So, after weeks and weeks of continuous heat and sun and drought and sweat and wilting, we're finally having our first cool, overcast day. And it just seemed so unusual, since it's been so long, that I of course had to get out in it some today. So I hopped on my bike and now I'm down here at Intelligentsia (Broadway and Barry), writing this entry in the precious few minutes I have left in outdoor seating before it starts raining, and deciding what it is that I'm going to write about today, anyway.

I had a rather long bike ride last night, as a matter of fact, at least as it compares to my particular pack-of-cigarettes-a-day life; 8.5 miles (13.7 km), from Uptown to Rogers Park and back, with a side trip in Rogers Park once up there. It was to meet up with one of my readers, someone who goes by "Anne Alt" online, a longtime bicycling enthusiast and former arts administrator here in Chicago. And see, I'm trying to push myself a little bit more right now, as far as what my maximum "comfort trip" on my bike is (that is, the farthest I can go and not have it feel like it was a big effort). And the place where we were originally going to meet up is 2.75 miles from my apartment (4.4 km), which is just on the absolute outer tip of how long a "comfort ride" is for me. So I decided to push myself and indeed make the trip by bike; but then I got up there and we realized that the place was already closed, so Anne suggested another place another mile up (1.6 km), and we ended up going about a mile over and back as well, in order to take a safer street. And then of course it was 3.75 miles back home (6 km) after it was over.

But it was okay, actually (even though I'm awfully sore today, that's for sure), plus it was fun to finally meet up with Anne and hang out, talk about our old experiences in arts co-ops when younger, and of course gab on and on about bicycling. Plus I even had an unbelievable three extra bucks in my pocket by the end of the night (will wonders never cease), so even got to stop by a bar halfway home, for a well-deserved pit stop (pint of Guinness, that is), and to take a little breather from what was admittedly a bit of a long ride for me.

So, yeah, it's been a week of errands for me: first a full day of external ones (groceries, duct tape, bathroom supplies, quarters for laundry, etc), then another full day of internal ones (laundry, cleaning, rearranging, computer work, etc). And that was the day I simply had my Treo turned off, so as to not be tempted back to my email or Bloglines feeds or anything else, so I apologize to all the people it turned out who were trying to get ahold of me that day.

Tomorrow should turn out to be pretty interesting, I hope, or at least full if nothing else. It starts for me way early in the morning, 7:15 or so, as I make my way to UIC for my first of the regularly-scheduled Chicago Small Business Expos here, sponsored by the city (specifically, put together mainly by the Office of the Treasurer). If its literature and reputation is to be believed, it's simply a chance for the city to help out people like me a little - those of us dreaming of and planning for opening a small business, who could use some pointers to various resources at our disposal. It's your standard fare for such a thing - a large room in the middle, full of exhibitors all day, both private-sector ones and booths from government agencies; and then a whole series of informative workshops running the entire day as well, including business-plan tips, pointers to funding resources, seminars on marketing and the like.

But here's the thing - the Small Business Expos run by the city (I think at least two a year) are completely free to any Chicago citizen who wants to call and register. Which, again, is just yet another thing about Chicago that I love so much, that the city acknowledges exactly how important small business is to its survival and growth, and goes way out of its way here to encourage as many people as possible to start their own business, and to be armed with the right knowledge needed to do such a thing. Which, like I've detailed here before, is yet another of the myriad of reasons I think Chicago has emerged in the early 21st century as such a blooming flower out here in the midwest, one of the only former industrial cities out here to really reinvent itself from the ground up, and to avoid the crumbling, shrinking fate of so many other midwestern industrial cities. And hey, the city even provides a free lunch on top of everything else! Yeehaw!

I wish I had the money to be well-armed down at the expo - to have professionally-printed cards to hand out, multiple copies of my finished business plan to distribute and the like. But as I've said many times here, I knew this process would be full of frustrations, and that's simply one more of them. So I'm going to do what it is that I can do - which is listen to everything being said, make as many contacts as I can, try to get as many good benefits from this opportunity as possible. Anyway, there will be short live reports coming tomorrow, over at my business blog [metafeed], both text and photos (and maybe even an audio file, if you're lucky), for anyone curious about what these free expos are like.

And then tomorrow night I head over to Strawdog Theatre to see a new play by one of my readers, Chris Tutor, called Mass Mind Rape, which I'm agreeing to review here in exchange for a free ticket. (Don't worry - it'll be an honest review of what I really thought. It should be noted, by the way, that it's the Cest La Vie Drama company actually mounting the production; they're merely renting Strawdog's space to do so.) And this is pretty much an open invitation to any other reader as well, or at least as much as I can afford to say yes to going out and reviewing local artistic events, so please feel free to let me know if you have an opportunity as well.

And then the 20th will be my performance at Quimby's that I've talked about here before; and then the 23rd is the second monthly live reading by Bookslut.com up at the Hopleaf, which I'm looking forward to (and promise to bring my correct camera memory card to this time). And then after that I may or may not be going back to suburban St. Louis for a week or so, because my mom's having surgery at the same time that my dad's community-college classes are back in session, and may or may not need some extra help right after the surgery. So my parents are making a final decision about all that, and I'll know the details before too long.

And then, let's see... Then my friend Alamar will be in from Giessen, Germany, for something like twelve days, and we'll be visiting goth clubs and Fermilab and The Alley shopping complex at Belmont and Clark, stuff like that. And then in mid-October (hopefully) I go out to New York City for maybe four days or so, to hang out with my new business friends, and my old poetry friends, and maybe do a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club, and definitely try to get a photo with Moby at his teahouse on the lower east side, and visit the Whitney again (as always) and maybe participate in an orgy (sigh - as always!), and all kinds of other interesting, fun stuff.

Oh, by the way, check out some of the interesting stuff some of my readers have been doing lately, which I've been meaning to mention here:

--Longtime correspondent Gretchen Hasse finally has her own website up, where she is serially publishing this rather odd comic tale - featuring Ralph-Steadmanesque surrealist caricatures over photographic backgrounds. Definitely worth checking out.

--And another longtime correspondent, PJ Thum, recently swam the English Channel! Motherfucker! It was for a charity event, in fact, called The Swim for Singapore; you can check out all the details, and media coverage of the event, at that link just referenced.

--And I should mention, by the way, that my friend Nikki Patin (mentioned here on Tuesday as an example of a self-administrative artist who could use my new arts center's help) has a a new show coming up as well. It'll be running September 2nd through 4th at Links Hall (Belmont and Sheffield, the legendary '80s home of such performers as Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian); and yes, I'll be attending that as well, and filing a report from it here too.

PODCAST UPDATE: Earlier this week I talked about finally tricking out my Palm Treo to the point that I can subscribe to, download and listen to podcasts. (Granted, there's like five or six messy steps involved; God forbid that something involving multimedia and a Palm device would actually be easy to accomplish.) And I also talked about how subscribing to new podcasts randomly was simply not working out for me, because like blogs, about 95 out of every 100 podcasts suck, but unlike blogs you can't just discover this ten seconds after semi-browsing a web page.

Anyway, so I've gotten two recommendations from readers now on decent podcasts, both of which I've enjoyed enough that I wanted to mention here. First is a series of podcasts from this goofy male duo at a place called Dragonpage.com. There's nothing really mind-blowing going on over there - just interviews with science-fiction authors, commentaries about such things as the new Dr. Who series, and other such randomness. But the two hosts, though, are obviously from a college-radio background, and know how to maintain this really great, kinda zany back-and-forth whenever the microphone is live, which is always a great thing to combine with science-fiction reports and interviews with authors. This site, by the way, was pointed out to me by my reader Vera Nazarian, who is an accomplished and prolific science-fiction writer herself, as well as the interviewee of an older Dragonpage podcast. So thanks, Vera, for the heads-up.

And then second of course is a podcast that I had actually checked out in the past, that I was intrigued by but never really listened to regularly, just because it's been such a pain in the ass up to now for me to listen to podcasts. That's right, it's Catholic Insider! Wow, how can you not be a fan of this podcast? It's run by a youngish Catholic priest in Amsterdam, who's not only incredibly tech-savvy but also with a bit of a wicked sense of humor for a priest, as well as a sincere love for such popular culture as the Star Wars movies.

So, this priest just basically walks around with his Minidisc and records all the things going on around him - an evening stroll in Amsterdam, an outdoor concert in Rome with his priest buddies, an interview with random tourists at a cafe. And since he's so tech-savvy, the recordings come off really incredibly well, the same quality of a typical NPR report or better - and since this priest is so inquisitive and funny, the content of the episodes themselves are almost always great too. Plus he's even done special supplementary podcasts as well, like a commentary track you can listen to while watching Star Wars, explaining which things you're seeing on-screen were cribbed from ancient Christian myths (Knights Templar, etc). Again, how is it even possible not to love Catholic Insider, man?

Anyway, I'm still looking for more podcast recommendations; drop me a line at ilikejason at hotmail dot com if you've got one for me to check out.

--Okay, so Google News is finally broadcasting feeds (both RSS and Atom). And this is a perfect, perfect example of why I don't necessarily mind Google taking their time wth some of this technology, and sometimes being a little late to the game, so thought I'd spell it out here today...

Let's compare Google News' feed to something like the one at Topix.net, a direct competitor of Google's (that is, they also offer a sophisticated aggregation of thousands of news sources, automatically grouped by subject matter through the use of algorithms). I tried subscribing to Topix' feed a couple of weeks ago, and ended up having to unsubscribe just a couple of days later, because Topix simply sends a copy of each and every article they track to their feed - so even a simple feed like "top headlines" ends up generating something like 200 items a day, most of which are duplicates of other articles running at the same time, completely clogging up my Bloglines Mobile account and making it impossible to get anything done.

Google News' feed, on the other hand (at least the Atom one), delivers exactly what you see on their webpage - one item per subject in the news, featuring a headline and first paragraph from one of the aggregated articles as an example, with direct links to three or four other articles on the subject, as well as a direct link to the Google page showing all articles associated with the subject. And so in this case I only get maybe 20 or 30 items in my "top stories" feed for the day, but all of them pointing to individual subjects, unique from all the others, and collectively giving me direct links to several thousand news items altogether. Which is the entire damn point of RSS, after all, to aggregate some of this content for you and take a couple of steps out of the usual eyeball-filtering process, not to make the entire thing just more complicated.

And so this is why I never really mind witing for Google to get caught up with a particular technology, because their track record so far is to usually do some pretty damn cool stuff with it by the time they're finished, and with an attention to usability issues that I'm sure makes Jakob Nielsen come in his pants on a regular basis. So, anyway, my two cents on the whole thing.