Urban Sketching - Misc

Here are a few sketches from a few years back.

This is of Chicago guitarist Eric Lugosch whom I sketched while he was playing at a restaurant in Lincoln Square maybe around 2003. That's his signature on the picture. While the detail in the hands is obviously a mess, I was pleased with the simple accuracy of his face and posture. His signature and his hair was done with a fading brown felt pen that didn't scan very well, so I enhanced these details a bit digitally.

This is a self-portrait sketched in pastels on paper at an open house at the Hyde Park Art Center in Winter '07. It was done in a room themed as Andy Warhol style portraits; hung on the wall were various classic Warhol portraits (Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, etc.) and we were encouraged to use bold, non-representational color to evoke the mood of the subject. At the time I was feeling kind of burnt-out about work, so I took the instructions pretty literally, as you can see.

CloudCamp Chicago meeting Oct 21, 2008

Last Tuesday (Oct 21, 2008) was the Cloud Computing one-night conference "CloudCamp" hosted by Tech Cocktail. My company has some really time consuming web analytics tasks that take days to run, and we're exploring using GridGain to distribute the work over several servers, so it was a good chance for me to get an acquaintance with this field.

I've included a few photos from the event, that come from the conference's Flickr photogallery.

The meeting was alright. I didn't see anyone I knew there but had reasonably enjoyable small talk with mostly non-technical people during the drinking hour.

It wasn't a conference in any traditional sense of the word. There were no scheduled topic, no scheduled speakers. They did use the format used by O'reilly's "Foo Camps". They have a grid of sessions and meeting rooms on a whiteboard. All the squares are empty. Then they ask everybody who has a topic they are interested in to write it in a square on the board. Presto...you are now the moderator of that session.

I volunteered the topic "Software Engineering and Grid Computing". Eight really smart people showed up, including two physicists from Italy, two doctoral students, a guy from UBS, and a consultant from CohesiveFT, a Chicago company specializing in cloud computing.

Physics people have been doing grid computing for years, so they were levels above me. But interestingly, a lot of their problems have to do with resource sharing. There can be other research teams that also want to use the grid, and maybe they don't want the nodes installed with the same software you do, and the people with the biggest grants tend to win out.

The most interesting guy there was the consultant from CohesiveFT, Pat Kerpan. He had two pieces of memorable wisdom. (1) Rule of thumb: count on a 30% performance penalty imposed from the overhead of grid enabling your problem. (2) It's easier to bring the computing to the data than to bring the data to the computing.

He talked about the stuff their company uses for their clients called "Open Source Sun Hypervisor". This has an interface that allows you to trick out your nodes with whatever setup you want (e.g. pick and choose between java, tomcat, flavors of linux, struts, etc.) and get a multinode environment all set up in six minutes.

Several of the people spoke knowingly of "paravirtualization". Pat distinguished between problems that are "compute bound" vs. "data bound".

A few people referred to Hadoop. No one had ever heard of GridGain, but I don't think that Java development was strongly represented in that collection of people.

People have different aims in cloud computing. For a lot of people, they don't mind if a lot of virtual nodes are spread over one machine.

Virtualization was recommended as a convention even when you are doing one node per machine.

In many commercial applications, 4 virtual nodes per machine is typical.

Many people responded to my description of what we are trying to do at iCrossing with "why don't you just use Amazon's cloud computing"? To hear them describe it, Amazon gives you the flexibility to do whatever you want.

I could have attended some of the other sessions if I wanted to stay two more hours, but I split after mine. The other sessions were on pretty soft- or business-focussed topics. One guy led a session called “What color is your cloud?” There were two Microsoft people who found each other and made their own Microsoft-focussed session ("Cloud Computing in Windows 8 and SQL Server").

Urban Sketching Part 1: Chicago faces

A few days ago I started enjoying a new blog called Urban Sketchers. Urban Sketching is a name they're giving to a casual kind of amateur art emphasizing simple techniques like line drawing and water coloring, not making a big deal out of making a "finished product" or eliminating flaws, and emphasizing simple subjects found in ordinary life.

I loved this kind of art in Mollie Katzen's self-illustrated cookbooks The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. And a few years back I found another fun book featuring a similar style: The Moonlight Chronicles. Also, there's R. Crumb's sketchbooks and "Waiting for Food" books.

Cartooning was an early love of mine, and in 1997 I returned to drawing to chronicle a trip I took to Finland, Sweden and Russia. During that time, inspired by the excitement of travel, and having a lot of time on trains, planes and boats, I think I became a halfway decent Urban Sketcher.

This is the start of a series of postings featuring some of my better drawings. I'm beginning with the pictures I drew around Chicago after I returned from that trip.

Other parts in this series:
Part 2: St. Petersburg, Russia
Part 3: Jyväskylä, Finland
Part 4: Uppsala, Sweden

	I sketched this woman on the Chicago red line el. I'm pretty pleased with the way I captured her bundled-up posture as she held on to her purse while trying to catch a snooze. People napping, or reading books are the best people to sketch, because they don't catch you in the act and make you feel self-conscious.
Another napper on the red line el. Generally I would start with the forehead, capture the indent of the eye socket, the nose, and the cheek of the subject. If I got that first stroke right, everything else would follow no problem. So that first moment would take incredible concentration and self-confidence, because I hated botching a sketch.
	Shannon Russell, my girlfriend at the time, at Heartland Cafe. It's not the best likeness of her, although it captures her beauty.
This is Bill Yost of Parmly Hearing Institute at Loyola University Chicago, where I worked at the time. I was able to sketch Bill because he was concentrating on a seminar speaker---which I was supposed to be doing too. :-)
	Yet another person snoozing on the Chicago red line el.

All of my sketches from 1997 can be found in this photo gallery.

Recruiter tips: finding software developers

Recently a friend from a company outside of Chicago asked me some advice on how they should go about hiring a java developer. I found myself offering advice on screening techniques for technical people and how not to blow it, and found myself thinking, damn, these are things that professional recruiters should hear.

Despite this economy, the market for programmers seems very hot right now. (Seller's market.) I get contacted by a lot of recruiters all the time. When I'm actually on the job market, I get more of these cold-call emails/phonecalls than I can possibly consider returning. So unfortunately I have to go on their voicemail or email as to whether they are worth my time or not. (First impression is a big deal.) Many people say things that send bad messages, like the job description doesn't make sense (they want strange mixtures of technical and business skills), or there's too much detail on company operations and history at the expense of core details (e.g., what the software development environment is like, whether it's Windows vs Linux vs Mac, what webserver they use, etc.), or they want you to complete some coding test before you even get a how-do-you-do. When recruiters get the message wrong like this, the more senior and experienced people know to stay away, and you get more junior or unqualified people who are willing to go along...and you waste a lot of time discovering that, or even make the mistake of making a bad hiring choice.

So here's my advice. Before you contact any software developer, get a complete job description. Keep the description of the nature of the company's business to no more than 1/3 of the description; the rest should all be technical specifics of the programming core responsibilities. Make sure that part is written by, or at least with the collaboration with, a person qualified to manage that person. Get coached by that person on how to describe that position over the phone. When you find a person to contact, either get them the description in their hands before the phone call, or try to send it to their email address during the phone call. On the phone, don't try to say more than you know. Don't bore the candidate with the history of your recruiting firm---trust me, all recruiting firms histories and mission sound completely identical. Don't ask the candidate to read their resume over the phone to you; do your due diligence and show them that you've digested it already. If you meet the candidate first, don't insult them by making the meeting be about nothing. The recruiters who did the best work for me never asked me to meet them first. Hope that helps!

Goodbye, Chicago Tribune!

I loved working at the Chicago Tribune! Unfortunately I felt it was better for my career to move on and take another opportunity. Here's a photo essay about my experience working there.


It's a beautiful old building with lots of history and class. Being right on Michigan Ave was fun. While all the tourists were gawking at pieces of castles and churches embedded in the walls of the Tribune building, I'd walk right in to go to work. And there were great places to go during lunch, like the nearby Viet Nam memorial on the Chicago River. I got to watch the Cubs' 2008 division-clinching game from the Tribune's box suite. I enjoyed pizza on the building's 22nd floor balcony. One early excitement was our president dumping $1 million cash in singles on the office floor to challenge us to come up with fantastic ideas. The idea was that if our idea could generate a 3:1 ROI, our idea would get funded with that $1 million. (Alas, falling revenues and changing priorities caused them to back off of that initiative.) At the elevators down to my office in Tribune Interactive, Sam Zell placed one of his personal sculptures called "Beaurocratic Shuffle", a fatcat businessman with seven legs. The offices of Tribune Interactive themselves are simply breathtaking. Formerly the location of the printing presses before they moved to the Freedom Center on Halsted street, they now are three-levels of glass meeting rooms and concrete catwalks. (I've included several historical photos of what the space looked like with the printing presses.) The actual content of the work was unlike any job I've been at before. The daily rhythm was dictated by what was happening in the news, because if a big event suddenly drew a lot of traffic to any of the Tribune websites, it could cause problems. It never got boring there, because events like the R. Kelley verdict, the Tim Russert passing, any number of hurricaines, the Sarah Palin announcement, the UAL stock panic, or spikes caused by a Barack Obama photo gallery link appearing on Digg or the Drudge Report, we'd constantly have to suspend whatever project we were working on to fix something. Also, there were interesting technical challenges created by over a dozen different newspapers sharing a common content management system which had new stories being added by the minute. Plus it was a great group of people too, of which several remain friends. So long!

Noel Coward's "Hay Fever" in Forest Park

I am engaging in some free advertising for a brilliant production of Noel Coward's play "Hay Fever" which I saw this weekend. Circle Theatre operates out of a tiny playhouse in Forest Park yet they put on a performance which seemed perfect in its casting, direction, costumes and stage design. One might think that a play from 1924, especially this one with all its references to 'flapper' culture, was all about "period charm." But actually Coward's plays endure out of their portrayal of human nature, as timeless as Shakespeare's. The period details of Circle's production simply put Coward's words into a context that made it believable and realistic. Go see it if you can; it's playing through August 24.

Cold War Missiles on Chicago Lakefront

About a year ago I learned that Montrose Harbor in Chicago (Google Map) was once the site of a cold war era missile defense installation called a "Nike Missile Base". Back then I searched around for historical photos and couldn't find any.

Along comes a website from Michael Epperson on Nike Missile Site C-41 with tons of photos and information on this little known facet of Chicago history. Michael mostly covers the installation just south of Montrose at Jackson Park, which is no less interesting, but includes a picture of the Montrose installation as well (at left).

The site has a fantastic amount of related material on the Nike Missile system in general. Nike was a turnkey system that was installed all over the US. The site has a 30 minute video with typical cold war era production values, but with more subtle propaganda techniques than is typical for the era. It starts with kids playing and an alert adult concerned by the shadow of a plane flying by. It turns out to come from a kid's glider. The film chooses to avoid obvious scare tactics, and instead lays out an informative description of how the system works and the personnel that support it. There are also original operating manuals. Very enjoyable site for tech geeks to spend an hour perusing.

Eight Great Books About Chicago

Calling Chicago history 'fascinating' is a hard sell. Chicago's stories admittedly don't have quite the excitement of, say, a French Canadian exodus turning New Orleans into a rich mix of Cajuns, gumbo and partying, or oil and movies transforming arid the arid desert and chaparral of Southern California into an entertainment paradise. Instead in Chicago we have the histories of railroads, fixing drainage problems, and abstracting the sale of grain into futures contracts.

We forget about this stuff in school civics classes but it takes on more meaning when we grow into an economic frame of mind. The Chicagoization of America, not what I'd call a great book but an interesting one, credits Chicago with having created the blueprint for American city development. Early New York in relation to the rest of the U.S. was a microcosm of the relationship between Europe and the U.S. as a whole, where aristocratic lineage trumped self-determinism. Chicago wasn't previously settled by pilgrims or displaced Europeans and then organically grown from a series of villages and crossroads. It was built from dust by plain-speaking, unpedigreed opportunists who wanted to get rich. Within a short 75 years or so Chicagoans reinvented American business with the railroads, grain and livestock much like Google and Yahoo in our own times reinventing the economy out of the internet. Other cities in America, also lacking a ready-made European heritage to start from, grew up following Chicago's path.

To get your head around Chicago history, think of an arc beginning around 1850, an arc that hasn't yet come to rest anywhere to delineate multiple ages and eras. We're still on that arc, and it's still all about opportunity and money. There are no traces left of the World's Columbian Exposition or the Stockyards; the Illinois-Michigan Canal is paved over with the I-55; we barely care about the few extant buildings from before the fire. Why? The sentiment and urge to preserve for posterity is driven by the memory of different eras, for example when New York was colonized by the Dutch, when Paris was occupied by the Romans. Chicago started out as stepladder to somewhere, and its arc is about more ladders and bigger steps. We discard the older steps like the Stockyards. Our architecture, a source of exhilaration to visitors and residents alike, are the living symbols of this arc.

So Chicago history does get pretty interesting when you see it as a successful epic experiment to build and invent an American city from scratch. Here are eight books which tell different sides of that story.

Chicago Days : 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City. When a friend has just moved here, this is the book you give to welcome them to Chicago. More a coffee table item then a book, it consists of single-page descriptions of great events in the city's history, with photos. It covers items of a wide range of interest, from the textbook historical to pop culture landmarks (St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Babe Ruth's "called shot" at Wrigley Field, and John Dillinger's shooting).

The Devil in the White City. This is an absolutely gripping read, whether you want to learn about Chicago or not. It pulls a literary tour de force of interleaving three co-occurring true stories: the building and occurrence of the World's Columbian Exposition, the story of a serial killer who built a murder mansion posing as a hotel near the fair, and the story of the lunatic who assassinated the Mayor of Chicago. It's the story of H.H. Holmes, the serial killer that is the biggest draw of course, but along the way you get possibly the best available description anywhere of the most spectacular (and equally most forgotten) fair ever built. Reading that Walt Disney's father Elias Disney was a laborer on the fair, makes a tantalizing connection to modern times.

The Outfit. Chicago's mob is less glamorous and less storied than New York's, but there are some big stories here, such as how the power roles with Capone's mob became the structure for Chicago government and that of many other cities, and the role Sam Giancana may have played in the JFK assassination and Marilyn Monroe's death. The real star of the book is Murray Humpreys, aka "The Camel", the Outfit's lawyer. Under his quiet leadership for decades the Outfit outwit the law at every turn. He is also credited with inventing "taking the fifth" in the courtroom.

Nature's Metropolis. Here's a book for the more committed reader to learn about the history of Chicago's early development. It tells the story of how fixing the big drainage problem, reversing the direction of the Chicago river, building railroads fit into the grand scheme to make Chicago the next big American city. He puts it in a socio-geographic-economic framework in which rural and city areas co-evolved to meet each others' needs. The author is at his most brilliant where he describes how technology growth and the American psyche fed and transformed each other. For example, because railroads created an unprecedented time-travel of goods across America, a mental construction of the railroads as an information network took root in peoples' minds, and that guided the ongoing development of the railroad. The author even manages to sell the commoditization of grain as a great story, as he outlines the transformation of farmers selling their own bags of grain to pooling it according to quality and type and moving it around as though it were a liquid. A truly great book.

The Chicago River; a Natural and Unnatural History or The Chicago River; an Illustrated History and Guide to the River and Its Waterways. Harlem Ave and Interstate highway I-55 (known locally as the Stevenson Expressway) is not a place you'd go to for a picnic, for shopping or for much of anything. For thousands of Chicagoans and suburbanites its a flyover spot from home to work. But what occurs there are three features which comprise the entire reason for Chicago's existence: (1) the continental divide that slopes one way towards the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system, and the other towards the Mississippi passes through there; (2) it's close to two rivers that connect with each of those watersheds (the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers); and (3) the spot itself, wet enough to be called "Mud Lake" during rainy times, and a Portage (place to carry a canoe across) during dry. Settlers as early as DuSable got dollar signs in their eyes when they contemplated an uninterrupted waterway from the St. Lawrence to New Orleans, and the Indians even showed them how to do it by canoe. But for that geographic sweet spot, tagged "Le Portage-e de Checago" at the time, there would be no Chicago. Since the spot is 17 mere feet above Lake Michigan, you can't go and "see" the slope, or even appreciate it on Google Earth. Both of these books contain illustrations that spell out the details of this magic spot; both are worth owning.


Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City . When I was looking for books about my new South Side neighborhood, I was surprised to hear from the bookseller at Chicago's AfroCentric Bookstore that this 1945 sociology study remains to this day the best portrait of the social and economic forces that have shaped the African American experience in Chicago. History that has been marginalized in American education, such as the great migration of blacks from the south to Chicago, is described and its legacy analyzed. There are ingenious assessments of social themes that run through urban black culture, including clothes-consciousness, the complex feelings around light-skinnedness and "passing" for white, and a range of adherence to the law including such categories as "church minded", "non-church respectables" and "upper shadies". The books social science tone and the preponderance of charts and graphs make it a book you might not read cover to cover, but still worth the read in pieces.

Sin in the Second City. Another location in Chicago which is no tourist draw, the Hilliard Homes at Cermak and State, was once home to the most notorious red light district in American history, known as the Levee. Specifically, the corner of 21st and Dearborn (now nonexistent) was the location of the Everleigh Club, an brothel run by two sisters from Virginia that redefined the word opulent. What made the Everleigh Club stand out from the dozens of competitors in the Levee was the idealized presentation of its girls as immaculate angels from a fantasy world, a formula which Hugh Hefner would practice in Chicago 100 years later. Another startling revelation is that an old-fashioned "dirty word" comes from the name of a real person: Suzy Poon Tang was a harlot whose reputation so preceded her arrival in Chicago that chiefs of the Levee cooperated to share her among their various houses. It's even speculated that the phrase "get laid" comes a play on name Everleigh. This book paints a detailed picture of what must have happened behind those doors, how the madams of the houses were the Paris Hiltons of their day, the political and moral forces that created vice laws in America, and eventually brought the whole Levee down.

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Recommended Links:

Geography of Chicago's Portage:

• The Chicago Portage - Historical Synopsis
• Geography of Chicago (Wikipedia)
• Chicago and the Continental Divide (map for canoeing)
• Map from 1812 showing the Portage and the connected waterways all the way to Peoria, IL
• Chicago's Continental Divide
  
• Continental Divide (Wikipedia)

The Levee and Everleigh Club

• Sin in the Second City (official site for Karen Abbott's book)
  

A Rare Stockyards Artifact

When I moved to the near south side of Chicago, right away I wanted to find out where the Union Stockyards used to be. This historically famous place is now just acres after lonely industrial acres of bottling plants and truck storage facilities (see this Google map), with the exception of the limestone gateway still standing in its original location.

I was surprised to stumble across this old tourist's pamphlet from 1903 which gives an interesting glimpse into what passed for tourism at one time. In its heyday, seeing the assembly line slaughtering of animals at the Yards was a "must" for any visitor to Chicago.

Thanks to Sharon Williams' Chicago History blog, where I found this.