Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Carl from Chicago Went down into the loop to patronize a local business for lunch. By most accounts business has been bad because the city is on lock down for these protestors. The streets did seem very empty for a beautiful sunny Sunday in May.
The police had a base on the north side of the new Art Institute Wing. They blocked the entrance with city snowplows and left a car in the front in case someone wanted to enter or exit.
They had the streets in River North blocked off (Ohio) in order to let the VIP’s come in from the airport. They mainly came in long white vans with black Chrysler 300 cars, and some other high-end ones mixed in as you can see below.
A bentley! Must be someone important.
It has been quiet but tense here in Chicago awaiting the NATO protests now that the G8 is being held at Camp David. There hasn’t been a lot of action but the police presence is heavy.
Here is a view of the Boeing HQ that has been boarded up with fences setup. I think that our Mayor didn’t approve of this because he wants to see “business as usual” rather than everyone hunkering down for a riot but there will be some sort of protest here on Monday due to Boeing’s role as a defense supplier for NATO (or whatever the “rationale” is for the protestors).
I was driving back to Chicago from Champaign (located in the middle of the state) last weekend when I saw boats exactly like this (with the red Coast Guard logo on the side of them) coming north on I-57 on the back of a truck. I did not see the machine gun in front, however. These boats are patrolling the Chicago River and a couple of times I saw the machine gun up front manned. It would be interesting to determine what you’d do with a heavy machine gun in a crowd control situation, but that likely is for a more formal threat to NATO.
The local River North restaurant Rockit uses former album covers as binders for their menus. I was surprised one day to see Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
While Tarkus would be an obscure album today (the average person who is familiar with classic rock might know “Lucky Man” and a couple other songs) it is hard to think that in 1971, when this album came out, it reached #1 on the billboard charts in the UK (and #9 in the US). According to wikipedia, this album landed between “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones and “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.
To put this in context – “Sticky Fingers” was one of the run of 4 fantastic albums that put the Rolling Stones in the pantheon of rock – they were 1) Beggars Banquet 2) Let it Bleed 3) Sticky Fingers 4) Exile on Main Street. And everyone knows Bridge over Troubled Water.
And yet Tarkus, and mostly Emerson, Lake & Palmer, is completely and utterly unknown. Nowadays Tarkus would be viewed as a niche product, un-commercial for radio / MP3 singles but perhaps capturing a tiny but devoted market. The song Tarkus takes up a whole side, and is over 20 minutes long, a series of sub-songs linked into one big song. If you even thought about releasing a jazz / semi-metal / progressive rock album (CD) like this today you’d get laughed out of the record executive’s office (if they have offices anymore).
At least I was entertained seeing Tarkus as part of my lunch menu. To think that one day long ago that this would be more than a minor trivia item, or a piece of kind of ugly artwork, is almost unthinkable.
Cross posted at LITGM
There are many blogging tools to use; over at LITGM we use “Blogger” which is owned by Google (and free) and over at Chicago Boyz and at other sites we use Word Press. Many of the up and coming sites are now on Tumblr, which looks pretty much like another blogging platform to me.
There was a Louis CK sketch where he talks about how amazing it is to fly on an airplane and connect to the Internet and all the things we take for granted while everyone whines about it. I felt the same way as I started to look at some of the new technologies available under Blogger.
Blogger just rolled out “dynamic views”. I am not a blogging technical expert but in laymans’ terms, you get a lot of real estate back that is taken up with static page elements like the blogroll on the side and post categories and comments. When you hover your cursor over these items, they “pop up” (dynamically) and then you can click on them if you wish else they don’t take up space otherwise.
Another advantage is that they load up your blog when you turn it on (you see the Blogger “gears” running) and then you can view it a bunch of different ways, from a “classic” view to a “magazine” view or “flip card” which is cool if you have a lot of photos because you can see them at a glance and click to get at the post underneath.
Like everything else, they are trying to get the bugs out at Blogger. When they initially rolled it out, you couldn’t see items like your blogroll / links because those “widgets” didn’t work with dynamic views. Some super-technical web nerds could make it work but the average person wouldn’t unless they wanted to hack html code. There are sites and message boards out there with many comments bemoaning the new technology and what is lacking but of course Google has added many of these widgets back so that they now work with dynamic views and at least you can see comments and labels (basically their version of tags or categories).
I turned “the most important site on the internet” Drunk Bear Fans into a dynamic views site and it is pretty cool. Since there is more page real estate (the tabs on the side only pop out when you hover over them) I was able to make the pictures bigger and I also did some other housecleaning. This is more of a test bed than LITGM so I will keep working over there until it is ready for “prime time” and then maybe we will kick over LITGM, too. For now we are looking at the header because you still have to work on that in html to get the great pictures up there that Gerry inserts but I am sure one of the tech guys at Google is working on that in a frenzy and that will be in some upcoming version.
It is simply amazing how far the technology has come on blogging and web development FOR FREE. Dan was chuckling at how much just the hard drive would have cost back when we were in college 20+ years ago to store the pictures, movies and other elements associated with a site like LITGM, which also is free along with all the development time Google has put into this platform (plus the fact that they bought the company that made the original technology in the first place).
I was in the dot.com “boom” era in the early 2000’s in the middle of all the companies that imploded. I can tell you first-hand that building a site that a 10 year old could do with dynamic views would have cost millions and millions of dollars, and it would have crawled. The cloud based infrastructure that these sites use and the power of the tools that they give developers and non-developers alike FOR FREE is amazing. For a couple of minutes it is worth stepping back and reflecting on that. Then back to complaining about everything, just like Louis CK says.
Cross posted at LITGM