All stations— regardless of size— already have to maintain such files and make them available to the public. Stations balked at this rule, however, because they’re concerned that their competitors will be able to easily see revenues from political ads and overall rates charged. Here’s a snip from the Chicago Tribune story, “FCC passes online political ad rule: Stations will be required to post campaign spending info“:

For months, broadcasters have objected to the new rule, arguing that even though they already must disclose it, posting it online would give competitors access to commercially sensitive rate information. Broadcasters last week had proposed a compromise to instead post a campaign’s total ad buy, rather than specific information on the exact amount paid per ad. Stations are required to sell candidates time at the lowest unit rate.

We hear these kinds of arguments all the time, and they feel more and more like the fading bleats of lambs. There is a brutal efficiency to spreadsheeting rates for ad time. We’ve all experienced the pain of hidden truths in markets (no one else really wants the house you’re bidding on, the car dealership is about to stop selling that Dodge Dart, the grocer is about to throw out those tomatoes anyway). People make bank off of knowledge gaps, and closing them can be scary. Let’s go ahead and be scared for a while.

It was interesting to see the FCC struggle with requiring stations to post in a standard format for reporting this data. Here’s snips:

We will not establish specific formatting requirements for documents posted to the online public file at this time. Some commenters promoted making the data well-structured as searchable as possible, and downloadable.

*

We agree that certain information in the public file would be of much greater benefit to the public if made available in a structured or database-friendly format that can be aggregated, manipulated, and more easily analyzed; this continues to be our ultimate goal.

This is evidence of growing pains inside this particular industry that are repeated nearly everywhere else. We can expect that wily stations may upload their documents in non-searchable PDFs so that they can comply with the rule while making analysis as difficult as possible.

One day at a time.

FCC 12 44A1 (Text)

WEIGHT

• My highest weight was 208 (day one), my lowest was 188.6 (on January 21). I am currently 192
• In my head, I string the weight loss back to mid-March, when I clocked 216 pounds. Uncool
• Since I am 5 foot 9 inches tall, this weight loss took me from slightly obese to merely overweight
• In other words, my story is not all that visually dramatic, but it definitely made a difference for me
• I use the Withings scale and stream it into my Fitbit dashboard. Works very well
• Since I weigh in every morning, it’s easy to notice what makes me gain weight, and it ain’t rocket science
• When I have chocolate cake, for instance, (which I did 28 times), the average weight gain the next day was 1.32 pounds
• I had Smarties 16 times

FOOD

• Speaking of food. My #1 food— the one I consumed more than any other— is the Quad Vente Non-Fat Latte. It has 170 calories, 16 grams of protein, and it is a wonderful friend. Each of these had four shots of espresso. I had 398 of them total. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t do drugs. This is it— all I’ve got. I love you, Quad Vente Non-Fat Latte.
• Speaking of love, I enjoyed coffee in the morning with my wife 89 times. I called this “Coffee at Lakewood” in my Fitbit dashboard, which is the street she used to live on, until we moved in together after months of marriage living apart due to real estate merging. I like using this archaic term
• I had cappuccino in a small cup, like in a restaurant before or after dinner, 36 times. Many of these were in places like Macaroni Grill, where I dined often with my children in the Western suburbs
• I consumed an average of 2,227 calories of nutrients per day
• I had 19 bowls of miso soup

ACTIVITY

• I took an average of 16,086 steps per day. I shit you not. They say this is about 8 miles per day. Re: mileage, I’m a smite dubious— Fitbit is great at counting steps, but is not so awesome at turning that in to an accurate mile count. Repeat after me: Fitbit counts your steps. That’s what it does. If your fitness relies more on actual running, or gym workouts, or swimming, you should probably use another device to track yourself
•  I burned an average of 3,583 calories per day. Given the fact that I ate far less calories than I burned, you’d think I would have lost a lot more weight than I did. Something is definitely wrong here, and I think it relates to portions. I was scrupulous on entering each item, but I think that I have under-estimated the portions. It could be pretty severe— maybe 20%
• There are lots of ways to get steps in. Let’s take a look at different models for 20,000 steps:

July 3, 2011— constant activity all day, including night fireworks.

Here's another "long steady activity" example-- 20,480 steps with hardly any periods of high exertion. On October 23, 2011 I knocked around the house, walked the dog, and ran up and down stairs to do laundry.

Here's 20,391 steps on a workday-- walk to and from a meeting, then a spark of activity walking to and from the car when teaching a class at night.

• There’s more than one way to skin a step.
• On the edges, the largest daily step count was on the day we moved. Here’s what that looks like:

July 30, 2011-- Moving day.

• One thing I’d like to see in Fitbit is a “save this activity” feature
• That way I could click-drag-select a set of bars and call it “walk dog to train station and back” or “walk to City Hall and back”. This would help with the “what does it take to get X number of steps”

SLEEP

• I slept an average of 6 hours and 36 minutes per night
• That’s not a whole lot. I really do need to get more sleep
• I slept the least amount on March 23 (210 minutes, 3 1/2 hours) and the largest amount (611 minutes, a little over 10 hours) on March 24. Averages always win

YOU TELL ME

• Fitbit has a data export system that downloads all of your data into a spreadsheet
• It’s a little goofy, because it separates your food intake into one sheet per day
• This makes it difficult to analyze by food type, time of day, etc.
• There are developers smarter than me who could take this data and put it into an analytics package
• So if you’re doing that, here’s a meticulously complete spreadsheet that can help with that

I used to work here, at 203 N. LaSalle. It is a late 80′s building with the sheen-y dark marble that was popular and opulent at the time.

I’ve always been a huge fan of 55 W. Wacker, the roughly-poured concrete wonder.

The greens and oranges in here remind us that what seems like flat greys is often bursting in macro:

The Carbon and Carbide is more interesting near the top than at eye-level, but this shot does remind you that these buildings are made from items that used to be in the ground. (Definitely best viewed large)

Home Sweet (Work), which is also the first window-wall, from Mies van der Rohe, 111 E. Wacker:

My guide in this was Kara Swisher, co-founder of the technology news Web site All Things D. Her ethics statement is a plain-language guide to who she is. It’s very personal, talking about her marriage, and also brass-tacks, where she discloses her financial interest. Kara breaks huge technology news on deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but it occurred to me that it would be useful if everyone had a statement of this kind. So I wrote my own.

"My Fathers Mansion Has Many Houses", limited edition dinnerware from the artist Shane Swank.

I am a lifelong urban American Catholic, and I am not going anywhere.

That’s my message to the extremists in my religion who have strayed from our core principles of tolerance, labor, and love to focus on exclusion, doctrine, and shame.  My experience of Catholicism in the cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago over the last 40 years has been full of people devoted to service.

• Fr. Regis Ryan gave me my First Communion at Annunciation Parish on the North Side. He’s still working near Pittsburgh today, running Focus on Renewal, a slew of agencies that provides services for the homeless and the working poor in McKees Rocks
• Strong, intelligent, loving nuns served as principals and teachers of my grade schools in Pittsburgh (Annunciation, St. Philomena) and Chicago (St. Mary of the Lake). St. Mary of the Lake (4200 N. Sheridan Road) was an oasis of peace in Uptown for dozens of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees in the late 70s and early 80s
• Tough, serious priests at Gordon Tech taught by example the importance of service. There was never a component of condescension or judgment for people in need. The men I know who graduated from there are all involved in community service in some way
• I lived near Mt. Carmel Parish in the mid 80s, and I remember the dozens of funerals held there for gay men who died of AIDS. To me, as a teenager, it was completely uncontroversial and expected that the Church would do this
• I’ve benefited from professionals who were also people of the cloth— therapist nuns, lawyer priests, and so on. People who have been essential to me and my family as we’ve gone through tough times
• As a catechist for the Church, I was required to take a training course called “Protecting God’s Children“, and I have to keep up with it on a monthly basis

I don’t mean to paint a inaccurate, bucolic picture. My father obtained an annulment of his marriage to my mother after seven kids and decades of marriage. A priest at St. Benedict High School cast aspersions on my mother as a single parent in the early 8os. A good friend, the pastor of my church in the early 2000s, was removed from ministry based on an accusation of sexual abuse in the 1970s. In general, the priest abuse scandal uncovered a criminal enterprise operated within the Catholic Church.

My point is a matter of focus. In my experience of the Church, the focus is on helping people, being of service, and tending to the needs of the poor. Over the last few years— coinciding with Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s leadership of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops— the static coming from official Catholic organs and prominent Catholics has been disturbing to me.

• Dolan applied key pressure to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation in their disastrous jettisoning of Planned Parenthood. The mission of Planned Parenthood is 100% in line with my experience of the Church, so I found this meddling very worrisome
• The Church has been utterly unhelpful in the matters of basic human rights when it comes to gay marriage
• The two nuttiest Republicans in the presidential race are not the usual Evangelical Christians but, in fact, Catholics. Santorum’s stomach trouble vis a vis the separation of Church and state is particularly troubling, and completely un-American
• The entire Church went into conniption fits over the President’s reasonable plan to make sure women employed by Catholic organizations had acceptable health care. My kids and I had to listen to two off-kilter homilies in two different churches earlier this year. One of those homilies threatened the Mass Hour Social Compact. There is very little more sacred, in a secular sense, to the American Catholic than the idea that the Mass lasts an hour. You get in, you read some stuff, you hear some stuff, you consecrate some stuff, you consume the body and blood of Jesus Christ, you sing one last song, and you’re out. The time the priest spent inaccurately describing the birth control policy severely impinged this essential compact, so we split (after proper genuflection in the aisle) while he was still talking

I have been disheartened at times by these policies and developments. But there is hope here, and it exists in the millions of Catholics like the ones I’ve grown up with. The deal struck by the President on birth control showed that mainstream American Catholics are in lock-step with the rest the country.

A new New York Times/CBS News poll has found that 57 percent of Catholic voters supported the requirement for religiously affiliated employers, like hospitals or universities, to cover the full cost of birth control for their employees, while 36 percent opposed it (7 percent said they did not know). There was almost no difference between Catholic and other voters on the question.

I still go to Church, I still teach religious education to 7th graders, including my eldest child. I deeply believe every word of the Nicene Creed. Transubstantiation is a fact, not just a long word. In short, I am Catholic, and I am not going anywhere.

Christ is risen. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Here are some pics of a mall in the middle.

Not abandoned, but not thriving.

More than half empty, but full of current holiday decorations.

Damp mustiness but not utter emptiness.

Contains current candy.

This is the Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles, IL, near midnight, upon the opening of The Hunger Games.

I always thought pics of this detail were beyond me. Turns out it’s all about lens, lens, lens.

I had no idea there was a mosquito sitting on these fuzz-leaves when I took this pic:

Whoever invented Velcro™ probably eyeballed one of these burr thingies up close:

This looks like a time-lapse burst of green:

Here’s some blue fer ya:

This method has always fascinated me, because it feels like a gap-filling process in which humans mimic nature. We’ve filled up nature so much that we have to invent ways to re-insert Here’s some great info from the Park District on their burn program:

Fire and Habitat Health
In the Chicago region, fire is a natural and essential ingredient of healthy native ecosystems. Throughout history, lightning sparked natural fires, performing a “house cleaning” function for nature. Oak woodlands and prairies are adapted to fire and depend on it to maintain their unique character.

Fire helps local habitats thrive by:

• Releasing nutrients from burned plant materials.
• Helping seeds to grow.
• Opening the woodland floor to sunlight so that native wildflowers and plants can flourish.

I don’t know when they did this burn, but when I got there on Thursday early evening you could still smell the char. I got some fun tilt-shift shots:

I don’t know exactly how they stop the fires, but I like how the char only extends halfway up the reeds here:

The browns and greens at this time of year are fun. This shot of a kid in green jacket made that even more noticeable:

Lastly, all this thought about controlled burns— and the skill one needs to do them— made me think about taxes. It’s popular in some quarters (including collar counties like DuPage, with Wheaton as its county seat) to rail against big government and evil taxes. Here’s a snip from the Daily Herald about controlled burns:

The fires are set by specially trained DuPage Forest Preserve crews in order to restore native prairies, wetlands and woodlands. The burns also help remove invasive plants, break down organic plant materials and clear any plant debris buildup.

The burns can’t be scheduled in advance, as safety depends on factors such as weather conditions and staff availability to monitor each burn, said Bonnie Olszewski, a public affairs specialist for the district. However, on the day of a prescription burn, the forest preserve district posts signs and notifies people who live near the affected preserves.

All hail those who live off of taxes, and help tame the succor of nature.

That’s why I was somewhat dismayed to see the outdoor plaza reconstruction at the Illinois Center complex on Michigan Avenue. For some reason, the design of the blocks that make up the plaza completely ignore the pattern that is established on the exterior of the building. They had to cut these lines like they were doing a rehab in somebody’s bathroom, snipping tiles to fit.

I do not know why they did this.

Detail of goofball tile work at 111 E. Wacker.