Events

I like traveling to Europe because it reminds me that technology can combine with public services in ways we will not see in the U.S. for 30 years. Yesterday it was a magic button that made a taxi appear in seconds. Today it was a bit of wasted time that led to two discoveries, one of which was that I wasted time. My business colleague and I, used to very long lines to get paper train tickets as well as some predictions about our cognitive abilities at 5:15 tomorrow morning, decided to swing by the...

Ouch, what a grim outcome from yesterday. Republicans took back the U.S. Senate by running the most negative campaign in history, promising nothing, which is exactly what they'll deliver. People angry at the slow recovery elected the very people who caused the recovery to go so slowly. Also, yesterday's voters were really, really old and white, much more than predicted (as midterm voters are usually older and whiter than those who vote in presidential elections). The worst story I heard about this...

Except for one minor problem, this has been a good trip. I'll have photos of the super-cute hotel probably this weekend. And the meeting today went surprisingly well, notwithstanding the 10 times I had to leave the room.* One amazing thing happened: at the end of the meeting, we stopped by reception and asked about getting a taxi. The receptionist pushed a button on a small device, which promptly spat out a receipt, which she handed us. By the time we got outside the building, there was a taxi waiting....

It's coming up on 11:30 am back home, so it's 18:30 here in Oslo, and I'm finally settled and unpacked. The bed looks so tempting. I have to stay up until 9pm, I really do. Photos and stuff eventually. Right now I really, really need a shower.

Posting will be sporadic the next couple of days, to say the least. At least Norway is a more advanced country than ours, with ubiquitous WiFi, so there will be some new items here.

I don't know why, exactly, but Dutch daredevil Nik Wallenda walked from Marina City to the Leo Burnett building last night the hard way: Wallenda, 35, began by walking more than two city blocks from the Marina City west tower to the Leo Burnett Building. That first crossing — which took 6:51 minutes and was done at a 19-degree slant across the Chicago River — set the world record for steepest incline for tightrope walking between two buildings. Wallenda took a Leo Burnett elevator down to the street and...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago will perform at 3:30 this afternoon at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago, right by the Chicago/Milwaukee Blue Line stop. We'll perform two movements from Schubert's Mass in A-flat, five choruses from Händel's Messiah, and a few other pieces (including a beautiful soprano duet by Monteverdi). The church is gorgeous. I mean, gorgeous. Even if you don't hear us perform you should at least poke around the space. Oh, did I mention the concert is free? You should still subscribe...

Ah, FitBit. I'm guessing the device only stores time stamps and not time-and-date stamps. I'm also guessing they haven't worked out daylight saving time, either. Because apparently going to bed before 1am CDT and getting up at 7:30 CST was only 5½ hours. (It was actually 7½.) This seems related to a problem I saw Wednesday. I got to Atlanta just past midnight and synced my FitBit to my phone—which had already switched to Eastern time. Since the device never got past midnight, it's daily summary value...

It's hard to overstate how much we live in a sci-fi world. In 24 hours, I've booked a trip to Oslo, Amazon has delivered an inexpensive guidebook, and Weather Underground has already forecast the weather through next weekend. (Oslo will have very similar weather to Chicago, owing in part to the record heat they're having in Europe recently.) But where's my flying car?

Well, the travel ambiguity resolved just a couple of minutes ago, and I'm now booked to Oslo, Norway next week. We're doing a site visit and writing the technical diligence report before we land back in Chicago about a week from right now. This is unusual, but not unprecedented. We do technical diligences all over the world. And it's not really a problem for me personally, because I'd already planned to be in Los Angeles next week anyway. It's just rather farther than California. Oh, and our site visit...