the reality tunnel

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

I hear “Oona’s commmming!!! …” and then a stream of tag playing kids pours off of the playground equipment. Picking up O+F from school is way better than being at work.
It’s a little alarming that at any given moment there’s at least one pair of boys trying to pin each other to the ground. [...]

I pulled my car into the remnants of a snow bank near the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Further down the block and across the street, the curbside was bare. According to a volunteer at a storefront across from the mysterious snow bank, the snow was created as [...]

I think I feel most connected to the city on transit.  Last night I talked to a friend and the idea of things that weren’t a presence in my life before I moved to Chicago came up.  I think that one of those things is just a pervasive and surprising sense of collective experience.  Today, [...]

Florence needs braces in a pretty serious way (potential future jaw and other pain) and now is the time that it’s best for treatment to begin. Unfortunately, it costs some serious bank.
Chiara started a Facebook group to help Florence out:
Florence needs braces as soon as possible to fix her overbite and avoid future messes such [...]