as part of my birthday celebration, we spent the afternoon at ‘taste of chicago’ in downtown. with food tickets in hand, we visited the different booths and tasted a few things. we were also excited to see stevie wonder perform…although when i say “see”, i mean we saw him on a jumbo-tron from a distance. read more
Here it is… our brand new Western Digital 1 TB external harddrive. We recently got a new laptop, and between that and our old desktop rapidly running out of harddrive space, I thought that it would be useful to have a little more backup and extra storage. 1 TB (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) should last us a read more
summer has arrived, and it’s feeling sticky. it’s also usually more humid and stuffy whenever there are thunderstorms in the forecast. we haven’t been able to install our air-conditioning unit yet, and so in desperation i discovered a new way to help feel cool today; sucking on sore throat menthol lozenges.
we’ve been meaning to visit the chicago history museum for awhile, and today finally had the time to go. there was a small section devoted to the city’s sports teams, including michael jordan, of course. we gained a better understanding of how the city survived the 1871 ‘great chicago fire’ and then rebuilt and shined read more
Today I came across this fascinating talk on the idea of our society’s “cognitive surplus” by a thinker named Clay Shirky. Here’s one of the many interesting tidbits from his presentation: So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line read more
after putting it off for more than a year, i finally went to get an illinois driver’s license. after an early start, we had to drive to the town of niles to find an office that was open on a saturday. it involved a lot of line-ups, sitting, and a written test, but two hours read more
we went to our first ever kentucky derby party, hosted by tom and anne (a born and bred kentuckian). to get into the horse racing spirit, we first watched ‘seabiscuit’ and then indulged in various delicious kentucky derby treats, including derby pie and a mint julep drink. then after an exciting two minutes, Big Brown read more
over the weekend we were able to spend time with our friends sal, renata and mirko from yvr. mirko was keen to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo (a free zoo right in the middle of chicago, apparently established in 1868!) which seemed like a great idea. we were quite impressed; we saw rhinos and read more
we’ve been introduced to ‘rock band’. i’m a bit embarassed to say exactly how many hours we spent playing with the game over the last few evenings, but i’ve developed new respect for the 10 year old chinese kid on ‘ellen’ who played the top level guitar hero song flawlessly. here we are, novices. first read more
we went out for some pizza the other day. i noticed i was missing my cutlery so i asked the waitress for it. i was a bit confused when she came back with crayons and a children’s colouring puzzle thing. i realized she thought i said “colouring”, so after a few more tries of “cut-le-ry”, read more