barry burton
the Contextual City
Jimmy John’s. Chicago has them. Birmingham doesn’t. One small bit of joy in my week. (the Jimmy Fix, I’m told). Another: XRT. I like good radio stations. Who else can play the Doors, Death Cab for Cutie, obscure Tom Petty, and then finish it off with Sufjan Stevens? (That’s right, listening to “Chicago” on the radio while sort of in Chicago. Of late, I’ve had good luck with the hearing of songs about places while in those places.)
Say what you will about Motorola, they at least have good taste in office furniture and interior design (and they’re no cynic, either :) ). However, boring meetings are no fun. Especially when sprung on me at the last minute and only wreck my plans. Also especially when at night, so that the desire to sleep resulting from boredom is compounded with the desire to sleep resulting from lateness and darkness, and thus the desire becomes irresistable.
Another note, crappy hotels kind of suck. I’m not sure if my hotel has exceptionally thin walls, or if the person in the next room suffered from a deviated septum or sleep apnea of the worst severity, but I could hear his snoring all night. Unpleasant. The hotel is also in the fine city of North Chicago. This is not in the sense of being a part of Chicago on the northern side, nor is it of being a suburb just to the north of Chicago. It is in the sense that it is pretty much in Wisconsin, so yeah it is way north of Chicago.
Back to Sufjan, last week I saw the trailer for Little Miss Sunshine, and not only does the movie feature the boss from The Office, but also pretty much the entire preview is set to “Chicago”. Yay for good music in public places.
On to more nerdy things, LiveJournal is in the process of opening up a Jabber server. It sort of works for now, but not all of the features are in place yet, and it likes to disconnect me randomly. Eventually, LiveJournal plans to enable posting via Jabber as well as receiving comments and friend notifications via Jabber. The best part is that the LiveJournal Jabber server will be federating, so LiveJournal Jabber users will be able to talk to users on any other federating Jabber server, of which Google Talk is one.
This is one more step towards being able to instant message anyone, without regard to nationality, creed, or which network they happen to use. Hopefully this will help build momentum to cause more email providers to offer parallel Jabber servers, and AIM, et al. can finally go away, or at least put in Jabber bridges to their networks. Isn’t it exciting??? So maybe open standards make me a little too happy. :)
