Events

After seeing Carousel yesterday, I'm going to take advantage of really gorgeous weather today. Parker will also benefit. Updates as the situation warrants.

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman blames us computer professionals for users thinking they don't know computers: In my recent podcast with UX expert and psychologist Dr. Danielle Smith the topic of "user self-blame" came up. This is that feeling when a person is interacting with a computer and something goes wrong and they blame themselves. I'd encourage you to listen to the show, she was a great guest and brought up a lot of these points. Self-blame when using technology has gotten so bad that when ANYTHING...

Wow, I have a lot of things on my Kindle. And I'm adding more: The roots of the Flash Crash of 2010 go back a lot farther Chicago's yellow night sky (see below) may be turning...black? Via Schneier, an investigation of an insecure voting machine by Virginia's elections board. Back to debugging... Photo: Chicago at night. Note the yellow-orange sodium vapor lamps.

First, a not-so-smart car: I'm not sure what amused me more, the disproportionate tow truck or that the Smart Car driver parked in a rush-hour tow zone long enough for Streets & Sanitation to remove him. Then, for everyone who takes his dog to work, there's this food truck: I didn't pick anything up for Parker yet. ($2.50 per biscuit? Did I read that right?) But if it comes back, maybe.

Now that Chicago's bike share has hundreds of stations, its efficiencies are becoming clearer: But what about convenience? Recently Divvy held its second annual data visualization challenge, and one of the winners, by Shaun Jacobsen at Transitized, compares the speed of Divvy with the speed of the CTA. And Divvy wins by a nose. Jacobsen’s “Who’s Faster” project starts with a look at the 1,000 top “station pairs"—i.e. the places that people most often go from point A to point B using Divvy. Then, those...

I had a mind-numbing email exchange with a large corporate IT department today. One of our best customers has a problem: no one has been able to use our software since Friday. We’ve been troubleshooting this problem. But we haven’t been able to fully investigate the issue, despite tremendous effort. We think we've uncovered the main issue preventing us from fixing the main issue. We couldn't connect to either their production or user-acceptance test (UAT) Web services from inside our office because (we...

The ancient spreadsheet package Lotus 1-2-3 set "0 January 1900" as its day zero. Whenever you entered a date into a Lotus spreadsheet, the program actually stored the number of days before or since that mythical date. Microsoft Excel needed to maintain compatability with Lotus early on, so it set 30 December 1899 as its day zero, which worked very well except for dates between 30 December 1899 and 1 January 1900, and it added the other mythical date 29 February 1900 because Lotus had that bug as well....

(Note: The developer in question does not work for my company.) I'm looking at some code in one of the products I'm responsible for, and I just came across this. // ReSharper disable once RedundantAssignment Tuple<List<SomeChartData>, string> objReportdata = null; Let's review the WTFs: The developer didn't understand ReSharper's admonition that the "= null" is completely useless, so he disabled the warning. The Tuple is actually the return value of the method. It doesn't even need to be declared as a...

After almost two years, the trail opens June 6th: Built on a long-defunct railroad line, the trail runs through Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square and Humboldt Park.  Work on the $95 million project began in fall 2013.  Take a look at the path under construction. When the trail opens, four of the access points will be through ground-level parks: Walsh Park, 1722 N. Ashland Ave.; Churchill Park, 1825 N. Damen Ave.; Julia de Burgos Park, 1805 N. Albany Ave.; and Park 567, 1805 N. Milwaukee Ave. When...

Parker didn't get picked up this morning by 8:15 so I had to cart him off to day care. Apparently the guy showed up around 8:20. But no matter, because at that point I was nearly an hour past the time I usually leave and nearly 90 minutes past his usual Monday pick-up time. So, survey: should I just trust that he'll get picked up and leave him home? Or should I continue to make sure he leaves the house before I do, just in case there's a problem and they can't pick him up?