CHICAGO CARLESS

Wimax Woes in High-Rise Chicago

Mike Doyle — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:39:07 +0000

When CLEAR Wimax launched its speedy 4G wireless broadband service in November, I was so happy I immediately signed up and then proceeded to beat my finicky AT&T DSL modem to death with a hammer. The first month of zippy speeds and streaming movies was fun while it lasted.

By December, though, I noticed my signal strength–and access speed–steadily degrading. Before Thanksgiving, four shiny green modem lights and six megabytes of speed had me glued to full-screen Netflix Instant Play. Today if I’m lucky, two come-and-go modem lights bring me a 4G wireless connection so slow, I have to wait for YouTube to cache low-definition, 90-second videos.

It isn’t as if my service has gotten any cheaper. Annoyed to be paying DSL prices for evaporating service, this month I asked CLEAR to send a tech support representative to my apartment–on the 38th floor of Marina City in downtown Chicago, directly across the Chicago River from the Loop.

When he arrived, I explained that every night, I watch my modem reset thanks to regular midnight maintenance on CLEAR’s part. And about once a week, after the modem finishes resetting, my connection speed is lower than before. I was getting afraid that one night my service simply wouldn’t come back.

As it turns out, that might come to pass. The tech told me service was speedy at street level in downtown Chicago. It’s these pesky high-rises that seem to be the problem. You know, the ones that clump a few hundred strong throughout downtown Chicago and stretch for 26 miles up and down the lakefront? If only Chicago were a flatter city–lower to the ground, as it were–my speed would be phenomenal.

Actually, it’s not the high-rises, alone, causing the problem. As the tech explained, it’s the fact that “too many people are signing up for service too quickly” for CLEAR to maintain an adequately strong 4G signal. So as growing popularity degrades the signal, the point-of-no-return for a useful signal gets closer and closer to the ground.

Of course I had great service in November, the tech told me. CLEAR didn’t have many customers yet, at that point. Worst of all, CLEAR has no plans to add towers or boost the signal. My choices are to cancel my service without penalty or to wait it out until demand and capacity balance out.

Or move to a shorter building.

Obviously no older than 25, I was sure the tech had no idea what he was really telling me. That is, that CLEAR’s rollout plan for Chicago–the city that invented the skyscraper, as evidenced by the fact that we actually built a couple, two, three of them here (look closely next time you’re outside in thew Windy City and if you’re lucky you might see one)–is inadequate for a significant segment of this market.

That means if you’re a business owner, a renter, or a condo dweller in one of those high-rises that CLEAR finds it hard to believe exist in Chicago who’s been considering Wimax broadband service, right now you may be out of luck. Too bad. When it worked in my apartment, Wimax was just as fast as my old DSL modem. It attains pretty good speeds, too, when I plug in my USB modem and take my laptop to a ground floor coffee shop, and worked great the whole way on a recent trip out to Naperville on Metra.

It would be nice if CLEAR actually noticed the high-rise Wimax problem in Chicago. When I complained about the issue recently on WindyCitizen, a CLEAR representative with what I can only imagine to be questionable reading comprehension responded by sending me a personal email. It was an offer for discounts if I get my friends and family to sign up for the service.

I wish CLEAR the best of luck should they ever decide to roll Wimax out in New York City. I hear they have high-rises there, too. Someone should probably let them know.

In Defense of CTA “Doomsday”

Mike Doyle — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:32:52 +0000

Today, at long last, comes the day Chicagoans have dreaded in one guise or another since the bad old era of the Blagojevich regime: CTA “Doomsday”. You might be surprised to learn I welcome it with open arms.

At the stroke of midnight, approximately 20% of Chicago transit bus service and 9% of ‘L’ rail service was eliminated, including all arterial express bus routes, and 1,100 union workers lost their jobs. It happened because the CTA’s unions refused to offer pay and pension concessions at a time when sales tax revenues to help fund the system are at perilously low levels.

You can’t say we–and the union–weren’t warned. For a year, the CTA has advised anyone who would listen that the punishing cost of the existing union contracts simply could not be borne by current revenues, and that something would have to give. Either the union, or transit service, itself.

Unfortunately, after all the aborted cries of CTA “Doomsday” heard over the past few years, this time no one really felt like listening anymore. The state always seemed to ride in like a fiscal Lone Ranger and cover any budget deficit just enough to stave off service cuts. Even I thought that would happen this time around.

Last November when Illinois Governor Pat Quinn offered monetary aid to the CTA only on the conditions that fares not increase and threatened service cuts go forward, I thought he was pandering to longtime community activists who constantly rail against fare increases. (As if costs don’t naturally rise over time, for transit service or anything else.)

Now I see the wisdom in Quinn’s move. We’ve argued in this state about the cost of Chicago transit in good times and bad. Even before CTA “Doomsday” was so clearly on the table, the fixed and seemingly unquestionable cost of transit union wages, health care, and pensions was impossible to justify.

The reason is clear. The CTA exists to do one thing: that is, move three million Chicagoans around this massive city. That is its only reason for being. Not to provide guaranteed, lifelong jobs for union workers. And certainly not to protect work rules and compensation regarding those jobs to the point where moving those three million Chicagoans around becomes impaired.

Unfortunately, impairment of service has finally come to pass, and we three million Chicagoans have the unions’ stubborness to blame for it. The unions refused to give, so transit service gave out instead. If Gov. Quinn had allowed the CTA to raise fares or had provided enough state money to stave off fare increases, we’d just be in this position once again next year as the transit unions dug in their heels and thumbed their collective nose at the potential for service cuts.

I’d much prefer my tax monies be spent on providing the transit service so needed in a city as congested as Chicago, rather than being used to ensure a false sense of entitlement among union workers who, unlike many thousands of Chicagoans, are lucky enough to at least have jobs. Of course, now 1,100 of them don’t have jobs anymore, and I’m sure few Chicago transit riders who will face longer waits and more crowded commutes this week feel any sympathy for them.

But today’s cuts are the only way forward. Unless Chicago transit service is to be permanently reduced or priced outrageously high (remember the Sunday-only service levels and $5 rides proposed during the Blagojevich administration?), then it’s the unions who must give back. That’s the gist of Quinn’s strategy: once and for all show the transit unions you mean business by finally allowing “Doomsday” to happen.

Today no one wins. But if the 11th hour intervention by Mayor Daley is any indication, the negotiations are far from over. While the mayor could have intervened a little sooner, it’s a help that he did. As the weekend began, the CTA’s unions were offering $90 million in givebacks to get today’s layoffs and service cuts reversed. If they manage to reach an agreement with the CTA, within a couple of weeks, bus and ‘L’ service levels could be back to normal.

That would be good news. Not just because Chicago would have its transit service back, but also because precedent would now be set to revise transit union work rules and compensation agreements to ensure that in the future, Windy City transit service is never again held hostage by a group of self-interested workers refusing to share the pain of a bad economy with their fellow Chicagoans.

I hope such an agreement happens. The only chance of it happening, though, is for us transit riders to bear the hopefully temporary pain of today’s service cuts. So welcome, CTA “Doomsday”.

I guess we had you coming.

Antigone Goes West: A Man, A Dog, A Bike…and 2,000 Miles Towards A New Life

Mike Doyle — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:32:10 +0000

This post originally appeared on the ChicagoNow blog, Chicagosphere.

Know this first: this is the most emotionally compelling blog I’ve ever read, and perhaps the best. A Chicago writer and pet lover loses his job, gets fed up with the economy, and decides to bike to the Pacific Ocean to promote pet adoption, with his favorite Basset Hound, Antigone, blogging the trip from her doggie trailer. But it’s the candid bravery of the human author that shines best as Antigone Goes West.

Chicago fiction author Marshall Lee, 41, was working an unstressful office job to give him the time and mental energy to write. The job evaporated with the economy last year, and Lee had a heck of a depressing time finding a replacement gig.

A stalwart Basset Hound-lover, and not a great fan of a Chicago winter (who is?), as Antigone tells it, one day Lee’s demeanor changed. Last fall, he came home with a bike and a little animal trailer, started taking her on practice rides around the northwest side, then around Chicagoland. And the next thing she knew, she was being towed across the country.

Laptop in paw, apparently.

Lee decided to give up the Windy City for the warmer winters (though no less onerous job market) of the Pacific Northwest. Figuring such a monumental move ought to be put to good purpose, he decided to make the trip by bicycle and dedicate his effort to Basset Hound adoption. And the best way to make that happen was to “let” Antigone blog the journey from her canine perspective as the scribe of Antigone Goes West.

It’s a touching, heartwarming, and at times melancholy blog, as Antigone chronicles the towns and states through which they pass, and the mood of her human companion as his well-known past recedes in the distance and an unknown future looms larger into view.

They’re in southern California now, trekking the last few hundred miles to the Pacific coast in San Francisco. Once there, the official journey will end and the pair will head up to Portland, Oregon, and potentially on to Seattle.

Today, in the midst of the Californian desert, Antigone remembered her origins in a sad puppy mill. Earlier this month, she was worried about the mood of her human companion as evidence of the stress of the 2,000-mile journey became apparent, as it had a few weeks before, in Colorado Springs, Texas.

Of course, there have been many happy moments, too. The inexpensive repairs at the bike shop in Tempe, Arizona. The fun of the foothills of the Continental Divide. The U.F.O. museum in Roswell, New Mexico. Meeting friends in Kansas City, Missouri.

Lee hopes to raise consciousness for Basset Hound adoption, and the blog offers numerous resources for you to become involved. His effort has earned him praised and media coverage along the way.

But this blog is something deeper. It’s an unexpectedly candid look into the heart and soul of an average Chicagoan forced by the hard times we’ve all been facing lately into making an extraordinary decision. This is as much Lee’s story as Antigone’s, and it’s an astounding one.

It is not lightly that I say, of every blog I’ve ever written about, this is easily the most personal, honest, and affecting story I’ve ever encountered. I’ve cried reading Lee and Antigone’s story. I’ve laughed, been riveted with attention, and rooted for this pair.

Why Lee isn’t a published author I don’t know. What I do know is Chicago’s loss will be the West Coast’s gain. If you want to read one the most compelling personal blogs you may ever come across, read this one.

From beginning to what I hope will be a well-earned, warmer-wintered end.

The New Chicago Carless

Mike Doyle — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:31:08 +0000

Today I’m officially announcing the newly redesigned Chicago Carless. The new design–this blog’s third since debuting in June 2005–is an adaptation of the powerful, image-friendly magazine-style theme, Mimbo. (The change was inspired by the recent redesign of the thought-provoking personal blog, Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind.) I invite readers–especially those who read Carless via my RSS and email feeds–to come take a look around the new site and let me know in the comment thread what you think of the new set-up.

First and foremost, this third version of Chicago Carless now features six main channels to help individual readers better delve into the content in which they’re most interested. The new homepage features these channels in the navigation bar (with nifty dropdowns), and shows recent posts in each channel in the left sidebar. All topic categories are now grouped within these new channels, which include:

ADHD Life: A home for my well-received posts about my life experience with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder;
Chicago Way: Almost everything I write that has to do with living in Chicago and Chicago politics, history, architecture, and related lore;
CTA Blues: All content related to CTA service–or lack thereof–as well as Metra, Pace, Amtrak, driving, and walking around the Windy City;
Daybook: A home for my memoir posts–find love, sex, dating, spirit, my backstory, and the Tuesday night coffee gang in this channel;
Media Social: My observations about the blogosphere, social media, and traditional media, as well as a home for all cross-posts and promos from current and previous bylines that I’ve written for other websites; and
Technology: Including my “I’m Not a Mac” series–the chronicle of my ongoing migration away from the Apple Mac computing platform–as well as other tech-related posts.

In addition, the homepage is much shorter and more manageable now, featuring attractive thumbnails and brief summaries for new and recent posts instead of a long scroll of entire entries. The Recent Comments widget in the right sidebar has also been improved, now grouping comments according to the post to which they belong. And the Search and Subscribe functions have been simplified and grouped together atop the right sidebar (mouse over the buttons to see what each subscription option is for.)

Commenting now requires registration on the site and the submission of a verifiable email address and here I humbly ask the patience of my readers. This is an automated process that readers only have to do one time. I choose to enable registrations after much forethought. The new requirement will allow me to better reach out to commenters and should help generate a stronger sense of community here on Carless. Equally important, it will help guard against spam and anonymous verbal attacks on Yours Truly, other commenters, and public officials about whom I write. I expect the readers who will find registration most onerous will be such anonymous trollers who fear putting their email address where there mouths are. I’m going to put this one back on hold for now, but I’d love to hear reader comments about the idea.

Another, more obvious addition to the site (you can tell me whether they’re an improvement or not) are ad widgets. After nearly five years of keeping Chicago Carless non-commercial, I think it’s fair to finally explore revenue options for the more than 500 posts that I’ve written here.

You’ll notice an ad box in the right sidebar and another one atop the comment thread of each post. At the moment, I’m using Chitika search-based ads in the sidebar, alternating with an Amazon affiliate ad for readers who arrive on the site through bookmarks instead of search, and another Amazon affiliate ad in posts. This will likely change as I find my footing with blog ads.

And for those who constantly ask me, I’ve finally written an answer as best as I can give one to explain Why I Write Chicago Carless.

Finally, a technical note. Adopting the Mimbo theme has necessitated that I re-edit each and every post on Chicago Carless to ensure that thumbnails and summaries work the “Mimbo” way. So far, I’ve fixed posts dating back to September 2008. Earlier posts will unfortunately have a broken design container at the very top of the page. Scroll down–the post in its entirety is there below. I’m trying to edit 30 to 50 posts a day and will report on my progress in the comment thread. I hope to all archived posts “fixed” by the end of the month.

So…what do you think?

Carless Under Construction

Mike Doyle — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:12:48 +0000

Chicago Carless is currently under renovation. I apologize in advance for any wonky things that happen when you visit the site in the meanwhile. I should have all the kinks worked out of the new template by week’s end soon. (And isn’t it a nifty one?) You can find progress updates in the comment thread of this post. Thanks for your patience!

CTA Transit Union Deserves No One’s Sympathy (Video)

Mike Doyle — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:30:27 +0000

UPDATE (1/21/10): A CTA union board member complained today in my comment thread that past union-member pay raises have been put instead towards health insurance and pensions–so they deserve raises now. I’m sure many underemployed or unemployed Chicagoans would love to have health insurance or a 401K plan. It’s as if the CTA union has been living in a different economy than the rest of us for the past 18 months. The comment needs to be read to be believed…
___

Today in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) transit union complained that 1,000 union workers will lose their jobs on February 7th. The rest of us 1.5 million CTA ‘L’ and bus riders know that as the day almost 20% of Chicago transit service will be eliminated–because the transit union refused to share the pain of a bad economy with the rest of us. In this video, I explain why CTA riders owe no sympathy to the soon-to-be-sacked union workers who needlessly caused commutes to get a lot worse for an entire city of transit riders.

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

The Point of Social Media Is the Social, Not the Media

Mike Doyle — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:27:30 +0000

(Photo: Part of the wall of patron photos at the now-closed Lido’s Caffé.)

Last month on Chicagosphere, I wrote a popular post about how social media helped save a financially struggling local business. Unfortunately, social media wasn’t enough to save a popular Oak Park coffee shop. Lido’s Caffé, the home of a longstanding coffee klatsch that germinated on Twitter–my coffee klatsch–succumbed to the ailing economy last week. Yet in the shop’s failure is a lesson in online community–and how to translate it to real life.

Founded in mid-2008 by three fifty-something friends who wanted to open a business to retire on, Lido’s Caffé was a breath of fresh air in downtown Oak Park. The eponymous Lido Petrucci, his life partner Louise Mihalik, and friend Jan Louis, along with sneak-attack singing server Tina Pekovich, dished out more than Italian coffee, sandwiches, and gelato from dawn to far past dusk at their Marion Street café. They made their customers feel welcomed–to the point that several nearby regulars seldom ate in their own homes. It was, in fact, a feeling of family.

In September 2008, my close friend, local corporate trainer and chef Christopher Mahoney (yes, Pastry Chef Chris from this very blog), a former Oak Park resident, suggested we start a game night for our combined city and suburban friends. The same week we came upon Lido’s, which immediately felt like home to me, thanks to it’s New York-style Italian café vibe. We decided to replace games with coffee and gelato, and the next week, what came to be known as our Tuesday Night Coffee Klatsch was born.

(Photo: A gelato case to be sorely missed.)

A month into its existence, a Twitter follower of mine, Emily Culbertson (also of Chicago Carless fame), sent me a curious tweet: “Was that you at Lidos when I was just in there buying a banana?” It was, we met, and from then on the coffee klatsch was shouted out on Twitter, every week like clockwork. Tuesday nights at 6:30, Lido’s Caffé. In 16 months we barely missed a week. Sometimes we were a dozen people and sometimes just a pair, but in that time probably 50 people came through to share caffeine and real-life community with us, most of them organized from Twitter, then herded to the café in weekly emails.

I’ve written a good deal about our group here on Carless. For some reason, at Lido’s we felt safe enough to share the most bizarre and amazing stories amongst each other. (Read for yourself, for example, about the evening of the cocoa condoms, or why you should never initiate a high-speed chase from the Wisconsin police.)

I guess we always knew it wouldn’t last. Marketing was never strong at Lido’s. I blogged about Lido’s on Gapers Block and created a Twitter account for the café, but it was never put to any great use. As you might expect, there was never a Facebook page, either. The economy–coupled with the inertia of Oak Parkers to have their evening fun outside the village–eventually dealt the death blow. As 2010 began, the cafe announced its impending closure.

(Photo: Lido’s counter in 2008.)

As a testament to the power of Lido’s to foster community–both online and offline–immediately, college students who worked at the café and several interested regulars mounted a fundraising effort to help Lido, Louise, and Jan make the rent. But the proceeds from local indie bands and ad-hoc art auctions aren’t enough to stave off a persistent landlord who isn’t in the mood to play Let’s Make a Deal.

We held our last Tuesday Night tweetup at Lido’s on January 5th. Petrucci cried when we gave him a card signed by us all. In it, we thanked him for the real-world warm welcome that helped a disparate group of people, many of whom had never met in person before meeting on a Lido’s Tuesday night, become–in the best and most honest sense of the word–friends.

To our great surprise, the Oak Park Leaves newspaper chronicled our final Lido’s tweetup, as well as the reasons behind the café’s closure. And with that, the “Cheers of cafés” closed, and 16 months of community building may have gone with it.

(Photo: Pastry Chef Chris, grinning from ear to ear, with regular and occasional coffee klatsch participants.)

And that’s when we all realized the miracle that Lido’s had wrought for us. No, sadly, social media was not put to good use by Lido’s owners in order to save our beloved weekly home-away-from-home. Instead, Lido’s had given us a safe haven for turning electronic Twitter acquaintances into real-life friends on a regular basis. Every month, sometimes every week, Lido’s Caffé was the catalyst for alchemizing the virtual into the real. We wouldn’t have been so emboldened to so regularly take that step into the real world with each other without the home we were given by Lido, Louise, and Jan.

We’re an itinerant coffee group now. But thanks to the community building of the past 16 months, we remain a group, regardless. We even had newcomers at our final coffee klatsch at Lido’s. And this week, we had newcomers again in our temporary January home, Noble Tree Coffee in Lincoln Park (2444 North Clark Street.) I’m sure we’ll bounce around a few more times before we decide on a permanent home, and I know we’ll never recapture the magic that was Lidos.

But we’re proud to realize that we’re the moral of the story. There’s a miracle in social media. The miracle is the people on the other end of the keyboard from you. The ones you’ve tweeted and direct messaged forever but whose faces you’d never recognize on the street. Don’t miss an opportunity to meet them in person. Create those opportunities, if you can. Because the point of social media is the social, not the media. Media comes and media goes. But if you’re lucky, social endures.

May you be as lucky as we were.