A recent business conference brought me back to Chicago. I haven’t been there for quite a few years, and after a few long, long days – I realized why I wasn’t real big on in-city life. Living in Los Angeles was nice, because it was a big “city” – but it’s so spread out, there’s seperate little towns that make up the bigger area. No one really lives downtown LA. However, Chicago is a different story, people stacked upon people, auto fumes stuffing your lungs, and heat permeating from the concrete that surrounds you.

I’ll take the wide open spaces.

It was fun on some levels, though. Monday night, I attended a party on the top floor (95th) of the John Hancock Center. The view in the picture is taken from the room we were in – it was something. Besides soaring 95 floors in about 10 seconds and having my ears go crazy, it was great. Free drinks and food, met some interesting people, and saw quite the view. Also saw the new Trump building going up, and loved the Tribune building… beautiful stuff.

Tuesday I actually saw the Temptations perform for a while. There was a banquet I went to and they came on stage with a full brass section and band for the last hour of the event. I didn’t stay for any songs I liked… my legs were about to give out.

I’m still exhausted from being on my feet so much, and it’s nice to be home with Heather.

Other Stuff Going On
I changed my “start” page off of Microsoft’s Live.com. I’m now using the up-and-coming PageFlakes.com. A lot of you probably know I’ve used every start page on the planet, and PageFlakes gets almost everything right. It’s easy to use and add feeds, utilizes tabs, and looks clean. A few things that I’d change: drag & drop tabs to move them, bullet story links, change default action of clicking on a link (currently set to display all feeds in the PageFlakes RSS Viewer).

I got a new computer and never posted about it. It’s a souped-up Dell, 20″ LCD, surround sound, Bluetooth keyboard/mouse… maybe I’ll get some pics up… I love this stuff… but I’m a geek.

New design. I’ve started playing around with a new design for iELLIOTT.com… not sure when it might be done, but maybe this fall I’ll have some more time. It seems like I just put this one up, so I’m not in a real rush.

New site… I’ve been developing a new site since December – actually, the idea came in December, the site work started in February I think. I’m about 2-3 weeks from design/mock-up completion and then will be looking for programmers to add the core functionality. Can’t say what it’s about quite yet, but within a month I’ll have a live blog that will talk about the site, progress, and the everyday stresses. :)