david-s.net - David Schlosnagle's Words, Photos, and Links

Photos from Chicago

Thursday, May 19, 2005

• Flight is scheduled to leave Dulles at 5:15 pm
• Mother nature decides to dump rain and fog on Chicago
• Flight is delayed
• All inbound flights to O’Hare are stopped
• Flight is delayed
• We finally arrive at O’Hare at 10:45 pm Chicago time
• Take the El with Cheryl and Friends

Friday, May 20, 2005

• Mother nature brings in the sunshine
• The girls and I go shopping on Michigan Ave
• Visit the Apple Store
• Drinks at the Hancock Building at the 96th floor lounge. - If you want to see the city, I highly recommend hitting the lounge rather than going to the skydeck. The $10.50 margarita is more than worth it compared to the $9.75 the Hancock Observatory will charge to go up to the 94th floor
• Aston Martin DB9 outside the Hyatt
• Dinner at Dublin’s Pub

Saturday, May 21, 2005

• Tickets to the Chicago White Sox vs. Chicago Cubs at historic Wrigley Field: free
• Deep dish Chicago pizza at Pizano’s Pizza and Pasta: $10
• Forgetting to take your camera to Wrigleyville: priceless

Sunday, May 22, 2005

• Ride down south to Hyde Park and the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House
• Wandered through Millenium Park
• Frank Gehry’s Millenium Park Music Pavillion
• Watched the Crown Fountain spit water on people
• Drinks at the beach during sunset

Monday, May 23, 2005

• Head up to the Sears tower skydeck
• Picasso’s Untitled Sculpture
• Take the [El] back to O’Hare
• Watch the fire at O’Hare
• Arrive back in Dulles.
• Mother nature decides to dump rain and fog on Virginia

In the rush that has been this past week, I forgot my Dad’s birthday, and now I feel really bad about it. It’s not entirely my fault since we celebrated Mother’s day, Mom’s bday and Dad’s bday all at once. That makes up for him getting presents a week and a half early.

The fine people over at TextDrive run ModSecurity on their Apache servers. ModSecurity takes care of filtering out most evil comment spammers requests before they even have a chance to actually hit the applications running on the server (i.e. WordPress). This is all great, unless of course your mom tries to make a comment and gets a HTTP 412 Error, The precondition given in one or more of the request-header fields evaluated to false when it was tested on the server.. The problem is that the referrer in this case has the evil word sex in it. Last I checked, sexagenarian wasn’t dirty (I don’t think Texas has banned it yet, but they might try to soon. Any word over 2 syllables matching the regex ".*$DEVIL_WORD.*" will be stricken from the dictionary). Thanks to An introduction to mod_security, I added the following to my .htaccess and all is well.

SecFilterSelective "HTTP_REFERER" "the-newest-member-of-the-sexagenarian-club" "allow"

There just so happens to be a Frank Lloyd Wright extravaganza in Chicago when I will be there, May 18-21. Too bad its a little out of my price range. I will be checking out the Robie House tour.

Thursday, May 19 - Sunday, May 22, 2005

The Ultimate Plus

Indulge in a unique immersion package of intimate Wright experiences. In addition to the previous four Wright Plus events, enjoy Exclusively Wright Dinners on Saturday, May 21 at 7 pm. The exclusive event combines a magical Frank Lloyd Wright space and the exquisite cuisine of an acclaimed chef. The offerings of Wright-designed venues and chefs are: Avery Coonley House (1907), chef Michael Pivoney (Signature Room, Chicago); Harry S. Adams House (1913), chef Denise Norton (Flavour Cooking School, Forest Park); Avery Coonley Playhouse (1912), James Boardman (Lloyd’s Chicago); and Hills-DeCaro House (1906), chef Steven Chiappetti (Cafe Le Coq, Oak Park). Limited number of guests per home.

The Ultimate Plus Package: $1500 per person

Exclusively Wright Dinner only: $1250 per person

Happy Birthday Mom! Six syllables for a sixty year old. You might want to keep that one in mind for the crosswords.