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Chicago Sun-Times:

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

Last time I went to Chicago, I took several such bags. One had spare batteries in. Another had the change from my pockets while I was going through airport security.

In Chicago, the police are asking loyal citizens to report anyone seen using a map or binoculars, or taking photographs.

Meanwhile in California, police are stopping drivers who have done nothing wrong in order to compliment their driving and give them $5 gift vouchers.

Both of these seem to me to be misguided. The former is obviously nutty; do they really want the 911 dispatchers bothered by some paranoid who just saw someone take a picture of Chicago’s art deco architecture?

The latter I can understand the motivation behind, but I can’t help wondering how many recipients will feel that the gift voucher is worth  the stress and/or anger of being pulled over. And for a US cop, any time you stop a vehicle, you’re risking your life; I can imagine them stopping a good driver who happens to have a car full of drugs, and having him freak out and start shooting.

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

I’ve had a stressful couple of weeks.

At work, on the 1st we rolled out a brand new replacement I had built for a heavily-used database system. It’s now in use across the USA and Latin America to manage high profile events leading to multi-million-dollar business deals. Everything went fairly smoothly in the end, but still–stressful.

Then last week I had a business trip to Chicago. My hours there were pretty much 100% filled; although the scheduled meetings ended early on the second day, I then had a server crash and some network problems to deal with, plus a new server build that I confirmed was OK just in time to get in a cab and dash to the airport.

I am now trying to relax and not snap at the spouse.

An amazing article from the Chicago Reader describes a recent incident in which an out-of-uniform police officer who was late arriving to work, shot an unarmed man in the head at point blank range, in full view of security cameras.

The officer lied and said that at the time of the shooting he was surrounded by 4 or 5 men who had threatened his life. When police discovered that the video footage existed, the story was changed to say that the victim had raised a fist and attempted to disarm the officer, and that the cop had raised his arm and accidentally shot the victim through the head.

And it gets worse from there. I encourage you to watch the footage and listen to the narration.

I’ve had some pretty hellish experiences on plane flights. I’ve traveled from the UK to the USA while suffering from the ‘flu, on a plane filled with rowdy cheerleaders. I’ve been trapped for several hours on a motionless plane in Chicago, with all the ventilation and air conditioning turned off. However, a recent news story is putting my experiences into perspective.

An elderly woman died near the start of a flight from India. British Airways propped up the body in a spare seat in first class. The first class passengers then had to deal with not just the presence of the corpse, but also the corpse’s daughter, who spent the remainder of the 9 hour flight sobbing inconsolably.

Then once the plane landed, they all had to sit there for an extra hour until a coroner could verify that they hadn’t caught anything from the corpse.

One passenger complained to British Airways. Their official response is that he should “get over” it. Nice.

Recently I watched a documentary about a group of 5 UK teenagers who went away to a Summer Camp in the US.

I remember Charlie Brown used to go away to summer camp. I always thought it was a strange idea; one of those very American institutions that Americans probably assume exist everywhere, like college fraternities and drive-through restaurants.

This particular summer camp was more of an institution than usual, though: it’s a camp for children who suffer from Tourette Syndrome, often as well as OCD and ADHD.

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I’m in Chicago to put signs on doors. No, really.

IBM is setting up a swanky new customer briefing center, where major customers are given custom presentations, attend hands-on technical demonstrations, and are shown proof-of-concept systems. Outside each room will be a video screen. The plan is for each screen to show the room number and name, the title of whatever event is happening at that moment (or starting soon), the times of the event, and the name and e-mail address of the IBM contact responsible for the event. There may also be a need to put custom logos, screenshots, clip art or animation on the screens.

There are turnkey systems for doing this sort of thing, but they cost a ton of money and are a pain to administer. So, we’re building one in-house. Or more specifically, I’m building the software, a colleague is installing the (Linux based) hardware. Each room will be driven from a central Domino database, which can be managed by any authorized user, and is integrated with the system used to book meeting rooms. The screens will show a web page, implemented in XHTML and CSS, and displayed using an embedded version of Firefox (I hope, or else I’ll have to do some extra work to downgrade the web design). The page will simply refresh every N minutes.

The hardware only arrived on Friday, so everything was booked at the last minute. I picked the closest hotel to IBM that had broadband. It turned out to be the Hard Rock Hotel in downtown Chicago, on the north edge of the theater district. The current IBM office building is a short bleary-eyed zombie-like morning walk away, and there’s a Starbucks across the street from the obvious route, so that works well.

Also just down the street is the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist. Until now, the only Christian Scientist church I had seen was the one in Boston, labeled First Church of Christ Scientist. I had thought that that was just the full brand name of the church, like the First National Bank. It hadn’t occurred to me that they actually number the things. Thank goodness Starbucks didn’t take that approach, or they’d have problems fitting wide enough signs on the stores.

This evening I walked to the original Pizzeria Uno. Just down the street someone had started an independent pizza restaurant called Pizzeria Due, with a very similar logo. I thought this was pretty amusing, and would have eaten there, but there was a queue almost as long as the one in front of Uno.

I’m sure I heard something about Chicago having a tough economy; yet someone is clearly doing well, as downtown is infested with condo developments. Many local businesses have recently shut down, and often have “Coming soon: more condos!” signs on the windows. A condo here starts at $200,000 or so.

Further evidence of selective richness: I saw a shiny silver Lambourghini downtown. I think it was a Countach. I love the design of the Countach, and the name—it turns out it’s the Italian equivalent of “Holy crap!”. The car got that name because when people living near the Lambourghini plant saw the test car being driven, they tended to say something like “Countach!”. A security guard was standing looking at the car. I’m not sure whether he was a guard from a nearby store taking a break, or whether it’s possible that someone is rich enough to hire a guard to stand and watch his car.

There’s also an enormous Apple Store. It’s just like one of the stores in the original Grand Theft Auto—the one where there’s a special stunt jump that involves driving through the plate glass windows and up the glass staircase.

If you like Art Deco, Chicago is the city for you. It’s everywhere. The hotel is in a historic building, and has some beautiful metal elevator doors on the ground floor. It also has an authentic deco mailbox set into the wall; or rather, something which used to be a mailbox. It doesn’t have a slot any more.

Looked at the air conditioner filter in the Prius. Saw that it was encrusted with filth, covered in tufted seeds (dandelions?) and had collected a few leaves too. Checked the price of a replacement filter: $19 for a regular one, $35 for an electrostatic.

Went to Target, got a 3M electrostatic filter for $4, cut it to fit the Prius’s filter holder. Job done.

Surprisingly, Reader’s Digest ranks Austin as the 8th cleanest city in the USA. (Just don’t drink the water.) I say surprisingly, because it seems like the pollution here is dreadful–it’s almost like they don’t bother with vehicle emissions standards at all. (Oh, wait, who was the last state governor? Which state went straight to #1 in pollution levels? Never mind.)

Thinking about it more, though, the streets are clean. And whereas Boston/Cambridge/Somerville had various areas that always smelt like rotting garbage (for instance, the intersection near the Twin City Plaza mall), I’ve not encountered any skunk-gaggingly stinky places in Austin. Yet.

Chicago is ranked the dirtiest major city in the US. Looks like I’m going to be there at the start of next month, so maybe I’ll get a chance to see if it’s true. Right now, the sum total of my knowledge concerning Chicago is what I learned from watching The Blues Brothers and playing SubLogic Flight Simulator (in which Meigs Airfield was one of the key locations).

So, on Monday morning sara set off to catch a 10:00 flight to Chicago. At around 16:30, she called to tell me she was still at Logan airport. I’m sure she’ll have a few words to say about United Airlines when she returns.

Monday was Patriots Day, notionally a holiday in Massachusetts. It was also a Bank Holiday in the UK. I decided to work anyway, as it was a good opportunity to roll out a redesign of a vital 3GB database while nobody was likely to be needing it. Everything seemed to go more or less according to plan, until some kind of glitch dumped a few hundred old e-mail messages in my inbox.

In the evening, I met up with Mark and we went to Buddha’s Delight in Chinatown. He suggested it, saying he’d never been before. Apparently he doesn’t eat vegetarian very often.

Afterwords he came back to take a look at the iBook and iMac. I also showed him Linux. Some time this week, hopefully, we’re going to try switching his old PC to run Linux—all he really uses it for is web, e-mail, and the usual office tasks involving spreadsheets and writing documents. He’s had Windows Me self-destruct multiple times, and is ready to try something a little more stable.

After that, we played video games—mostly Cookie and Cream, which is a two-player game of almost Nintendo-like cuteness involving two bunnies who have to race through level after level of obstacles, co-operating to help each other past the various hazards. I also showed him Rez, which he agreed is very cool. Then he had to dash off to get the last train home.

Today I cleaned up the inevitable unforeseen problems from yesterday. Obviously the one thing I didn’t think to check (because I hadn’t changed it in any way) was the one thing that broke, in completely mysterious circumstances. Once I’d fixed that up and cleaned out my inbox again, I dealt with various end-user requests, and that was about it for the work day.

This evening I’ve been mostly tidying up and repairing stuff around the house.