I recently moved from Chicago to Vancouver, BC.  Of course I miss family and friends.  I never was a huge fan of deep dish pizza.  With the close proximity of world class outdoor activities and the buzz around the 2010 Winter Olympics coming to town I haven’t found myself waxing nostalgic for the Windy City.

At least until I settled down to work and was looking for a little background noise.  I’ve always had a stereo or my Griffin radio Shark near by so I can listen to WXRT.  

Unlike so many of the radio stations out there which recycle the same 20 songs, WXRT plays a wide variety of songs.  The station also puts out a great CD each year called ONXRT: Live from the Archives.  The disc is always full of great live performances artists record for the station or at local shows and all of the proceeds go to worthy charities.  Picking up this year’s Volume 11 (which ironically looks like a deep dish pizza) was one of top errands to run on my recent trip back to Chicago.

When I left Chicago one of the first things I checked was if XRT had dumped the old AOL, Windows-only stream and luckily they had.  So for a while I listened on the tinny speakers of my MacBook Pro but eventually felt the need to feel the bass without having the length of the aux cable to my stereo limiting where I could sit and work in the apartment.  Enter one of my favorite indie Mac dev shops, Rogue Amoeba and their product Airfoil.

 

Airfoil lets you send any audio stream to an Airport Express so you can fully enjoy your wireless freedom. Almost…

The frustrating thing was the WXRT player is essentially a Safari window.  For Airfoil to work it often needs the application whose audio you’re hijacking and re-routing to the Airport Express to be restarted.  Restarting almost any application but Safari or NetNewsWire is feasible for me.  But like others, I use my browser tabs to keep track of a lot I have going on.  So I’d tend to listen to the same old Wilco and Smashing Pumpkins from iTunes rather than opting to restart Safari.

That is until I discovered Fluid and made my own site specific browser.  It was silly easy to create WXRT.app using Fluid and now I can listen to WXRT without disturbing all those browser tabs.  Until Google Chrome is released for OS X I can get some of the benefits by using Fluid.

 

October 31st, 2008 | apple | 2 comments

I’ve been saying I’d do it for a while but this post marks the start of my post-Chicago blog. Unlike Rideabout this will not be specific to my travels or a particular trip.  Although since I’m traveling now it might not seem that way initially.

Started my morning in Chicago on a beautiful sunny Fall day. While photographing “The Bat” in front of the Chicago offices of Social Security Department I was reminded of a disturbing trend of late when a security guard came out and warned me I could take pictures of the sculpture but was not allowed to point my camera at the building. I had this happen earlier this summer at another location and have seen it happen many times in and around the building of the Orbitz offices — none of which are federal buildings. But does it matter if they’re federal or not? It is no secret Social Security as it stands today is hosed. Were they afraid I’d uncover something?  It was quite obvious I was there as a photographer and not on a recon mission. I don’t think I look threatening or like I should be forced to wear an orange jump suit ala Ted Kaczynski. Maybe I’m wrong…

Anyone determined to get a picture of the Social Security or any other building downtown could do it without much trouble. It bothers me as a photographer in search of new pictures but it bothers me more in how this kind of attitude has begun to permeate American society. Not to mention I probably couldn’t count on my fingers and toes how many surveillance cameras captured me as I captured the bat from every angle which (mostly) didn’t include the Social Security Administration building.

 

I’ve always enjoyed looking at the city from this location.  For some reason it is quintessential Chicago to me –  I think it’s the El on Lake Street crossing over the river.  Of course the location where I’m standing is also where the Great Chicago Flood of ’92 started. And with that, my first trip back to Chicago as a non-resident was over as I was off to ORD to make my way to Central America for the rest of October. First stop, Costa Rica.

October 17th, 2008 | photography, travel | No comments