The centerline file I am working with that has every road in the United States contains 31,971,068 road segments. My computer is running very sssssllllllloooooowwwwww............

I think the phrase "legislating from the bench" is stupid and meaningless.

Sheri got her flu shot this morning, and I am going to get mine tonight after work.

Click here to find the closest place for you to get your vaccination.

We just got back from a nice day in Chicago.

There is only one express train into the city on weekends, so we rushed out of the house to make sure we made it. I didn't get to spend any quality time in the restroom at home, so we stopped at the W Hotel so I could use their facilities. It would have to be a dire emergency before I would do anything besides number 1 at Union Station.

Then we walked to State Street and hopped on the Red line to Chinatown. Sheri had nothing for breakfast and I just had a glass of soy protein, so we were ready to eat by the time we got there. We did a quick up and down on China Place and then decided to eat at BBQ King House.





We ordered a half order of barbecued duck and a small order of barbecued pork. They brought out a delicious pot of hot tea and two bowls of some of the most delicious chicken (duck?) broth I have ever had. Just perfect. It got our appetites really going.

Then they brought out the plates with the duck and pork and two bowls of rice.

Pork


Duck


Notice in the picture above what a rich color the tea has. A lot of Chinese restaurants make their tea so weak it is one step above hot water.

I LOVED the duck. The skin was very crunchy and with good flavor. The skin seemed thinner and much less fatty than chicken skin, but I still limited myself to just a few mouthfuls of it. The meat seemed to be halfway between white meat and dark meat. A great combination of flavor, moistness, and tenderness. It didn't come with a head; I suppose since it was only half an order.

The pork was also very good. Mostly meat with very little fat to pick out.

We spent almost two hours walking around Chinatown. We stopped into a couple places to split a sweet and a drink. Stopped in a few stores that had a lot of unusual things: shark fins, dried stomachs (I don't know from what animal), dried seahorses, deer antlers, bird nests (for soup), tons (literally) of ginseng, and about 1,000 other neat things I can't remember.

Sheri's neck and shoulder have been bothering her this last week, and this morning when she woke up it was really bothering her, so we picked up some Tiger Balm and I massaged it into the tender area.







We decided to hop back on the L and head up to Wicker Park and hang out in the Filter coffee house for a while. After just a station or two on the L we stopped, the doors opened and a guy went running past saying the train was on fire! We had smelled something odd, and it got progressively stronger, but we just thought it was a brake pad that was new or got stuck.





The station was filling up pretty quickly with smoke, so we figured the train wasn't going to be moving for a while and we had better find a different way to go north. Fortunately we were at the Roosevelt station which lets you transfer to other lines. We got on a green line for a few stops and then transferred in the Loop to the Blue line. It only took us a few extra minutes, plus we got a little adventure.

Sheri was excited to take me to Filter, but I didn't like it as much as she does. For starters they allow smoking, and just about everybody was. They can't be too serious about their coffee if they allow the smell of cigarette smoke to overpower the good coffee smells that a coffee house should have.

Secondly I didn't like the vibe the place had. Everyone looked like they were taking themselves way to seriously in a pretentious way. I have also never seen so many Apple laptops and iPods in one place. This crowd definitely more style than substance. And no, the coffee was very average.

Having said that we did have an enjoyable visit. I read the paper for a bit while Sheri worked a crossword, and then we both switched to doing Sudokus. It is an interesting place for people watching, I just didn't want to talk to anyone there.

After at least an hour there we thought we would see if Quimby's had anything interesting. On the way there we passed a pizza shop called Santullo's. The pizza slices I saw looked and smelled wonderful. Piece was just down the block and Sheri wanted to try that, so we kept walking.

Once in Quimby's I crashed. I could have curled up in the corner for an hour or two and slept soundly.

We went to Piece, but they don't sell slices. You have to get a whole pizza, which was more food than we wanted, plus we were running short on time before the only express train back home left.

We went to Santullo's and I think we are both glad we did. It is one of my new favorite pizza places. It serves New York style pizza and it is very close to the what we had in Brooklyn last year. We just got one slice and a drink to split, but I think we were both more hungry than we realized. Sheri denies it, but she woofed down about 2/3's of the slice, so we got another one. The crust is very very thin (like real New York pizza) and it will not support the weight of itself if you try to pick it up. That is why you have to fold NY pizza in half. It works perfectly. Kind of like a pizza sandwich. The cheese, sauce, and crust were all excellent quality. That is now on my list of places that I have to go when I am in the city or showing out-of-towners around.



We took the Blue line back to the Loop and walked to Union Station. Sheri got us a small bag of freshly (still hot) made bag of caramel corn from Nuts On Clark to split on the train.

We are both out of the shower now and don't know if we are going to watch a movie or just TV. I am on the tired side and might not be able to get through a whole movie without falling asleep.

Here is a map of the five Chinese barbecue restaurants we are going to check out today. We will take the Metra to Union Station, walk east to State St. to get on the Red line, and take that to the L stop at Cermak and Clark.

click on the map for the full size image

I was trying to login to the Chicago Tribune's website for almost 5 minutes, but they didn't have me listed as a subscriber. I was just about to click the button to send a help message to the customer service department when I noticed I was on the Columbus Dispatch website. Old habits die really really hard.

It's a nice Friday morning. I'm in a good mood. Feeling generous. I am going to share one of my power user secrets.

You may have asked yourself "How does Brad stay so incredibly well informed and up-to-date on just about everything?" One of the secrets, besides my incredibly big brain, is SharpReader and RSS feeds.

An RSS feed is a page that is regularly updated, maybe every 30 seconds, maybe every 5 minutes, by a website and is meant to be read by RSS aggregators. The RSS feed is just a listing of all the stories that a site publishes. The aggregator program can sort this feed by date, title, etc.

This is what the raw CNN technology feed looks like. Not too useful like that, but install SharpReader on your PC and it will look like this:



I have about 20 feeds entered into SharpReader at work. Rather than visiting each of the 20 sites several times a day to stay current on things, I just look at SharpReader, which I leave running all day, and I can scan the headlines of 20 sites in a few seconds.

As SharpReader sees a new story come in from a site it will pop up a little window in the corner of my screen for about 5 seconds. It looks like this:



Just about any site you can think of now has RSS feeds: news sites, financial site, sports sites, photo sharing sites, blog sites. I can even turn on an RSS feed for my blog if anyone is interested.

Before the hurricanes hit I entered the RSS hurricane feed from NOAA so I could stay up to date with new developments.

This is a list of all the feeds I am currently monitoring at work:

Hurricane RITA
Hacking NetFlix
Slate Magazine
BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition
Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories
Yahoo! News: Most Viewed
New York Times: Science
New York Times: NYT HomePage
New York Times: National
CNN.com
Google Search: nanosolar
Google Search: xmax xg
Google Maps Mania
Scientific American
InfoWorld: Top News
The Register
Slashdot
CNet News.com
New York Times: Technology
Wired News
HowStuffWorks.com
CNN.com - Technology


It is very easy to install SharpReader and get it going. As far as finding RSS feeds, just look on any of the websites you go to regularly and look for a link that says RSS, XML, or Atom. These all mean pretty much the same thing. Click on the link, and then just copy the address of the RSS page into SharpReader. Let me know if you have any questions.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication

We went to our new Ikea tonight for dinner, people watching, and so I could just check out the place.

This is everything we got for dinner. With tax the total came to $10.88.



Sheri ordered the Swedish meatballs and boiled new potatoes which was on special for $1.99. We have never had their meatballs and they were pretty good. Sheri ate two of the potatoes and 7.5 of the meatballs. Pretty good for her.

I had the poached salmon plate and steamed vegetables for $5.99. I thought it was a little high for what you get, and at first thought I would not order it again, but I changed my mind after we ate and I decided I probably would get it again. The salmon was good, but I wouldn't recommend it to a person that only likes seafood a little bit. It had a pronounced fish taste. I liked it, but it was strong enough that I didn't bother offering Sheri a taste. The lemon cream sauce was good. The vegetables were good, but by the time we went from the serving line, paid, got our drinks and sat down the they were cold.

I also got what they call an open face shrimp sandwich. They were on special for $0.99. They are normally $1.99. It is a piece of good whole grain bread with a sliced hard boiled egg on top, a few field greens, a little dollop of mayonnaise, and about a quarter cup of chilled salad shrimp. The bread might have had a little butter spread on it, but I am not sure. It just might have been some of the mayo and hard boiled egg yolk mixed together. It was good though and I would order it again at full price.

We split a piece of chocolate and toffee torte that that was on special for $0.50. Of course it was very good.

I got a drink which was priced normally at $0.60.

close-up of shrimp sandwich


In case you have never been to an Ikea before they have little rooms set up to give you ideas of how to use and place their products. One of the scenes was a bathroom with a toilet in it. I thought it was funny that they had to put this warning on it.



After walking around for an hour or so we stopped at the snack bar near the exit. I got a hot dog and we split a cinnamon roll and a decaf coffee and did some more people watching. Ikea is about the best place in the world for people watching.

Only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies.

Stated a different way, there were 1,176,000 unique book titles in 2004 that sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

In this month's electric bill there was a flyer from our city's library announcing they now offer audio books to download over the Internet for free!

Just to test it out last night I downloaded and listened to 25 Things To Say To The Interviewer, To Get The Job You Want. It worked perfect. After two weeks the audio book will automatically be deleted from my computer, but it says I can burn it to CD if I want. That doesn't make sense, but maybe I will give that a try too.

Could Google have done anything else to get more street cred than partnering with NASA and getting 1,000,000 square feet of office space at NASA's Ames Research Center?

There was a story in my beloved Chicago Tribune about Chinese barbecue restaurants. They listed these as particularly good. We are going to go into the city on Saturday and try one. The first two on Argyle Street are not in Chinatown. The rest are. Sheri will probably try pork, and I want to try duck. The story said it is common that they chop the duck up whole, bones, head, everything, and serve it that way. You are not supposed to eat the head. It serves as kind of a stamp of authenticity. Should make for some good pictures to post.

Hon Kee Restaurant
1064 W. Argyle St.
773-878-6650
This by-the-books Cantonese joint directly east of the Argyle Red Line stop also has 150-plus other menu items.

Sun Wah Bar-B-Q Restaurant
1134 W. Argyle St.
773-769-1254
The takeout counter is a bit on the drab side, but the House Special Salt Baked Chicken is hard to beat.

BBQ King House
2148 S. Archer Ave., Chinatown Square
312-326-1219

2306 S. Wentworth Ave.
312-225-2652 (takeout only)

1835 S. Canal St.
312-492-7888 (takeout only)
The Chinatown Square location has a fairly elegant dining room. The barbecue pork here is particularly good.

Seven Treasures
2312 S. Wentworth Ave.
312-225-2668
A large sit-down area, with perhaps the biggest selection of Chinese BBQ items.

Wing Chan
2157 S. China Place
312-791-9398
A strictly-barbecue spot in Chinatown Square, featuring the usual, as well as pork spare ribs, beef stew and chicken feet.

This gastronomical window shopping can be a peculiar sight for Western eyes. Behind the steamy glass windows, the staples of Chinese barbecue--roast duck, soy sauce chicken, curry squid, barbecue pork--hang on meat hooks, bathed in a natural sheen of glistening juices, with head, neck, beak, tentacle or snout still attached, just to be unmistakably clear what animal you'll soon be devouring.

It is a scene repeated on every street corner in Hong Kong, and just as familiar in Chicago's Chinatown and along Argyle Street in Uptown.

This is authentic Chinese takeout. There is no orange pork, no chicken dishes named after General Tso in proper Chinese cooking--just as you'd likely not find fettuccine Alfredo at a restaurant in Tuscany, much less endless salad or breadsticks.

Most telling is that these barbecue restaurants--with perhaps the tastiest and cheapest Chinese food this side of the Yangtze River--are rarely visited by non-Asians.

"We sell 30 chickens, 80 ducks, maybe 100 pounds of barbecue pork every day," said Wai Chee Yuen, manager of Wing Chan BBQ in Chinatown. "But not that many Americans come. It's usually Asian people: Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino."

While the language barrier can be intimidating, a venture into these restaurants can uncover some of the best food deals in Chicago.

The best way to go at a Chinese barbecue is a rice box. At most restaurants, you can get a healthy serving of pork, chicken and/or duck (mix and match to your desire), served in a heaping box of rice with vegetables for under $5.

Count on choosing from these five dishes:

Barbecue pork (char siu): Tender pieces of pork loin with a honey-like glaze. The darker and crustier the outside, the better. The most popular item among Western patrons. BBQ King House does a good rendition.

Roast pork (siu yook): Smoky chunks of pork with crispy crackling. The best roast pork has a thick fatty layer. It's fine to remove it. But in the words of Emeril Lagasse, "pork fat rules."

Roast duck (siu ahp): Duck meat is leaner than chicken, but duck skin is fattier. That makes for an interesting texture, and in concert with the slightly sweet and livery flavors, roast duck is your best bet at any Chinese barbecue.

Soy sauce chicken (see yow gai): Marinated in sweet soy and boiled, the chicken is chopped into bite-size chunks, bone and all. Always ask for a sachet of ginger-scallion relish (geung choung).

Salt baked chicken (yeem gohk gai): Not as intense as soy sauce chicken, but more flavorful in its "chickeniness." The salt baked chicken at Sun Wah Bar-B-Q in Uptown is one of the best.

For the unaccustomed, there are several issues to address.

First, there is no sweet-and-sour sauce. Don't even bother asking.

If you order fowl, be prepared for lots of bones. Chefs don't leave it in for inconvenience; they say bones make the dish more flavorful.

But that doesn't explain the head that comes with the whole chicken or duck. Like a scene out of "The Godfather," it's a frightening sight finding a chicken or duck head in the bottom of the carton. It's not meant to be eaten (though some people do), but rather, as a sign of respect that yes, that meat you're eating came from this (points to head) animal. Or it might be best to ask the butcher to leave it out altogether.

Intersections vs. Roadway Segments: Within a network, the weakest link is the capacity of an intersection. Stated another way, it is better to have an improved intersection than a wider roadway segment.

What the layperson calls an overpass or underpass, we in the business (and by the business I mean the industry) call a grade separation.

This is because the intersection of the two roads, or the road and train tracks, are no longer "at grade".

I am working on two maps that will be presented next week before a high level federal government official that you all know. It is confidential stuff and I was told I cannot talk to anyone about it. How cool is that?

I thought this portion of the President's speech today was HUGE:

From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 2000s, for I am today setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade.

To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.

We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

I'm proposing a bold conservation program to involve every state, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford.

I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I'm proposing tonight an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Tonight for the first time ever I heard an owl! I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed and I heard him hooting in the backyard. I called for Sheri so she could hear. He kept it up for a few minutes. I feel fortunate.

Harvest season has started. I saw the first combine out this morning picking up soybeans. The corn fields have not been touched yet though.

We had three friends from Brooklyn here this weekend. They flew into Midway Friday afternoon, and they are flying out tomorrow (Monday) afternoon.

They wanted to bring us a "hostess" gift, but must have been indecisive, so they brought us many hostess gifts. The brought us:

• Full hard salami from Katz's deli (I have not weighed it yet. My guess is about 5 pounds!)
  
• T-shirt from Katz's deli
  
• Two jars of Guss' pickles (One of my favorites. Best pickle in the world. There is no other pickle like it.)
  
• Two boxes of frozen Jamaican beef patties (9 to a box)

They brought us something else, it is in the cheese drawer of the fridge, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.

Friday night we took them to Lou Malnati's for pizza. Saturday we took them into the city. Today it was raining all day, so we went to Bobak's for brunch and then gave them the full Midwest experience by taking them to our mall in the minivan.

We just got done watching "Desperate Housewives" and eating some Jamaican beef patties. I am upstairs getting ready for bed and work tomorrow. They are downstairs watching a movie and drinking some neat imported beers they were excited to find at Bobak's. They were also pleasantly shocked at the Midwestern beer prices.

I didn't know that Galveston, TX was an island. I love it when I learn something. [map]