Chicago in the spring-summer-fall has perfect weather. We don't have mountains or high altitude, but we do have the lake, which is decent-sized, and a few rivers. But there's always something going on, tons of good people to meet, music, culture, and it's very walkable in many parts. Rarely driving is a requirement for me. If I ever have to drive more than once or twice in a week, then it's not a place I could live. It does, however, massively limit where I can pick to live, but ok. [Read more…]

Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange's page layout kinda bugs me. I never use or want the left or right columns, and often the code in the middle column is severely truncated, making it a bad experience for anything but the smallest of code discussions. So I opened the Javascript inspector and created a bookmarklet to fix the problem. Wish I had done this years ago. [Read more…]

I just got back from a great conference, iPhone/iPad DevCon East out in Boston. I'm completely exhausted. I have no plans to do anything this weekend excepting some hard-core reclining and the occasional stroll. I'm not just exhausted from that, I'm exhausted from both winter and all that comes with it, and from the long amount of work that led up to the app BookHabit that I finally released about a week and a half ago. More about that in an upcoming post.

But the weather is taking a turn for the better, chilly and rainy as today might be, and I can sense spring is actually going to happen this time. There was a weather tease a few weeks back, but I knew it was only foreshadowing. At any rate, I declare spring. I can refresh my todo lists, recalibrate my goals, rearrange my office, etc. [Read more…]

Big mathematics systems like Mathematica, Maple or MATLAB are extremely expensive, with prices starting at 00, 00 and 00 respectively. Those prices are for the single commercial license. My interests aren't commercial, but is no non-commercial sales option. They all have Student, Government and Commercial licenses. I'd call myself a student in the wider sense, but they will want to check with my institution, which is, I guess, just myself, and I'm guessing they'd balk at that. [Read more…]

Ok, looks like I'm not going anywhere for a while now and it's time to get a move on a lot of things going into the fall and winter. Not looking forward to the cold weather, but very much looking forward to getting things done. Most things pre my recent vacation were all about getting the iPhone programs I did with Andrew into solid shape. I'm very proud of them both. We got in the last of the really big updates before I left. During vacation my mind was a complete blank on all things work-wise. I did discover how good the oysters are in Vancouver. Still miss the great "sea" food out west. Perhaps I'll live out that way at some point. Who knows. [Read more…]

Basic thermodynamics doesn't generally give the average person enough conceptual tools to fight the enormous mess and upkeep of the place where you live. Your home isn't best modeled as a closed system. The part of my home that I want to keep clean is far from closed off from the rest of the world, and it's far from equilibrium. Entropy always seems to be winning, and one has to pour a lot of energy into this system to keep things clean. One has to take anti-entropic measures. Entropy is always playing the game. Dust bunnies are its minions. [Read more…]

Back in the late '80s/early '90s, the Chicago cafe scene was the match of nearly any city. And one particular joy was how many of them were open until 2 or 3am, sometimes more. I'm not talking about Denny's-type establishments, but small, hip cafes. But now it's 2:40am, and if I want to head out to a cafe, there's nothing that I know of. When I came back to Chicago in in the early '00s, the cafe scene was almost decimated, replaced by chain commuter coffee places. It's now beginning to fill out again, but none of them are open late. Cultural change? Rent prices too high to staff that late? Places I just don't know about? Several other major cities this is just not a problem.