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Let’s Talk. Progressively.

Note: I know the author of the book reviewed in this post.

When it comes to politics, I want concise and salient talking points spoken by politicians and myself. Sadly, the former does not possess this and the latter possess more passion than saliency. In these times of polarization, I returned to John K. Wilson’s book How The Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People to see if talking points made almost 20 years ago hold up and to see if I could apply them to today’s political conversation. Sadly, they’re still relevant.

Continue reading “Let’s Talk. Progressively.”

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Fun With FOIA: How I Created a City of Chicago FOIA Dashboard using Power BI

I was inspired by my colleague Neal Levin’s recent blog posts where he combined his passion for data and insights with interests in other areas. I’m passionate about government transparency so I wanted to see if I could build a dashboard that would shed some light on the City of Chicago’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests using Power BI.

This blog walks through how I built my solution. I plan to do a follow up post on the insights.

Continue reading “Fun With FOIA: How I Created a City of Chicago FOIA Dashboard using Power BI”

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Fun With FOIA: Downers Grove Public Library

Since late last year I’ve become very interested in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). If I had to point fingers, I’d have to say that Jason Leopold’s reporting has really made me aware of not only what I can get from FOIA, but also his reporting illustrates the frustrations of a reporter as government agencies try to obfuscate, redact, and be obstinate.

I took the dip this year and started writing some FOIA requests of my own. This new series will document my experiences with FOIA.

Continue reading “Fun With FOIA: Downers Grove Public Library”

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One On The Way

People always ask if I have kids. I used to reply “Just a dog.” A lot of people liked that.

Chloe flaunts it all the time.

Now that my wife and I are expecting, when asked the same question, I reply, “One on the way!” to which is almost always followed by, “Oh – is this your first?”

I think “one on the way” succinctly answers their question. If I had more than one, wouldn’t I reply  ,”A two year old and one on the way” or “Yes. I have n  many children”?

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Correlation Errors in Office 365: Cute as a Button, Still Useless

This morning I was doing some configuration in a client’s Office 365 tenant when I saw this cute little guy this morning.

At first I was like “Huh – that’s new.” But then I got mad.

After years of not having meaningful error pages in O365, Microsoft gives us this cartoon animal instead of the error message. What a rip off! What product team approved this? You can’t tell me there is some UserVoice out there that said “Create non-fugly error pages” and everyone upvoted it three times. Some cute cartoon animal is not going to make my anger dissipate because an error occurred.

I believe this update is spiteful to all the developers and admins out there who have been grinding away in O365 for years and still do not have effective error pages.