the reality tunnel

I live in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.  When I tell people where I live, I’m often  asked “why Lakeview?” or given a glum, “oh.  That’s cool.”  My friends in Chicago don’t live in the neighborhood.  People think of it for the college town style bars in Wrigleyville, or going to The Alley when they [...]

I loved David Wilcox’s Chicago Reader article Human Care Bears about the cultural framing of people with mental disabilities.  I am always profoundly frustrated by the way that critiques of critiques of language dismiss people feeling offended or having other deeply personal reactions to certain words.  Wilcox’s writing about the word “retarded” is much more [...]

My last post explained what I was doing, but not neccessarily why I was doing it.  I had to answer some questions for the Medill website about the Knight Scholarship and I thought I’d share my responses here.
What was your undergrad major / graduation year? Did you work in your field of study after graduation?
I [...]

I haven’t written here in a while and that’s largely because of going back to school.  At the beginning of January, I started a one-year MSJ program at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University thanks to a scholarship from the Knight Foundation (read an article in Time about the scholarship).
Even with the funding, [...]

A few days into the recent CTA cuts and it really doesn’t seem that bad. The Tribune even seemed to struggle with its coverage when some people were saying their transit experience after the cuts sucked and other said it was fine, which is pretty much how the discourse over the quality of CTA [...]

While those looking to discover neighborhoods across racial blind spots would certainly benefit from a broader set of geographically discoverable neighborhood social media, it is ultimately up to individual neighborhoods to decide if they benefit from voicing neighborhood identity and experience on the web.

High on my list of neglected tech. projects is the Testament books to prisoners database web application.  This is the database program that projects like the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project use to track packages sent and returned and books requested in the hopes avoiding delays in delivering books to incarcerated people and to provide [...]

Today, my coworker Russ and I gave a talk at the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group titled Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules.  This talk detailed modules that were useful to us in building the updated Center for Research Libraries website.
Download the presentation slides (Microsoft Powerpoint format) or View the slides on Slidesharet

Often, I find myself needing to do string mangling in spreadsheets. For instance, in an Excel dump of an MS Access database, the names of institutions were sometimes written as “Foo, University of” or “Foo U”. I wanted these to be formatted as “University of Foo” and “Foo University” respectively. I may be misinformed but [...]

As part of my work at the Center for Research Libraries, I am investigating different Constituent Resource Management (CRM) systems.  One of the options is CiviCRM, a popular FLOSS CRM.  As CRL is, in large part, a membership organization, I wanted to see if it was possible to represent the basic information that we keep [...]