2003 Taste of Chicago

Woohoo! The 2003 Taste of Chicago starts today! Here’s what’s on today!

The 2003 Taste of Chicago presented by U.S. Cellular will field a great line-up of food, activities and entertainment, June 27- July 6, 2003 in Grant Park, featuring many returning players as well as some great new stars.
Taste-goers will step up to the plate at 65 restaurants serving specialties from pizza to pierogies. A different restaurant will be featured each day in the Gourmet Dining Pavilion each of the ten days of the festival.

Rush hour horror: Woman dragged under train

Last night after work I walked down to Washington/Wells to catch the L home. At the station passengers were turned back by officials and told to go up to Merchandise Mart. No explanation was given as to why. Not being completely familiar with Chicago yet I walked north, following the train line and took a wrong turning. As I approached State/Clarke I saw a policeman directing traffic across the river, and noticed ambulances and that the road was blocked up ahead. I had the radio on (NPR – loud music after work irritates me!) and as I turned around I heard there had been a “pedestrian accident” on the L. I walked too far unfortunately, reaching the Green Line station at Clinton before consulting my map and turning back and north to Merchandise Mart. There we were told that no trains were heading south (back into town) but trains were running north. A train pulled in 5 minutes later, and everyone on the outbound side of the train station was told that the train was going north again. We all rushed over to the other side and headed home. I saw at least 3 south bound trains stopped on the brown line.
I heard on the train that a woman had been dragged under the L at a station, but I missed the news last night. Here’s the story from the Sun Times. Poor woman, really bad accident. 🙁

ssh tip of the day

If you ssh to hosts beyond a firewall or from within a NATted network then you’ll have noticed that SSH sessions timeout and get disconnected. I found that setting the TMOUT variable to 0 helped when not going through a firewall, and it must have been the firewall disconnecting an idle session otherwise.
Add this line to the sshd_config of the server and restart sshd. This will send a keep alive signal to the client every 360 seconds.

ClientAliveInterval 360

man 5 sshd_config will give you more information about that. This works in OpenSSH. I’m not sure if it’ll work elsewhere.