Al Iverson's Bacon Rodeo

Blog Using Your Own Domain Name

2010-02-20T16:50:00.000-06:00

Here's why you should always blog under your own domain name, and never use a subdomain under one of the popular blog services: They could take the name away from you at any time, as one Tumblr user found when his blog was displaced to give his URL to Pitchfork. Lame. Of course, even if you do use your own domain, that might not stop Tumblr from deleting your blog, but you could then at least resurrect it elsewhere.

Resident charged in fatal apartment building fire

2010-01-17T13:13:00.000-06:00

The Trib's Chicago Breaking News site reports: "Mahad Ali Hassan, 26, of 6720 N. Sheridan Road, was charged late Saturday night with first-degree murder, aggravated arson and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer John Mirabelli."

Here's a prior story on the fire from the same site, with more details about the blaze.

6720 North Sheridan -- The Day After

2010-01-15T14:37:00.004-06:00

Here's 6720 North Sheridan Road the day after the fire. Looks a lot quieter today, doesn't it? Sad to think of the people who were hurt, the one person who perished, and of course, the people who are now homeless, thanks to their apartments being ruined by fire, smoke, and/or water damage.

6720 North Sheridan Fire Update

2010-01-14T16:04:00.003-06:00

According to CBS2:

One death; multiple injuries. :(
Somebody jumped from the back before they could be rescued. They are in critical condition.
Two firefighters were injured.
Might have been arson. Gasoline found nearby.

CBS2 used some of my pictures on their website, including the one accompanying this article.

I fumbled trying to shoot cell phone video with my phone; was hard to see the "recording" indicator. This left me with a handful of very short clips. I was able to stitch them together into a single Youtube video.

Fire at 6720 North Sheridan

2010-01-14T13:11:00.006-06:00

I spent the morning working from Starbucks, then was going to walk down to Five Guys and grab a burger for lunch. I walked out the door of Starbucks and wondered, why are all those people standing there? What's that smoke? Oh no, the apartment building at 6720 North Sheridan Road was on fire. Smoke seemed to be pouring out of two middle windows on the top floor. (The building is a four plus one.) Just as soon as I had walked out and saw the smoke, I heard sirens, and police and fire showed up seconds later. It was clear that I was in no position to help, so I hung back and took a few pictures.

Click here to see some more pictures from the fire and rescue efforts.

One lady was sticking her head out of her fourth floor window, telling people she couldn't get out of her apartment. This was right when the fire trucks were arriving. The CFD didn't spend any time messing around. They very quickly set things up so they could get a ladder up to her. She did make it down OK. She's on the stretcher here, I wonder if perhaps only due to possible smoke inhalation. At the same time, the firefighters were helping one or two more people down from another fourth floor apartment on the other side of the fire.

It looks as though the people in the two adjacent apartments were able to get down safely, thanks to the good work of the Chicago Fire Department. Here's hoping that the burned apartment was unoccupied.

Update: One dead and four injured, according to CBS2. :(

Celebrate New Year's Eve at RoPa

2009-12-29T11:04:00.001-06:00

RoPa, located at 1146 W. Pratt is offering New Year's Eve specials as well as their regular menu. Don't forget to call and make a reservation (773-508-0002). Read about it on the Rogers Park Business Alliance blog.

Grand Victoria Casino, Elgin

2009-12-28T12:32:00.003-06:00

Saturday was our first wedding anniversary, and since we were married in Vegas, we decided to adventure out to a casino to celebrate. It was, uh, an adventure.

We took the Metra train to Elgin, which was fun, except for the drunk people and young kinds riding all over hell and gone with their $5 weekend passes. (I swear, we ended up sitting next to one particular loud douchebag on both trips. When he got on as we were heading back downtown, we actually ended up switching cars to get away from him.) In spite of that, riding Metra is still nicer than riding the L, as many stations are newer and cleaner, and some have someplace indoors to stand and wait away of the cold.

There was a pretty big FAIL in our adventure plan; the website for the Grand Victoria Casino points out that the casino is only a block from the Metra stop. Which Metra stop? I guess I didn't pick up on it from Google Maps, and assumed they meant the Elgin stop. So we got off at the Elgin stop, which turned out to be nearly a mile from the casino. That's kind of a long walk when there's a ton of snow on the ground, sidewalks are unplowed, and the snow's pounding you in the face.

I'm kind of pissed about this. The Grand Victoria Casino's website says, "The Metra Milwaukee District West Line will take you to the Elgin train Station located approximately 1 block from the casino." What it actually needs to say is: It's one block from the National Street Metra station, not the main "Elgin" stop. The National Street stop is about a block from the casino. Much closer than the Elgin stop.

But hey, we were wearing warm coats, and I only slipped and fell in the snow a couple of times.

Once we got inside, we realized, hey, this casino is actually pretty small. Nice looking, but there's not much going on there. We kept expecting there to be another gaming floor on the boat. (There seem to be two levels; the main level, and a much smaller lower level.) We were disappointed by the small number of cheap slots to play; there were a whole hell of a lot of $1 and $5 slots. Fun for five minutes of play, but I'm not going to spend $400 playing five dollar slots. The money just vanishes too quickly.

The casino has banners pointing out that they are ranked as the most fun casino. This was a head scratcher until it dawned on me that they're talking about "in Illinois".... only. The casinos in Indiana and Michigan are not included in this ranking. We've been to both the Ameristar and Horseshoe casinos just across the border, and we had more fun both times. Next up on our list is to try the ones in Michigan.

They had a nice looking little steak house, and we considered having dinner there, but we got bored so quickly that we ended up taking the Metra train back to downtown Chicago and we had dinner somewhere in the city instead.

Lessons learned: 1. If you take the Metra to the Grand Victoria Casino, make sure you get off at the National Street stop. 2. Who cares, because we'll never be going to the Grand Victoria Casino again..

Yikes: Tribune's New CEO & Freedom of the Press?

2009-12-21T16:42:00.001-06:00

Hard to say what's worse: That the Tribune's new CEO Randy Michaels is an ex-shock jock who sounds like he's the embodiment of the bad end of the sophomoric element of morning radio; or that NBC Chicago squashed a pretty straightforward piece on this guy, and nobody's got the balls to give author Steve Rhodes an honest answer as to what happened.

Good on Steve Rhodes for walking over this. I would have done the same.

Also, when did NBC decide to turn all their TV station websites into mini paid blogs? NBC Chicago's website now looks like a tiny little Salon.com-wannabe, which strikes me as useless. I wonder how much of their traffic is misdirected; people coming to the site to look for info about shows and schedules and news; which is not exactly what the site is nowadays. I wonder what their bounce rate is; I'm guessing "much higher than they would like."

And I wonder how long until NBC starts to realize that the internet is forever.

Verizon: FAIL

2009-12-13T18:05:00.001-06:00

Well, that was a short adventure. On Wednesday, I stopped into a Verizon Wireless Store and picked up a Mifi 3G pocket router/modem. It's small, it's neat looking, it's easy to configure.

Over the next few days, I spent some varying amounts of time trying to get online with the thing. It connects fine, but after a few minutes, the connection would always get really slow. Looking at its web interface I would find that it dropped down from EVDO (3G) coverage to 1XRTT, the slower, older data connectivity standard. All EVDO modems seem to support this, and it's not uncommon to "fall back" to the slower level of service if the modem can't find a 3G connection.

The problem is, it keeps doing this, over and over, even in a supposedly "good" coverage area like Chicago. I couldn't find a setting to prevent it from connecting to the 1X network (I'd rather have it drop the connection), and it seems to stay on this slow link, even when it could go back to EVDO.

My hours of use all went like this:

Fire it up. Online with 3G/EVDO.
10-15 minutes later, why did it get slow?
Oh, we're on 1XRTT.
Power cycle the modem.
Reconnect. At 3G/EVDO speed.
10-15 minutes later, why did it get slow?
Oh, we're on 1XRTT.
Power cycle the modem.

etc...

To Hell With That. My current Sprint modem is better than that is. I don't know if it's the specific Verizon device, or if my home is in a dead spot in Verizon 3G coverage. Don't know, don't care. I need it to work, and since it doesn't work, I returned it today and canceled the service.

My Verizon retail experience was superb. Both trips to the Verizon Wireless store were easy and quick. Staff there is polite and friendly, and I found that hugely positive. But, if they can't keep me online, there's not much chance of me being able to be a Verizon customer.

3G vs. 3G: Whose mobile data network is best?

2009-12-08T12:38:00.002-06:00

My colleague Matt shared this very detailed article from Telephony Online that breaks down who actually has the best 3G network. It's nice to see some data applied to the question of whose network is better; I trust data more than I trust Luke Wilson.

I have a Sprint 3G USB modem currently, and I'm not really happy with it. I have what feels to be a lot of connectivity issues; dropped connections, etc. So I've been thinking of what I could do about that. I could switch providers, maybe get a 4G/3G combo modem, maybe switch to Verizon, who knows.

Here's what the author has to say about each provider:

Sprint: The article points out that Sprint has the strongest signal: "Typically 90% of its footprint receives receives signals of 50% or greater of full strength." But, Sprint has "the highest data connection failure rate, as high as 15% in Seattle, while the rest of the operators kept their failure rates well below 5%. So while Sprint 3G customers are getting more bars consistently, they’re much less likely to actually complete a data session."

Forget AT&T. "In most markets, 30% to 50% of AT&T’s footprint received half-strength signals or worse, which in part explains many of the lack of coverage and capacity complaints " Yeah, I don't care if they give out 3G modems for free with a service plan only charging me $1/month, I'm still not switching to AT&T. Everybody I know complains about poor services on their iPhones. I don't care if it's the device or the network; I'm just not jumping into that pool of fail. Not to mention, I tried an AT&T 3G modem about a year or so ago, and I couldn't keep a reliable connection in my home neighborhood in the city of Chicago proper. If it doesn't work at home, is it going to work on the road? Dunno, don't care.

What about Verizon? Here's a useful data point, specific to Chicago. Verizon users have a 2% chance of data connection failure, while Sprint users have an 11% chance. Hey, that sounds familiar.

The article points out that Sprint users tend to get "more bars" than Verizon users -- but even with more bars, they have more trouble connecting. What's up with that? Verizon's network speeds in Chicago (259k down/138k up) are just a tiny bit faster than Sprint's speeds (236k down/72k up), too.

T-Mobile isn't really on my radar. I have them for voice service and data service on my cell phone, and I'm happy with it. But, their 3G network still isn't built out enough at this time. I drop down to EDGE quite a bit when wandering around Chicago. At least I do get a reliable data connection just about anywhere I go.

Verdict: I'm going to go buy a Verizon modem today and cancel the Sprint service.

The Ethics of Content Syndication (or "Theft")

2009-12-05T19:57:00.010-06:00

This weekend, while dealing with yet another dillhole who thinks it's kosher to republish content I've authored sans consent, I figured that perhaps it was time to again point out the ethical considerations relating to content syndication and republishing.

This article by Antone Roundy is a great place to start. In the article, he shares "a few of the generally accepted rules for syndicating ethically to avoid injuring the publisher." These include:

not syndicating feeds that explicitly forbid it and honoring all requests to stop syndicating feeds (pretty obvious).
not syndicating the full content of feeds that contain full content (just display an excerpt)
always linking to the original source of the content (ALWAYS — don’t skip this one)
linking in a way that’s visible to the search engines (eg. don’t use ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ in your link tags or use JavaScript links)
caching the RSS feed locally on your server so that you’re not using the publisher’s bandwidth to reload it every time someone loads your webpage (this isn’t just an ethical issue — it speeds up your website significantly too)

O, Hai! See what I did there? Let me break it down for you: I'm used content written by someone else as a reference, leverage it as content for my own site, and drive additional traffic to his site, all in one simple exercise. I did it by excerpting and linking to the original source material. I was able to do it without stealing the other blogger's content, nor did I pretend that it was published by the author on my site.

Let's add to this a little; perhaps rephrase it a bit. Why don't we call this next set Al's List of Things Only Content Stealing Douchebags Do:

Content-stealing douchebags take your RSS feed, and using a script, incorporate entire articles into their own website, as if those articles were genuinely provided to that site for purposes of repulishing.
Content-stealing douchebags take entire posts from your website, repost them on their own website, providing the false impression that you are somehow associated with their site.
Apparently, some content-stealing douchebags will go so far as to steal content from an author's LinkedIn profile and re-purpose it into a bogus "About the Author" page, implying that the author has a connection with the thieving website, when none exists. Yikes.

Incidentally, if you quote entire articles in your blog posts or articles, you're still a content stealing douchebag. Fair use and ethics both imply that a small excerpt is okay, but "select all," followed by "copy," followed by "paste" is accurately described as stealing. An author publish my articles in specific locations for various important reasons; by republishing that content elsewhere, without that author's consent, you're diluting or otherwise modifying an author's online presence in a way most authors do not want to allow, and the law does not require them to allow. (And if that's confusing to you, please go read the ethics article again. And if that's still confusing to you after reading it again, go ask a lawyer.)

And finally, copyright-stealing douchebags should also keep these three very important facts in mind:

At least one of the websites they steal content from is likely to be a multinational corporation with an easy ability to take UK-based legal action for copyright violation. Hint.
Occasionally they are going to steal the content of somebody who knows how to defend themselves. As I've mentioned to others, my long history of spam fighting provides me with ample expertise in making bad actors really unhappy. This includes, but is not limited to, sharing information about the transgressions with a very large audience, contacting other supposed "content authors" to reveal to them your theft of their content, and ensuring that every time somebody searches your name in Google, they'll find my account of how you don't seem to respect other peoples' intellectual property rights.
When confronted over content theft, If they plan to dance around the topic by telling content owners, "oops, sorry, but the site is getting you more recognition and will get you even more traffic in the future as we take it to the next level (paraphrase)" you should probably make sure your site actually gets any traffic at all. (Or hide your hit counter, if you don't wish to reveal that the only significant draw of traffic to your site lately has been my publicized efforts to get you to stop stealing my content.)

New Website!

2009-11-09T13:20:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I set up a website for my favorite hot dog stand, the Wiener and Still Champion in Evanston. Why do people charge so much for websites? I just don't see the point, unless there's some big, significant value being added over what you can do on your own, with a few hours of elbow grease. The site is hosted (free) with Blogger. I think it cost, in total, $6, for the first year of the domain registration.

I ended up starting with this "Natural Health" Blogger template -- which I think is pretty funny considering it was going to be for a hot dog stand -- and tweaked it until I ended up with the yellow, orange and red thing you see before you today.

Country-Fried Gyros!

2009-11-06T22:36:00.002-06:00

Are you tired of me talking about Wiener and Still Champion yet? No? Good.

Last night Kate and I made our way up to WaSC in Evanston after work, both to meet up with our friends and to sample some of the new goodies on the menu. Our trip was well worth it, we were rewarded with many delicious deep-fried treats.

Gus welcomes us to Wiener.

Country-fried gyros. It's breaded. It's deep fried. It comes with a delicious cucumber dipping sauce.

Getting up close and personal with the gyros. I was surprised how well the batter flavor works with the gyros meat. It's not incompatible. The only down side is that it's probably about 8,000 calories, and very heavy. Can't imagine eating this every day, but every once in a while? Hell yes.

What the heck is that? It's a Deluxe Dippin' Dog. Underneath the pile of chili and cheddar cheese you'll find a dippin' dog - Gus's trademarked corn-battered all-beef hot dog. It's goooood.

Deep fried chili! It's apparently scoops of chili, battered and deep fried.

Eating a deep-fried chili ball is like eating a piece of cornbread with chili hidden inside of it. It's really quite good.

(By the way, I suspect I'm obligated to inform you, under the new FTC guidelines, that this delicious food was provided to us free of charge. Don't hold it against me...or Gus.)

We Miss Lucy :(

2009-11-04T17:25:00.005-06:00

More after the cut.

Hana Restaurant on Sheridan

2009-11-03T13:45:00.001-06:00

Hana Restaurant is open! Located in Rogers Park at 6803 Sheridan, in the old Mandarin Restaurant space, they serve delicious Japanese cuisine, including teriyaki and and sushi. I stopped in for lunch today and had the pleasure of being the second customer. I loaded up on sushi rolls: California, Spicy Tuna, and Philadelphia. The kind proprietor also gave me a piece of nagiri to try; I think it was barbecued unagi, and it was delicious. Didn't see that on the menu, but I'll be sure to ask about it next time I stop in. Everything I tried was all very good and I can't wait to go back some time soon for dinner with my wife. I imagine she'll try the teriyaki or tempura, since she's not much of a sushi fan.

Hana Restaurant
6803 N Sheridan Road
Chicago, IL 60626
(773) 338-8815 Phone
(773) 338-8895 Fax
Menu (PDF Format)
Google Maps

Saturday with Copying Files and Crazy Rebooting XP Funtime

2009-11-02T12:45:00.003-06:00

I walked up to my office on Saturday to catch up on work (having been out at two conferences the whole week prior), and also to swap some hardware around. All because I really want an iMac.

I can't afford an iMac. The quad core 27" one costs about two grand, which I can't afford at the moment. My home desktop, where my iTunes library and all my graphics stuff lives, is an aging Gateway dual P4, a huge tower that sounds like a jet engine. I hate it and I can't stand working on it for any length of time. What COULD I replace it with, without spending any money?

I had an MSI Wind CS120 Nettop sitting around doing nothing. I bought it back in March to use it for our living room entertainment center, but the setup never really worked the way I wanted it to. For the past few months it's been gathering dust in a corner. An Atom processor with weak video wasn't my idea of an upgrade.

I did have a Mac Mini, though. It was my web server/linux desktop at my office. Speedy little box, it'd do nicely (if weirdly) running Windows XP, managing iTunes and my graphics stuff. And the MSI Wind Nettop ought to make a fine webserver, considering that in the past, I ran 30+ websites simultaneously on a P90.

So, because I really want an iMac, which I can't afford, I spent much of Saturday transferring all my linux and web server files from the Mac Mini over to the MSI Wind, making the Wind my new XNND.com server, making sure I've backed everything up from the Mini, then taking the Mac Mini home, wiping it, loading a spare XP license onto it, and setting it up to be my new desktop computer at home.

Saturday was a day spent copying files. It was irritating to sit at home for hours installing XP, backing up the Gateway desktop (while the jet engine whirred), etc. But, there was happiness, in anticipation of being able to retire the beast, having a new, quiet, tiny, faster desktop in its place.

Everything was going swimmingly, more or less. Until Kate and I came back from dinner out at RoPa. I came back to find that the Mac Mini had rebooted itself constantly the entire time. It would get through the XP startup screen, then dump and automatically reboot right at the end of it. Over and over and over, probably for about 900 times while we were out.

Turns out some driver or DLL had become corrupted or wasn't compatible with the hardware. I'm not sure what caused it; I had installed a bunch of different drivers and application. The Apple Boot Camp drivers, all of my various applications, and things like Open Office, SlingPlayer, iTunes, etc.

To make a very long story short, the whole point of this post is for me to write down what happened, to help the next poor soul that comes along. Here's what I did, here's what I figured out, and here's how I fixed it.

XP is apparently set to reboot automatically if it dies mid-startup. Hit F8 a bunch of times as Windows begins to boot. You'll get a startup options screen. Disable "automatic restart on system failure" here.
Start it up again and now you'll actually get an error message when it dies. In my case, it told me that "iertutil.dll is missing or corrupt."
Don't bother trying to restart in safe mode. It'll just die after the mup.sys driver loads. You'll think the mup.sys driver must be to blame. You'll waste hours trying to figure out what to do. Don't bother. The mup.sys driver is not at issue; it's just where the startup process happens to die, whenever certain types of driver or DLL corruption occurs.
Start up off of your XP install CD.
Launch Recovery Console.
Change directory to the location of the bum DLL.
Rename it to iertutil.dll.bad or whatever
Reboot. Your computer will work, sort of. Mine would get as far as the explorer desktop, but just sort of hang there, because it couldn't launch explorer.
Read this page that guides you on how to replace a file on your computer when explorer won't launch. This is a clever hack, using the task manager as a mini-file manager. I used this to copy the DLL from my other Windows XP desktop machine to the Mac Mini.
Reboot, and everything works! I can't believe it.

Lots of screwing around, all because I want an iMac. But, this is working well. The Mac Mini is faster than my old Gateway tower, and life is much better. The lack of the jet engine noise alone is worth it.

Hey, what's a Bacon Rodeo?

2009-10-20T17:25:00.009-05:00

You might have noticed (or might not have noticed) that this blog now lives at www.baconrodeo.com. I've decided to move the blog off of aliverson.com and turn that URL into a sort of a calling card website with links to all my different blogs and projects and such.

Why "Bacon Rodeo"? Uhh, I don't really have a good answer for that. I register lots of domains for different purposes. Sometimes it comes in handy for testing or tracking to have a domain nobody knows about. A domain you can let lapse later on, when some payday-loan-email-sending-jerkwad sells your seed email addresses to ten thousand of his closest friends. So, I have a lot of domains, and I didn't really need this one for anything any longer. And it gave me an opportunity to draw a Bacon Rodeo logo, based on the "push button, receive bacon" meme, which has always been a favorite of mine. (And because I'm an ex-design geek, I kept some sense of design consistency going among my logos by continuing my use of DuePuntoZero for the logo's typography, as I've done on Spam Resource and elsewhere.) Stay tuned for a new www.aliverson.com, coming soon.

Speaking of bacon, allow me to heartily recommend the deep fried bacon from Wiener and Still Champion. I recommend that everyone try it. Once.

Sullivan's $69 for Two

2009-09-27T17:25:00.004-05:00

Thinking I was over my bit o' viral unhappiness the other night, Kate and I wandered downtown to go to the post office and have dinner.

The post office mission was a failure; seriously, nobody there is helpful, and my dreams of easily obtaining a PO Box were dashed. So much for that. After leaving the post office, and walking around a bit to calm down after that awful encounter with stupid people, we pondered what to do for dinner. Steak sounded good (it always does), but it's kind of expensive, and we might have been under-dressed. Wandering around a bit, we walked by Sullivan's. I can't remember if we had ever eaten there before, but I have had a drink in the bar before, and I like the place. Lo and behold, they had a sign outside talking up their "Summer of $69" three-course dinner for two. So, that's what we ended up doing. Ate in the bar, at a table by the window, had a couple of drinks, and we each had a filet mignon. Yum! It was really good, and a good bargain, too.

Blogger Lookin' All Fancy 'n Stuff

2009-09-25T20:09:00.002-05:00

Check out my fancy new Blogger template. After I re-skinned Spam Resource last week, I figured it was about time to update this blog, as well. I can't remember which tempate this is, but I got it from btemplates.com. It wasn't too hard to drop into place, and wow, it looks so much better than any of the default Blogger templates. It took a bit of time to add-in all the widgets I wanted, and to re-add any links that fell off when I swapped out the template, but that was no big deal.

If anybody out there wants help reskinning their Blogger-hosted blog to make it look a little better, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd be happy to help. I'm looking at you, Toni!

Photoshop 7 Works on Linux!

2009-09-21T13:11:00.001-05:00

Woot! It turns out that Photoshop 7 runs fine under Wine on Ubuntu. Annoyingly, my legal copy of Photoshop is version 6, and it does not run in Wine. It runs through the startup process, then dumps out right as it tries to draw the tools palette.

Photoshop 7 "just works," from what I can tell. I didn't really have to do any messing around with settings. I did notice that it barfs if you turn on a virtual desktop. Disabling that, everything went smooth as silk.

Now the real question is, where can I cheaply buy a legal copy of Photoshop 7? Googling finds a ton of copies of Photoshop 7 Elements, which is not the full application.

I did find a 30 day trial version - search for "adobeps7tryout.exe" if you want to try to wrangle your own copy.

New Video Store?

2009-08-07T13:03:00.004-05:00

Looks like Tom Westgard's old office space at (I think) 6970 Sheridan (at Lunt) is going to become a video store, according to the notice of a zoning change request found taped to the window as I walk by it today.

What's a video store? People actually use those nowadays?

Now Open: Five Guys

2009-07-14T08:57:00.003-05:00

Over on her Tales from the Lake Shore blog, Neighbor friend Red Haired Girl reports on the new Five Guys Burger Joint, just opened at Sheridan and Arthur/Loyola.

I can't wait to try this place out. I tried to go there for lunch yesterday, but it was too busy. And I'm in Indiana for most of the rest of the week, so it will have to wait until this weekend.

400 Theater Opened Last Night

2009-07-02T10:11:00.002-05:00

Kate and I went to see Public Enemies at the New 400 Theater (formerly the Village North) last night. Our experience was mostly positive, and we're definitely glad that the theater is back open again. I hope they're not quite done renovating; there's some disappointing, incomplete facade work on the outside around the doors, and the inside hallways and lobby looks like the grandest expense spent was put toward a coat of white paint. Also, the screen in auditorium #4 seems to have a hot spot in it, perhaps due to a bump on the wall or a shadow from some leaking light source.

I'm sure I've made the new owner very unhappy with those statements, but I have to call it like I see it.

That being said, it's great to see the theater here; it provides a valuable service to Rogers Park, and helps to keep our neighborhood alive and vibrant. I want the theater to succeed, and I hope the plans for success include putting a little more elbow grease into making the place shine.

Parking on Pratt and Sheridan?

2009-07-01T14:37:00.003-05:00

We rented a car to go out of town last week, as we occasionally do. We returned to Chicago on Monday night, but weren't able to return the car until Tuesday morning, as Enterprise wasn't open in the evening. Yuck, a night of street parking. My least favorite thing about Rogers Park.

That got me thinking -- is it possible to get occasional temporary parking permits for the permit parking in the neighborhood? I don't actually own a car, so I wouldn't be buying a city sticker. If it's allowable to occasionally get a temporary permit, how does one go about doing that?

Beware: Woot Sent My Mom Dying Flowers, Doesn't Care

2009-05-27T18:31:00.005-05:00

I just wrote the following email to Consumerist, CC'ing Woot. If you're considering buying something from Woot, you might want to read this first.

Dear Ben and Co. at Consumerist,

I'm wondering if you can help me out here, or if at least, you could help me by sharing my story with others.

On May 4, the "one deal per day" online store Woot had this neat little rose bush for sale for $29.99. They guaranteed that it would be shipped to my by Mother's Day. I had ordered about once per month from Woot and I thought this was a neat idea, and I was a big fan of Woot, so I ordered one for my mom. ( http://www.woot.com/Forums/ViewPost.aspx?PostID=3172889 )

They did indeed deliver it on May 8th. She thanked me for it and said she liked it. Problem is, I found out later that it arrived sick and dying. It died somewhere around a week after she received it. She didn't tell me at first, but I found out after that it was unwell the entire time, and that the roses never bloomed, and it ended up dying. My mom is a very savvy gardener, so she knows how to take care of a
rose bush.

She didn't tell me that it died until about May 17th or 18th. It took me a few days to follow up, because she left me a voice mail, and we live hundreds of miles apart. When she did tell me it was dead, I looked up and found that I wasn't the only one who received a dead or dying rose bush (see the last page of the discussion thread on this Woot item -- see
http://www.woot.com/Forums/ViewPost.aspx?PostID=3172889&PageIndex=11&ReplyCount=433#post3188368 ).

So, on May 20th, I followed up with Woot, asking them to refund my money. The wrote back telling me to call NuDell at 678-730-0701. I did and they said sorry, they can't help me, these plants only have a 7 day warranty. I thought to myself, hey, that's a bit odd, and we're not talking about closeout electronics, we're talking about a plant.

And it did indeed seem to die within about a week of being received. Since NuDell told me no, I went back to Woot. I explained the situation and asked if they could refund my money, or if I should file a credit card charge back. Riley from Woot responded with, "Unfortunately, we do not have the item on hand. If the item was dead upon receipt of it, why did it take you so long to contact us about it?"

At no point did I say the item was dead upon receipt, but I did politely reply and explain that my mom lives 300 miles away and it took me some time to understand what had happened and follow up. Jordan from Woot responded with a one line reply instructing me to call NuDell again.

I wrote back, again, and explained that NuDell told me no, and that I'm asking Woot to make it right for me, because Woot is who I bought the item from.

All the correspondence is below. (Not included in this blog post.)

I'm wondering if there's anything you can do to help, if Woot will notice this and help, or if I should just give up and file a credit card charge back. I'm not paying for a diseased plant, it's not right. As I explained in email to Woot, I realize that I'm a nobody, but I've spent an average for $50 per month with Woot for the past four months, which is when I first heard about Woot. That, plus the theory of me
continuing to buy more stuff from Woot in the future, makes me wonder if perhaps a little bit of support and customer service would be appropriate here. I like ordering from Woot. Wine.woot in particular is awesome. But, if I have to be worried about getting screwed over because somebody is going to ship me something other than what was promised, I guess I can't feel comfortable ordering from Woot in the
future.

I was a happy Woot'er until this happened. One of my friends turned me on to Woot, and I've turned on my friends to Woot. Yes, I know that iPods only come with white headphones. Yes, Woot did mention the "7
day warranty." I wondered what warranty there could be about a plant when I read that. Something's wrong when you get a plant and it dies within 7 days, or within 8 days, or within 9 days. And knowing that this happened to various other Wooters too is disappointing. I see multiple reports of dead and damaged plants, or plants arriving late, or not at all.

Like you often do, I'd welcome any public statement or response from Woot, if they'd care to make one. My communication with Woot hasn't gone so well. It looks like they're just copying and pasting the same info back at me and not reading what I'm writing.

Thanks for taking the time to listen to my story. If you decide to post this, please edit it as desired.

Best regards,
Al Iverson

5/29/2009 Edit: Yesterday (5/28), Woot sent me a one line reply to the long email above: "A complete refund has been issued." Thanks, Woot, though I'm still a little bummed that this is what it took to get that refund. Since Woot didn't CC Consumerist on their reply, I forwarded it on to Consumerist, in case they decide to publish my letter. (Woot also seemingly forgot to apologize for screwing this up, and not making it right, and not actually reading what I wrote. They also left out the bit about how they care about my business.)