Year: 2018

To be fair, it wasn’t my tulips that were banned. It was my self-promotion. Let me explain. Today I wrote a really nice positive post about how the tulips are blossoming in Chicago now. The vibe is totally happy and…

The tulips are wondering, “Is it ok to come out?” After the fourth-coldest April in Chicago records, the temperatures are finally starting to warm up. Huddled underground for months, the tulips are finally feeling the warmth. They are mustering up…

Ah, the joys of the beginning of spring. The weather is so nice that you can sit outside and enjoy the day. The Walgreens at the historic Wrigley Building in Chicago has a fantastic outdoor plaza. Get a snack and…

I can’t remember which account I use with Wikipedia: mattmaldre or spudart. mattmaldre has made 2 edits. spudart has 9 edits. mattmaldre’s first edit is in 2011 spudart’s first edit is 2008. Spudart seems the winner with more edits and…

I keep forgetting that I have duckduckgo set as my default browser. Just now I searched for duck puns in Chrome. Up comes the DuckDuckGo website with their duck logo, and “duck puns” in the search bar. Pretty amusing! What…

I LOVE ALL CAPS Some people love emojis I love all caps LOVE IT I wish there was a triple all-caps button OOOHHH WWWAAAIIITTT TTTHHHIIISSS IIISSS TTTRRRIIIPPPLLLEEE AAALLLLLL CCCAAAPPPSSS Hey, can anyone program something that will take text and make…

My to-do list sometimes looks pretty silly—and that’s the way I like it. Here are two fun items on my to-do list: [  ] Blog about if birds—specifically robins—run or do they hop? Seriously. I saw a robin the other…

You can download your Facebook data archive and look through all the various things that Facebook has collected about you. One of the items is a list of all the Facebook Pages you’ve liked and Facebook Groups you have joined.…

You move to a different neighborhood and make the adjustments to the new area. Voting is one of the best ways to feel like you are a part of where you live. Last summer, my wife, one-year-old daughter, and I…

Former Cub Matt Murton got hired by the Cubs to work as their Baseball Operations Assistant. Murton was a fan-favorite when he played for the Cubs in 2007 to 2008. He wasn’t a great player. Who knows why he was…

Frame conservation. Picking the right frame to match artwork from centuries ago. The Art Institute of Chicago has an employee with the title of Assistant Conservator for Preparation and Framing. Kirk Vuillemot has been restoring and creating frames for the…

Cereal, cereal, cereal. The standard quick meal not only for breakfast, but for any time of day! National Cereal Day was last week. Yeah, I’ve been too busy eating cereal throughout the day to really remember about this esteemed national…

Youtube has a new rule to be able to make money off your videos. You must have 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. Thus, I’m no longer in their Partner Program. I have 640 watch…

I stood in a Walgreens dish soap aisle for two minutes recording a video of the store window. Why? Because this Walgreens, in the historic Wrigley Building, features a fantastic view of 34 flags of all the South and North…

I want to feel the paper on Amazon.

Seeing tiny snowflakes embedded in ice makes me wish I still carried my iPhone macro lens with me. This photo is a bit blurry, but you kinda get the point. The macro lens would have really zoomed in on a…

People freak out about Google following you around and making creepy suggestions. But here is a story about a very nice suggestion from Google. My wife and I have been limiting my 22-month-old daughter’s screentime to Sesame Street songs on…

Since 2010, I’ve photographed the budding tulips across from the Tribune Tower. A quick trip across the street to Walgreens and I get the pleasant surprise of seeing the tulips. Or sometimes I would discover the budding flowers in the…

Which Olympic athletes that play the violin? Six athletes from the 2018 Winter Olympics list playing the violin as one of their hobbies. Spanning countries of Estonia, USA, Canada, France, and Kazakhstan, they include a flag bearer and a bronze…

Every book should have its own hashtag, so we can follow conversations about the book on Twitter. I’m looking to tweet quotes from an awesome new book “Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain“. However, there is no hashtag for the book. The…

I love how the results for Mona Lisa on Google Images first start off with all serious, normal images. And then as you scroll down, the images get more and more ridiculous with all the spoofs. And then after the…

A Google search for 19 consecutive equal signs yields zero results. Maybe 19 is too many. Let’s try a lower number. Googling ten equal signs also gives you nothing. Ok, let’s try five. Nothing. Four? Nope. Four equal signs has…

Instead of being called Wal-Mart, it’s now Walmart. No more dash—but wait—that’s not a dash! It’s a hyphen. Grammarly explains: A hyphen (-) is a punctuation mark that’s used to join words or parts of words. It’s not interchangeable with…

The design of the State of the Union ticket has gone through several evolutions through the years. Most recently a typo appeared on the 2018 State of the Union ticket. Oops! Ok, the typo is pretty bad, but many other…

When one alternative Chicago newspaper pokes fun at another alternative Chicago newspaper, you get some fun (and I ended up finding a really cool book). January 23, 2018: the Chicago Reader retweeted an very old tweet from the Onion. April…

My four years as an art major at Illinois Wesleyan University were some of the best years of my life. The students and professors taught me how to think critically as an artist. We weren’t just technical drones producing work,…

The reality of space. Real objects. Real textures. Thousands of miles away, images brought back to Earth. To our computer screens. I love the caption for this photo. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft obtained this unprocessed image on Dec. 12, 2011. The…

Philadelphia is retiring their transit tokens. I urge people to go and buy as many tokens as you can. They will be worth the investment 20 years from now. How? Let’s use Chicago as an example. In 1999 Chicago phased…

I’m not sure why, but I’m finding it fascinating doing a Google image search for: stair non-slip stickers.  I work at landmark Tribune Tower building in Chicago, and they have these stickers on their stairs. (Pic coming soon) Why do…

What do you do with negative criticism? Our first reaction might be to dismiss words that tear us down. Instead of ignoring the negative criticism, I want to absorb those words. Consider them, know the rationale and source behind the…