open with things I probably can't get to today: Andrew Sullivan thinks Forbes is ridiculous elevating Putin to "most powerful person." Someone forwarded me a short film called The Signal. How about giving Canada a...

Aw, buggre alle this for a Larke. I'm all in favor of upgrades, but for Foucault's sake, don't break things. I'm trying to upgrade a .NET project to Entity Framework 6, and I want to smack the developers. Under previous versions, you could set the retry manager through configuration. This was really helpful for unit testing, when you might want to change the configuration and have the application block load a transient fault handler automatically. With Entity Framework 6 (EF6 — yes, this is blatant...

Since we moved the end of Daylight Saving Time to the first week of November, sunrises at the end of October are later than those in mid-December. Yesterday's sunrise was the latest sunrise in a year, and will be the latest until 2016. (The sunrise on 6 November 2010 was the latest until 2021, so it really could be worse.) In Chicago this morning, the sun rose at 6:26, the same time it rose on September 12th. It won't rise this early again until March 3rd—but then a week later we shift the clocks again...